Conservationists, Anglers Applaud Condemnation of Dam Nuisance

On a July afternoon in 1837, while visiting a college friend in Maine’s burgeoning new capital, Nathaniel Hawthorne watched a stone-and-timber dam take shape on the Kennebec River.

Writing from his friend’s riverside home, the author observed that the current of the Kennebec, known at the time for prodigious harvests of fish, was “interrupted by the works of the mill-dam.”

Things haven’t been the same since for the fish that used to swim freely upstream.

The Edwards Dam, meanwhile, has survived floods, an explosion and assaults by governors, anglers, environmentalists and a television star. But it faces the greatest threat in its 160-year history: condemnation by the federal government.

The case has broad implications and is being watched closely across the country. But it may be a while before the 19-foot-high, concrete-topped dam, which stretches 917 feet across the Kennebec, is gone--if it is removed at all.

The owner is determined to fight the order, maintaining that the government is illegally seizing the main asset of his business.

“We operate on the principle that you shall not take your neighbor’s property,” said Mark Isaacson, vice president of Edwards Manufacturing Co.

The coalition that has been pressing for the dam’s removal for a decade is confident that it will prevail in Edwards’ expected court challenge. “That river is a public resource and they’ve had monopoly rights” to it, said Steve Brooke of the Kennebec Coalition. “They have borrowed our river; they now have to give it back.”

Last November, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made history by ordering for the first time the removal of an operating dam against the wishes of the owner. The owner was also ordered to pay for the demolition, whose cost has been estimated at $2.7 million or more, and restoration of the area around it.

FERC acted under a decade-old law requiring it to balance environmental protection with energy interests in considering dam licenses. The agency said removal would give salmon, shad, the endangered shortnose sturgeon and other species of fish natural access to 17 more miles of the Kennebec.

For the first time since the telegraph was patented, nine species of fish would have access to their natural spawning habitat; four species, including striped bass, would regain their entire historic range.

At the time of the dam’s construction, however, the well-being of fish ranked behind navigation and mechanical power, the chief reasons the dam was proposed.

A spot in the Kennebec where tidal flows end was recognized as early as 1785 as a potential site for a dam. In 1834, the Legislature was petitioned to build a dam to “open the great resources of the state, which thus far have been suffered to lie neglected.”

A work force of Irish and French-Canadian immigrants bolted huge timber cribs into place across the river and filled them with rock ballast. The cribs were covered with pine planks and stone. In all, 25 tons of iron, 75,000 tons of ballast and 2.5 million feet of timber were used.

The dam was breached in a spring flood of 1839 and at least twice after that, but it was repaired each time. By the 1850s, flour, saw and cotton mills had appeared alongside the dam.

For a time, five steamboats a day passed through the locks to travel to the next city north, Waterville.

After the railroad supplanted the boats, the cotton mill that became a major employer in town for a century was humming at the dam’s side. The dam today bears the Edwards Manufacturing Co.’s name.

With the mill gone, the Edwards Dam has been selling all 3.5 megawatts it generates to Maine’s largest electric utility, Central Maine Power Co. That’s only 0.1% of Maine’s total.

FERC cited the dam’s relatively small role in power production as one consideration in issuing its order. The dam’s value as a historic structure has been dismissed because it has been rebuilt so many times; opponents have derided it as a “harmful relic of a past era.”

Among those who have spoken out for the dam’s removal is local native Richard Dysart, star of the “L.A. Law” television series, who once fished just downstream from the dam as news cameras whirred.

Besides restoring fish habitat, FERC said removal would restore valuable wetlands and enhance recreational boating.

The Kennebec Coalition, which has been calling for the dam’s removal for a decade, predicted that the populations of migratory fish will again flourish. John McKernan proposed removal when he was governor in 1990, and Gov. Angus King also supports the dam’s demolition.

The FERC order also demonstrates that dams are no longer perceived as permanent structures, said Margaret Bowman of American Rivers, a coalition member.

“This will be the first time that FERC’s authority to order a dam removed will be tested in court, and a lot of people are watching that,” Bowman said recently.

The city of Tacoma, Wash., is intervening in the case in the interest of protecting a local dam at relicensing time. National hydroelectric power groups, aware that FERC will consider relicensing about 200 dams in the next decade, are also involved.