When Should a Dam be Breached?

As a crowd gathered early last month along the east bluff of Edwards Dam, a great blue heron flew low above the Kennebec River, traveling downstream from where water still flowed smoothly over the 162-year-old structure. Soon out of view, the heron had been disturbed from its usual stalking territory, perhaps by the diesel shovel digging bucketfuls of soil from a temporary dam across the river or the large crowd on the opposite shore. Perhaps it was the noise of a helicopter and a floatplane circling overhead carrying television crews.

They had all shown up at Edwards Dam to witness the breaching of a major hydropower dam, an unprecedented event in U.S. history. The dam is being removed to save migrating fish, restore Kennebec’s habitat and improve fishing and boating. If fish increase in the river, it might be a boon for the heron. Built in 1837, the dam was operating when Henry David Thoreau canoed Maine’s rivers in the 1840s.

“A bittersweet event,” Augusta’s mayor said. So it was: a willing and willful removal of one of the triumphs of the machine age, a piece of Yankee ingenuity that had provided power, jobs and prosperity for Augusta.

As I stood by the river, I thought about my own experiences with New England water power. My friend and father-in-law, Heman Chase, owned a small water- powered mill in East Alstead, a southwestern New Hampshire village. At the turn of the 19th century, seven mills lined a short stretch of a stream flowing out of Warren’s Pond. As it tumbled down a steep slope, the stream turned mill wheels to cut wood, grind grain, make cloth.

By the turn of the 20th century, electrical transmission lines had replaced the old mechanical mills. Chase restored his mill by installing a turbine wheel inside the mill building at the end of a long flume, instead of a big waterwheel outside. The turbine had been the latest technology in the second part of the 19th century, invented just before mills made the transition from mechanical- to electrical-power generation.

Each century and each generation has had its own approach to water power and rivers. Dams were built across the United States to provide power for many kinds of industries, from textile mills to aluminum refineries; to store water for irrigation; to control water to aid ship navigation so grain and other goods could be transported downriver; for flood control; and for recreation. But dams greatly altered stream habitat. As Thoreau observed on the Merrimack, migrating fish like shad and salmon, once common there, were rare in his time because they could not pass over the dams already in place by the 1840s.

The old mill, a seeming symbol of constancy, was just one stage in a society and technology rapidly changing. For Chase, his mill was a symbol of Yankee independence and the ideal of self-sufficiency in a democratic society. One winter, soon after the environment had become a major social issue, I helped him install a new flume. “Best way to teach physics is to see the mill running,” Chase used to say. Water power was viewed as clean energy in the 1970s and 1980s, not polluting the air or water. It seemed an improvement over other forms of energy generation because of “brown” environmental issues. But today, the emphasis is shifting to “green” issues: fish in the rivers, trees along the shores, endangered species and the quality of human life.

When a big bell in an Augusta church announced the time to breach Edwards Dam, the diesel shovel dug deeper and deeper into the temporary earth dam until a shout went up from the crowd and water began to spill through. The thin trickle breached the dam and eroded rapidly downward, moving ever faster. A frothy, brown, mud-laden torrent began to run down the far side of the Kennebec, tumbling against an old mill building and spreading its color into the main channel. The river began to clean itself of a century and a half of deposits behind the old dam.

Some would say that the removal of the dam was righting an old wrong. Others would say it was a mistake, wronging an old right. But it was not a matter of absolute right or wrong, but a change in our society’s needs and desires, a continuation of change and progress, of new ideas, that has characterized U.S. society. The dam and its mills no longer provided prosperity for Augusta but instead threatened migrating fish like shad, which are in trouble along the coast. The majority of people wanted the river back as a renewable resource for living things. Other sources for energy could be found.

Edwards Dam is likely to be the first of many dams that will be removed. It was a relatively easy decision, since the dam had ceased to be much use to Augusta. Maine is now a major tourist, rather than industrial, state. But other dams to follow are likely to cause much more conflict.

For example, a more controversial suggestion is the partial removal of four lower dams on the Snake River in Idaho--Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite--by breaching earthen portions and allowing cement portions to remain. The dams, with their huge locks, make Lewiston, Idaho, 465 miles from the Pacific Ocean, a seaport, connected by the Snake and Columbia Rivers to the ocean at Astoria, Ore.

Snake River salmon, once plentiful and now sparse, could benefit. Snake River populations of three salmon species are listed as threatened or endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act, and some action is legally required.

People who would benefit include recreational, commercial and tribal fishermen and recreational outfitters; railroads and truckers, which would move the grain previously carried by barge; construction companies; and those throughout the nation who value just knowing that the river is once again free-running and an improved salmon habitat.

Those opposed to the breachings argue that 5% of the electricity produced by the Bonneville Power Administration would be lost. Replacing it would cost consumers and add to pollution if the source were fossil fuels; transporting grain would be more expensive; breaching the dams would cost nearly $1 billion; tourist ships following the Lewis and Clark trail from Lewiston to the mouth of the Columbia would suffer, as would the economies of cities like Lewiston.

Supporters counter that the electrical-rate increases would be low per capita, about $1 to $5 per month per household, and way below the national average because of cheap hydropower; that wind and solar could provide clean sources of energy; that costs of breaching and related engineering works could be amortized. They suggest that meeting Endangered Species Act requirements by other means would cost about the same; that once the salmon on the Snake return to their former numbers, fishing, from California to Alaska, would improve, with economic benefits ranging from $400 million to more than $600 million a year.

The danger is that proposals like breaching portions of dams on the Snake River will turn into shouting matches of who’s right, who’s wrong, rather than into discussions of what kind of progress is appropriate. Nature’s needs will be pitted against people’s needs. But Thoreau knew that these needs are deeply intertwined. When he wrote his famous phrase, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he followed it with an explanation: from wilderness comes “the tonics and barks that brace mankind,” a poetic way of saying that nature provides what human beings need. It was the contact between nature and human society that so interested Thoreau, and interested my watermill-owning father-in-law.

When we recognize this contact and our deep interdependency with nature, we will be able to see the adjustments in where we have dams and what we dam as not a matter of true or false, right or wrong, but as a matter of landscape design that best meets many needs and desires in a world that is always changing. With the removal of Edwards Dam, the heron and the cormorant will fly again along the waters, and we will begin to enjoy nature within a changed society and changed environment. The tolling of the bell was an announcement of progress, not death or decline.*