A Maine dam removal aims to give endangered Atlantic salmon a path home
The Cherryfield ice-control dam on the Narraguagus River has been replaced with a nature-like fishway, part of a $9.1 million project meant to help one of the last wild Atlantic salmon runs in the United States.
According to a piece published Saturday by Delger Erdenesanaa of The Maine Monitor, republished via Inside Climate News, the Cherryfield ice-control dam on Maine's Narraguagus River has been demolished and replaced with a "nature-like fishway," a series of stair-stepped pools designed to let fish pass while still managing flood and ice risk. The $9.1 million project, funded through NOAA's Restoration Center and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, began in June 2026 and is expected to finish by November.
Gulf of Maine Atlantic salmon are federally listed as endangered, with only about 1,000 wild adults now returning to Maine rivers each year, down from the hundreds of thousands that once ran there historically. The Narraguagus River specifically sees roughly 25 wild adult salmon return annually, and the fish are increasingly stressed by warming water, since they struggle above 68 degrees Fahrenheit, a threshold the river regularly exceeds in summer.
Federal recovery plans estimate that fully restoring the species could take 75 years and cost more than $800 million, and the population still depends heavily on hatchery releases, fewer than 1% of which return as adults. Still, the report notes that Cherryfield residents voted unanimously in 2023 to remove the dam, seeing both environmental and economic potential in the change.
Delger Erdenesanaa, The Maine Monitor / Inside Climate News: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19092026/maine-dam-removal-helps-endangered-salmon/
This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by an editor before publication.
