Commission on Climate Resilience Begins Work on Profitable Port: Stonington

STONINGTON — Gov. Janet Mills signed an executive order Tuesday that created a new infrastructure rebuilding and resiliency commission to help Maine recover from a string of winter storms and prepare for the long-term impacts of climate change.

Within hours of its creation, the 24-member board held its first meeting in Stonington, Maine’s most profitable lobster port, whose working waterfront, public roads and connecting causeway were buffeted by wind, waves and storm surges. January. storms.

Travis Fifield, a fourth-generation lobsterman and local picker, remembers using $50,000 worth of chains, rocks and pitchforks to anchor his family’s fishing pier after the first January storm. He feared the second one would wash away the $400,000 rebuild altogether.

“Just pray you don’t lose all your livelihood,” Fifield told the commission. “The anxiety of that day is returning. It was a very scary thing to see. We had just rebuilt our pier, raising it on a leg, to account for climate change, but it just wasn’t enough.”

Fifield said he hopes this winter’s storms have convinced even skeptical Mainers that climate change is real and convinced communities across the state to prepare for what’s coming soon, before the next damaging storm hits. drought or heat wave.

Stonington has been planning for the impacts of sea level rise since 2012, said City Manager Kathleen Billings. The city was scrambling to find money to implement some of the recommendations in a vulnerability study conducted by a consultant hired by the city when the winter storms hit.

She estimates it will cost $8 million to $10 million to repair Stonington’s storm-damaged infrastructure.

‘WE JUST CAN’T GO ON’

“I can only tax people so much,” Billings said. “The school budget has increased with inflation. The district budget has increased with inflation. You can only get so much from your taxpayers. This presents a problem. This climate change stuff isn’t going away and we just can’t keep going.

The winter storms caused about $90 million in damage to public infrastructure, ranging from Kittery to Eastport and inland to collapsed roads and ditches in the western mountains, according to state claims filed with the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency.

And 2,500 people applied for federal disaster assistance for individual losses by Monday’s deadline.

The commission plans to travel the state to hear from storm-ravaged communities to see how the state can help those whose needs don’t fit neatly into federal disaster relief categories, like dozens of private docks that support the lobster industry. in Maine, of $1.5 billion. .

Mills thought it was appropriate to sign the executive order that created the commission at the Stonington Lobster Co-op. Before the summer lobster season began, she had to rebuild the dock she was standing on Tuesday morning. The cooperative will replace the temporary bank with a permanent one in January.

“My ancestors fished and went out to sea and risked their lives and worked here in Stonington,” Mills said Tuesday. “I know how important it is for our coastal communities to survive and thrive. It is important for our economy. It is important for our culture, for our very identity as a people and as a state”.

The commission is comprised of 24 members appointed by Mills from state and local government, industry, and the rebuilding and resiliency fields, including construction, engineering, floodplain management, utilities, financing, emergency response and climate science.

The board must report on short-term rebuilding priorities focused on recovery and storm preparation by November, and draft a long-term resilience plan for extreme weather and other climate-induced disasters, including drought and extreme heat, by next May.

The committee will be chaired by Linda Nelson, Stonington’s community and economic development director and a Deer Isle resident, and Dan Tishman of Port Clyde, a Midcoast contractor with experience helping communities rebuild after disasters, including the 2012 Hurricane Sandy recovery effort.

The Gulf of Maine has risen about 7.5 inches over the past century, about half of what has happened since the 1990s. The Maine Climate Council projects that seas will rise another 1.1 to 3.2 feet by 2050 and 3 up to 9.3 feet by 2100, depending on how much we curb global emissions rates.

RULES CAUSE A LOT OF DAMAGE

And that doesn’t include the storm surge, which is what many people who rely on Maine’s 20 miles of working water — out of 3,200 miles of coastline — say did the most damage during January’s storms, sweeping away the pilings they support. so many docks, piers and piers.

How does climate change affect sea level? In a warming world, glaciers and ice sheets are melting, adding water to the ocean. The ocean also expands in volume as the water warms. Ocean circulation patterns, land water storage, and the gravitational effects of glaciers also play a small role.

Gulf of Maine sea levels are projected to rise faster than the global average because it is sensitive to changes in the Gulf Stream and seasonal wind patterns, according to the Island Institute, a Rockland-based nonprofit that serves coastal communities. Maine.

The climate council’s projections are coast-wide estimates, but each coastal community has its own rate of sea-level rise, largely controlled by geology. Since 1993, Bar Harbor and Portland’s seas have risen at a rate of just over a foot per century, the data show, while Eastport’s seas have risen 1.3 feet.

Mainers don’t have to imagine what storms like the ones we had last winter will do to Maine’s future coastline. The state has determined how much of it will be lost to sea level rise under different scenarios, in different years, and what future storms might do to what’s left.

A 1 meter rise in sea level by 2050 will lead to a 15-fold increase in the frequency of nuisance floods, which are daytime or high-wave flooding that occurs in the absence of a storm. It would make the “100-year” flood level have a probability of occurring once every 10 years.

The state has yet to produce maps showing the impact of future storms of varying strength on different parts of the Maine coast, much less the potential damage from the impact of waves. But surges like those experienced last winter could add an additional 3 to 4 feet of water on top of rising seas.

Copy the story link

“Previous

Lewiston shooting commission to receive report of ‘utter chaos’ during manhunt

Next ”

The Buxton company is the first in Maine to offer ‘renewable propane’ for home heating