The Presumpscot gets a chance at life.
THE MAINE CONSERVATIONIST
By Douglas Watts, July 1999
Used by permission of the author.
There is nothing in the entire State of Maine more sad than
what we humans have done to the Presumpscot River, the 25-mile long outlet
of Sebago Lake, Maine's second largest lake. And there is nothing more hopeful
than what the Coastal Conservation Association of Maine is doing for it.
The Presumpscot was once a crystal clear stream that leaped over ledges,
boiled through
bouldery pools and poured down thundering falls to the fertile salt marshes
of Casco Bay. It swarmed with nearly every fish native to the State of Maine:
landlocked salmon, sea-run Atlantic salmon, brook trout, striped bass, alewives,
blueback herring, American eels, American shad, rainbow smelt ... the list
goes on.
Each fall, the 15 to 25 pound landlocked salmon of Sebago, salmon as large
as any the ocean produced, dropped down from the lake to cut spawning redds
in the pebbly riffles of the Presumpscot and returned to Sebago to resume
their diet of foot-long smelt. The Presumpscot was also home to a unique
type of riverine salmon 19th century anglers called the "Presumpscot
Jumper" because it carried red spots throughout its life and spent
more time out of the water than in it when hooked on a fly. The jumpers
disappeared soon after World War I when the river's last bit of free-flowing
habitat was drowned by the North Gorham dam.
Today, the only free-flowing piece of the Presumpscot is a 1.25 mile stretch
right below Sebago Lake, which the state fought to have re-watered in the
1980s and 1990s after being bypassed for a century by S.D. Warren's Eel
Weir Dam. S.D. Warren bitterly opposed the re-watering and its attorneys
actually tried to claim restoring flow to the riverbed would create a safety
hazard because wading anglers might drown. As it has for this entire century,
the rest of the river's 25 miles remains a continuous series of still, flat
hydro-electric dam impoundments stretching all the way from North Gorham
to Casco Bay. Below the South African Pulp & Paper mill in Westbrook,
the river is seriously degraded in water quality. It is one of the only
river stretches in Maine which fails to meet Class C water standards, the
state's lowest classification.
Given all this, why would anyone care about such a sad, abused, polluted
and thoroughly dammed up river The Coastal Conservation Association of Maine.
Smelt Hill Dam To Go
Thanks to the Yarmouth-based saltwater fishing organization, the head of
tide Smelt Hill Dam on the Presumpscot River will be breached and removed
by late summer of next year. To accomplish this, CCA must raise between
$150,000 and $350,000 in the next year to pay its share of the cost of removing
the dam.
Pat Keliher, executive director of the Maine CCA, said the removal of dam
was made possible by a disastrous flood on the Presumpscot in the fall of
1996 which destroyed the dam's fish lift and several of its electrical generators.
The cost of repairs from the flooding and the low amount of power the dam
produced convinced its owner, Central Maine Power, to sell the dam to CCA
so that it can be removed.
Removal of the Smelt Hill Dam will return the Presumpscot's first seven
miles to its free-flowing condition, improve its water quality and provide
full passage for resident and migratory fish species.
Remarkably, the lower Presumpscot still maintains a small alewife run (20,000
adults) and a remnant shad and sea-run smelt run. Keliher believes numbers
of these species as well as blueback herring, eels, striped bass and salmonids
will expand greatly with the dam's removal.
"I'm sure stripers will go all the way to Westbrook once the dam is
out as long as they have bait fish to eat," Keliher said.
To make sure the Presumpscot's stripers have plenty of food to eat when
the dam comes out, CCA volunteers have been out in force this spring clearing
debris and beaver dams so the river's alewives can reach their prime spawning
grounds in Highland Lake in Windham.
If nothing else, the dedication of CCA members to improving their local
waters is remarkable. This May, a series of flood gates at the Smelt Hill
Dam were opened which allowed some alewives and shad to pass through the
dam at high tide. Word reached CCA from the Department of Marine Resources
that a large beaver dam on Mill Brook in Westbrook was preventing alewives
from reaching Highland Lake. E-mails were sent out to CCA members calling
for volunteers to clear the dam and check Mill Brook for other obstructions.
At 8 a.m. on Tuesday, May 25, a dozen CCA members gathered at a Portland
coffee shop armed with waders, clam rakes and hand saws. One group walked
more than two miles of boggy brook looking for obstructions. The second
group headed to Highland Lake and cleared the fishway of wood and debris
and opened up several log jams downstream. Within an hour, the rocky pool
below the fishway began filling with silvery blue alewives and small schools
alewives were spotted moving through the riffles and pools of Mill Brook
to their spawning grounds. Jeff Faulkner, a CCA volunteer, drove all the
way from Sanford to help the Presumpscot's alewives make it safely to their
spawning grounds.
Why did a group with about 800 members decide to take on a $200,000 dam
removal project on a polluted river?
Keliher said his group has eyed the Smelt Hill Dam for several years after
it learned the SAPPI paper company was considering buying and removing the
dam itself to reduce its pollution control costs upstream. In 1998, SAPPI
was required to have a new wastewater discharge license for its Westbrook
mill. A major contributor to poor water quality in the Presumpscot is the
Smelt Hill Dam, which slows the river's flow and allows solids from SAPPI's
pulp mill to settle on the river bottom and consume oxygen.
"With the dam in place, the lower seven miles of the Presumpscot is
a big, dead pond," said Keliher. "The studies show that the insect
life in the river bottom keeps getting buried by solids from the Westbrook
mill each summer. Biologically, it's a dead river section."
CCA stepped up to the plate when SAPPI suddenly lost interest in acquiring
and removing the Smelt Hill Dam. Since then, SAPPI has announced it is closing
its paper pulping operation at the Westbrook mill, which many believe was
a key reason why it decided not to buy and remove the Smelt Hill Dam. Without
the pulping operation, SAPPI's discharges to the river will be significantly
reduced.
"After SAPPI decided not to buy the dam, we got a call from the state
saying they wanted to remove the dam to improve water quality in the river,"
Keliher said. "But they needed a non-profit organization to lead the
project and raise the funds."
This is because the dam will be removed under the direction of the Army
Corps of Engineers through a federal river and estuary restoration program
called Coastal America. Under Coastal America, federal money can be used
to pay up to 65 percent of a dam removal, with the remaining funds coming
from non-federal sources. The state of Maine will contribute no funds to
the project, which does not bother Keliher or CCA.
"We're working with private foundations to raise most of the funds
and finding that many are very interested in helping with this type of project.
We're also hoping that anglers will contribute to the fund," he said.
Unlike the City of Augusta's long opposition to removing the Edwards Dam
on the Kennebec, there has been no virtually no local opposition to removing
the Smelt Hill Dam. Keliher said some local groups expressed concern that
polluted sediment behind the dam would be released and contaminate clam
flats in Casco Bay. Recent tests by the state show this will not happen
since spring flood flows appear to regularly scour the bottom of the lower
Presumpscot. As a result, Keliher said, there is not an appreciable amount
of sediment behind the dam.
"The local communities are really getting behind this project and everybody's
been great to work with," he said. "This river is a real gem.
You can canoe down this whole lower stretch and not see any houses. You
feel like you're a million miles from Portland."
Let's Restore A River
CCA's goal of restoring the Presumpscot River and its wealth of native fish
species is far from new. The idea is more than 130 years old. In 1867, Maine's
first Fisheries Commissioner, Charles Grandison Atkins, developed an expansive
and detailed plan of action to restore salmon, alewives, shad and other
fish and to all of state's major river systems, including the Presumpscot.
Because of citizen and government indifference and opposition from mill
and dam owners, Atkins' plan to restore the state's sea-run fisheries was
never realized except on one place: the Presumpscot. On the Presumpscot,
Atkins actually succeeded and by the late 1800s all of the mill dams on
the river from the sea to Sebago Lake had fully functioning fishways. While
the historic record past this point is poor, it appears that pollution,
new dams and increasing industrial use of the river overwhelmed those trying
to restore the river and the fishways were abandoned For the next century,
fish were ignored, more dams were built, pollution increased to horrible
levels and the Presumpscot River skidded into a decline that is only now
being partly arrested.
The federal licenses of five of SAPPI's low-power Presumpscot RIver dams
will expire in 2001 including Dundee Falls, Gambo Falls, Mallison Falls,
Little Falls and Saccarrapa Falls. At the same time, construction is now
beginning on a natural gas burning power plant next to the river that will
produce 50 times more electricity than all of the Presumpscot's dams combined.
Reflecting on this juxtaposition, George Neavoll of the Maine Sunday Telegram
wrote in a 1998 editorial column: "None of [these] dams have any discernible
useful purpose; they all should come out."
At minimum, the removal of the Smelt Hill Dam creates the opportunity for
the use of fishways at the Westbrook and Windham dams to allow sea-run trout
and salmon to gain access to spawning and nursery grounds in the free-flowing
reaches of Pleasant River, Little River and Colley Wright Brook; and for
sea-run alewives and juvenile eels to reach Little Sebago Lake.
Gordon Russell of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service was one of the persistent
biologists who insisted on returning flows to the upper 1.25 miles of the
Presumpscot in 1992, an effort which took nearly a decade. Russell said
he wants state and federal fisheries agencies to take a "big picture"
of the potential of the Presumpscot with the coming demolition of the Smelt
Hill Dam. "This is a chance for us to examine the whole watershed in
terms of water quality and fish passage and opportunities to restore the
river's sea-run fish," he said.
Nothing captures the potential of the Presumpscot better than a visit to
the free-flowing river just below Sebago Lake. The river is crystal clear
and is now recapturing its natural channel from a century of being overgrown
with vegetation. If you creep among the aldery shallows in late May you
will see hundreds of wild landlocked salmon and brook trout fry about the
size of a paper clip finning between granite boulders for a tidbit of food.
The restoration is in progress. Concerned anglers will ensure it continues.