An unplanned turbine shutdown at Brookfield Renewable’s McKay Station on the West Branch of the Penobscot River on July 27 dropped flows from roughly 2,400 cubic feet per second to about 450 cfs almost instantly and held there for more than two hours, stranding and killing juvenile landlocked salmon on what Brookfield’s own filings describe as one of the premier landlocked salmon fisheries in Maine.
It is the third trip event with fish-kill impacts at McKay in three years, and it lands as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission weighs Brookfield’s next 30-year license for the Ripogenus Project.
Neal Hagstrom, a retired fish biologist and Maine Council of Trout Unlimited member, produced a preliminary estimate that between 3,800 and 7,700 juvenile landlocked salmon died in the shutdown, extrapolating from Brookfield’s own 2022 stranding study, The Maine Monitor reported. Great Lakes Hydro America, Brookfield’s operating company, said the station’s automated minimum flow system “operated as designed” and held the 400 cfs required under Article 402 of the existing 1996 license, per the Bangor Daily News. In a subsequent FERC filing, the company said it did not survey the reach downstream but that “it is likely that impacts to aquatic life occurred.”
The current 1996 license expires in September. The FERC public comment window on the Ripogenus relicensing, docket P-2572, closes August 28.
