A building does not need to defend itself with words when it has already survived that long.
I am the sixth generation of Thibaults to live on this land. I have a degree in civil engineering and thirty-one years of professional experience. My property covers 180 acres and contains the old mill, the dam, the reservoir, and the dock where my late wife and I spent countless evenings watching bats emerge from the mill loft.
Our daughter, Coralie, inherited her mother’s mathematical ability and my stubborn streak. Somehow, the combination made her an exceptional hydrologist and one of the strongest allies I have ever had.
I explain this because the story that follows is ultimately about expertise.
And expertise only has meaning when you understand the person carrying it, and the price they paid to acquire it.
Heather Lynn moved into Cascade Meadows Estates four years before the flood.
The subdivision had been built in the lower valley, downstream from my property. For two centuries, that land had remained relatively safe and suitable for development because our family’s dam had regulated the Branch River’s spring flows.
The relationship between the dam and the safety of the lower valley was not some obscure engineering theory.
Anyone who had lived in the valley for years could have explained it.
A look at the watershed maps would have made it obvious.
Heather did neither.
Instead, she conducted her research online. She joined environmental advocacy groups on Facebook and eventually connected with a real estate company called Hammond Realty LLC.
At the time, she believed the company was interested in ecological restoration.
She would eventually learn that its real interest was the exposed riverbed and the possibility of turning that land into residential property.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Fourteen months before the flood, Heather filed a complaint with the State Agency of Natural Resources.
She claimed that my dam was an unlawful obstruction of a public waterway. She argued that it interfered with downstream residents’ natural water rights and insisted that removing it would restore the river to its historic condition.
In her filing, she called herself a concerned citizen and environmental advocate.
She described me as a private landowner exploiting a public resource for personal profit.
When I read the complaint, I experienced a kind of exhaustion that is difficult to explain unless you have spent decades professionally explaining things that should have been obvious in the first place.
I had been responsible for the dam and its water rights for eleven years.
My father had taught me the stewardship procedures.
His father had taught them to him.
Those practices stretched back through six generations.
To our family, the reservoir was never simply a private luxury.
It was a responsibility.