Ben Cary sits down with Gabe Martin, a project civil engineer at Kleinschmidt, to explore the design, construction, and lessons learned from the Shikellamy Nature-Like Fishway on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. The fishway — a 900-foot-long, 100-foot-wide channel that simulates a natural stream — provides critical upstream and downstream passage for American shad and other species around the Adam T. Bower Inflatable Dam, one of the longest inflatable dams in the world.

Their conversation covers what makes a nature-like fishway different from a traditional fish ladder, the engineering challenges of balancing flow at both high and low river conditions, mid-design adjustments for dam maintenance access, and the construction hurdles that arose along the way. Gabe also shares insights from post-construction monitoring, including how the fishway performs through annual dewatering cycles and what the team has learned about substrate stability — insights he recently presented at the International Fish Passage Conference.