Brunswick Dam Fish Ladder Design Blocks River Herring

This is a piece contributed by John Lichter about how the fish passage at Brunswick Dam is inadequate. The graph shows river herring passage in the Androscoggin compared to two other sites with some dam removals and updated fish passages.

Figure 1.  River herring passage at Brunswick on the Androscoggin River, Damariscotta Mills, and Benton Falls on the Sebasticook River between 2000-2023 in millions of fish passed. Estimates of potential river herring production are 2.7 million for the Androscoggin, 1 million for Damariscotta Mills, and 5.3 million for the Sebasticook. By 2009, two dams had been removed and three fish lifts installed on the remaining dams in the Sebasticook/Kennebec system allowing passage of millions of river herring. By 2017, the Damariscotta Mills fishway had been reconstructed allowing passage of ~1 million alewives each year into a single lake. The Androscoggin, however, has been left behind with inadequate fish passage. The fishway at Brunswick has only passed 71,087 river herring on average each year between 2000 and 2023, only 2.6% of its potential productivity. Also, very few American shad are able to navigate the Brunswick fishway (data not shown).