Municipal Maintenance spent much of last Tuesday night, Wednesday, and Thursday pumping up to 250,000 gallons of water per minute across the Tremont Dam in West Wareham -  trying to keep the water flowing downstream.

The effort required collaboration among municipal maintenance and local cranberry harvesters.   Slocum and Gibbs Cranberry Co. of South Carver and A.D. Makepeace Co. of Wareham donated pumping equipment and manpower.  Three tractor pumps were in operation Wednesday afternoon, and Municipal Maintenance Director Mark Gifford said that five more were available if necessary.

"I don't know where we'd be without the cranberry harvesters," Gifford said.

According to Danny King, an employee of Slocum and Gibbs, five-and-a-half inches of rain fell on the bogs in the last storm, saturating basements throughout the region and filling streams as the rain drained from the land.

Gifford said that the Gibbs dam in Carver had breached by Wednesday and water was flowing across France Street.  They were trying to prevent a similar incident at the Tremont Dam, a massive earthworks dam about 40 feet high that holds back Tremont Mill Pond.  (The dam is at the site of the original Tremont Iron Works,  later Bethlehem Steel, not the Tremont Nail Factory in downtown Wareham).  The dam, which dates from the 1800s, had one sluice fully opened and its other opened as far as possible.

The workers were limited, however, by how much water to allow through.  The railroad bed lies just below the dam, and workers could not release too much water and wash out the tracks.  Workers watched cautiously as the Energy Train passed on its afternoon run.

Gifford said that the water on the pond was the highest he's ever seen it, and many curious onlookers stopped to take pictures of the rushing floodwater at the dam and at other spots downstream.

A culvert on Fearing Hill road was so clogged that it created a lake around a nearby shed.  The dam and smelting location on Horseshoe Pond also attracted onlookers.

And although the skies cleared on Wednesday afternoon, the water was still running off into the streams...and into basements.

The Wareham Fire Department (WFD) had 27 requests for "pump details" on Wednesday and 31 on Thursday.

"It's been a long time since we've seen this many," said Paul Reedy, WFD dispatch officer.

Video of the scene: