Dianne O’Donnell has seen Craig Pond’s water level get unusually low before in the 77 summers she’s spent there, but this year she’s especially worried.
Vegetation appears to be dying, camp owners took their boats and docks out weeks earlier than usual, strange brown goop is washing up onshore and she fears property values dropping on the 218-acre, dam-controlled water body in East Orland, which also has a popular public beach and boat ramp.
It is a drought year, but the rest of the watershed hasn’t shown such dramatic decreases — and unlike Craig Pond, none of those lakes and ponds have recently become the sole water source for a federal fish hatchery producing the eggs of more than 5 million endangered Atlantic salmon a year.
“It just seems like we’re in a repeating pattern, but this time, it’s worse,” O’Donnell said. “We just keep looking out the windows and saying, ‘What can we do?’ The complaints and the issues seem to fall on deaf ears.”
Similar complaints have plagued the Craig Brook National Fish Hatchery on neighboring Alamoosook Lake in past decades, and raise questions among onlookers about whether operations are still sustainable.
It’s another example in Maine of property owners around a body of water raising concerns about how water levels are managed as infrastructure ages and uses change. Numerous dams in the watershed that were built to supply papermaking in Bucksport are also aging as an industrial owner seeks to abandon some of them, and low water levels have also drawn concern at Graham Lake in Ellsworth, where a dam’s federal permit has expired and some are calling for its removal.
Craig Pond’s case may be particularly thorny as a 1953 law supersedes state limits on the hatchery’s water use, according to state documents.
Landowners fear the hatchery’s impacts will intensify – with potential negative consequences for the pond’s prized health — if it continues to draw the same amount of water from the pond. They feel its federal operators haven’t been responsive and they want state law governing it to be revisited.
But the hatchery is also federally charged to rebuild stocks of the once-ubiquitous fish, providing a restoration resource that advocates call a “life support system” — with the right to use Craig Pond water to do so. Using water from Alamoosook Lake recently got the hatchery sanctioned by federal environmental regulators for high phosphorus levels, forcing a change in its operations and apparently leaving no option but Craig Pond.
“I support the hatchery, and they’ve been an important part of the Craig Pond environment for a long time, and I know they have an important mission to do. There’s a lot of good there,” said Jane Crosen, who has visited for decades and recently built a camp there. “But the frustrating thing for me, and I think many of my camp neighbors, is there’s apparently no limit to how low they can draw the water down.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which runs the hatchery and its sister facility on Green Lake in Ellsworth, did not grant a request for an interview with hatchery staff.
“Craig Brook NFH management is in regular contact with Craig Pond property owners and we welcome their feedback,” an unidentified spokesperson said in an emailed response to a request for comment and questions about whether any changes had been made or are planned in response to concerns.
The hatchery used an average of 1,200 gallons a minute this year, a “slight reduction” from previous years, according to the spokesperson, who did not confirm or deny statements from landowners that withdrawal rates started out higher and were reduced during the summer.
It has used Craig Pond’s water since the 1880s, and drew from Alamoosook at times starting in the 1960s but hit bacterial issues there that killed fish.
By 1988, hatchery withdrawals had dried up the pond’s lake trout breeding habitat and raised concerns about loon nesting areas. The hatchery was then taking between 600 and 1,200 gallons of water per minute, according to state documents.
A public petition led to a state water level order tied to the pond’s dam, which was built by the hatchery but is regulated by the state. That order remains in effect.
But a 1953 Maine law giving the hatchery the right to draw water makes water level requirements unenforceable unless the law is rescinded or the hatchery is shut down, according to the order. Alamoosook water was used as a supplemental source until recent years.
Crosen is used to Craig Pond receding as the summer wears on, but it seemed not to recover from last year. On an afternoon in mid-September, the pond level looked how she’d expect it to in November.
Several feet of rockier beach was exposed where a parent and child walked the shore; a group of teenagers arrived with fishing poles and a man prepared to practice scuba diving around the submerged pipes that carry water to the hatchery.
If Maine continues to see frequent drought conditions — which some climate change predictions indicate could become more severe — Crosen thinks legislation should be revisited.
“If that means curtailing their operations a bit … for me, the most important thing is the health of the pond,” Crosen said.
Her property near the O’Donnells is on a shallower cove, she said, where the impact of low water can be seen earlier. Some other neighbors took a wait-and-see approach, she said, but water levels were a hot topic by the association’s yearly meeting this summer.
In addition to the low water level, a brown goop Crosen’s never seen before has been churning up from the bottom.
“Honestly, it was like chocolate pudding,” she said. “It was the most disgusting, surprising thing to find on my beach.”
It may be algae surfacing during the pond’s natural cycling, exacerbated by the low water level and recent wind, she said, but she’s still concerned.
Crosen and others want to see an outside party study the health of the watershed, which also includes Alamoosook Lake, Toddy Pond and Heart Pond — a project the Alamoosook Lake Association is pursuing, she said. The association didn’t respond to an interview request.
The pond association has invested in water quality and health, Dianne O’Donnell said, monitoring phosphorus levels and starting a volunteer boat inspection program to keep out invasive milfoil vegetation.
Meanwhile, levels of phosphorus in Alamoosook, which can cause harmful algal blooms and fish kills, have contributed to the hatchery using only water from Craig Pond since 2023.
That year the fish and wildlife service reached an agreement with federal regulators to reduce the amount the hatchery discharged into Alamoosook, after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found it was not meeting Clean Water Act requirements limiting phosphorus in its effluent.
If it did not meet requirements by 2025, the hatchery would have to build a bypass for effluent or reduce the number of fish it raised. It had made changes already during the negotiation period, according to the EPA.
A spokesperson said it has “reduced” the number of adult salmon there, which has cut down water requirements but also had negative effects on the number of young salmon available for recovery efforts.
Craig Pond’s water is gravity-fed to the hatchery, is colder and contains less phosphorus than Alamoosook, according to a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, which issues the hatchery’s discharge permit. Using water from the lake instead would come with expensive pumping, temperatures that could hurt salmon stock and more ambient phosphorus that would make it harder to comply with effluent limits.
It’s currently meeting its permit requirements, he said. He did not answer a follow-up question about the cause of higher phosphorus levels in Alamoosook Lake.
Paul Jellison, whose family has had a camp on Craig Pond since 1953, said he feels the hatchery isn’t responsive to local concerns about its sustainability, and everyone now seems worried.
“I don’t know as you would find anybody that’s happy with the situation out there right now,” he said. “I don’t think they’ve been very forthcoming in what they’ve told us.”
