Williamsport Dam
dam in Williamsport, Pennsylvania
The Williamsport Dam, officially known as the Hepburn Street Dam, is a low-head dam on the West Branch Susquehanna River in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The first dam at this site was built in the 1800s. Ground was broken for the current structure in 1984, and it was finished in the spring of 1986. It was built for recreation, such as boating, watersports and fishing. It has been described as a "killer dam" and a "drowning machine".
Background
The old Hepburn Street Dam (pre-1984) was made of wooden timber cribs filled with rock with a 4-inch thick wooden apron on the downstream side. The new dam, constructed in 1984–1986, was built for recreation. Before the dam was built, the average depth of the West Branch Susquehanna River was 4.6 feet, with its deepest parts being just under 10 feet deep. Some places were impassable by boat, being only a couple of feet or a few inches deep. Since the construction of the new dam, the average depth of the West Branch Susquehanna is 8.3 feet, with some depths of over 20 feet.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Williamsport Dam” is dam in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Williamsport and Pennsylvania, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24060789. Authority coordinates are 41.234, -77.005. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1984 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Williamsport Dam” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.