Old Lyme — It's a tale — or, perhaps more appropriately, a beaver's tail — of woe and frustration that's dampening spirits and properties in an area of town off the Black Hall River.

An industrious group of the rodents is leaving both town officials and residents bewildered as they try to navigate town policy and environmental regulations in an effort to remove a dam causing flooding to nearby properties.

Built somewhere south of Black Hall Pond, within a dense, forested swamp area where the Black Hall River begins and the pond ends, the strongly constructed dam has forced Black Hall Pond water levels to rise more than two feet higher than normal over the last four years, says Dave Berggren, who's been living at 17 Boughton Road, a 1.6-acre plot of land abutting the pond, since the 1960s.[naviga:img hspace="5" vspace="5" border="0" height="585" width="800" align="middle" alt="" src="https://www.theday.com/assets/news2019/graphs/beaver-dam-map-oldlyme.jpg"/]

“I used to host parties out here on Memorial Day, or Fourth of July, and the kids would play baseball out here in the yard,” Berggren said while sitting for a recent interview in his backyard, overlooking the pond. “But guess what you play now? Mud ball.”

With the backyard now almost entirely waterlogged because of the beaver-induced flooding, Berggren said he’s suffered through a host of problems ranging from a towering invasive plant species overtaking his lawn to an inundated septic system — all issues, he said, that have negatively impacted his quality of life and likely will amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.

“Now you have to be very careful with how you use the septic system,” he said, explaining that his septic tank’s leeching field no longer can efficiently filter effluent. “No more running the washing machine. And you make sure to minimize the flushing of a toilet, to be sure.”

Because his backyard is muddy and soft, Berggren said he also hasn’t been able to mow his lawn for years now, forcing him to weed-whack parts closer to the pond, but also allowing for the invasive species, phragmites, to take over other parts.

A section of his home built on cinderblock pillars is slowly sinking into the ground, he said, making the 82-year-old avoid using what was once his living room.

“It’s one colossal pain,” Berggren said. “The property values are shot. You couldn’t resell this if you wanted to.”

Because the beaver dam is located on land other than his own property, however, Berggren said he hasn’t been able to seek a permit allowing him to eliminate the source of the issue — the beavers themselves.[naviga:img hspace="5" vspace="5" border="0" height="295" width="400" align="right" alt="" src="https://www.theday.com/assets/news2019/graphs/beaver-complaint-permits-data-ct.jpg"/]

Berggren said he also hasn’t received much help from the town, which says the dam is not located on its property and therefore it is not responsible for eliminating the beavers.

“The town shouldn’t do anything about dams that are on private property,” First Selectwoman Bonnie Reemsnyder said in a phone interview Wednesday. “I can’t get a trapping permit for someone else’s property, but I can for town property.”

Reemsnyder said that the dam’s seclusion also has made it difficult to understand whose property the dam is located on, and because of its swampy location, public works crews also wouldn’t be able to easily reach and break up the dam, either.

“But it also doesn’t do any good to just break up the dam, because the beavers can rebuild overnight. So you really need to get rid of the beavers to solve the issue,” Reemsnyder said. “The trapping of the beavers is really up to the property owner. With that said, there have been situations where a dam has been close to a road, and not necessarily on town property, where public works has been able to go in and release the dam.”[naviga:img hspace="5" vspace="5" border="0" height="360" width="400" align="right" alt="" src="https://www.theday.com/assets/news2019/graphs/beaver-complaint-permits-data-ct-by-permitee.jpg"/]

As one example, Reemsnyder said a homeowner inundated with flooding from a dam located on his Sill Lane property contacted the town for help in 2016. After obtaining his own trapping permit to remove the beavers, Reemsnyder said town public works came to help dislodge the dam.

“We try to help where and when we can,” Reemsnyder said.

Town Land Use Coordinator and Zoning Enforcement Officer Keith Rosenfeld also said Tuesday that, “The whole thing with beavers is that it’s not a zoning issue, it’s not a land use issue. It’s not regulated by anyone in the locality. It’s all done through the (Department of Energy and Environmental Protection). We don’t issue any permit. We don’t oversee any regulatory process to accommodate property owners or eliminate the beavers.” He also stated that eliminating beavers from dams on town property would fall under Reemsnyder’s jurisdiction.

“She would be in charge of any action that the town would take in regards to beavers,” Rosenfeld said. “She makes the decisions for the town.”

But for Berggren, who isn’t sure whose property the dam is on, the solution isn’t as cut and dry.

Despite making efforts to contact the town for help without much avail, Berggren said he also has tried taking matters into his own hands, regularly paddling a boat into the swamp to dislodge the dam himself.

“The beavers just kept rebuilding the dam,” he said, and have even recently relocated their dam to a more secluded part of the swamp that he can’t reach.

After noticing that beavers were swimming up to his property line to chew on a fallen tree branch last year, Berggren obtained a trapping permit from DEEP to hire a licensed trapper to catch as many beavers as possible from the banks of his own property, hoping to alleviate the problem, if only a little.

Yet, even after successfully obtaining the permit, Berggren said the trapper never arrived and the permit expired after 21 days.

A beaver death sentence

According to DEEP, property owners able to prove extensive damage caused by a beaver dam located on their own property can obtain permits to hire a trapper. Because beavers can and will quickly rebuild dams that have been either damaged or removed, the only way to truly eliminate a beaver problem, according to DEEP, is to have the beavers removed through trapping.

Trapping a beaver, however, is a death sentence for the industrious mammals.

According to state law, beavers trapped must be killed and are not allowed to be relocated, said DEEP wildlife biologist Chris Vann, who is responsible for issuing special beaver-trapping permits throughout the state.

He said that’s in part because there are more beavers in the state presently than at any other time in the last 300 years, meaning moving a beaver likely will perpetuate the issue elsewhere.

Vann said that beavers have been managed as “a renewable natural resource” through trapping practices in place since 1961. The practice, Vann said, removes a portion of the beaver population each year, while also stabilizing population growth and reducing conflicts with humans. Annually, DEEP receives approximately 150 complaints of nuisance beavers around the state, with about 75 special trapping permits issued annually, Vann said.

The practice can be controversial, Vann said, with some property owners opting not to trap and instead consider alternative methods to control flooding, such as installing a baffle "flow device,” or a pipe, through the dam to alleviate flooding, while "deceiver" fencing can be installed in roadway culverts affected by beaver dams.

Problems can arise, however, when a beaver dam located on someone’s property is impacting an entirely separate property from their own.

“To the best of my knowledge, it’s the landowners who own the property where the dam is located who are responsible for remedying issues a dam is causing,” Vann said. But sometimes property owners neglect the problem or don’t want the beavers killed.

“Yes, people can and have gotten into water disputes, property damage disputes, because of beaver activity happening on one property and affecting another,” Vann said. “It can also get convoluted when one property owner owns part of the land where the dam is located and a different owner owns the other half of the dam.”

An old problem

Beavers building dams in Old Lyme is nothing new, Reemsnyder explained Wednesday. Throughout her tenure alone, she said the town has dealt with several beaver issues causing flooding on both town property and privately owned land on Sill Lane and Grassy Hill Road, as some examples. In those instances, though, dam locations were clear.

According to Day archives, damage caused by beavers and their dams has been affecting Old Lyme since at least the 1980s, with stories about the issue in 1986, 1992 and 1997, among other years.

Reemsnyder also explained that other dams currently exist throughout the town. A dam built in a culvert under town-owned Whippoorwill Road near Interstate 95 has recently caused flooding on the town-owned Ames Open Space property, as well as a part of Whippoorwill Road, she said.

Because the Open Space Commission is against trapping beavers, the town, despite obtaining a trapping permit to alleviate the problem there, instead has broken up the beaver dam and has been monitoring it, Reemsnyder said.

Open Space Commission Co-Chair Amanda Blair, responding to questions seeking to understand the extent of flooding on Open Space property through email Tuesday, said, “This is a naturally occurring phenomenon, the beavers will eventually move on to new territory. In the meantime, a new and valuable habitat is being created. The watershed is protected from erosion, water quality is improved by the capture of sediment and pollution from lawns and septic systems. Protecting wildlife is what we do in land conservation and we should be using this opportunity to educate the public rather than demonizing a native species."

Berggren’s neighbor Lee Detwiler said she thinks the beavers have been building dams in the Black Hall Pond swamp area for six years now and that flooding has been a slow problem accumulating over time.

“It’s so overgrown with everything, so you just get really cut up just trying to get through it,” said Detwiler, explaining that she and her son recently have tried to help Berggren with the problem by tearing the dam apart themselves. “My son, while going back there, flipped the kayak, lost his glasses and hit his head. He was literally up to his waist in what he felt like was quicksand. He said he was terrified, but he was, fortunately, able to get out by wiggling his feet like flippers.”

“Dave (Berggren) is an incredible man, but it’s just far too dangerous for him to keep trying to go back there anymore,” Detwiler said, also explaining that after her son tore apart the dam in May, he returned two weeks later to find it “four times bigger.”

“He said, 'Mom, this is like a nightmare,'” Detwiler said. “We just don’t know what to do, but you think the town would be responsible for helping with the situation.”

For Didier and Eugenie Rocherolle of 16 Jericho Drive — a property overlooking the bog where the dam is located — the two said they’ve also experienced their own “runaround” seeking town aid with their own flooding issues caused by the dam.

The two said they first noticed rising water levels a couple of years ago, and in an effort to combat the issue, Didier Rocherolle said he has gone to both the state and town looking for answers.

Both Rocherolles said that they weren’t sure of the dam’s exact location, unable to see it from their property, but maintained that the Black Hall River runs behind their property line.

“When I went to the state, they told me it was a town problem. So then I went to the town and they told me that, since it was on private property, we would have to take care of it,” Didier Rocherolle said. “It’s an environmental problem. Somebody should be responsible for that type of thing. It’s just a runaround.”

Though their house hasn’t sustained flooding damage because it sits on a hill overlooking the swamp, they said they're worried that the rising waterline on the lower edges of their property may dislodge trees — two already toppled last fall — and mosquitoes may become a more persistent issue, possibly impacting their home’s resale value.

“Someone needs a permit, but since no one knows who needs to get the permit, we are kind of stuck,” Didier Rocherolle said, stating that he didn’t want to get involved with killing beavers.

“I don’t want to kill (the beavers), but what do you do with them?” Eugenie added. “It’s a crazy situation and we don’t know what to do.”

m.biekert@theday.com