Can Maine use natural methods to stop shoreline erosion?
Lisa Vickers, a senior coastal specialist at GEI Consultants, talks about their nature-based shoreline stabilization proposal during a workshop at Willard Beach near Southern Maine Community College in South Portland on Wednesday. The city-owned pump house is seen in the background as well as the closed walking path. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
SOUTH PORTLAND — On a mild afternoon, sailboats glided across Casco Bay while Southern Maine Community College students sat at picnic tables studying, knitting and talking politics. Just steps away, however, this beloved stretch of coastline is crumbling.
Back-to-back winter storms battered the Willard Beach area three years ago, eating away at fragile bluffs beneath a campus science building and city pump house and closing a popular shoreline walking path.
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Now city, regional and state officials are coming together to try to protect the shoreline and infrastructure, using natural methods when they can and hoping to forestall rising seas and worsening storms for as long as they can.
The closed walking path near the city pump house at Willard Beach at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland on Wednesday. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
The proposal to protect this small stretch of shoreline, which would involve the combination of riprap, vegetation and a relocated walking path, is one of three that the Greater Portland Council of Governments is using federal grants to help draft.
The plans for South Portland, Mitchell Field in Harpswell and the Yarmouth wastewater treatment plant are far from complete. Variations abound. Nothing is permitted. Nobody knows who might foot the bill.
“It’s clear that something has to be done,” said Sara Mills-Knapp, the sustainability director at Greater Portland Council of Governments and the leader of a nature-based shoreline erosion workshop at Willard Beach on Wednesday.
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The Willard Beach workshop serves as a crucial test case for how vulnerable communities can adapt, if not turn back, rising waters without smothering their shorelines under a rigid granite seawall. Instead of concrete, think plants, coir logs and buried trees to rebuild the dune system.
Lisa Vickers, a senior coastal specialist at GEI Consultants, talks about their nature-based shoreline stabilization proposal during a workshop at Willard Beach near Southern Maine Community College in South Portland on Wednesday. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection now favors such methods during permitting, said Nathan Robbins, the department’s climate change specialist. The state is publishing a new reference guide to help promote nature-based erosion control this week, Robbins said.
Maine sea levels have been rising at a rate of about a half-foot a century. The pace has sped up as the world burns more fossil fuels, producing heat-trapping emissions that warm both air and sea.
Maine sea levels are projected to rise between 1.1 and 3.2 feet by 2050 and 3 and 9.3 feet by 2100, depending on how successful and quick we are at curbing global emissions rates, according to the scientists who advise the Maine Climate Council.
The $800,000 to $1 million Willard Beach proposal would give engineers room to replace the steep, failing bank with a gentler sloped bluff. Unlike hard seawalls that reflect wave energy downward and scoop out beach sand, the sloped bluff dissipates waves.
Heavy vegetative riprap — stone embedded with deep-rooted native plants — would bind the slope, paired with a newly engineered sand dune at the base. As much as they wanted to avoid stone, the consultants agreed Willard Beach requires a mixed approach.
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Exposed pipes, broken fencing and no sand dunes or grass seen at Willard Beach near Southern Maine Community College in South Portland on Wednesday. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
“Plants alone just won’t cut it,” said Lisa Vickers, senior coastal specialist at GEI Consultants.
The proposal, which is about 30% complete, would require moving the walking path a couple hundred feet inland, behind the science building. But that extra space means it will not encroach upon the sandy beach below, a favorite among sunbathers and dog walkers.
Nature-based methods have sparked some tension. Hard seawalls offer immediate structural defense, while living shorelines require two to three growing seasons for native roots to bind sands. Marine contractors are used to dumping heavy granite boulders, not installing soil lifts.
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And they could fail with the next winter storm, warned Pete Slovinsky, a marine geologist with the Maine Geological Survey. But so could traditional seawalls and even jettys, even with a high price tag and the harder-to-win permits required to build them, he said.
Pete Slovinsky, a marine geologist with the Maine Geological Survey, talks about the shoreline stabilization proposal at Willard Beach in South Portland on Wednesday. Slovinsky was one of a few dozen people at a workshop that delved into a proposal to protect the stretch of shoreline, which would involve a combination of riprap, vegetation and a relocated walking path. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
At the workshop Wednesday, Slovinsky told a crowd of about 30 people that ranged from local residents to engineers working on other erosion control projects that the proposed bluff project would help protect the city pump house for now, but the city should plan to eventually move it.
“The one thing I can guarantee you is that the sea will keep rising,” Slovinsky said. He pointed at the pump house behind him, which sits a couple dozen feet back from the 22-foot bluff. “That’s going to fail. Maybe not today, or next year, but sooner than you think.”
For state leaders, however, these pilot designs mark an essential turning point.
“Rocks don’t have roots,” Robbins said. “Plants have roots, deep roots that can help stabilize from the top of the bluff to the dunes to the beach. And rocks are expensive and require maintenance. Over time, plants will take over and do a lot of our work for us.”
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Tagged: climate change, climate resiliency, environment, maine beaches, willard beach
Penny is excited to be the Portland Press Herald’s first climate reporter. Since joining the paper in 2016, she has written about Maine’s lobster and cannabis industries, covered state politics and. More by Penelope Overton
