Penobscot River Restoration Continues with Removal of Veazie Dam

by Catherine Schmitt

Restoration of the mighty Penobscot River became one step closer to reality on July 22, when hundreds of people gathered on the river banks to watch as demolition crews began dismantling the Veazie Dam.

The dam stretches 830 feet across the river between Veazie and Eddington above the rapids of Eddington Bend, which according to Penobscot Nation Chief Kirk Francis delineated the Tribe’s territory in early treaties. “This river is simply who we are,” said Francis. “We are creating a future for Penobscots to be Penobscots in the most meaningful way.”

Removal of the Veazie Dam comes one year after removal of the Great Works Dam at Old Town last summer. Both are part of the Penobscot River Restoration Project, a collaboration between the Penobscot Indian Nation, seven conservation groups, hydropower companies, and state and federal agencies to restore populations of native sea-run fish. The next phase of the project includes construction of a bypass channel around the Howland Dam at the mouth of the Piscataquis River, one of four major tributaries of the Penobscot. Another crucial aspect of the project is the enhancement of energy production: Black Bear Hydro is already working to increase electric power generation capacity at six other dams.

The current restoration project, which has cost around $63 million to date, is a creative resolution to decades of conflict over fish and power in the Penobscot River Valley.

Not that long ago, people were proposing to build new dams on the river (remember Swift River Co.’s Bangor Dam proposal? Remember Basin Mills?). But the project’s roots go deeper: people have been advocating for restoration of Penobscot River fish ever since people began destroying the Penobscot River.

Since rain and flooding wiped out the Bangor Dam in the mid-1970s, Veazie has been the dam closest to the sea, making it the first barrier confronted by upstream-migrating fish, which will be the first to benefit this fall, when project partners expect passage at Veazie to open fully, although the research on Sedgeunkedunk Stream, a tributary of the lower Penobscot, has shown that Atlantic salmon, which are endangered in Maine, sea lamprey and river herring quickly occupy native habitat when barriers are removed. While the number of adult salmon returning to the Penobscot has been small this year, the river is still considered by many scientists to be the last best hope for Atlantic salmon restoration. And with so much attention on the Penobscot, other fish have been able to share (steal?) the spotlight.

“I can’t wait to see what the sturgeon do,” said Gayle Zydlewski, a University of Maine fisheries biologist who has been tracking endangered shortnose sturgeon and Atlantic sturgeon in the Penobscot since 2006. “My guess is they go all the way to Milford. In other rivers, sturgeon typically will travel as far as they can to the foot of the first dam.” The adults want to get into freshwater, ideally 200 kilometers from the ocean, to spawn and hatch their young. While spawning activity has yet to be confirmed in the Penobscot, it may be that the sturgeon have been waiting for access to the right habitat.

These studies are contributing to a larger effort to scientifically document the impacts of dam removal. More than 1,000 dams have been removed from rivers across the country in the last decade. In 2012 alone, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service helped remove more than 200 barriers to fish passage. Yet data on the effects of dam removal are scarce. Guided by a $1.5 million monitoring strategy that The Nature Conservancy calls possibly “the most extensive before/after river restoration analysis in U.S. history,” scientists are studying how the dam removal affects everything from hydrology and sediment to water quality, wetlands, insects, shellfish, birds, and aquatic mammals in addition to fish.

Documentation of successful restoration of Maine’s largest watershed will be of benefit to rivers elsewhere, said Landis Hudson, Executive Director of Maine Rivers. “The more familiar people are with the kind of success these projects can have, the more they are open to restoring their own rivers,” said Hudson. The research associated with the Penobscot project helps to buoy smaller projects, such as those on the Mousam, Royal, and St. Croix rivers, that may not have the funding for such extensive scientific monitoring.

The science, combined with the comprehensive, watershed-scale approach to balancing fish passage and hydropower, are placing the Penobscot River project at the forefront of restoration science. Maine-based NOAA Fisheries staff, who helped draft the monitoring strategy, have shared results of Penobscot River research with West Coast colleagues who are monitoring the effects of dam removal on the Olympic Peninsula’s Elwha River.

Most of the more than 100 dams on the Penobscot River were built one at a time, rapid by rapid, to satisfy demands of individual mills, paper companies, and electric utilities, with a devastating cumulative impact on the ecosystem. To avoid repeating this piecemeal approach, The Nature Conservancy, who joined the project in 2006, is sharing Penobscot lessons around the world where new hydroelectric developments are being planned, such as the Yangtze River in China, Mekong River in southeast Asia, the Ganges River in India, Amazon Basin in Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa. “We are helping China Three Gorges Corporation and other utilities and power companies think at a basin-wide scale to find the least damaging places to build dams,” said The Nature Conservancy’s Kate Dempsey.

Restoring a river means more than just providing fish passage. Converting the existing impoundment at Veazie and Eddington, which extends nearly four miles upstream, to a series of whitewater rapids, riffles, and pools will return this stretch of the Penobscot to its natural riverine character, yielding a “web of benefits,” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Insects that are adapted to life in flowing water will come back and provide food for river fish, birds, and other animals. At the outer reaches of the “web of benefits” are inland denizens such as bald eagles, mink, and freshwater fish, and marine fish and wildlife in the Gulf of Maine. Several fisheries experts have proposed, based on historical reports and natural logic, that restoring forage (food) fish like river herring and smelt will help to replenish depleted populations of Atlantic cod and other ocean fish. The food and nutrients provided by migrating sea-run fish connect inland residents with the ocean and vice versa.

Members of the Penobscot Nation want to be able to practice their cultural traditions and human rights. With so many dams in close proximity, the lower Penobscot River has been difficult to access or travel upon. And with Atlantic salmon on the Endangered Species List, the Penobscot’s legendary fly-fishing culture is fading. On the day of the dam breaching, Claude Westfall held court in the Veazie Salmon Club, showing videos and photographs. Westfall was the last in an eighty-year tradition of delivering the first salmon caught in the Penobscot River to the President of the United States when he gave a fish to George H.W. Bush in 1992. Westfall is pretty sure the dam removal won’t much help the salmon. “I think other species will benefit,” he said. “Salmon are still going to have challenges with other dams and things, and global warming—I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t think I’ll fish for salmon again in my lifetime.” Westfall and other members of the Veazie, Eddington, and Penobscot salmon clubs were crucial defenders of the river during the dam-building proposals of the 1980s and 1990s.

Westfall’s gift to President Bush in 1992 marked the end of another tradition, that of eating salmon from the river. The Penobscots have been waiting for salmon to rebound before they exercise their tribal rights to the King of Fish. And the fish that reside in the river now—the trout, perch, pickerel, non-native bass and pike—are too contaminated with mercury and PCBs to regularly consume safely.

“This is about intergenerational justice,” said NOAA Regional Administrator John Bullard at the July 22 event. NOAA has provided more than $22 million in funds to support the restoration and associated science, and announced an additional $1.4 million in July. Ultimately, restoring the Penobscot River has the potential to bring healthier and more plentiful food fish back to the river and the Gulf of Maine.

Project partners and friends up and down the valley are celebrating the removal of the Veazie Dam, but they know there is still a lot of work to be done—removing barriers on tributary streams and lakes that continue to block access to smelt, alewives, and other species, improving water quality, and raising money—and that they won’t succeed without continued involvement and community support. It took two hundred years to bring the Penobscot’s Atlantic salmon and other sea-run fish to the brink of extinction. The question now is, will they come back, and how long will it take?