Midcoast

Merrymeeting Shellfish Company has exceeded its Total Suspended Solids limit twice this year at the same outfall: 442% over limit at the end of March, and 300% over limit just two days ago, on July 31. Two violations at the same discharge point, four months apart, points toward a recurring solids-control problem rather than a single upset that got fixed and forgotten.There's a real irony worth sitting with here. This is a shellfish operation, a business that depends directly on clean, low-turbidity coastal water to grow a marketable product. Suspended solids cloud the water column and can smother filter-feeding shellfish beds outright; as the organic material in that loading breaks down, it can also draw down dissolved oxygen. No stream gauge sits close enough to this outfall to confirm what's actually happening downstream, so the direct ecological effect isn't measured here, only the permit exceedance itself.Northern Quahog, American Lobster, and even an Atlantic Horseshoe Crab (a species iNaturalist flags as threatened) have all turned up nearby this season, but these are simple presence records and shouldn't be read as evidence either way about the discharge's impact. The violation stands on its own as something worth watching, especially now that a second exceedance is on the books.