By BILL CHAISSON
Yesterday, I wrote about the siting of mill towns and the relationship to topography as controlled by geology. The source of energy for mills until the 20th century was either water power directly driving machinery (as is still the case at the Chase Mill in Alstead), water power turning a turbine that drives machinery, or water power turning a turbine hooked up to a generator that creates electricity that drives machinery. Recently, newly elected Springfield select board member George McNaughton asked the energy advisory board of the town why hydro-power was not in the plan for creating “green” power in the future. They told him that dams are expensive and potentially bad for stream ecology.
Today I was introduced to a fish that is new to me: the sauger. It is closely related to a walleye (and sometimes hybridizes with it to create “saugereyes”), but unlike the walleye it prefers streams and rivers and is highly migratory. Consequently, the sauger is rare to the point that there is no legal season for them and anglers are asked to throw them back after they distinguish them from a walleye.
In 1989 while I was in graduate school, I spent several months working on the Connecticut River fishways in Massachusetts. Part of my job was to count American shad and blue-backed herring as they migrated up the river to spawn. A fish the migrates from salt- to freshwater to spawn is called an anadromous species. We counted shad and herring by the hundreds of thousands, but we were really there to count the Atlantic salmon. They had been re-introduced to the river in a multi-state effort. We caught every 10th fish that swam by and they carted it off to the hatchery to spawn it. Thirty years later this program is considered a failure; the salmon population has not become self-sustaining. One of the most significant factors in the failure is the damming of the Connecticut and many of its tributaries.
You can read this between the lines in the text at the website for the Wilder Dam (between Wilder, Vt. and West Lebanon, N.H.). One paragraph lists the “benefits” of the dam: electric power production and significant contribution to the tax base, and more arguably, creation of “ecologically rich backwaters and wetland areas.” In the next paragraph the writer walks this back a bit. “Water temperatures increase as a result of the greater surface exposure to sunlight, leading to reduced dissolved oxygen and reducing habitat quality for trout and other coldwater fish.” Furthermore the floodplains no longer function because the dam raises the water level and causes sediment accumulation in new places.
Selectman McNaugh-ton’s perspective is quite logical: these dams helped build the economy of this town in the 19th century, why can’t they do it now? Well, because not only have we learned a lot about stream ecology since the 19th century, but at least some members of American society care about the consequences of disrupting it. The engineering fix of building fishways works for some species (shad, herring), but not for others (salmon, sauger). And we know that if you affect some species, then the consequences cascade through the whole system.
When I lived on Martha’s Vineyard, the town of West Tisbury was very attached to their mill pond. The pond was held back by small dam that had a fishway that did not work. The pond was largely silted in and the temperatures were too high to support herring attempting to breed, even if they managed to get up the fishway. There were certainly no mills present anymore and therefore the pond has no function except as scenery and as a reminder of a working landscape that has long since retired.
Mill Brook in Windsor, Vermont has three natural falls that create a drop of over 60 feet in just a third of a mile. The Ascutney Mill Dam (or Windsor Upper Dam) was built in 1834. It was important to the industrial growth and development of the town, but it hasn’t produced power since the 1960s, when, according to the application for historical register status, it was “no longer needed.” Recently, the town spent $1.5 million (plus a $1.25 million grant) to repair the 184-year-old dam because if it failed residents below would be in serious danger and because of its historic status.
There are dams like this one — albeit not this old — throughout the Connecticut drainage. The official position of environmentalists in government employ is that they should all be removed to let the rivers run free again, as there is no use for them as a power source anymore. Many of them were abandoned when the national grid powered by fossil fuel (and much, much larger Canadian hydro-power dams) obviated them in the 20th century. But now there is no reason to put them on line again because the combination of wind and solar power will be the order of the day, especially when battery technology for electricity storage gets to where it needs to be.
Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times.
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