BENTON FALLS, Maine — “Look underneath you,” commands Nate Gray, a burly biologist for the state of
Maine.
He reaches down to the grate floor of a steel cage perched on a dam
straddling the Sebasticook River, and pulls back a board revealing the
roiling river 30 feet below. “All you see is fish.”
Below, undulating in swift current, are the silver backs of thousands of small, sleek river herrings called alewives.
Six
years ago, there were no alewives here. This summer, Mr. Gray expects 3
million. The fish arrive here, awaiting a lift over the 27-foot high
hydroelectric dam in a $1 million hydraulic fish elevator, because two
dams downstream have been demolished. The first “class” of alewives that
hatched in lakes upstream after the dam removals are now returning by
the millions after four years at sea, eager to spawn. “What you are
looking at is a change in the mind-set of humanity toward what wealth
is,” says Gray.
The demolition of the two downstream dams at Winslow and
Augusta, opening a 63-mile run to the sea from Benton Falls, is part of a profound shift of priorities in the
United States.
Dams, celebrated as a triumph of modern engineering and symbol of man’s
call to redesign nature, are gradually being torn down. Some are safety
hazards; others are too costly to maintain. But the catalyst for most
of the demolition is to restore rivers to a wild state.
Nearly 900 dams, erected to power the
country’s machinery, store water, irrigate fields, or generate
hydroelectric power, have come down in the past 25 years. Each year,
about 50 or 60 more are removed, ranging from almost-forgotten rubble
obstructions to towering concrete structures. As dams come down,
conservationists say they are surprised at how quickly nature recovers.
River-watchers are starting to record signs of the natural bounty that
fed native Americans and astonished the first European settlers.
“We
are beginning to recognize the value of what we lost,” says Laura Rose
Day, who has worked on Maine river restoration for 16 years. “People
think dam removals are just about fish. Then they say, ‘Oh, I have more
eagles now,’ and ‘Oh, my water quality is better,’ and ‘Oh, I do like
the running river.’ ”
Mike Joslyn is one of those surprised. He
works for Essex Hydro at Benton Falls and helps maintain the fish
elevator. The alewives surge into a 6-by-6-foot cage that lifts from the
lower river every eight minutes. Thirty feet higher, its doors open,
and the alewives flash forward, darting through plastic tubing, where
each is electronically counted, and then out into the upper reach of the
river to continue their migratory dash. Standing beside the mechanism,
Mr. Joslyn checks his clipboard. The previous day, he lifted 95,200
river herrings.
When he started operating the fish lift, Joslyn
admits he thought it was a silly task. Then he went fishing below the
dam and found striped bass, another traveler now patrolling the freed
river for a meal of alewife. He fought a 39-inch striper.
“Now my attitude is completely changed,” he says. “The alewife are important to the habitat.”
New England
and the Great Lakes region, peppered with dams built for mills and
factories more than a century ago, have taken down the most dams,
according to American Rivers, a nonprofit advocating river restoration.
California and the Pacific Northwest rank next.
The
largest dam destroyed so far was the 108-foot-high Elwha Dam in
Washington, removed in 2011 after a bitter, two-decade battle that
pitted native Americans and environmentalists against conservative
politicians who balked at the idea and the cost. The dismantling of the
210-foot Glines Canyon Dam, eight miles behind it, is almost finished,
and will unlock 70 miles of the Elwha River to Pacific salmon. The
Embrey Dam removal on the Rappahannock River in Virginia may have been
the most spectacular: Engineers used 600 pounds of explosives to punch a
hole in the dam, allowing the river to drain to the Chesapeake Bay.
The
poster fish for dam removals is the wild salmon, beleaguered but still
numerous in the West and nearly gone in the East. They migrate from the
sea to find a familiar old river, and – by smell, scientists theorize –
work upriver to the farthest headwaters to spawn. River herring, shad,
sturgeon, and eel do the same on the East Coast. On the West Coast, the
greatest migration is of Pacific salmon and steelhead trout.
All
are stymied in that journey when they confront a dam. “Fish ladders” –
typically a series of successively higher pools – are imperfect. “They
will pass from zero to maybe 60 to 70 percent of the fish,” says Josh
Royte, a biologist who works for The
Nature Conservancy in Maine. Hydraulic elevators are used in some places; in other places, fish are netted and trucked around a dam.
• • •
But the decision to tear down a dam
is not always about fish; it often involves money and safety. The
American Society of Civil Engineers gave dam safety a “D” in its 2013
“report card” on infrastructure, and noted more than 2,000 “high hazard”
dams are structurally deficient. “The nation’s dams are aging and the
number of high-hazard dams is on the rise,” the group warned.
It
is a real threat. In 1972, coal sludge dams on Buffalo Creek in West
Virginia burst, killing 123 people. The Canyon Lake Dam in South Dakota
broke the same year, killing 238. In 1976, the collapse of the Teton Dam
in Idaho killed 11 people. In 1977 a Georgia dam failed, unleashing a
flood onto a Bible college and killing 39 people; a dam collapse in
Pennsylvania that year killed 40.
Each disaster is an echo of the
worst dam tragedy in this country. After pounding rains in 1889, a dam
built for wealthy fishermen high above Johnstown, Pa., was breached,
sending a 60-foot wall of water crashing over the towns below, killing
2,209 people.
Those tragedies put pressure on owners of dams, who
are responsible for the upkeep and could be liable for the failure of a
dam.
Robert Douglas,
the conservation manager in Andover, Mass., tracked down a lawn dye
company still listed as the owner of an 8-foot-high dam on the Shawsheen
River built by a textile baron in the 1920s because he liked the sound
of falling water. It had remained, even though it blocked fish and
periodically helped flood the downtown.
“They were surprised when
we called them a few years ago and said they were the owner of a
100-year-old dam,” Mr. Douglas recalls with a chuckle. The company “was
delighted” to give the dam up for removal rather than pay to repair it,
he says. Often, removal advocates find dam owners eager to dismantle
dams when they are shown the bill for safety updates and maintenance.
• • •
Dams sprouted in the US
as the population grew – first to divert water for crops and storage
for dry spells, and then for flood control and small manufacturing.
Owners of New England gunpowder, grist, and textile mills found dams
could increase the power of paddle wheels connected by pulleys to their
machines. Streams were dammed by the thousands, and people upstream and
down protested, sued, and sometimes rioted when their access to fish or a
riverway was blocked. But they usually lost, victims of a perception
that putting nature to work was man’s destiny.
In the West, the vast and dry expanses cut by mighty rivers led to the era of big dams. The
Colorado and Columbia rivers seemed a challenge, mighty but “wasted” flows to be harnessed for man. In 1920,
Franklin D. Roosevelt traveled the
Columbia River
Gorge while campaigning for the vice presidency. “As we were coming
down the river today,” he remarked, “I could not help thinking, as
everyone does, of all that water running unchecked down to the sea.”
By
the time Roosevelt became president in 1933, construction of the Hoover
Dam – then the biggest hydroelectric dam ever built, rising 726 feet in
3 million cubic yards of concrete – was under way. Roosevelt saw huge
dams – what his cousin Teddy Roosevelt, a Harvard-trained naturalist,
had praised as “great storage works” – as a way to put starving men to
work in the Depression, and to power the development of “practically
unused” stretches of America.
In a 35-year spurt, until 1965, the
massive structures grew: the Grand Coulee Dam and Bonneville Dam and
locks on the Columbia River, the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River,
the Shasta Dam on the Sacramento, the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado,
and others. The Tennessee Valley Authority diced up the mighty Tennessee
River with dams for power. The Army Corps of Engineers harnessed the
Ohio and Mississippi, creating dams and locks to keep the rivers placid
and the ships moving.
The projects were lionized in movie reels,
the workers hailed as the brave troops in a grand battle to subdue
nature. The resulting hydroelectricity fueled the transformation of the
US to an industrial power in World War II. By the 1960s, according to
Army Corps history, the US was the second most dammed country in the
world. It now lists approximately 80,000 dams higher than six feet, and
one estimate puts the number of smaller dams at more than 2 million.
“We
have been building, on average, one large dam a day, every day since
the Declaration of Independence,” remarked Bruce Babbitt, then secretary
of the interior, in 1998.
• • •
The modern environmental movement that coalesced
in the late 1960s and early ’70s – sparked by Rachel Carson and infused
with the rebellion of the times – questioned dams and began to slow
their pace. About a dozen were removed annually in the ’80s, but many
advocates see the Edwards Dam on Maine’s
Kennebec River
as their symbolic starting gun. In 1999, the hulking 917-foot-long,
24-foot-high hydroelectric dam was demolished on orders of the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission, which ruled that it impeded fish. It was
the first time river restoration won priority over electricity. Like the
hydroelectric dam removals that followed, the Edwards Dam power plant
was long outdated. Run by three workers, it produced only 3.5
megawatts.
Nature writer
John McPhee
watched the destruction. “The thundering water turned white and the
slicks were cordovan glass,” Mr. McPhee wrote in his book on shad, “The
Founding Fish.” “The Kennebec River in Augusta, after 162 years in the
slammer, was walking.”
Dams don’t stop just fish. The flow of
sediment and nutrients, increasingly understood as important to the
health of the river and land downstream, is blocked. Ponds behind dams
are sluggish, deep, and warm, inhospitable for species that like clear,
fast, and cool. Salmon are replaced by bass. Oxygen levels in the water
drop. Sediments pile up and toxins accumulate. Algae and weeds take
over. Birds of prey go elsewhere.
“Our goal is to give the river
back as much self-control as possible,” says Alison Bowden, an ecologist
who works with The Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts. She estimates
the streams in that state are plugged with 3,000 dams. “Do we really
think we can go back to the 1600s? No. But we want to do as much as we
can to return a river to a self-sustaining process.”
“As a
general rule, we don’t consider removing dams that were built for the
purpose of flood control,” says Ms. Bowden. But those are few; dams that
hold back reservoirs of water, or regulate the passing flow of rivers
for hydroelectric production, are not built for flood control. “The
general perception among the public is that dams provide flood control,
but most don’t. The old mill dams, for example, couldn’t hold back water
if you wanted them to.” The majority of dams targeted for removal no
longer serve a purpose at all, she says.
Not all dam removals have
been a success. When the Fort Edward Dam on the Hudson River north of
Albany, N.Y., was removed in 1973, tons of pent-up soil with highly
toxic PCBs were released downstream, an acute health hazard and cleanup
problem, still, 41 years later. And in the West, as drought sucks water
levels in reservoirs to record lows, some state lawmakers now are
clamoring to build more dams. “It is crucial that we create more
storage,” says California State Sen. Cathleen Galgiani, a Democrat who
wants four new reservoirs at a cost of $6.2 billion.
California
congressmen also are asking the federal government to enlarge two
existing dams and build two new ones. Rep. Richard “Doc” Hastings (R) of
Washington, who thinks salmon have too much leverage, introduced a bill
in 2012 to stop studying the removal of a hydroelectric dam or spilling
water for salmon without congressional approval. The bill went nowhere,
but he told a legislative hearing he wanted to “take back the offensive
on saving dams.”
And Maine Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican who
promotes hydropower, said, “I think it’s irresponsible for our state or
our country to be taking out hydro dams. In fact, we ought to be putting
more in,” he said in boycotting the ceremony of a dam removal on the
Penobscot River in 2012.
• • •
Andrew Goode contends
the only dams that have been removed are old; no longer needed for
mills, irrigation, or reservoirs; or produce little power. He works for
the Atlantic Salmon Federation, a Canadian-headquartered nonprofit
trying to save the last remnants of wild Atlantic salmon in North
American rivers. Most of those rivers are in Canada; the Penobscot River
in Maine is the southernmost wild salmon habitat.
Mr. Goode
spends more time trying to bring back river herring than salmon. The US
government spent 45 years and more than $25 million trying to restore
Atlantic salmon to the Connecticut and other New England rivers, and
failed.
“You have a lot of people around here who saw the federal
government spend a whole lot of money on one species – the salmon –
without much success,” he says. “We are trying to fix the problem from
the ground up, looking at the whole river.”
So he picks his
battles carefully, Goode explains while inspecting a fish ladder that
loops around a fieldstone dam built in the 1700s on Blackman Stream, a
swift tributary to the Penobscot. The dam powered a sawmill that is now a
museum run by period-costumed actors, a popular destination for school
trips. So taking down the dam is “a nonstarter,” he says.
When two
dam removals downstream opened the lower Penobscot River in 2009, the
federation built 17 climbing pools to help fish clear this dam. The
eight-inch-long alewives flash as they wiggle over each step. Goode nets
one and shows a group of excited schoolchildren.
In 2010,
conservation officials released 7,000 alewives in a pond upstream. Four
years later, exactly on cue, “like magic, we have thousands and
thousands of fish return.” Goode expects a half-million alewives will
return to this one narrow stream.
“Alewife are the keystone
species of the Maine rivers,” he explains. If he can help bring back the
alewife and the shad and other species, salmon will have a better
chance, he believes. The ecosystem will be healthier, the water cleaner
with more nutrients, and salmon will have more cover from predators.
Maine’s
Penobscot River and its veins of streams and brooks historically saw
massive migrations of salmon, shad, herring, sturgeon, striped bass,
eel, and lamprey. During salmon runs, the riverbanks would be so packed
that anglers took turns at the best spots, say old-timers who fished
here.
Overfished at sea and blocked from spawning grounds,
Atlantic salmon were declared endangered in the Penobscot in 2009.
Biologists estimate fewer than a half of 1 percent of the historic
population remains.
• • •
Hachey’s Rod and Fly Shop sits on a hill above where the Veazie Dam stood just north of
Bangor
until it was removed from the Penobscot last year. Gayland Hachey, a
fisherman for seven decades, is surrounded in his small shop by spools
of brilliant thread and a rainbow of feathers for tying flies. He says
he doesn’t expect to see big salmon runs again: “Not in my lifetime.”
Even
with two dams on the river gone, salmon must surmount three more dams
to get to spawning grounds in the farthest reaches of the tributaries.
“Show
me a dam on a river, and I’ll show you a river without Atlantic
salmon,” Mr. Hachey says. Under his cash register tray, he keeps “the
Green Gremlin,” a fly he made with green thread and a mallard’s feather.
It has a bent hook from the 10-1/2-pound Atlantic salmon he caught in
2007, the first fish of the season, a prize fiercely contested among the
members of the Veazie Salmon Club. And, Hachey figures, it was one of
the few remaining stragglers that returned to the Penobscot. Now, he
says, members of the club compete for cribbage honors.
The
Penobscot runs wide and fast where the Veazie Dam stood, shushing at the
rocks that slow its sprint to the Gulf of Maine. The dam’s destruction
exposed ancient rapids, and white froth snaps at the air.
Removal
of the Veazie and Great Works dams came because Bangor Hydro proposed a
massive new dam on the river in 1991. “People said, ‘enough,’ ”
recalled Ms. Rose Day. “They were fed up. They had been through a
significant cleanup of the river, and they saw what it could be.”
Groups
seeking to restore the river cooperated to create the Penobscot River
Restoration Trust, which Rose Day directs, and raised $25 million to buy
three dams. Two have been removed; the third was outfitted with a side
channel of modern fish steps.
The removals are working for
alewives. Chances for Atlantic salmon, still blocked from the farthest
headwaters and in danger at sea, are “not even 50-50,” Goode admits.
“But this is our last, best chance to save the Atlantic salmon in the
United States.”
Some think that is chasing a lost era. In his book
“Running Silver,” John Waldman describes that loss: “No longer did
family members fish the river for food and for market; no longer were
these fish on the dinner table; no longer did residents hold festivals
celebrating their return; no longer did they matter – and so they were
forgotten.”
The Penobscot native American tribe has not forgotten.
They fished the river for 10,000 years. Many of its 2,200 members live
on islands in the river. In 1976, they gained federal recognition and
fishing rights.
Mostly, those rights have been “words on paper,”
with no fish to claim, says John Banks, the tribe’s natural resources
director. But he is hopeful. “It took a couple of hundred years to put
the river in a bad condition,” he says.
“It will take a few more
years to bring it back. We are seeing ecological improvement. We’ve seen
more eagles come back. Ospreys. The river is coming back to life.”
No comments:
Post a Comment