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US conservationists reach milestone in plan to buy dams

An environmental coalition in the American state of Maine has raised the US$25 million it needed to buy three dams from a power company under an agreement to restore a number of fish species in the Penobscot River, the New York Times reported.

The coalition will remove two of the three dams and build a fish run around the third, the report said, opening up about 1,600 kilometres of the Penobscot and its tributaries, home to most of the United States’ Atlantic salmon population.

The goal of the agreement between environmental groups, the government and power firm, which was finally brokered in 2004, was to  restore the struggling Atlantic salmon population as well as other native fish, including the American shad and river herring.

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