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Alewives Signal Rivers' Renaissance

June 03, 2009 - AUGUSTA -- Almost 10 years after the historic removal of the Edwards Dam in Augusta, the Kennebec River and its tributaries are in splendid health. Water quality has improved from the murky, oxygen-poor flatwater backed up for miles behind the dam and most dramatically, fish populations are rebounding.

Just ask the alewife harvesters in Benton, where the springtime run of these native fish has reached almost two million -- which regulators say is perhaps the largest migration in the United States this year.

The Kennebec and its tributaries, including the Sebasticook River, were once among the East Coast's most productive rivers, filled with native fish like salmon, shad, blueback herring and alewives and crowded with the species that relied on them for food -- bald eagles, osprey, great blue heron, bear, mink.

That abundance was lost with the advent of the industrial era and the dams that powered it, which blocked migrating fish from their upriver spawning grounds and decimated their populations. Likewise, industrial pollution fouled the Kennebec's once clear waters and it was said that by the mid-20th century, you were as likely to catch what one sportswriter called "a soggy ribbon of toilet paper" as a fish.

For many decades, Maine was willing to pay that price for its prosperity. But in the 1980s, a restoration effort began to bring the river back to good health.

The 1999 removal of the Edwards Dam was a crucial part of that multi-year river restoration effort spearheaded by the feds, the state of Maine and local conservation and angler groups. The Edwards Dam removal opened up 17 miles of free-flowing water upriver of Augusta.

Last summer, the restoration plan for the Kennebec reached another milestone when the Fort Halifax dam, which impounded the Sebasticook River where it meets the Kennebec, was also removed.

Between the free-flowing river above the old Fort Halifax dam site and the state-of-the-art fish passage at the other upriver dams, the Kennebec's native fish now have access to the headwater ponds in the Sebasticook river system, as far inland as Stetson Pond near Newport. That's almost 75 miles from the coast and the Gulf of Maine. And state fisheries officials, as well as the men harvesting alewives in Benton this year for the first time in 200 years, say the alewives have shown up in astonishing numbers.

This year's alewife migration is testimony to the ability of the river to recover from centuries of insults. But there's something more: The money made off the alewife harvest in Benton (more than $15,000 paid in fees to the town by the harvester, who will sell the alewives as lobster bait), demonstrates there's economic value to river restoration, too.

The story of the Kennebec's renewal, and the renewal of tributaries like the Sebasticook, is not an unequivocally rosy one. There are still Augusta residents who lament the loss of the Edwards Dam and the substantial taxes its owners paid to the city. The residents of Dallaire Street in Winslow, whose homes are now sitting on an unstable riverbank after the removal of the Fort Halifax Dam, are undeniably suffering.

Yet the thrilling fact of a river restored -- two million alewives! -- does not pale in the presence of these losses. It is part of the complicated social, cultural, political and economic fabric of ecological restoration. When the full measure of the Kennebec's restoration is taken many decades hence, it will contain both of these poles.

And we believe that, even now, it is possible to say that there is great value in these new and abundant signs of life in our river. Value that comes at a cost, but value nonetheless.

Monday June 1st, 2009

Kennebec Journal editorial


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Regions: Belgrade, Bangor, Mid Coast


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