Environmental groups and a Native American tribe accused the operator of a Maine dam on Monday of not fulfilling its obligation to protect the country’s last remaining Atlantic salmon river run.

The last wild Atlantic salmon live in a group of rivers in Maine and have been listed under the Endangered Species Act since 2000. The Penobscot River, a 109-mile (175-kilometer) river in the eastern part of the state is one of the most important habitats for the fish.

The Penobscot is also the site of the Milford Dam, which is owned by renewable energy giant Brookfield Renewable. The company is required under the Endangered Species Act to maintain fish passages that allow 95% of adult salmon to pass the dam within 48 hours.

According to the Natural Resources Council of Maine, Atlantic Salmon Federation and Penobscot Indian Nation, documents obtained using the Maine Freedom of Access Act show that Brookfield isn’t living up to that obligation and that data compiled by the Maine Department of Marine Resources last fall show that only about 21% of salmon pass the dam in the required timeframe.

The groups contend that the problems at the dam are longstanding and that the data illustrate that Brookfield isn’t doing enough to fix them.

“We need to see some action here because this problem has been festering for too long,” said Nick Bennett, a staff scientist with the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

A Brookfield representative declined to comment on the group’s statements.

Brookfield’s stewardship of Maine salmon has long been a point of contention with environmental groups. The company has touted its efforts to improve passage on the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers.

Salmon were once plentiful in U.S. rivers, but populations were hurt by overfishing, and factors such as dams and pollution have made restoring them difficult. The species is widely used as seafood because it is widely grown in aquaculture farms.

Salmon counters found more than 1,300 of the wild fish on the Penobscot River last year. Numbers ebb and flow from year to year, with a recent low of 503 in 2016 but more than 1,400 in 2020.

The environmental groups shared the documents they obtained with The Associated Press. The documents include an email from Dan Kircheis, a salmon recovery coordinator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in which Kircheis states that Brookfield is “not meeting the delay standard for Atlantic salmon.”

Kircheis declined to comment. Officials with the Maine Department of Marine Resources also declined to comment.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230306234548/https://apnews.com/article/salmon-migration-dam-removal-maine-f2b637274617c783e885e39c5bcf398f

Agreed. Old timers knew this dam was going to be an issue as the Penobscot restoration project got underway.

Damn bears eating all the salmons and now this asshole ?

Brookfield is literally a cartoon villain.

Didn’t read the article but that’s no surprise

Oh well

Oh well. What's it matter?

Yup. They own several dams on the Kennebec as well, and refuse to allow adequate fish passage.

Some of those dams the state doesn’t want fish passage through to protect fish downstream. For example the Brassau dam. Above it there are smallmouth bass. Downstream in the moose river and Moosehead you have a good landlocked salmon fishery.

That one is also a Brookfield dam

I thought the state did something in Milford/Old Town a few years ago (maybe a decade at this point) to help the fish get upstream of the Milford dam?

Well it’s literally the last Atlantic Salmon run in the entire country.

It’s an extremely nuanced problem. We could remove the dam, but the damage upstream has already been done. It’s unclear to me at least if removing it would cause water level issues between east mill and Milford. Or a myriad of other things Plus you’d need to replace the power with something else. It would probably be oil or nat gas. Warming will fuck the salmon anyways through the warming gulf.

The dam is only 8MW, so it would take a handful of wind turbines to produce the same wattage. However the life of wind turbines is much shorter than a dam, and it remains to be seen what developers will do when the turbines reach the end of their life. They may just abandon them.

It comes back to it’s probably best to just leave the dam where it is, and figure out how to let the fish pass through.

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the kennebec and it’s tributary’s also a sea run salmon River? At least up to a certain point? I’m no where near an expert on Maine fisheries.

Don't kid yourself, Brookfield doesn't give a dam about separating species. There are plenty of reports of smallies in the moose going back a decade. I can't verify the accuracy of this tag from 2015, but you can see someone claiming their kid caught one there.

Not only do they not provide adequate fish passage, but they also to an atrocious job protecting the juvenile fish beneath their hydroelectric dams. On average dams trip for multiple hours four times a year, reducing river flows by upward of 85%, resulting in mass casualties and stranding's of salmon and trout. I can say this first hand as I participated in a citizen survey sponsored by trout unlimited as part of Brookfield's federal obligation to perform a study on the impact of these trip events this past October on the West Branch Penobscot. It's a bad scene. These guys are crooks who are profiting from our natural resources and we should put them out of business.

They built a stream-like fish bypass around the Howland dam. Milford dam has an inadequate fish lift.

Oh yeah that is what I am thinking of. The Howland fish bypass