page_title: Moore Dam
section_title: Environmental impacts
hierarchical_section_title: Moore Dam / Environmental impacts
caption_attribution_description: Moore Reservoir on the Connecticut River, New Hampshire/Vermont, United States
context_page_description: Moore Dam is a major hydroelectric dam on the Upper Connecticut River between Grafton County, New Hampshire and Caledonia County, Vermont in the northeastern United States. The dam is located near Littleton, New Hampshire, and forms the 3,490-acre Moore Reservoir. The Moore Station is the largest conventional hydroelectric plant in New England, in terms of installed capacity and average power generation. The dam and reservoir also provide flood control, recreational boating and fishing.
  The official name of the dam is the Samuel C. Moore Dam, after a former president of the now defunct New England Power Company that originally built it. The dam, reservoir and power station are now owned and operated by TransCanada Corporation.
context_section_description: For decades before the dams were built, paper mills and factories along the Connecticut River had been dumping their waste in the river; each spring, floods would flush the contaminants towards the ocean. When Moore Dam was constructed the mill waste was trapped in the reservoir where it settled into the lake bottom sediment creating highly anoxic conditions. For many years, the reservoir was essentially devoid of aquatic life below a depth of 10 feet (3.0 m) or so, although this has slowly improved due to the closing of many industries that originally discharged their waste in the river, and the installation of sewage treatment systems in rural areas. However, fish populations must still be replenished each year by artificial stocking.
  Because the downstream McIndoe Dam posed a total barrier to both upstream fish migration in the Connecticut River, neither the Moore or Comerford dams was built with fish passage facilities. The great height of the dam precludes the installation of structures such as fish ladders and has posed an obstacle to restoring salmon runs in the Connecticut River, as the best spawning areas for salmon are located in the headwaters area upstream of the dam.
caption: Moore Reservoir
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