CAMP ELLIS, Maine — Flooding on Wednesday damaged a seawall protecting a beachside home. The owner rebuilt what he could on Thursday. Then it was obliterated by Saturday’s storm that brought more devastation to coastal Maine.
A deck at that home was also destroyed. Next-door neighbor David Plavin’s home, which is also protected by a private seawall, also took damage. But they were among the lucky ones. Plavin estimated that four homes in this village of Saco were destroyed between last week’s twin storms bringing high winds and record tides to parts of the Maine coast.
“Even though we knew that storm was coming, we had to put up as much of a battle as we could, some sort of defense,” Plavin said of he and his neighbor. “I’d like to think it made some sort of difference.”
A day after Saturday’s storm, coastal communities were only beginning to assess the damage. It seemed to fall hardest on areas where dunes and physical infrastructure like roads, seawalls and buildings had been weakened by winds and surge earlier in the week.
Reports from local officials suggested damage to public and private property in the tens of millions of dollars, particularly in southern Maine communities where homes were swept away or knocked from their foundations and other towns important to the state’s fishing economy. It will likely require an unprecedented federal, state and local response.
“It’s just absolute carnage,” Paul Plummer, the harbormaster in the midcoast town of Harpswell, said. “It’s going to be devastating to so many: not just residents and their recreational gear, but these commercial folks just took a beating.”
High water levels in the Gulf of Maine along with heavy winds and heavy rain conspired with the largest high tide of the season to hammer parts of the coast on Saturday. Portland hit a record tide after nearing one in the Wednesday storm. Gusts exceeded 50 mph in many areas while the massive tide came in over the weekend.
Some of the most devastating damage in the state came on the relatively short stretch between Camp Ellis and the Old Orchard Beach village of Ocean Park. The latter community was inundated in both of this week’s storms. Some places took on feet of water, and the association managing the neighborhood posted a picture of a shed that floated to a new location.
On Saturday, the town’s fire department had to rescue residents whose homes were in a low-lying area that quickly filled with water, Megan Arsenault, the deputy director of the York County Emergency Management Agency, said. Town firemen were called out 25 more times early Sunday, mostly for electrical and propane tank issues in Ocean Park.
Biddeford Mayor Marty Grohman was standing around midday Sunday on Middle Beach, at the beginning of a peninsula that leads to the exclusive Biddeford Pool village. He cited examples of damage nobody in the city has ever seen before, including homes knocked off foundations and large trees and rocks washed up on damaged beaches and roads. Six homes have been deemed uninhabitable.
A city seawall took heavy damage after Saturday’s storm, as did another privately maintained one protecting Biddeford Pool, Grohman said. The public works director is estimating a three-week job to repair the municipal one, not to mention the money and time it will take to repair roads and clear debris.
Political issues are brewing at Camp Ellis, where a jetty built in the 1870s by the Army Corps of Engineers to facilitate commercial navigation has long been blamed for causing erosion there. The village has lost 38 homes to the sea since the middle of the 20th century, said Plavin, who is vice president of Save Our Shores Saco Bay, a local nonprofit.
In 2022, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, secured $45 million for a permanent solution to the erosion, but the project has not yet begun. Plavin’s group wants it to hurry up. One resident said after Wednesday’s storm that she would be leaving her home after this year.
“It’s certainly frustrating, and I think a lot of us get to the point where you say, ‘Enough is enough,’” he said. “We really have no recourse other than to just leave.”
There are going to be broad economic consequences as well. The hardest-hit area of Harpswell was the fishing village of Bailey Island, where docks and buildings took heavy damage. Gov. Janet Mills, who toured a damaged fishing co-op in Bristol on Friday, said Mainers will rebuild from the storm.
“I think [the damage] is really quickly going to have a lot of negative consequences that are maybe a little more far-reaching,” Andrew Sankey, the director of the Hancock County Emergency Management Agency, said.
