June 11, 2012 — When an excavator slashes into the berm of the Great Works Dam on Monday morning, it will mark the start of a multimillion-dollar project to allow endangered and dwindling species to return to their historic spawning grounds along Maine’s Penobscot river. When the project is done – and after an additional dam is razed and another bypassed – it will open access to 1,000 miles of habitat for the native fish, including endangered Atlantic salmon.
When the project is done – scheduled for 2015, after an additional dam is razed and another bypassed – it will open access to 1,000 miles of habitat for the native fish, including endangered Atlantic salmon and short-nosed sturgeon that journey from the Gulf of Maine to breed in the cold, fresh waters of the Penobscot. That is more than any dam removal and river restoration effort in the country, state and federal officials say.
“People who had been fighting each other for many decades set that aside to focus on the common good,’’ said Laura Rose Day, executive director of the Penobscot River Restoration Trust, which bought the dams for $24 million two years ago and is overseeing their demolition. “It’s among the nation’s most comprehensive projects, with tribal, national, state, local, and nonprofit groups coming together to totally reconfigure the power production on a river so we can have fish restoration and hydropower.’’
The project, estimated to cost $62 million, will allow six other dams that will remain on the Penobscot and its tributaries to produce more electricity. Together, they will generate an estimated 50 megawatts of power, enough for about 25,000 homes.
“We absolutely see this as a positive – from a business standpoint and to satisfy our environmental responsibilities,’’ said Scott Hall, a spokesman for Black Bear Hydro Partners of Milford, Me., which owns the remaining dams.
Environmental advocates, fishermen, and a host of local, state, and federal officials have spent years seeking to restore the free flow of the Penobscot, the second-largest river in New England. 0ver the decades, as the dams churned out electricity, many of the river’s fish have disappeared.
Like other rivers in the region, such as the Kennebec, Androscoggin, Merrimack, and Connecticut, the Penobscot had massive fish runs until the early 1800s, when the nation began installing dams and log drives, mill waste, and other pollution began making many rivers into the equivalent of industrial dumps. There were as many as 100,000 salmon, 6 million American shad, and some 20 million river herring that migrated every year from the ocean to well north of Bradley to spawn.
There are now fewer than 1 percent that many fish of most of the 11 species that inhabit these waters, with less than 500 salmon counted this year, environmental advocates say. Most were bred in a hatchery. For years, the advocates prodded dam owners to build better fish ladders to allow the salmon to cross safely. But they found improved fish ladders didn’t do enough. The only answer, they decided, was to remove the three dams in the river’s lower 10 miles.
“The salmon population is now on life support, and it’s a miracle that we’re still finding all species that historically inhabited the river,’’ said Andy Goode, vice president of the Atlantic Salmon Federation in Brunswick, noting that many salmon die while trying to pass through the dams. “We think this is the last best chance to save the Atlantic salmon from extinction. They’ve already been lost on many other rivers.’’