The Ten Mile River flows from Massachusetts to upper Narragansett Bay through the city of East Providence, R.I. Along its course are three significant dams: Turner Reservoir dam, which forms a man-made lake several hundred acres in size; Hunts Mill dam, an historic semicircular or "horseshoe" falls; and Omega Pond dam, a large stone structure which forms another large body of freshwater and separates the Ten Mile system from the salt waters of the Seekonk River (not a true river, but actually a tidal arm of Narragansett Bay).

The Narragansett Bay Estuary Program and its partners are restoring historic fish runs on the Ten Mile River by building fish ladders that will allow river herring and American shad to swim upstream in the spring to spawn. The restoration will create about 340 acres of spawning habitat for alewives (a species of river herring that prefers to spawn in lakes and ponds) and provide approximately 3 miles of habitat for blueback herring and American shad (which prefer to spawn in streams). A projection by the R.I. Department of Environmental Management (RIDEM), suggests that the restoration will support more than 200,000 herring and about 25,000 shad annually.

Each dam will also be equipped with an eelpass-a different kind of fish ladder to allow American eels to move upstream as well. River herring and shad are anadromous, meaning that they spawn in fresh water, but live in the ocean as adults. Eels are catadromous, which means they have the opposite lifecycle-spawning far out in the Sargasso Sea, then moving as adults into freshwater rivers, lakes and ponds. Like herring and shad, however, eels are a vital component of watershed ecosystems-part of Narragansett Bay's vast estuarine food web and, as all striped bass anglers know, a favorite prey of larger gamefish as well as predatory birds like herons, osprey and cormorants.

Construction of the Ten Mile River restoration project is expected to get underway in 2008 at an estimated cost of about $1.9 million, of which the federal government will pay 65 percent. In addition to NBEP and RIDEM, project partners include Save The Bay, Inc., and the City of East Providence, R.I..