Roughly three weeks since a pair of powerful storms slammed into Maine’s coast, likely causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, a lobsterman’s cooperative in the village of Corea is limping along as it figures out how to get everything fixed.
The Corea Lobster Co-op, located on the far eastern side of Hancock County in the town of Gouldsboro, had its main pier and building repeatedly lifted up and down in the waves that surged into the small harbor on Jan. 10. Like many wooden-piling piers up and down the coast, the deck was lifted off the posts underneath, while buildings on top were pounded by the surf.
“That is by far the worst storm I’ve seen since I been here, about five years,” Darryl Stanley, the co-op’s manager, said Wednesday. “The hurricanes did nothing compared to that.”
The Corea co-op and other heavily used fishing piers along the coast are not just assessing the damage; they also are figuring out how to continue operating through the relatively quiet period of winter while also making urgent repairs before summer, when lobster fishing begins in earnest.
Maine’s lobster fishery on average catches roughly half a billion dollars worth of seafood each year, and the commercial piers where fishermen buy bait and fuel and unload their catch play a vital role in the industry.
Chipman’s Wharf in Milbridge, Beal’s Lobster Pier in Southwest Harbor, the Stonington Lobster Co-op, Greenhead Lobster in Stonington, and the New Harbor Co-op in Bristol are among other commercial docks that serve hundreds of lobstermen from May through October and were heavily damaged in the back-to-back storms on Jan. 10 and 13.
In Corea, the co-op lost use of its two fuel pumps at the end of the dock, the aluminum ramp used for walking between the pier and floats, and three propane tanks that floated away into the waves. The surf swamped the generator and destroyed the shed meant to keep it dry, and flooded the main warehouse area. That left bait bins, couches and a heavy set of wooden stairs floating like toys in a bathtub. Some of the rafters overhead snapped with the force of the building being lifted up and down, and a wall remains bowed inward from the force of the surge.
While the pier remains usable, it is considered unsafe for vehicles, including forklifts, so the co-op’s dockhands now have to wheel bait and lobster crates back and forth on the pier with hand carts. The scaled-back operations are doable this time of year, when the co-op has only 16 members who fish through the winter, but it won’t work when all 50 members are fishing again in another five months or so, Stanley said.
“We’d never be able to pull this off in July,” he said. “There would be too much volume.”
Nick Carter, a dockhand at the co-op, said he was “shocked” when he saw the damage from the Jan. 10 storm.
“I didn’t expect anything like this could ever happen,” Carter said. “The water was well over two feet above everything. I’m surprised everything here is still standing.”
As the co-op staff comes up with short-term fixes — such as fueling up boats directly from tanker trucks with long hoses that show up twice a week — they are getting cost estimates for repairs.
The pier structure alone suffered $260,000 in damage in the two storms, according to Stanley. That doesn’t include the $8,000 to $10,000 it will cost to redo the electrical wiring, which sparks whenever they try to turn it on, or the $10,000 and $20,000 it will cost to replace the generator.
The co-op did get a $5,000 grant from the Rockland-based Island Institute to put toward a new $14,000 aluminum ramp, Stanley said, and it has been talking to its insurance company about what repairs might be covered.
What the co-op and other privately owned commercial fishing piers don’t expect to get is direct reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, although the agency will pay to repair and replace public infrastructure such as roads or town-owned docks. Stanley said the co-op likely will apply for other assistance, such as government-backed grants or no- or low-interest loans.
“We’re hoping for some emergency money to get approved,” Stanley said. “It would be really nice to get some grants.”
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden declared a major disaster for the December wind and rain storm that caused an estimated $20 million in damage to roads, bridges, buildings and other public infrastructure in inland Maine.
Maine lawmakers have proposed creating a $50 million relief program to aid small businesses hurt by the recent storms and other severe weather. In addition, Gov. Janet Mills on Tuesday proposed a fund of that same amount for infrastructure adaptation and $5 million more to help cities and towns prepare for extreme weather.
With damage assessments from the January storms still being filed this week, it remains to be seen how far the $105 million proposed for those state programs would go toward repairing damage along the coast.
In Hancock County alone, the damages to public infrastructure — which does not include private commercial fishing piers such as the Corea co-op — so far is estimated to be more than $10 million, according to county emergency management officials.
Stanley said that, even with all the repairs needed to put the co-op back in pre-storm form, he thinks they will have time to do it, provided they can find the funding for the work.
“I think we can get ‘er done,” the co-op manager said. “The guy who does wharf work said four or five months, and he’s going to start in a couple of weeks.”
