About once a year, a pesky beaver pops up on the Greenwood Stormwater Board’s agenda and costs the city and its residents a chunk of change.
This time, in one of the more extreme cases Stormwater Director Christopher Jones has seen in his six years with the department, what is believed to be a family of beavers has built a more than 6-foot tall, 30-foot wide dam on a farm along Honey Creek Road, south of Cutsinger and north of the new Cherry Tree Walk subdivision.
The dam is blocking water from draining from north to south, which is why the city utility office had to get involved.
It’s so massive the farmer can’t get to some of his crops, Jones said.
“If he tries to take a combine through there, he’ll sink,” he said.
In most cases, it’s the property owners who are mostly affected by the dam. But in some cases, like this one, it’s several homeowners, city streets and drains. When a drain is blocked, water backs up.
At this particular legal drain, the water backed up about 2,000 feet, all the way to Freedom Springs, which is northeast of the dam across Cutsinger Road, Jones said.
Sometimes, the beaver will get flooded out or washed downstream and property owners or DNR crews can remove the dam. Other times, a natural predator will come along and snatch them up, he said.
But not this one.
“Mr. Beaver’s been working on this one for a while,” he said.
The city asked the Department of Natural Resources to take a look. They advised the Stormwater Department and its board to hire a wild animal removal specialist because these beavers and their dam habitats have repeatedly wreaked havoc on this area. The cost is almost $1,000.
“In the past, the city has worked with the property owner (and) DNR to remove the beavers. This particular area has experienced several obstructions year after year because all of the beavers were not relocated,” Jones said.
The city hired Rusty’s Animal Control, out of Greenfield, to remove the beavers and destroy the dam.
Rusty Fields, who was working to remove the dam on Thursday, said he’s 6-feet tall and can’t see over it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the beaver — or beavers — has been working on it for a long time. Beavers could build a dam of that size in a matter of days, he said.
It’s not the biggest dam he’s seen in his career, but it’s certainly above average.
“They’ve got this water so backed up that it’s all the way out of the creek and across the farm. The outside edges of the creek aren’t designed to hold this kind of water,” Fields said.
Once the dam is removed, drainage should be back to normal within 12 hours, he said.
Generally, beavers build their habitats in much larger bodies of water, or in more rural areas. But it’s becoming more common for beavers to build dams in suburban areas due to urban sprawl taking over their habitats, Jones said. It’s affecting more legal drains, which are city-owned and operated.
The ending to Mr. Beaver’s story is not a happy one.
The beaver — or beavers — will be euthanized, which is common practice, Fields said.
