After 28 years living in a beachfront home at Camp Ellis in Saco, Ellen Coniaris is fed up.
On the heels of coastal flooding that blitzed Maine on Wednesday, she shoveled sand out of a storm drain in front of her modest, red home. A hose was sticking out one of her windows, working overtime to pump water out of her basement.
“This is my last year here,” Coniaris said.
She isn’t alone in feeling frustrated. While beachside living will never go out of fashion, some Mainers are beginning to factor proximity to the Maine coast into their housing decisions. Stronger storms and rising sea levels will sharply raise coastal flooding risks over the next 30 years, and the same areas hit hard by floods earlier this week may see an even bigger storm on Saturday.
“I knew better than to have oceanfront property, because I respect Mother Nature for what she can bring, and we’re seeing it,” said Mike Haggett, a weather forecaster who lives two miles from the Maine coast in Kennebunk and has a devoted following on his Pine Tree Weather website.
On Wednesday, snowmelt, high winds and storm surge combined with a high tide that reached nearly 14 feet in Portland — the third-highest total on record — damaged homes, businesses and waterfronts up the Maine coast.
It is part of a historic trend. Maine has seen sea levels rise 8 inches since 1950. They are expected to rise another 1.5 feet by 2050 and 4 feet by 2100, according to state data. In York County, nearly 1 in 5 properties have more than a 26 percent chance of severe flooding over the next 30 years, including critical infrastructure, according to First Street Foundation data.
For example, Coniaris’ home in Camp Ellis has almost no flood risk now. But there is a 41 percent chance of an inch of water there in the next 30 years. In Kennebunk, where the fire department posted a dramatic video of the ocean spilling across Middle Beach on Wednesday, one nearby home has a 42 percent chance of a 1-foot flood during that time.
The storm this week took many, including 17-year Kennebunk resident Barbara Berry, by surprise. On Wednesday, Berry was walking her dog down Bayberry Avenue, one street up from the beach, between flooded intersections.
“It does look more intense than I anticipated,” Berry said, frowning at the deep, muddy pools and debris by her feet. “We shouldn’t have built so close to the coast. We should have got better wetland protection. I am very concerned.”
For others, like Kennebunk resident Don Harty, planning for weather like this was a factor in their housing decisions. When Harty and his wife moved to Maine from New Hampshire three years ago, they chose a Kennebunk home five miles from the coastline.
“I looked at a lot of the houses in Wells, down in the marsh, and I said, ‘They’re gonna have a lot of troubles,’” Harty said.
Like Berry, Harty and his wife had hoped to walk their dogs along Beach Avenue on Wednesday, but swaths of standing floodwater cut them off at every access point.
“This is probably the worst we’ve ever seen it,” Harty said.
There will be no rest for waterfront areas this weekend. A storm roughly as powerful as the last one is expected to bring more coastal flooding around midday Saturday, with the National Weather Service saying areas that lost dune protection earlier in the week are even more vulnerable this time around.
The York County Emergency Management Agency has issued a public notice warning coastal residents that from Friday night, a weather system will bring snow, rain, wind and potential power outages to coastal regions and flooding to low-lying properties.
After this week, Haggett would not blame anyone who wanted to move farther inland like Conairis.
“There’s people that have lived here their whole life and they get tired of it, and there’s other people where these properties have been handed down for generations and there’s no way that they’re going to give them up,” he said.
