Case Study

Head Tide Dam Removal

Challenges

The Head Tide Dam was constructed over 250 years ago to power a series of mills in Alna. The Jewett family donated the dam to the town in 1964. One of the main challenges in the project was deciding whether work could proceed due to a covenant in the deed stating the dam could never be destroyed.

Solutions

To address the concerns about the legal deed covenant, the decision was made to partially remove the western portion of the dam. The partial dam removal and construction of the overlook platform – which maintained “one contiguous line from shore to shore” – was deemed acceptable by Alna selectmen and legal counsel as complying with the legal deed covenant. In addition, the partial removal maintained a portion of the historic structure as a landmark for the community.

Successes

The partial removal of the Head Tide Dam is a good example of the ability to think and work creatively to address legal limitations on a project. It also was successful in providing habitat connectivity as well as preserving the historic dam structure that was important to the community.

Lessons Learned

The partial removal of the Head Tide Dam dam resulted from a strong team that worked on the project. The restoration team did not go into the community with a preconceived idea of what needed to happen but rather worked with the community to decide how to improve fish passage and river connectivity.

Just because there are legal challenges or deed restrictions on a dam, doesn’t mean that modifications can not be made to a dam. This project highlights the opportunity to think creatively to work through legal challenges and deed restrictions.

References and Additional Resources

https://atlanticsalmonrestoration.org/projects/magic-on-the-river

https://lcnme.com/currentnews/work-starts-at-head-tide-dam-in-alna/

https://lcnme.com/currentnews/head-tide-dam-project-a-gift-thats-going-to-outlive-us-all/

Location
Alna, Maine
River
Sheepscot River
Year
2019
Type
Partial Removal
Cost
$515,000
Project Partners
Town of Alna, Atlantic Salmon Federation (ASF), The Nature Conservancy, Midcoast Conservancy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Maine Department of Marine Resources, Maine Department of Environmental Protection, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation
Funding Sources
NOAA Community Habitat Restoration Program, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Enbridge Corporation, The Nature Conservancy, Elmina B. Sewall Foundation, Davis Conservation Foundation, Patagonia, Farnsworth Foundation, Trout and Salmon Foundation and others

The Dam Atlas is a guide for communities to understand, evaluate, and make decisions about historic dams.

New England is home to more than 14,000 dams, many of which are small, “legacy” structures built over a century ago. Most no longer serve their original industrial purposes and are reaching the end of their useful lives, raising concerns about safety, maintenance, and ecological impacts. These aging dams can threaten downstream communities, especially as climate change brings more frequent and intense storms. While dam removal is often advocated for ecological, economic, and safety reasons—such as restoring fish passage, water quality, and sediment flow—many communities feel a strong attachment to their local dams. Dams and their impoundments have become part of the landscape, local history, and sense of place, sometimes even serving as town landmarks or symbols of cultural identity.

The goal of this website is to share this work and support communities who are making decisions about the future of a dam. Decisions about dams are inherently complex and require the consideration of ecological, social, safety, and economic trade-offs. While there are many great resources and publications for proponents of dam removal, this website aims to provide an unbiased source of information on the ecological and social considerations associated with dam decisions. Rather than advocating solely for removal, the goal of this approach is to bring a community into an open conversation to think creatively about the future of a dam. While this may seem counterintuitive if your role is to advocate for dam removal, engaging communities in an open but structured discussion about the future of a dam has the potential to lead to better environmental outcomes and a community that has more ownership, connection, and sense of stewardship over their river. In addition, this approach has the potential to address what are often perceived as unequal power dynamics between dam removal proponents and the local community, which has led to projects stalling or failing in the past.

This website consists of four main sections: The first chapter, “Understanding Dams,” introduces key ecological, social, infrastructural, and economic factors that are important to consider for the management of dams at the individual and watershed scale. The second part, “Scenarios & Case Studies,” looks at various alternatives for the future of a dam and presents a series of case studies of projects throughout the region. The third chapter, “Making Decisions,” shares methods, ideas, and tools for how to engage in conversations about the future of a dam. The last section, the Interactive Dam Atlas, was developed in collaboration with faculty from the University of Rhode Island and helps to visualize and build a geographic understanding of dams in the Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island coastal watersheds.

While this Dam Atlas is focused on dams in the Narragansett Bay and coastal watersheds of Rhode Island, the metrics calculated in the GIS analysis can be applied to other watersheds, and the decision-making tools are not region-specific. By sharing our methods and the open-source decision support toolkit, the aim is to help support practitioners and communities that are looking for ideas, methods, and techniques for having discussions about the future of a dam. We encourage others to use, test, modify, evolve, and share these methods. Ultimately, the goal is for this work to contribute to a “library of approaches” that are openly shared to build knowledge and techniques to support collaborative environmental decision-making around dams.