Second Outage In 3 Years At Brookfield Dam May Have Killed Thousands Of Fish
Flows on the West Branch Penobscot plunged for hours on July 27, and guides say Brookfield's equipment has failed there before.
Anglers and fishing guides say a sudden loss of water on the Penobscot River's West Branch on July 27 may have left thousands of fish dead after equipment tied to Brookfield Renewable's McKay Station failed. A transmission line's cross-arm broke roughly 30 miles from Millinocket, and turbines at the station tripped offline around 4:30 in the afternoon. Flows on that stretch of river plunged almost immediately, dropping from roughly 2,400 cubic feet per second down to about 450 cfs, and stayed suppressed for more than two hours. Chris Howe, who manages the river for New England Outdoor Center, said he and a colleague pulled two dozen surviving fish from the water and counted 39 dead brook trout, salmon and other species along just 100 yards of bank in roughly an hour and a half. Drawing on a 2022 Brookfield study that modeled a comparable drop in flow, retired biologist Neal Hagstrom put together an early estimate of 3,800 to 7,700 dead juvenile landlocked salmon. A comparable outage cut flows sharply at the same station in 2023. Great Lakes Hydro America, Brookfield's operator for the project, said its automatic minimum-flow equipment functioned properly and that regulators were alerted, while Maine wildlife officials said they are looking into how long the event lasted and what it did to the fish population.
This story was first reported by Bangor Daily News.
