The Downeast Salmon Federation is waiting for new equipment that should prevent an infection like the one last fall that made it necessary to kill all 170,000 fish in its Peter Gray Hatchery in East Machias.
The fish had tested positive for infectious pancreatic virus in late September during a routine hatchery disease screening. The virus occurs naturally in Maine water from other species of fish or birds, Dwayne Shaw, executive director of Downeast Salmon, said in October 2023.
The new equipment includes water filters to take out silt and sediment before it enters the hatchery, and an ultraviolet light system to kill anything that sneaks through the filtration.
Downeast Salmon has been working for more than 30 years to help restore Maine’s wild salmon population in Washington County waterways, including the Narraguagus and East Machias rivers. This was the first time it has had to kill all of its fish because of disease.
“The cleanup has been frustrating,” Shaw said Wednesday, but all of the steps have been taken and the facility will be ready for the next cycle of eggs to hatch.
The hatchery is based on systems developed by Peter Gray in England and Scotland that draws unfiltered water from the rivers in order to raise the fish in the conditions where they eventually will live. The new equipment will filter the water.
The fish, which had no visible symptoms of infection, were killed and disposed of in an approved site away from any water. The hatchery tanks were drained and the facility was dried out. Then the entire hatchery was washed in chlorine bleach to clean out any remaining virus, he said.
With the last traces of chlorine washed away, the hatchery just needs its new equipment to be ready to accept eggs at the end of February from Craig Brook National Fish Hatchery in Orland.
The East Machias facility will hatch half of the eggs available for two strains of Atlantic salmon — one for the Narraguagus River and the other for the East Machias River. The Craig Brook facility will raise the other halves.
Peter Gray Hatchery will release their fish as parr and Craig Brook will release theirs as the smaller fry stage or as planted eggs. All are juvenile stages of the salmon’s life cycle.
Downeast Salmon has raised $30,000 toward its goal of approximately $50,000. The group borrowed from its operational budget to pay for the capital improvements, Shaw said.
The remainder of the funds raised will be used toward the anticipated increase in operational expenses such as electricity needed to run the filtration and ultraviolet light systems, he said.
“Supporters have really stepped up for this project, including some new folks. We hope some others will too,” Shaw said.
He hoped the hatchery would be running by mid-February prior to the delivery of the new salmon eggs.
Although the two hatcheries Downeast Salmon Federation operates escaped damage from the storms, Shaw said he thought the anticipated arrival of some of the new equipment was delayed by them.
The storms were not as kind to Machias. The town office and businesses were flooded. A railbed that has been converted to a rail trail was washed away. The railbed was built in the 1860s and ran across the marshes, he said.
“These storms are foretelling the future. The next time an actual hurricane strikes our coast, it will wreak more havoc now that there’s already damage,” he said. “The sea level rise and hefty storms show people we need to be more active.”
To that end he said the Maine Department of Transportation’s proposal for a dike instead of a bridge in Addison should be considered in the context of public safety and fish movement. When water is blocked, people are in danger and migratory fish can’t get where they need to go, he said.
“It brings two separate arguments together to deal with high dams,” he said.