The river under the Bridge Street bridge in Yarmouth, Maine used to pool flat and still.<\/p>\n
Now it drops through broken concrete.<\/p>\n
An excavator works where a dam held the water back for more than a century and a half.<\/p>\n
Jackhammers have chewed through a fish ladder that never passed fish the way it was meant to.<\/p>\n
Behind it, the impoundment has been drawn down to bare riverbed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n So what made this particular stretch of water worth tearing apart?<\/p>\n The Bridge Street Dam stretches 275 feet across<\/strong> a run of whitewater called Second Falls, and it has blocked the Royal River since the mill era, when it powered a textile mill for the Royal River Manufacturing Co. A fish ladder was bolted on long after the mills closed, but the federal restoration review concluded that the fishway does not pass<\/strong> fish effectively, leaving alewives, blueback herring and sea run trout stacked up at the base of the falls.<\/p>\n That matters because alewives are a key forage species<\/strong> the whole bay leans on. They are what lobstermen bait traps with, what ospreys and eagles hunt, and what carries ocean nutrients inland every time a run pushes upstream to spawn.<\/p>\n Without working passage, fish piled up below the dam, unable to reach water their ancestors used. Federal planners treated the two town owned dams as the main chokepoint<\/strong> on the whole system, structures sitting near the head of tide that cut off nearly all of the spawning habitat<\/strong> above them.<\/p>\n Contractors drained the impoundment first, lowering the lake like pool that had backed up behind the dam for generations. They began by pulling a section of the old penstock, the large metal pipe that once directed water to the Sparhawk Mill downstream.<\/p>\n Next came jackhammers on the cement fishway, then the dam itself, taken out chunk by chunk<\/strong> rather than blasted at once. Crews expected the fishway, penstock and dam to be down by the end of September, with the last piece of penstock<\/strong> cut away and the opening filled with cement. The town mounted a photolog on the bridge so anyone can watch the channel change.<\/p>\n “It’s record breaking in terms of what it will mean for the river,” one town official said of the project, describing it as the biggest step yet<\/strong> toward a self sustaining run.<\/p>\n The Army Corps of Engineers found that the two dams obstruct fish passage to roughly 135 river miles<\/a> of reproductive and nursery habitat in the Royal’s main stem and tributaries. Coverage of the town’s decision put the predicted benefit at about 35,000 alewives<\/strong>, a run now largely missing from the river above Yarmouth.<\/p>\n Yarmouth’s town council voted unanimously in January<\/strong> 2025 to pursue removal of both the Bridge Street and East Elm Street dams, after two decades of studies and public argument.<\/p>\n This January, the Maine Natural Resources Conservation Program approved a $1 million grant<\/strong>, enough to start the Bridge Street work. The full job is estimated around $3.8 million, with American Rivers, the Casco Bay Estuary Partnership, the Nature Conservancy and other donors contributing, and the town’s resolution bars local tax money from the approved work.<\/p>\n Only one of the two dams is coming out this year. The East Elm Street Dam, farther upstream, is slated for removal next summer if<\/strong> the plan holds, and the fix for a third set of rapids at Middle Falls is still unsettled.<\/p>\n The federal plan called for a diversion structure pushing flow into a side channel, while engineers working for the town concluded that chipping bedrock in key spots would cost less over the long run. That disagreement has left Middle Falls as the project’s unresolved piece<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Business owners around Yarmouth’s marinas have opposed the removals, citing sediment and contaminants moving downstream. Testing behind the dams found only modest sediment deposits<\/strong>, generally low chemical levels and little risk to the estuary. Partners including the Casco Bay Estuary Partnership, state biologists and federal wildlife staff plan to track water quality, fish and the shape of the new channel.<\/p>\n Rivers nearby give a sense of the scale involved. On the Presumpscot River<\/a> and its tributary Mill Brook, where a dam at the head of tide came out and fish passage was built upstream, annual runs now number roughly 50,000 to 100,000<\/strong> alewives.<\/p>\n That is small next to Maine’s biggest rivers, where the Penobscot’s rebuilt run has reached the millions, but it is a return from near zero<\/strong>. People building homemade fish passages<\/a> elsewhere in the Northeast have found that herring and eels locate a new route quickly once one opens.<\/p>\n The same logic drives work like the volunteer divers<\/a> clearing derelict crab traps from waters off Vancouver Island: removing the obstruction is often the cheapest restoration available<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Nobody expects the Royal to fill with fish overnight. But once the last of the concrete is gone, the falls under Bridge Street will run over open ledge for the first time since the mill era, and the river will finally get to answer the question on its own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The river under the Bridge Street bridge in Yarmouth, Maine used to pool flat and still. Now it drops through broken concrete. An excavator works where a dam held the water back for more than a century and a half. Jackhammers have chewed through a fish ladder that never passed fish the way it was … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":43669,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"275 foot dam","rank_math_title":"Workers are tearing out a 275 foot dam on Maine's Royal River, a removal expected to reopen about 135 miles of river and tributary habitat and bring spawning alewives back upstream","rank_math_description":"Yarmouth, Maine crews are tearing down the Bridge Street Dam, reopening 135 miles of river for alewives after two centuries blocked.","footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-earth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43664"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43670,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43664\/revisions\/43670"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why this one small dam mattered so much to fish<\/h2>\n
What the river actually looks like right now<\/h2>\n
The hard numbers behind the push to tear it down<\/h2>\n
Where the project still runs into limits<\/h2>\n
What it could mean for the bay beyond the bridge<\/h2>\n