The fifth annual KENNEBEC CELEBRATION will take place rain or shine Saturday, June 12, from 11 am – 5 pm at Old Fort Western and the East Side Boat Launch on the Augusta waterfront. The free family event is a celebration of the spring running and life in, on and along the Kennebec River that will feature live music performances hosted by the Kennebec Conservatory, demonstrations by the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association, Native American drumming by the Burnurwurbskek Singers of the Penobscot Indian Nation, the Fort to Fort Canoe and Kayak Expedition, a craft show featuring Maine artisans, and much more.
Visit www.kennebeccelebration.com and become a fan on Facebook for updates. For further information about the festival, contact Dana Morse of Maine Sea Grant and University of Maine Cooperative Extension at 207-563-3146 x205 or dana.morse@maine.edu

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.

The banks once covered by the impoundment upriver of the Edwards Dam have greened up and now boast wildflowers as well as hikers on newly developed trails.

And the water that had begun to be cleaned up before the Edwards removal is now that much healthier because it’s no longer sitting still and dead. Instead, it bubbles and spills its way downstream across rediscovered gravel bars and river ledges, collecting and absorbing oxygen as it moves toward the ocean.

The river is alive in a way it hasn’t been for generations.

There are those who mourn the loss of the Edwards Dam. The structure was as much a part of the emotional landscape of Augusta as it was part of the economic landscape of this region. The mill it powered is no more, the electricity it generated is lost as well as the revenues from that generation and the property taxes Augusta collected.

But the federal government deemed that the ecological damage from Edwards — in fish populations destroyed and poor water quality behind the dam — cost more than the economic value it added to the region and ordered it removed, and 10 years ago it was.

It was a stunning development, the first hydroelectric dam ever ordered dismantled by the feds because the potential benefits from removal outweighed the benefits of the electricity produced.

The ecological promise of the dam’s removal has been borne out as fish have returned to spawn and thrive. The species that depend on them have likewise rebounded.

Yet the economic promise of a river restored is yet to be fully realized, perhaps because economic recovery in this case takes much longer than ecological recovery. There are positive signs: In 2008, Bates College economist Lynne Lewis studied the effects of Edwards’ removal and determined that the price of homes near the dam prior to its removal was lower than similar homes further away. After the dam’s removal, the price of nearby homes rose, equalizing with those further away from the dam site.

Likewise, some of the cities and towns along the river are working hard to develop the riverside landscape for use by hikers, picnickers, anglers and other recreationists. Gardiner, Richmond, Hallowell, Augusta and Waterville all have initiated riverside projects such as parks and trails. The Kennebec River Initiative is a multi-city project to increase public access along the river and help local municipalities develop waterfront sites. And all this river-related development is designed to result in economic development, too.

But in Augusta, especially, the money that was expected to come via well-heeled anglers has yet to materialize. “I think we’re still waiting for the increased fishing, the increased tourism, anticipated by advocates,” says City Manager Bill Bridgeo.

Perhaps that’s part of the problem: Augusta seems to be waiting, rather than moving decisively to capture some of that action, as other cities have.

Ten years later, the feds have yet to make another move like the one they made with Edwards. No more dams of similar size have been ordered demolished.

But perhaps that’s not the lesson or legacy of the Edwards removal. Rather, that mark is seen instead in a different way of perceiving the world.

For after that first trickle of water slid through the breached dam, after it carved a deep and wide hole and the Kennebec River flowed freely past Augusta for the first time in 172 years, the unthinkable became thinkable: A dam was no longer a permanent thing.

And the fish, the eagles, the osprey, the anglers and the hikers and the paddlers are all testimony to the wisdom of that decision. As the waters flowed through the breach in the dam 10 years ago, they brought with them the promise of renewed life for the river that runs through our communities.

That promise has been fulfilled.

read the original article here

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.

Somersaulting beavers were one of many surprises following the precedent-setting removal of a major dam on a river so significant it appears on a standard schoolroom globe of the world. In the intervening years, more than a dozen canoe trips from Waterville to Sidney or Augusta have revealed other surprises.

And now there’s a whole new area opened up to archeological paddling trips. The river formerly impounded by the Fort Halifax dam on the Sebasticook offers easy access, strong current and interesting revelations, all within minutes of downtown Waterville.

In the mid-1980s, when I launched a canoe in Waterville it was to paddle to Augusta and camp overnight on an island along the way. Lack of current made it a long trip. My young son and I met Hank, a friend, at the Hathaway parking lot. Hank had planned to take a birchbark canoe, but with the Scott Paper mill still churning out tissue, he worried his priceless heirloom might end up pink if they happened to be making pink toilet paper that day. So he brought a fiberglass boat.

I started paddling the Sebasticook River years before that, in the early 1970s. Benton Falls was a Class III-IV rapid (the Benton Falls Dam flooded that in 1988), and you could still see chicken feathers if you opened your eyes underwater before rolling the kayak upright.

It’s no stretch to say that Maine rivers — the Kennebec and Androscoggin in particular — inspired the Clean Water Act since its author, Edmund Muskie, spent much of his life in river cities along the Androscoggin and Kennebec. He grew up in Rumford, attended college in Lewiston, and served as mayor in Waterville and governor in Augusta. Today the improved water quality in local rivers is testament to Muskie’s vision and a monument to the act’s beneficial effects. But Muskie didn’t live to see the rivers flow freely.

Now, with the two dams removed, there are surprisingly interesting paddling trips offering good scenery, bald eagles thicker than black flies and long-hidden secrets — all within minutes of home.

By canoe it’s about two hours from Waterville to Sidney and another hour and a half to Augusta. In low water you can see iron rings in mid-river rocks — hardware reportedly used to pull bateaux against the current when Jeremiah Chaplin came north to establish Colby College in 1818.

The star of a trip last summer was a three-foot sturgeon that leapt a couple of feet clear of the water. At Six Mile Falls (greatly exaggerated by Kenneth Roberts in Arundel, which chronicles Arnold’s 1775 trip upriver to Quebéc), a diagonal ledge forms an easy rapid, and there’s an old channel on the Vassalboro side evidently constructed to provide passage in low water.

Until 1999 no one could argue with Roberts’s overwrought description; it lay out of sight, sunken under the Edwards Dam impoundment since 1837, almost 100 years before he wrote the account.

More recently the liberated Sebasticook in Winslow has revealed treasures, too. A fellow with a metal detector found dozens of musket balls and scores of coins, some dating to the late 1700s, on riverbanks near the former dam. Old oaken stumps and roots, flooded for 100 years, form ornate riverside sculptures. Outlet Stream, which drains China Lake and enters the river a mile above Fort Halifax, has a fun new half-mile-long rapid slicing through deep silt, and the rushing water is excavating 100 years of old bottles and debris, a safe tossed off the bridge, even old clay smoking pipes.

But more valuable to me than old coins and artifacts are five miles of brisk current, immature eagles too numerous to count, and knowledge that, even after 170 years, fish species have found their way home, apparently with surprising ease.

Stephen B. Collins is college editor at Colby College and a former Morning Sentinel correspondent. He has canoed throughout Maine and as far north as Labrador and Arctic Canada.

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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.

On Tuesday, none of that mattered. Andrew Goode and I weren’t on the Kennebec for peace and quiet. We weren’t there to escape civilization.

Instead, we were there, sharing Goode’s square-stern canoe, to learn more about the Kennebec’s varied fishery and take advantage of an opportunity that wouldn’t have existed even a decade ago.

We wanted to catch a shad.

Goode is the vice president of U.S. programs for the Atlantic Salmon Federation, and as his title suggests, he’s an avid salmon fisherman.

But his group is also a key stakeholder in the cooperative Penobscot River Restoration Project, and he realizes that in order for “his” fish to do well, other species must thrive.

Other species like shad.

“I think one of the problems has been this single-species focus with Atlantic salmon in these rivers in Maine,” Goode said, taking a break from fly-casting. “In a project like [the Penobscot River Restoration Project], where we’re focused on all the different fish there, we’re recognizing that these fish live all together in the river and depend on each other and if you focus on one, you’re not going to be successful. To restore salmon, you’ve got to restore the river.”

Billed as one of the most ambitious river restoration projects in U.S. history, the Penobscot effort calls for removing two dams and providing fish passage at a third.

On the Kennebec, a major obstacle to fish passage was removed a decade ago when the Edwards Dam in Augusta was demolished.

With additional habitat available, sea-run fish began heading upriver and reaching spots that hadn’t been accessible for generations.

Places like Lockwood Dam in Waterville.

“A lot of [good shad habitat], their historical spawning habitat in the Kennebec was above the Edwards Dam,” Goode said. “The state was stocking shad before the dam ever came out, upriver. We’re a little farther behind on the Penobscot. We’re not stocking any shad at the moment. There are still some shad in the Penobscot [and biologists] are trying to figure out [how many] now.”

The parallel to the Penobscot is clear: Both the Kennebec and the Penobscot are large river systems with historic runs of shad that have been interrupted by the presence of dams.

Shad return from the ocean to spawn and can reach eight pounds or more. They’re fun to catch, attack flies readily, and in places where there are significant runs — the Connecticut, Hudson and Merrimac rivers, for instance — sport fisheries and shad festivals are common.

“You see pictures below the Veazie Dam of all the boats during the heyday of the salmon fishery. That’s what those shad fisheries look like when you go to some of these other rivers,” Goode said. “There’s just boats anchored one right after the other.”

Goode said it’s difficult to get an accurate population assessment on shad in the Kennebec, but said the number of returnees is surely in the tens of thousands per year.

One veteran shad angler and his fishing partners caught 30 shad on the Kennebec over a two-day span earlier this week in order to tag some fish for research purposes, Goode said.

Goode and I had no such luck on Tuesday, but that doesn’t mean the fish weren’t there. And it doesn’t mean that larger, healthier runs of shad aren’t on the horizon.

It just means that we were too busy fighting off the alewives to land any shad.

“If you look [at other shad rivers], if you had even 100,000 fish, you could have a really big recreational fishery,” Goode said. “If you start getting up into those larger numbers, it would be one of the better shad fisheries on the East Coast. The potential’s certainly there.”

Goode said shad are finicky fish that are easily spooked. That trait makes them tougher to catch during bright sunlight, and makes fish lifts preferable to fish ladders at dams.

On the Penobscot, the potential for a massive shad run also exists.

“They estimate the run [historically] was over 2 million, maybe 2½ million shad,” Goode said.

Most of the suitable shad habitat on the Penobscot is below the Enfield Dam, according to Goode. The Penobscot project would open up much of that habitat to shad, and the results could be staggering.

”Under the scenario of removing Veazie and Great Works [dams] and putting a fish lift in at Milford, biologists think we could get back a run of a million to a million and a half shad over time,” Goode said.

Good for the shad. Good for the anglers. But how good is the idea for the river’s other species?

As it turns out, very good indeed.

Today, without a sizeable run of shad on the Penobscot, Atlantic salmon that return to the river end up facing more severe challenges than they will in the future.

“These shad are coming into the river here in May and June, it’s when our big adult salmon are coming back,” Goode said. “So you get all the big predators, like seals, at the mouths of these rivers, that would have nothing but salmon to prey on [now].”

Goode explained that those seals and other predators aren’t necessarily looking for a salmon dinner. They’re looking for any dinner. And when they eventually get to look at a new, improved menu, they may opt for something else.

“If they’ve got big numbers of shad and alewives and river herring, those fish have a higher caloric content [than salmon],” Goode said. “They’re an oily fish, and they tend to become the preferred prey. So there’s a lot of benefits for Atlantic salmon by having shad in the river.”

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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.

The breaching of the dam on July 1, 1999, was considered a turning point for river restoration efforts nationwide. It was the first time the federal government had ordered a hydroelectric dam removed against its owner’s wishes.

It also was celebrated as a rebirth of the Kennebec River and its tributaries, which had been cut off from the ocean by the 24-foot-tall dam.

The decade since has been one of constant change in the Kennebec as the once-thriving waterway has recovered from what was basically “a public sewer system,” Gray said. “It’s nothing short of unbelievable, really.”

Gray will speak about the dam’s removal and the river’s recovery today at The Spring Running, an annual daylong Kennebec River festival at Old Fort Western in Augusta. (For more information, go to www.springrunning.com.)

The removal of the Edwards Dam put hydropower operators nationwide on notice that restoring sea-run fish populations, even ones that had all but disappeared, was as much a federal priority as the generation of renewable energy.

Dam removals – most with the owners’ consent – have become increasingly common since then, with about 460 dams removed nationwide. Eight have been removed in Maine, including the Smelt Hill Dam in Falmouth and the Fort Halifax Dam in Winslow.

It took the removal of both the Edwards Dam and the Fort Halifax Dam to allow the shad and river herring to swim all the way up the Kennebec and Sebasticook rivers to Benton Falls this spring.

Tearing down dams remains controversial, especially given the increasing demand for clean power. Each case is unique.

What’s happened in the Kennebec is at least clear proof that rivers and fish runs can recover if given the chance, Gray said.

“Right now, we’re seeing what amounts to a remarkable turnaround from what the river had been,” he said. “It’s something that’s never, ever really been seen before.”

River herring – alewives and blue back herring – were the first sea-run fish to move back into the upper Kennebec.

This spring, the first since the Fort Halifax Dam’s removal, 1.2 million fish moved up through the Kennebec and Sebasticook and were passed by a fish elevator over the Benton Falls Dam. It was an exciting spring, for Gray and for the fishermen who netted thousands of pounds of alewives in Benton for the first time.

“Everywhere else on the Eastern Seaboard, these river herring populations are tanking,” Gray said. “We’re building the population back.”

The big run of herring is good news for the Gulf of Maine, where alewives spend most of their lives and are a favorite meal for everything from tuna and cod to seals and whales.

Shad are coming back more slowly, so the pair that swam into the fish elevator this week was “a very, very pleasant surprise,” Gray said.

Gray is sure there also are striped bass swimming up the Kennebec and Sebasticook past Winslow.

While the numbers of fish swimming upstream are huge, scientists aren’t entirely surprised.

Gray said he saw it coming while listening to the church bells and watching the river surge through the breached dam in 1999.

“That very day, I went back and where the breach was, there were fish trying to get upstream in that huge cataract of brown mud. You could see river herring at the surface,” he said. “That’s how strong the drive is.”

Staff Writer John Richardson can be contacted at 791-6324 or at:

jrichardson@pressherald.com

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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.

I remember the church bells tolling as the dam came down, ringing in a new era for the river. Today, the Kennebec is reborn, home to abundant fish populations, improved water quality, enhanced recreational activity and communities that are turning back toward the river.

Little did we know that those bells would be heard as far away as Pennsylvania, North Carolina, California. We even received multiple media inquires from Japan after Edwards Dam was removed.

Edwards was not the first dam in the nation to be removed, but the event prompted the first national discussion about the role of dams and the importance of healthy rivers to our communities and our environment.

People from a range of political persuasions and points of view started to appreciate that dams are not meant to serve as enduring monuments, but rather as tools that eventually wear out or become obsolete. They also started to recognize and appreciate that healthy, free-flowing rivers can deliver a host of benefits to communities.

In the 10 years since the removal of the Edwards Dam, more than 430 outdated dams have been removed nationwide and the number of recorded dam removals grows each year, thanks to the work of American Rivers and its partners. Most of these did not involve the fanfare or the years of debate that surrounded the Edwards Dam.

Since 1999, nearly 100 dams have been removed across Pennsylvania, from creeks flowing through rural Amish communities to the city of Philadelphia, eliminating public safety hazards and improving water quality. In Oregon, removal of the 50-foot-high Marmot Dam on Sandy River was advocated and paid for by the electric utility that owned it, in order to restore native salmon runs.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., fought tirelessly for funding to remove Embrey Dam on the Rappahannock River, and he characterizes the dam removal and river restoration as his proudest achievement in his 30-year career.

A tentative agreement has been reached between farmers, fishermen, native tribes and a power company to remove dams on the Klamath in California.

Maine’s famed Penobscot River is the site of another landmark agreement to remove obsolete dams and restore fabled runs of Atlantic salmon.

While every river and dam is unique, successful restoration projects are always achieved through a combination of vision, perseverance and collaboration.

In addition to the innumerable stories of individual dam removals that followed close on the heels of Edwards, states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have launched entire dam removal initiatives. New Hampshire and Massachusetts have state agency programs and staff dedicated to dam removal and river restoration.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has partnered with American Rivers to distribute nearly $4 million over the past seven years to provide direct financial and technical assistance for the removal of obsolete dams. The non-partisan issue was embraced by the Bush administration, which created the Open Rivers Initiative in 2005 to fund and support the removal of dams and the restoration of rivers. And the Obama administration continues to expand our nation’s investment in river restoration through the Economic Recovery Act, which includes dam removal project funding.

Dams will continue to play an important and valuable role in our economy and our society. The removal of the Edwards Dam did nothing to change that, nor should it.

Instead, it awakened us to the idea that rivers have a remarkable ability to heal themselves and that removing an outdated dam can bring a river back to life, while creating new opportunities for the people who live and work along its banks.

Rebecca Wodder is president of the nonprofit group, American Rivers, www.americanrivers.org.

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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.

They’re flying above the river — eagles, ospreys and other birds drawn to the Kennebec to feed on alewives and other fish in the free-flowing stretch of river.

And they’re paddling the river’s waters — canoeists and kayakers rediscovering the solitude which can be found on the remote-feeling stretch of river despite its proximity to relatively urban areas.

“The river is much more alive, there’s no question about that,” said Steve Brooke, of Farmingdale, who worked as project coordinator for the Kennebec Coalition, an organization of four groups which came together to work for the removal of Edwards Dam. “To me, it was something that proved our democracy works. We did it openly, through the public process. It was a true affirmation of what it means to be an American. Where government does, in fact, react when it is approached within the process.”

Mark Isaacson, then vice president of dam owner Edwards Manufacturing, said he has no regrets over Edwards Manufacturing’s role in first fighting, then relenting to, efforts to remove the dam.

“I always viewed it as a tradeoff, it was then, it still is,” Isaacson said. “You lost a renewable resource. We’ve had to replace the electricity it produced with natural gas. That has an environmental impact.”

This year an estimated 2 million alewives, or river herring — their route previously blocked by Edwards Dam — made their way past Augusta, up the Kennebec.

“I think it has been a great success,” Thomas Squiers, who oversees sea-run fish restoration and management for the state Department of Marine Resources, said of how fish have returned since the dam was removed. “We’re seeing sturgeon in Waterville, American shad, striped bass, bluebacks, alewives …”

Back in 1981, area fisherman just wanted a way for sea-run fish to be able to get past the dam on their journeys upriver to spawn.

A group of members of the Kennebec Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited increasingly began, back in the 1980s, talking about getting a fish ladder or lift installed to get fish passed the 24-foot high Edwards Dam.

One of them — artist and past chapter president Peter Thompson — had a bigger idea. Remove the entire dam. Group members and fishing buddies Jim Thibodeau, of Waterville, and Bruce Bowman, of Palmyra, first thought that idea was pretty radical, even crazy. But the more they thought about it, especially given that Edwards Dam only produced a relatively small 3.5 megawatts of power, the more they thought it might be attainable.

Eventually, when Edwards Dam and other hydroelectric dams on the Kennebec came up for relicensing, they got their chance.

“If they hadn’t had relicensing, this probably never would have happened,” said Thibodeau, who is retired and said he’s on the river, fishing, almost every day. “Then they had to consider the other uses of the river.”

Jeff Reardon, of Windsor, New England Conservation Director for Trout Unlimited, noted dam licenses only come up for renewal every 30 to 50 years, making the Edwards relicensing process a nearly once in a lifetime opportunity.

Until Edwards, it was unheard of for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to order dams removed.

“It was such a compelling case, even though it was unheard of to say, ‘Don’t give these guys a license,’” Reardon said below Lockwood Dam recently, while, out in the river, about a half-dozen fisherman sought stripers, shad, and other fish. “The biological evidence was so great, it was hard to pick a place better than here. I’ve worked on a number of projects since. I think it has made those projects a whole lot easier to do. You can look at the evidence here. It speaks for itself.”

The Kennebec Coalition — American Rivers, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, the Natural Resources Council of Maine and the Maine chapter of Trout Unlimited — and other dam removal advocates successfully argued the benefits of the electricity produced by the dam were outweighed by the damage it was doing to the river.

The energy commission, after numerous hearings, eventually ordered the dam removed, against the objections of dam owners Edwards Manufacturing Company and the city of Augusta, which was paid revenues from Edwards based upon how much power the dam produced.

Ultimately, in a complex deal involving compensation for the dam owners funded by a Bath Iron Works payment as part of BIW getting its permit to expand its waterfront shipyard, the state took control of the dam. On July 1, 1999, it was breached and then removed.

Isaacson is still in the energy business, as a partner in major windmill and solar projects, and the Worumbo Dam in Lisbon Falls, one of just two Low Impact Hydro Institute-certified dams in Maine.

Isaacson said while Edwards Dam could, conceivably, have been producing electricity these last 10 years, he doubts the politics of the situation ever would have allowed it to happen. He doesn’t think Edwards Dam could meet the same stringent environmental standards to become Low Impact Hydro Institute certified as Worumbo is.

Dam removal proponents paddled down the Kennebec from Waterville to Augusta the day after Edwards Dam was breached.

Brooke said he was so excited he only vaguely remembers much about that day.

Bowman and Thibodeau both said they can’t believe it has been 10 years since the dam was removed. Thibodeau marvels at how the river came back, and thinks it will only continue to get better.

“Think of all the years we’ve lost,” Thibodeau said of the 172 years that stretch of river was blocked by dams. “And how fast it came back, when you give it a chance.”

Keith Edwards — 621-5647

kedwards@centralmaine.com

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BENTON — The town’s Sebasticook River alewife run might be the largest in the United States this year, an official from the Department of Marine Resources says.

While most of those fish made it to upstream ponds to spawn, more than 350,000 of them were netted. The town, which gets one-third of the proceeds from the catch, has made more than $15,000 from the harvest.

Nate Gray, a Marine Resources scientist who has helped monitor the alewife run at the Benton Falls Dam, said that the Sebasticook run has been terrific.

“It’s probably close (to the largest), if not the largest,” Gray said. “We’re looking at something in the order of nearly 2 million fish.”

Rick Lawrence, Benton’s first alewife warden, had told townspeople to expect $5,000 to $10,000 in profits from the harvest. Ron Weeks of Jefferson and his crew have been netting and hauling in the bait fish for the entire month.

“It’s marvelous, and the fish passage is, too,” Lawrence said Wednesday. “It seems to be tailing off now. We’re in the last few days.”

Despite staunch opposition, residents agreed last month to spend $17,000 to purchase land and build an access road a mile below the dam. For this year only, dam owner Essex Hyrdo is permitting the harvest just below the dam, which is equipped with a fish ladder.

“At the meetings, I wanted to be as conservative as possible,” Lawrence said.

The uninhibited alewife run to Benton didn’t come without a cost. Fort Halifax Dam in Winslow first had to be torn down. According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Winslow dam produced to the power grid 7 million kilowatt hours a year of clean electricity — enough to power one-third of the town’s 1,200 homes.

And despite assurances that the dam removal would pose no serious risk to the stability of the riverbank, the town has applied for a grant to pay for demolishing homes on Dallaire Street. Sebago Technics, which did the slope-monitoring for dam removal, has indicated the area’s slope is unstable, and the town is paying $1,500 a month to monitor it.

But now that Edwards Dam on the Kennebec in Augusta and Fort Halifax are gone, the sea-run species can make it up to the ponds of the Sebasticook watershed, as far north as Stetson Pond near Newport — 70 to 75 miles from the coast. There are fish ladders in the Vassalboro dam on Webber Pond, and on the Benton and Burnham dams on the Sebasticook.

“Other alewife runs are going down — loss of habitat, over-fishing, pollution,” Gray said. “The Sebasticook watershed has lots of lakes and ponds that are spawning grounds.

“They haven’t eaten. They just want to get there and spawn. That’s one of the great planetary migrations.”

Lawrence said that the alewife run is good not only for the harvesters and the town, but for the watershed’s ecology, as well.

“Most on their way back down will be eaten in the Gulf of Maine, and they have created thousands more,” Lawrence said. “Some are coming back downstream already. They face upstream as they come back down.”

Weeks said that, on his best day, he harvested 300 bushels of fish, which he sells to lobstermen. He and his crew net alewives in other locations, including in Vassalboro and Jefferson. But the Sebasticook is the largest, albeit the most challenging.

Great cooperation from the Department of Marine Resources and from dam supervisor Calvin Neal made his job much easier, Weeks said.

“We’ve definitely caught a lot more fish out of the Sebasticook,” Weeks said. “The Benton harvest is better than I expected. It was quite a challenge to get them up out of there, with the steep banks.”

Lawrence saw that, first-hand.

“I tried to lift one end of a half-filled crate and I couldn’t lift it,” he said.

Larry Grard, 861-9239

lgrard@centralmaine.com

read the original article here

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Clinton B. Townsend

This is the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the Boundary Waters Treaty by the United States and Canada. The treaty established the International Joint Commission to address international river issues. The St. Croix River forms the boundary between New Brunswick in Canada and Maine in the United States.

Dams on the St. Croix River are under the jurisdiction of the International Joint Commission. On March 18, a petition by the Atlantic Salmon Federation, Maine Rivers and Natural Resources Council of Maine was simultaneously filed with the commission’s offices in Washington and Ottawa, requesting the commission to order opening the dams in the St. Croix River to passage of alewives, a native river herring, to their ancestral spawning grounds in the St. Croix River watershed.

Alewives are ecologically and economically important. They serve as a forage base for fish, mammals and birds, from mink to eagles, from cod to whales. They serve as a buffer against predation on Atlantic salmon smolts, which migrate out of rivers while alewives migrate in. They are important to lobster fishermen as bait when other sources of bait are scarce. Many Maine communities add thousands of dollars annually to their treasuries through the lease of alewife harvesting rights.

The goal of the petition is to undo the harm created by the decision by the state of Maine in 1995 to bar alewives at the dams because of concern over perceived detrimental impact on non-native small mouth bass, an important recreational fishery in Washington County. Since the dams were closed, the number of alewives in the St. Croix River has crashed from more than 2.5 million to less than 12,000.

The petitioners are from both sides of the international boundary. Maine Rivers and the Natural Resources Council of Maine are located in Maine. The Atlantic Salmon Federation is an international organization with headquarters in St. Andrews, New Brunswick.

It has long been a concern of advocates for alewife restoration on both sides of the border that Maine sought to impose its own will unilaterally on a resource which is significant not only to Maine and the United States, but also to New Brunswick and Canada.

In 2007, Maine Rivers published peer-reviewed scientific documentation that alewives are not detrimental to bass, and that in fact 2- and 3-year-old bass thrive on a diet of alewives.

The petition sets out the history of the obstruction of alewife passage by Maine. It spells out the ecological importance of these native fish. It outlines the jurisdiction of the International Joint Commission over the St. Croix dams, and the commission’s authority to order them to be opened for fish passage.

Lastly, the petition requests that the International Joint Commission enter an order requiring that alewives be permitted to pass through the St. Croix River dams to their historic spawning grounds.

In addition to Maine Rivers, Atlantic Salmon Federation and the Natural Resources Council of Maine, 48 nongovernmental organizations from the United States and Canada have signed on in support of the petition, 24 national, regional, and local groups from each side of the border. The full text of the petition and list of signers-on may be seen at the Maine Rivers Web site, www.mainerivers.org.

On June 17, as part of its celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Boundary Waters Treaty, the IJC held a meeting in McAdam, New Brunswick, at which there was a presentation and discussion of the St. Croix alewife issue. This was the first public step in the process which it is hoped will resolve the conflict once and for all.

It is a shame that it has taken so long for action to correct the 1995 decision by Maine to reach this stage. However, there is no reason why the International Joint Commission cannot review the facts and the law and complete a decision before the alewife run begins in 2010. I urge the American and Canadian members of the commission to apply themselves promptly and diligently to resolution of the issue, and wish them well in their deliberations.

Clinton B. Townsend is a lawyer in Skowhegan. He has served on the board of directors of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, Maine Rivers and the Atlantic Salmon Federation.

Read the petition to the International Joint Commission:

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