Foot-dragging on fish ladder cuts power from Juliette dam

Federal officials have ordered a hydroelectric plant on an Ocmulgee River dam shut down by Sunday, following a 12-year effort to get the operator to build an access route for migrating fish.

The East Juliette dam, about 20 miles north of Macon, blocks fish -- especially American shad -- from returning to their spawning grounds. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued an order Oct. 16 for Eastern Hydroelectric Corp. to permanently disable its powerhouse at the dam within 10 days.

Eastern Hydro has 30 days to appeal the shutdown order, but that right of appeal doesn’t supersede the requirement to cease operations, said Craig Cano, a spokesman for the commission’s electric division.

Such a mandate from federal officials is fairly unusual, he said.

“A more common outcome would be that a licensee would surrender its license because it was unable to comply with a condition imposed by the commission,” Cano said.

Neither Robert Rose, president of Eastern Hydro, according to Florida corporate records, nor other company representatives replied to a request for comment Thursday. Electricity from the 678-kilowatt station is bought by Georgia Power, according to documents filed with the commission.

“We were happy to see FERC take action on this,” said Gerrit Jobsis, Southeast regional director for American Rivers, a conservation group that lobbied for the shutdown decision.

Jobsis said he doesn’t know if Eastern Hydro has appealed the shutdown order or plans to. American Rivers has been involved in this and similar cases since requirements for fish passages at dams were instituted, he said.

This doesn’t happen very often. Most hydropower operators comply with license requirements, Jobsis said.

Whether anything further is done, and what Eastern Hydro’s long-term response will be, is unknown, said John Biagi, chief of fisheries for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Wildlife Resources Division.

“That’s where it gets really fuzzy,” he said. “We’re kind of at a loss ourselves on trying to find answers as to what the next steps will be.”

The long-term intention has been to get Eastern Hydro to install a fish ladder at the dam so American shad could get to spawning grounds upstream, Biagi said.

American shad spend their first year in rivers such as the Ocmulgee, but they live most of their adult lives in the ocean off the northwest coast of Canada, he said. They return to their home streams to spawn and die, and there are “high quality” spawning grounds upstream from the Juliette dam, Biagi said.

American shad aren’t regulated under the Endangered Species Act, but they are more scarce than they once were, he said. They’re commercially and recreationally fished in Georgia and provide food for other popular fish such as bass and crappie, Biagi said.

“It’s a fish that really can drive a system in the river,” he said.

While they’re found in other rivers too, the Oconee/Ocmulgee/Altamaha system probably holds the largest spawning population in Georgia, Biagi said.

SEVERAL EXTENSIONS

That’s why all the agencies involved thought it was important to allow American shad access past the East Juilette dam, he said. That conviction is reflected in the Oct. 16 commission order.

“The Georgia Department of Natural Resources, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service state that restoring access to historical spawning habitat for American shad is among their highest priorities for the region,” wrote commission Secretary Kimberly Bose.

The concrete dam, 20 feet high and 1,230 feet long, dates from 1921. There are two powerhouses on the river’s east bank, but the southern powerhouse hasn’t operated since 1999.

Eastern Hydro has held a license for the dam since 1995. In June 2002, the commission authorized building a third powerhouse on the river’s west bank. It was never built, but the authorization included a requirement to build some sort of passage for migrating fish.

The East Juliette dam is the first barrier that fish migrating back to their birthplaces face when coming up the Altamaha and Ocmulgee rivers from the Atlantic Ocean. Fish passage facilities have been required at dams since 2002.

After getting several extensions on that requirement, Eastern Hydro filed a plan in 2006 to build a “fish lift” that was supposed to be working by March 2007. But nothing happened, despite a 2007 compliance order from the commission. Following that failure, in 2011 the commission ordered Eastern Hydro to show some reason it shouldn’t revoke the power-generating license.

Eastern Hydro said it wanted to build a fish ladder instead of a fish lift and filed plans in June 2012. Commission staff approved a 4-foot-wide ladder that that would let fish, mostly American shad, climb around the dam.

But Eastern Hydro didn’t file its plans until May 2013, a month past deadline. In September 2013 the commission sent out another compliance order, warning that the dam’s operating license could be revoked.

After another year of back-and-forth, the commission, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, National Marine Fisheries Service and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service all concluded that Eastern Hydro wasn’t actually going to build the fish ladder, based on its history of failure.

What conservationists really want is for the dam to be removed -- especially if it’s not generating power -- restoring free access for fish, Jobsis said. Even if a fish passage was built, it wouldn’t be as effective as dam removal and would require ongoing maintenance, he said.

“If the dam is not actively being used, there’s no way of assuring that that passage is being maintained,” Jobsis said.

While hydropower dams are beneficial in some ways, they can cause problems too, including hazards for swimmers and boaters, he said.

On Aug. 18, American Rivers and the Altamaha Riverkeeper conservation groups asked federal officials to revoke Eastern Hydro’s license, followed by removal of the dam itself. That’s further than the commission was willing to go, at least so far.

“While we understand the conservation group’s interest to see removal of all project facilities owned by the licensee, we will not condition license revocation upon a licensee’s completion of such extensive remedial action,” Bose wrote.

To contact writer Jim Gaines, call 744-4489.

This story was originally published October 23, 2014 at 6:14 PM with the headline "Foot-dragging on fish ladder cuts power from Juliette dam ."