Alewives will be able to swim from the ocean to Highland Lake to spawn now that a new fish passageway has been built around the Highland Lake Dam.

The reconstruction of the passageway was hailed by environmentalists who have been seeking to restore a link in the food chain and, ulitmately, the Presumpscot River to its natural state.

“Yee-haw, this is just awesome!” Friends of the Presumpscot member Will Plumley said of the construction. “This was once a dirty and smelly river which people had turned their backs on.”

Plumley was among dozens who gathered at the Highland Lake Dam last week to witness the unveiling of the newly constructed passageway. The new passage is expected to allow the resident alewife population to once again make its annual pilgrimage to the lake to spawn.

Last Friday morning, residents of Highland Lake met along the banks of the dam off Duck Pond Road in Westbrook with members of several private and government organizations to discuss the importance of fish passage along Maine’s rivers. The occasion was organized by people and groups involved in the restoration of the Presumpscot River, including the Friends of the Presumpscot.

Among attendees at Friday’s event, Lois Winter, of U.S. Fish & Wildlife and the Gulf of Maine Coastal Project, said the project “represents a more critical link in restoring the Presumpscot River as a place of community pride instead of community shame.” She went on to say the river has been “treated as a cesspool in the past.”

Several speakers quoted a report from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife filed in the 1960s stating “all residential, aesthetic and recreational values have been destroyed.”

With an improved fish passageway now established to circumvent the dam, anadromous fish – those that migrate from the sea to fresh water to breed – particularly alewives, will be able to more easily access Highland Lake via Mill Brook. Mill Brook connects the lake to the Presumpscot River, which eventually leads to the ocean.

The original Highland Lake Dam, built by the city of Westbrook in 1936, was washed out during a massive flood in October of 1996. The flood also destroyed the fish passage built eight years earlier by the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

In 2000, a new dam and fishway were constructed, but they didn’t work effectively in trafficking alewives. High water velocity within the passage made it almost impossible for the fish to navigate the designated channel.

According to event organizers, alewife passage is important because the fish return to spawn in freshwater lakes and streams, sometimes swimming as far as 120 miles inland. With the new fish passage in place, these gray-green and silver bodied, forked-tail fish are expected to surge in population from the current estimated 8,000 to a projected 150,000 adults. The total estimated population of alewives is expected to surpass 1 million.

This number will provide a boost in the food chain for Highland Lake fish as well as many other woodland species, such as owls. Alewives are expected to be a staple food source for much of the natural food chain for the 640 acres of Highland Lake.

The goal of the new fish passage is not to create a new natural order for the river system, but to restore an old one that has been brought to the brink of extinction through years of unmonitored and unregulated practices by commercial and residential zones along the river’s banks.

The Friends of the Presumpscot ended the gathering by planting natural vegetation along the reconstructed riverbanks, and stressing their goals of continued progress along the Presumpscot River. Among their goals is constructing effective, efficient fish passages at each successive dam up the Presumpscot in an attempt to recreate the natural order as best as possible.

Members of the community gather and admire the new dam between Highland Lake and Mill Brook before the scheduled meeting about the importance of fish passages in the river system.

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