It's a great day here today, beautiful day.
It's a beautiful day for us, but its also a beautiful day for fish and aquatic wildlife
here in the Little River as we've taken out this dam which blocked, for decades, fish
moving upstream from their native spawning habitat.
This is very exiting.
It's going to open up a good portion of the river and Denson's Creek that you could probably
take a canoe and go a few miles up and down.
So that's exciting and will be a blessing for us in the future.
I was raised in a little community called Okeewemee, maybe 5 miles from here, but I
was raised in there and in my boyhood days I traveled up and down these streams, Densons
Creek and Little River barefooted and having a great time.
Now, we have trails up and down this river and the creek and sometimes you get out there
and you feel like you are a thousand miles away from anyone and its really, really pretty
We are looking at a series of dam removals and fish passage projects along these streams
that are going to open-up this habitat for several At-Risk Species of fish and mussels.
It's a great partnership it involves the city of Troy, North Carolina, and other programs,
Department of Parks and a whole host of partners all contributing bits and pieces of these
mayor projects that are goanna really improve the habitat in this watershed.
Last year we took down Dynamo Dam here renting local equipment and using fisheries and refuge
employees to take out this structure in under a day.
These projects will open up 55 main stem miles and over 350 tributary miles to the benefit
of endemic mussels and diadromous species such as American Eel, American Chad and Blueback
herring.
Another reason we do stream restoration, river restoration by removing barriers such as dams,
is to provide better fishing quality for anglers.
Where above the dam it was just sediment laden and it was not good fishing habitat so once
you remove the barrier slowly over time the sediment will dissolve and the substrate will
be back to provide great fish habitat.
It's also a great opportunity for people who are paddling the river.
Where we once had this obstruction that prevented them from paddling down-actually endangered
them in some of the dangerous currents bellow the dam- with this obstruction removed people
can now paddle through and there is actually a new access point also been put in here.
We are really excited about what this means for the river and the people in this area
to be able to use the river.
We want to thank all the partners involved with this including the city of Troy, US Fish
and Wildlife Service and many others that have been involved.