By LARRY GRARD
Staff Writer

WINSLOW $ Dismantling of the Halifax Dam remained on hold Monday as area residents and a town planning-board member differed with the company hired to monitor the Sebasticook River's slope.

An angry W. Elery Keene stood on Dallaire Street with the residents who were evacuated from their homes Friday when the ground shifted. They fired questions at Sebago Technics engineer Dick Reynolds, who came to the site to handle them.

"The planning-board conditions said '24-hour monitoring,' " Keene said to Reynolds. "You're in violation."

Reynolds replied that the dam breach and drawdown has gone as planned.
"We have a pretty good idea what's going on down there," he said, "and to monitor several times a day, I don't believe would increase the stability of that slope."

Dam owner FPL Energy has put the drawdown on hold, at least until today, to allow the river to recede from the rain, said FPL spokesman F. Allen Wiley. The company put a steel sheet in the opening to impede the Sebasticook's flow, he said.

Standing in a circle near the site of the old Halifax Street School, Keene, two-dozen residents and town officials asked Reynolds why there was a gap of seven or more hours between the time that monitors detected a quarter-inch shift in the bank, and when residents were evacuated at 11:30 p.m. Friday.

Reynolds had told the group that Sebago Technics instruments monitor soil movement around the clock, but check on measurements only three times daily. Homes on Dallaire Street were built on paper-company fill material, after the dam was built 100 years ago. The homes rest high above the river, near a steep embankment.