Maine Rivers

06/28/2009

Ten years after the Edwards dam was demolished at the head of tide in Augusta, the Kennebec River is visibly healthier.

That health is evident in sturgeon breaching skyward, their metallic bodies slicing out of the river and then splashing back into its depths. It’s evident in the millions of alewives that journeyed upriver this spring, their traditional spawning run now uninterrupted by a manmade barrier. It’s visible in the eagles and osprey that prowl the skies, looking for newly abundant prey in the river below.

The Kennebec River between Augusta and Waterville, once fouled by industries whose growth fueled economic development over two centuries, is now home to canoeists, kayakers and fly fishermen as well as a burgeoning population of sea-run fish.
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BY STEPHEN B. COLLINS

06/28/2009

Special to the Kennebec Journal

As astonishing as it was to paddlers and fishermen, no one was more surprised than the beavers when Edwards Dam was breached 10 years ago.

It was July 2, 1999 — the day after. A green Old Town Penobscot canoe carrying two Homo sapiens bobbed on swift current where a day before had been deadwater. High on the Sidney riverbank, an elaborate lodge of sticks and mud now perched incongruously a dozen feet above the new waterline — home of unsuspecting Castor canadensis.

It’s hard to say which species was more startled when the large beaver scrambled out his front door, stretched as if to land a belly-flop and swim away, but found himself tumbling tail over teakettle down the steep embankment to the water below. Just downstream, another entrance dislodged another perplexed aquatic rodent. Then a third, all in less than a minute. For 162 years their entrances had been underwater, but the dam removal changed that, literally overnight.
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By John Holyoke
BDN Staff
Bangor Daily News

As fishing outings go, Tuesday evening’s jaunt on the Kennebec River lacked a few of the features that most anglers typically prefer.

This was not a trip to the back-of-beyond, where getting there is half the fun, and where encountering another fisherman would have been a surprise.

Instead, this was urban fishing at its finest, and a quick glance around proved it.

Nearby — two or three well-placed casts across an expansive, paved parking lot, perhaps — was the massive building that formerly housed the Hathaway Shirt Co. A few hundred yards from that? Waterville’s bustling Main Street.
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JOHN RICHARDSON
Portland Press Herald
June 13, 2009

It was just two fish. But to Nate Gray, the pair of American shad that swam upstream to the Benton Falls Dam near Winslow on Wednesday – like the 1.2 million river herring that showed up this spring – was proof of nature’s resiliency.

“This is the first time a shad (has made it from the ocean) to Benton since 1837,” said Gray, a scientist with Maine’s Department of Marine Resources who has been monitoring the fish run at the dam.

It has been 10 years since Gray and about 1,000 other people stood on the eastern shore of the Kennebec River in Augusta, listening to the ringing of church bells and watching the destruction of the 162-year-old Edwards Dam.
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BY Rebecca Wodder

06/28/2009

In the life of a river, a decade is but a drop of water in a roiling current. Viewed through the lens of public policy and perception, a decade can be a lifetime.
This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the removal of the Edwards Dam — an event that not only had profound benefits for the Kennebec River but that also marked a significant turning point for river restoration and the practice of dam removal in our country and around the world.

I was privileged to be there on the river bank in Augusta, watching the very moment that the Kennebec flowed free for the first time since the days of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau.
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BY KEITH EDWARDS
Staff Writer

06/21/2009

AUGUSTA — It was just a trickle of muddy water, poking through a dirt coffer dam on July 1, 1999.

But that trickle, the first free-flowing water there in 172 years, was the beginning of the end for the 917-foot Edwards Dam in Augusta.

The dam’s removal was precedent-setting, the first hydroelectric dam ever ordered removed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission because the potential benefits of its removal outweighed the benefits of the electricity it produced.

Those benefits are now swimming in the river — large striped bass, American shad, massive prehistoric-like sturgeon, alewives by the millions, and even a few rare Atlantic salmon.
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