AUGUSTA, Maine — The Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, which violated its wastewater permits at its fish hatcheries over a period of years, has reached a consent agreement with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection to correct the problems.
While there was some concern over the absence of certain aquatic insects used as biological indicators of a stream’s health in at least one location, there appeared to be no significant environmental damage done to the streams the hatcheries are located on, say state officials.
The consent agreement reached in May stems from violations, the first identified in 2006 and the latest in 2009, at the state’s nine fish hatcheries. The violations involved Maine’s Protection and Improvement of Waters laws and the conditions of the department’s waste discharge licenses.
Collectively, the violations ranged from failure to meet the license limits for biochemical oxygen demand, total suspended solids and total phosphorus to causing water quality of receiving waters to fall below the standards of its classification and conducting sampling without proper equipment, according to Peter Carney of the DEP’s enforcement branch.
Because the DIF&W has moved forward to address the problems, the DEP suspended the $35,960 penalty it imposed for violations at the the Governor Hill Hatchery and Rearing Station in Augusta; Wade State Fish Hatchery in Casco; Ela Rearing Station in Embden; Cobb State Fish Hatchery in Enfield; Grand Lake Stream State Hatchery; Dry Mills Fish Hatchery in Gray; New Gloucester Fish Hatchery; Palermo Rearing Station; and Phillips Fish Hatchery. The latter hatchery has since been closed as a result of state budget cuts.
The consent agreement has been a long time in development because so many facilities were involved, Phil Garwood, a DEP environmental specialist, said this week. It took time to go through the records and once the notices of violations were sent to the facilities, it took more time to work with the parties to make sure what was outlined in the consent agreement was factually correct, he noted. In addition, the DEP worked extensively with DIF&W to determine the best set of corrective actions to address the problems, he said.
“This isn’t something that we spend a week writing up and send to them. It takes quite a bit of time, especially when you’re dealing with eight or nine different facilities,” Garwood said. In addition, there were a number of different violations involved, he noted.
Garwood said DIF&W had measured the phosphorus levels incorrectly or not at all because hatchery officials didn’t have the right equipment, which has since been corrected. In addition, a number of the hatcheries had problems because of their historical locations on small streams that flow into nearby lakes, he said.
“Because of the kinds of water they are located on, the water can’t accept very much pollution, ” Garwood explained.
Todd Langevin, superintendent of the state’s fish hatcheries, said Thursday that many of the violations stem from the age of the hatcheries — which date as far back as the 1800s in the case of the Grand Lake Stream fishery — and the need for expensive technology. The violations were not intentional, he said.
Langevin also noted that the state’s stringent laws played a role in at least one of the violations.
“The [Maine] DEP has imposed some of the strictest limitations on phosphorus in the nation and we’ve come a long way in trying to deal with that,” he said. “Out of all the parameters that we report on as part of our waste discharge license, the total phosphorus parameter is our most difficult to comply with.” Phosphorus, a nu-trient, can cause algae blooms.
Two bond issues that were passed by the state’s residents have helped the department improve the hatcheries, where a total of 1.2 million fish are raised each year, according to Langevin. Four of the state’s nine hatcheries now have rotating microscreen filters that improve the quality of their discharges.
The DIF&W’s “mandate is to raise fish and stock those out throughout the state and traditionally their management was not charging them with doing much in the way of treating wastewater,” Garwood said. “Over the last five years we’ve worked very hard with them to get them to the point they are at now, where they do under-stand that there’s more they have to do to protect the water in addition to raising and stocking fish.”
Langevin said the consent agreement shows the public that the hatcheries do need repairs and that those repairs need the continued financial backing from Maine’s residents.