River Resurrection
Celebrating an ecological triumph
Shortly after we moved to Maine more than a decade ago, I was walking along the shores of the Kennebec River, my infant son slung across my chest as we explored our new territory. Suddenly, an enormous, studded sturgeon surged skyward out of the water, thrusting itself a good two feet off the surface before flopping back down with a thunderous crash. Stunned by the miraculous flash of fish, I burst out laughing. What a place! To this city boy, Maine seemed so pristine and wild, so remarkably natural.
But the awe-inspiring Kennebec we enjoy today is not a holdover from some pristine, untrammeled past. It is, rather, an ecological triumph resulting from human creativity, vision, and determination. Two generations ago, the Kennebec was an eyesore, a stinking, fetid cesspool largely devoid of aquatic life. The river was “so filthy that fumes stripped paint off nearby houses and cars,” wrote one reporter in 1989. “When you fell into the Kennebec in the late 60s and early 70s,” recalled local environmentalist Stephen Brooke, “the first place they took you was the hospital.”
The Kennebec’s resurrection is a compelling story of patience and persistence, of science and strategy, of ecology and economics, a story that challenges our traditional apocalyptic narratives about the environment.
The Kennebec River flows for 150 miles from Moosehead Lake in Maine’s western mountains to the fertile estuaries of Merrymeeting Bay. Its rich bounties of shad, herring, sturgeon, salmon, alewives, and striped bass nourished a string of 19th century riverside settlements, including Augusta, the capital of the new state of Maine. Eager to spur economic development, in 1837 city and state leaders built a 900-foot dam to span the Kennebec. Later named for the Edwards Manufacturing Company that owned it, the dam powered the area’s burgeoning mills and inspired dozens more dams to be built on the Kennebec and its tributaries further upstream.
On the Kennebec, fish died by the millions – the alewives all but disappeared, the shad industry collapsed, and the catch of salmon and sturgeon dwindled to a pittance. As the area continued to develop in the early 20th century, the river became a dumping ground for waste from paper mills and human sewage from growing towns. Logging drives choked the waters with detritus and layered the river bottom with bark. Riverside towns like Augusta built their downtowns to face away from the stinking sludge.
By the 1970s, with manufacturing in decline and environmental protection on the ascent, local leaders and residents alike began to see the putrid Kennebec as both an ecological disaster and an economic liability. With support from the federal Clean Water Act, signed by President Richard Nixon in 1972, the state spent $100 million to clean up the river. State officials worked with dam owners to build “fish ladders” and other mechanisms to allow alewives and other fish to migrate upstream. But still the fish did not rebound. By the 1980s, many observers came to see that the only way to fully restore the river and its fisheries was to remove the dam.
The idea was revolutionary, almost heretical at the time. “Dam removal was considered crazy talk,” remembered Laura Wildman, a hydro-engineer involved in dam removal efforts for decades. “It was like saying, ‘Let’s remove the sun from the sky,’ or ‘let’s remove Niagara Falls.’” For people reared on the idea that dams represented progress, the thought of removing a dam seemed retrograde, even un-American.
Yet the Kennebec’s defenders persevered. They formed the Kennebec Coalition to push for the removal of the Edwards Dam by targeting its federal license, which was due to expire in 1993. From the vantage point of today’s hyper-polarized politics, the Kennebec Coalition appears impossible – a motley crew of crunchy environmental activists, staid government bureaucrats, libertarian outdoorsmen, relentless lawyers, conservative business owners, and risk-averse public officials.
“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards,” wrote German theorist Max Weber more than a century ago. “It takes both passion and perspective.” The Kennebec Coalition took Weber to heart. With passion and perspective, it focused primarily on the economic benefits of restoring the river, arguing that the river’s resurrection would support local fisheries, bolster the outdoor industry, and be a magnet for tourists. They pointed out, as journalist Blaine Harden wrote, that “the dam cheats both fish and electricity consumers while funneling the bulk of its benefits into the pocket of a company that employs just four people. It does not control floods. It irrigates no fields. Its turbines produce one-tenth of 1 percent of Maine’s power needs, which is sold at three times the going rate for electricity in the state.” As Evan Richert, Maine’s State Director of Planning, put it: “the cost-benefit just wasn’t there.”
Advocates held public hearings and produced voluminous studies, filing more than 7,000 pages with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to argue that FERC should refuse to renew the dam’s license. And they won. In 1997, FERC rejected the dam owner’s license application, the first time that federal power regulators had ever done so. After three more years of complex negotiations to broker an agreement, the dam finally came down on July 1, 1999.
The removal itself was a party that attracted hundreds, including the inimitable writer John McPhee, who described the scene: “The crowd gathered in suits, ties, and combat fatigues, sandals, sneakers, boots, and backpacks—babies in the backpacks. There were port-a-potties, T-shirts for sale, booths of brochures. . . . The people had come to hear the Secretary of the Interior, the Governor of Maine, and the Mayor of Augusta—but mainly to witness the freeing of the Kennebec, the breaching of the dam.” With a ring of a church bell, a backhoe began tearing at the barrier and the river slowly broke through.
The successful removal of the Edwards Dam inspired other communities around the country to identify dams that have outlived their usefulness. “It was the first big dam that came out that demonstrated to the country that our rivers had other values beyond industrial use,” said John Burrows of the nonprofit Atlantic Salmon Federation, which was part of the Kennebec Coalition. Margaret Bowman of American Rivers agreed. “It made people realize that dam removal isn’t a crazy idea.”
Fish and wildlife rebounded almost immediately after the Edwards Dam came down, with alewives, sturgeon, and salmon returning by the millions. “The river is alive in a way it hasn’t been for generations,” gushed the Kennebec Journal in 2009. Augusta turned the former mill site next to the dam into a city park featuring concerts, festivals, and a farmer’s market. The city now sponsors an Ironman Triathlon in which competitors swim 2.4 miles in the river, which would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
It’s a remarkable turnaround embodied by the astounding sturgeon, that armored submarine of a fish that has become Augusta’s unofficial mascot – each year, local artists design four-feet fiberglass models that dot the city’s streets. Its return to the waters of the Kennebec is a reminder that, with passion and perspective, people can and have made significant environmental progress.
Sources
· “A Good Year for Alewives,” The Economist, July 27, 2000.
· Bruce Babbitt, “The Dawn of Dam Removal,” Patagonia, Early Fall 2012
· Jeff Crane, “’Setting the river free’: The Removal of the Edwards Dam and the Restoration of the Kennebec River,” Water History (January 2009): 131-148.
· Tara Lohan, “How Removing One Maine Dam 20 Years Ago Changed Everything,” The Revelator, Feb. 11, 2019.
· Maine State Planning Office, “The River Runs Free,”
· “Maine Dam Removal Voted 1999's Best New Development,” National Wildlife, Vol. 38, No. 4 (June/July 2000).
· Amy Nelson, “Expert Q&A: Laura Wildman,” Biohabitants (Fall Equinox, 2001).
On release day, I watched the flow from my 3 floor office window on Water St. A thrilling and hard fought victory.
A great story highlighting the fact that when man interferes with nature, problems arise.