FOREST CITY, Maine — The dam in this tiny border town isn’t much to look at: It sports three gates and a fishway, and may stretch all of 40 feet from Canada to the United States.
But a long-simmering situation has heated up in recent months as the mill owner, Woodland Pulp LLC, has filed paperwork with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that would allow it to surrender its license to the dam and remove two of the three gates.
Look upstream from the dam, and you begin to see why that possibility troubles local landowners: There lies East Grand Lake, a massive, 16,000-acre impoundment that ranks among the state’s most popular fishing destinations. Around the lake are more than 2,000 camps and cottages.
And downstream of the dam are other streams and lakes that could lose any sense of flood protection that they now have, thanks to the dam at Forest City.
“Most of the constituents — people who have cottages on the lake, lodges — are mainly concerned with the level of the lake,” says longtime Forest City sporting camp owner Dale Wheaton, who sold his own lodge four years ago. “If you took out those two gates, you’d be dropping the water level by six, six and a half feet, which would change everything.”
So, what is “everything?”
It’s a way of life, and the lifeblood of a region that depends on the interconnecting Chiputneticook chain of lakes, which includes East Grand, for both jobs and recreation.
The County is pleased to feature content from our sister company, Bangor Daily News. To read the rest of “The fate of this tiny border town may rely on the future of its dam,” an article by contributing Bangor Daily News staff writer John Holyoke, please follow this link to the BDN online.
