BAR HARBOR, Maine — A massive Saturday storm brought record flooding and high winds to coastal Maine, destroying iconic fishing shacks along a South Portland beach and forcing rescues farther down the coast.
Damage was heavy in the Portland area around the highest tide of the season around noon.
Some of the biggest casualties were three fishing shacks that sat on Fisherman’s Point and had interior timbers that are more than 200 years old. They were washed away as the high tide came in around noon Saturday.
Large storm surges were pushed into the Gulf of Maine on Saturday, combining with the season’s highest tide at a full foot higher than the one observed during a similar event on Wednesday. This one could lead to potentially more damage due to eroded dunes and infrastructure along the coast that was weakened in an earlier storm.
Portland eclipsed a flooding record set in a famous 1978 blizzard, with waters rising above 14.5 feet in the harbor. The flooding inundated parts of the Old Port and the area around Back Cove. Both Interstate 295 exits onto Franklin Street were closed due to flooding there.
In the Old Orchard Beach neighborhood of Ocean Park, the association managing the neighborhood posted an alert saying the town’s fire department was making several rescues and fighting electrical fires. That area was also inundated during Wednesday’s storm. Fire Chief John Gilboy did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment on the rescues.
The nearby Camp Ellis village of Saco was also hit hard on Saturday. Saco Mayor Jodi MacPhail blamed a “naked shoreline” and the effects of a jetty long blamed for eroding the coast for an amount of damage she has not seen in her lifetime. Pictures from the area showed heavily damaged homes and large rocks from the jetty on beaches.
Record flood stages had been expected in many places along the coast. Eastport and Cutler fell just shy of their record highs, according to National Weather Service data. Coastal winds measured as high as 68 mph on the Knox County island of Criehaven. Gusts were as high as 55 mph in Bar Harbor and Winter Harbor and reached 53 mph at the Portland Jetport.
In downtown Bar Harbor, as high tide was cresting just before noon, waves rolling in from the east slammed into the shore facing Frenchman Bay and into the granite town pier. The swells sprayed up through the bottom of a wooden pier at the Harborside Hotel, lifting the planking and small buildings on the pier a few inches into the air.
Local resident Galen Lowe, who works on Lulu the Lobster Boat tour vessel in the summers, was out walking Saturday morning surveying the impact of the storm along the town’s waterfront. He said he’s been out in heavy weather before but he’s never seen the tide and surf so high right by the harbor.
“I’ve never seen the pier lifted up like that. Never,” he said of the Harborside pier, where Lulu picks up and drops off customers in the summer. “This destruction is unprecedented. It’s unbelievable.”
Though surrounded by the ocean, Mount Desert Island does not have as many low-lying areas that are vulnerable to storm surge as other parts of the state. But the combination of high tide, high water levels, and heavy waves — both on Wednesday and Saturday — has left its mark along the shore.
The famous Shore Path in downtown Bar Harbor suffered severe erosion in Wednesday’s storm, and was pummeled again on Saturday. Roads that skirt the ocean at Bracy Cove and Sewall have been buried twice by cobblestones thrown up by the surf.
Waves overwashing the pier in Seal Harbor have heavily damaged a bathroom and pulled another small building on pilings into the harbor in Bernard. In Northeast Harbor, some docks on Wednesday were thrown off their granite pilings and left angling steeply into the water to be roughed up again on Saturday.
The ruins of an old wooden cargo ship called Tay were exposed at Sand Beach in Acadia National Park on Wednesday, drawing heavy attention from park visitors over the past three days. But on Saturday, after it wrecked and then drifted ashore more than 100 years ago, the spine and ribs that remained were washed out to sea by the subsequent storm, according to Bar Harbor Story.
Photographs from Popham Beach State Park in Georgetown showed debris littering the beach and significant dune erosion, though areas on the midcoast were generally spared the worst of the storm. In Bristol, which took millions of dollars in damage along its harbors on Wednesday, the secondary damage was less than expected given lower-than-forecasted winds.
“Everybody kind of breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t worse or equally as bad,” Chad Hanna, the town’s head selectman, said.