Agency hones in on Aroostook, Prestile waterways
Matt Scott, an 81-year-old retired water biologist, recently put 135 acres of land he owned in Belgrade into a conservation easement.
“I figure that’s the best thing I can do. I can’t take it with me,” said Scott, speaking at the University of Maine Presque Isle in April. The former chief biologist for the Maine Department of Environmental Protection shared “experimental” presentation on his experience as part of America’s first generation of environmental regulators.
“One of the things that always amazed me about rivers in Maine was the ice cutting that took place in the 1800s for the refrigeration industry in the cities south of us. The ice was cut out from these rivers that were polluted,” Scott said, referring to the many paper and pulp mills throughout the state. “I had always wondered how many people had ever got sick from it.”
Scott grew up in Wytopitlock, an unincorporated village along the Mattawamkeag River, in the 1930s and ‘40s, and he lived through and contributed to major improvements in Maine’s water and air quality.
“Water quality was probably the worst in Maine in years during and after World War II because there were no controls. In the 1950s, the idea of cleaning up water pollution became prominent and people began to wake up.” The 1960s and ‘70s brought modern state and federal environmental regulations — as well as clashes with business, as in the dispute over the “open sewer” of Aroostook County’s Prestile Stream.
Scott and others worked on water quality standards using new bioindicator methods, as new laws required the state government to classify water bodies with goals set for their quality and new treatment plants were built for industrial and municipal water pollution.
“In the 1980s, measured water quality had improved,” and it has largely continued to do so, Scott said. “Today we have a lot of AA waters and a lot of A waters.” Class AA prohibits impoundments and waste discharges, while class A requires any discharged effluent to be equal to or better than the existing water quality. Just over half of Maine’s 38,498 miles of streams and rivers are classified as B, 45 percent as A, 2.6 percent as AA and 0.4 percent as C.
“There is actually not much difference between the uses or the qualities of the various classes,” according to the DEP’s web page on water classification. “All attain the minimum fishable-swimmable standards established in the federal Clean Water Act.”
The classification system, set by legislatures, establishes an aspiration for the waterbodies, but in some — like the Prestile Stream — the quality is not meeting the class rating.
The Prestile and the nearby lower Aroostook River have been listed as impaired in the DEP’s 2014 Integrated Water Quality Monitoring and Assessment Report, which is open to public comment through May 27 before it will be filed (two years late) with the U.S. Environmental Protection.
The Prestile Stream isn’t meeting its B classification from its headwaters at the Christina Reservoir in Easton to the dam in Mars Hill, due to excess agricultural nutrients and some legacy sources of pollution linked to old potato processing plants.
Christina Reservoir was created by the late industrialist Fred Vahlsing as a source of water for potato processing, and today is used by McCain Foods and is surrounded by potato fields. The small, shallow lake is “easily whipped up by the winds, which re-suspends the sediments and nutrients” and sends them flowing down the Prestile, said Kathy Hoppe, an environmental specialist with the Maine DEP’s Bureau of Land and Water Quality in Presque Isle.
On the lower Aroostook River, two segments totalling more than 19 miles are also categorized as impaired in the report and highlighted as a priority for the DEP. The lower Aroostook still has a healthy brook trout population and is safe to swim in, but DEP studies going back to 2001 have found excessive algal growth and day-night swings in water oxygen.
“We know we have nutrients from these tributaries going into the Aroostook River,” said Hoppe, referring to sub-watersheds in central Aroostook County’s major farming areas. “We need to figure out where it’s coming from and try and fix it.”
Much of the Aroostook River’s highland tributaries are meeting their class A or AA status, including the Munsungan, Umcolcus, St. Croix and Machias. The river’s main stem is also listed as class A into Ashland, then a class B to Presque Isle and class C most of the rest of the way to the border at Fort Field. For the three miles upstream of the Caribou Utilities District, the river is rated as Class B, although Caribou and the rest of the river’s bordering municipalities all now use groundwater for their drinking water source.
McCain Foods, which has a pipe running from its Easton plant that discharges treated wastewater into the Aroostook, has been in compliance with its permit for nutrient and biological oxygen demand content, said Nick Archer, regional director for the DEP in northern Maine.
Instead of restricting McCain’s discharges, the DEP is focusing on non-point source pollution — runoff from farmland as well as residential lawns — which is leading to new conversations with farmers, the Maine Potato Board and the government, said Archer.
“We know the end game that we want to have is keeping soil where it belongs in the ground, and some of the methods that we’ve used in the past don’t work,” Archer said. “Everyone agrees on that. The issue is money and management, and do it more efficiently and get better results.”
The DEP is collaborating with landowners on a number of projects in specific sub-watersheds, including a cover crop and sediment basin project near Dudley Brook, a tributary of the Presque Isle Stream, which flows into the Aroostook River.
Scott, who worked with Archer and Hoppe before he retired, said he thinks sustainable land development is going to be critical in the long term for water quality and wildlife habitat. In his lifetime, the population of Maine has more than doubled, and even areas that have lost population — like central Aroostook County — still have seen large new footprints on the landscape from sprawling big box stores built over the last 30 years.
“What will Maine look like in 2050?” Scott wondered. “We’re seeing a lot of habitat fragmentation around the state.”
At the same time, more people are embracing their waterfronts, seeking local connections with nature and ways to revitalize downtowns, noted David Putnam, who teaches geology and archaeology at UMPI, in a conversation after Scott’s presentation.
In some ways, that trend is circling back to a time well before Scott’s youth, when rivers and streams served many purposes but hadn’t been polluted on a large scale. “The river was the center of town. The oldest buildings always faced the river,” said Putnam, noting Aroostook County’s oldest surviving building, the 203-year-old Blackhawk Putnam Tavern in Houlton across from the Meduxnekeag River.
