Official: MED long knew agencies' dam objections

MASSENA — Numerous environmental red flags raised over the past five years should have been enough for the Massena Electric Department to reconsider its now dead Grasse River dam project before millions were spent on several years' worth of studies, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.

Marci M. Caplis said her agency, as well as the state Department of Environmental Conservation and the Army Corps of Engineers, had been warning MED over the last five years about the potential environmental hazards and difficulties associated with building the proposed dam.

The Massena Electric Utility Board voted unanimously last week to end its effort to seek a license to construct the dam in the Grasse River near downtown Massena.

"Any of the concerns raised was serious enough that it could have warranted them to take another look at the project," Ms. Caplis said.

A major misconception was that each state and federal agency only recently raised concerns about the environmental impact of the project, she said. Among those concerns were the dam's impact on the river's lake sturgeon and American eel populations and migration patterns.

"There had been a lot of issues raised along the way, so it shouldn't be an enormous surprise," she said.

American eel migrate to freshwater to spawn, and lake sturgeon migrate to the ocean to reproduce, Ms. Caplis said. Installing a dam would harm their ability to travel and procreate.

"If a fish can't get back to where it was programmed to lay its eggs or to fertilize eggs, then you've lost a generation," she said.

The ability for all fish to pass through the dam was also of deep concern to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and DEC, Ms. Caplis said.

Representatives from DEC and the Army Corps of Engineers could not be reached for comment Thursday.

State and federal agencies knew the Grasse River used to have an operational dam until it breached in the 1990s, Ms. Caplis said. But since then, fish populations have grown. Installing a new dam would negate the environmental progress made since the dam was breached.

"Sure, there used to be a dam there. There also used to be a whole lot more fish there," she said. "The population is so small that anything that is built would have an impact on the species."

People don't notice a loss of fish and wildlife over time, she said.

"It's no coincidence that you have the development of dams on all of the rivers in the Northeast, and you had a decline in the populations to the point of extirpation in many rivers of species," she said. "These both happened and it's not a coincidence."

It is now up to state and federal environmental agencies to ensure the protection of fish and wildlife from man-made projects, she said.

"We have been engineering in this nation for hundreds of years," she said. "There's no place left for our wildlife to go."

Andrew J. McMahon, superintendent of the Massena Electric Department, said he and other project leaders knew of the environmental concerns raised throughout the four-year licensing effort.

"We were aware of the concerns but our assessment was that we could work collaboratively to find solutions," he said. "But the agencies did not want to work collaboratively to find solutions."