In his 1937 ebook, “Kennebec: Cradle of Individuals,” the poet Robert Tristram Coffin known as Maine’s sprawling river a “paradise for fish.” However air pollution and dams that block spawning runs for Atlantic salmon, sturgeon and shad put an finish to that world.
The Kennebec River now runs largely clear, due to legal guidelines that diminished air pollution. But 4 hydroelectric dams, two constructed within the early twentieth century and the opposite two within the Nineteen Eighties, stay on the decrease reaches of the 150-mile-long river and proceed to forestall endangered salmon from reaching their single most vital spawning tributary, the Sandy River. Now a confluence of things makes this the time to proper this flawed.
The Federal Vitality Regulatory Fee is contemplating relicensing one of many dams, the Shawmut, the third in line upstream from the Gulf of Maine, which might permit it to function for as much as 50 extra years. On the identical time, the fee is contemplating amending the licenses of the opposite three dams to allow their operator, Brookfield Renewable, which additionally owns the Shawmut, to pursue feeble efforts to develop methods for fish to bypass these blockades. (The deadline for public feedback on its draft proposal is June 4.)
An organization spokesman stated Brookfield seeks to “rigorously stability public, financial, power and pure useful resource pursuits.” However there is no such thing as a actual stability in its proposal. The fee ought to order the elimination of the dams. That is hardly an outlandish proposal. Dams are being faraway from rivers throughout the nation. Final yr, 80 have been demolished, reconnecting obstructed waterways with 1,160 upstream river miles.
It’s true that the lack of these dams would imply a lack of power manufacturing. The 4 dams have a mixed capability to generate practically 47 megawatts of electrical energy, sufficient to energy tens of hundreds of houses. However their output is barely 6 % of Maine’s total hydroelectric capability. Furthermore, their output could be dwarfed by plans by the State of Maine for sufficient wind generators within the Gulf of Maine to generate 3,000 megawatts of electrical energy by 2040 — practically 70 occasions the capability of these dams. A utility-scale solar energy plant of a number of hundred acres may substitute a lot of the electrical energy manufacturing that will be forgone.
Maine doesn’t want these 4 dams. Permitting them to stay for many years extra would perpetuate a seamless catastrophe for the river and its fish.
The variety of salmon spawning in Maine rivers has fallen to fewer than 2,000 right now, from as many as a half million in colonial occasions, and the Kennebec’s inhabitants is right down to single digits in some years, from a excessive of as many as 200,000 earlier than the dams. Sadly, due to these dams, the few salmon that also present up in the primary stem of the Kennebec should depend on the inner combustion engine to succeed in their spawning grounds — a type of triage wherein they’re trapped and carried by truck to succeed in the Sandy River.
In 2023 the Nationwide Marine Fisheries Service supplied a tortured opinion of the impact of permitting the dams to stay. The company stated that proposals by Brookfield to construct fish lifts and different conveyances to assist the fish get previous the dams “might adversely have an effect on however should not more likely to jeopardize the continued existence” of Atlantic salmon. That is an unaspiring evaluation of those midway measures. Fish ladders and related applied sciences on rivers with only a single dam usually carry out poorly. The monitor document for such contrivances on rivers with two or extra dams is dismal.
Dam elimination has already revitalized different components of the Kennebec and rivers elsewhere in the USA. The demolition of the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec in 1999 allowed migratory fish entry to 17 miles of river that had been blocked for 162 years. This stretch of river shortly surged again to life, most notably with river herring (an vital baitfish for Maine’s lobster fishery) recolonizing the Sebasticook, a tributary the place in just a few years their numbers skyrocketed to almost six million from zero.
Such was their impression that the city of Benton started an annual pageant celebrating the return of those fish. Bald eagles took word, too, with as many as 64 of the avian predators seen feasting on the herring in the future, forming what will be the largest summer time aggregation of those birds within the Northeastern United States.
On the West Coast, 4 hydroelectric dams that block California’s Klamath River are being dismantled in a daring effort to assist make sure the river’s ecological restoration, a choice consistent with the rising dam elimination motion throughout the USA. The proprietor of these 4 getting old dams, PacifiCorp, going through a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} in upgrades ordered by the federal authorities, agreed to take away them. The dismantling of the primary was accomplished final yr, and work to take away the remaining three will start this summer time.
It’s heartening to see nature speed up in response to river restoration efforts. The Kennebec is shouting that it might be a paradise once more. In June 2023 there was a migration of big sturgeon right into a small Kennebec tributary, the Cobbosseecontee. Had the Edwards Dam nonetheless been standing, this migration may not have occurred. At its peak there have been about 200 sturgeon so long as 10 toes spawning in a trout-stream-size pool, all seen to an enraptured public viewing the scene from a bridge.
Arriving too late to witness this phenomenon, I relaxed by the Kennebec and was overjoyed to see a four-foot-long sturgeon make an important arching leap simply yards away from me whereas an osprey carried off a river herring — unmistakable indicators of a river already partly reborn from the elimination of simply the Edwards Dam.
