Last week’s back-to-back storms inflicted some of their worst damage on Maine’s fishing industry, and the extent of the devastation has some fishing communities considering how to be more prepared for it next time.
Working waterfront property owners along the entire Maine coast witnessed destruction as extreme winds and storm surge flooded buildings, set some adrift and tore docks apart. Some already are planning to rebuild — with sturdier and maybe higher piers in mind as they consider the future — but it’s too early to tell how long it will take and how much it might cost.
Commercial lobster docks where fishermen offload and sell their catch were damaged in Milbridge, Corea, Southwest Harbor, Stonington and New Harbor, to name a few places.
“A lot of docks and wharves took a real beating,” said Jeff Nichols, spokesperson for the Maine Department of Marine Resources.
Nichols and Commissioner Patrick Keliher flew over affected areas in Maine Forest Service helicopters to assess the damage. In New Harbor, part of the town of Bristol, six docks were destroyed in the Jan. 10 storm.
“We saw damage in practically every harbor,” Nichols said.
John Williams, a longtime lobsterman in Stonington, said the dock where he ties up his boat on Atlantic Avenue suffered little damage in the two storms, but his father’s property didn’t fare so well. Robert Williams, also a local lobsterman, owns a granite pier on Burnt Cove on Whitman Road. The storm surge flooded the pier and damaged everything on it.
“He lost three buildings,” the younger Williams said. “The surge kept coming in, two to three feet at a time. The surge is what did the damage.”
Williams said he counted roughly six private wooden piers in town where fishermen store traps that likely won’t get rebuilt. He said the cost of seaworthy building materials will go up because of demand and that, in some cases, rebuilding higher would be impractical. Having a trap storage pier several feet higher would put the decks out of reach of a lobsterman standing on a boat, making it impossible to lift traps up or down by hand, he said.
“You’re going to lose working waterfront because of this,” he said.
Greenhead Lobster, a dealer and processor in Stonington, got hit by both storms at multiple locations.
Online videos show its buying wharf at the end of Ocean Street totally swamped by storm surge on Jan. 10. The day after that storm, at a Webb Cove property it leases, floating boat slips lay in the water bent out of shape, dozens of large plastic fish totes had been pulled into the cove or scattered on the shore, and a shed-sized building was left tilted at a steep angle on the rocks after being dislodged by the waves.
Allison Melvin, a spokesperson for the company, said its lobster pounds at Moose Island also were damaged in the first storm. All of Greenhead’s properties were flooded again on Saturday, she said, but the damage seemed less severe.
“While various preparations were made, we were unprepared for the surge of water at high tide, and our waterfront properties have severe damage,” she said of the Jan. 10 storm.
At the same time Greenhead Lobster cleans up and makes repairs, the company will “discuss resiliency on a broader level,” she said.
In Milbridge, Chipman’s Wharf essentially was destroyed by Wednesday’s storm. About 130 feet of wooden decking on top of posts driven into the mud at the mouth of the Narraguagus River was ripped off by the storm surge and swept away, along with the building at the dock’s tip, according to Amity Chipman, a co-owner and a retail manager of the business.
Wednesday’s storm was worse than Saturday’s because the winds peaked with the incoming tide and were blowing straight into the side of the pier, she said.
“The building basically fell off first, then the surge pulled the decking off, and it floated away,” she said. “We lost the wharf an hour and a half before high tide.”
The Chipmans plan to rebuild. Her husband, brother-in-law and father-in-law built the pier themselves 20-odd years ago and will do the work themselves again — but this time plan to build it higher and with more concrete, she said.
The work will be expensive and likely will have to wait until spring, but they need to adapt to reduce the likelihood of another catastrophic loss.
“If this is the new normal, we definitely need a bigger and better pier,” Chipman said.
Beal’s Lobster Pier in Southwest Harbor said on Facebook that it was closing down for a few months in order to make repairs after the storms. The dock will be closed to the public, and the dealer will suspend shipping operations during the closure.
“If you have an order already scheduled to be shipped you will be contacted by a member of our team with options,” Beal’s staff said. “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you all for your support and understanding.”
Nichols said his agency has been encouraging affected property owners to contact state emergency management officials to report damage, to give state and federal officials an idea of how widespread it is.
Damage descriptions can be submitted online or by calling 211. Officials said damage from the two storms should be tallied separately, as agencies are expected to consider how much harm each storm caused, not just the sum total of the two.
January typically is a quiet time of year for Maine’s fishing industry, but Nichols said the need to preserve working waterfront access is not a seasonal issue. Fishermen need a place to bring their harvest ashore and for distributors to pick it up. Maine’s seafood industry depends upon preserving the piers, infrastructure and equipment at these ocean access points, he said.
“The working waterfront is critically important to our coastal economy,” Nichols said. “That’s a problem that transcends the time of year.”
Dustin Delano, a lobsterman and the chief operating officer for the New England Fishermen Stewardship Association, said the damage to some lobstermen’s gear was so severe he doesn’t know if all of them will recover.
While boats and some wharfs can be insured, other gear, like traps, typically can’t. And with high interest rates, Delano said borrowing money to repair gear is out of the question for some lobstermen. On top of that, with so few people in the state who build wharfs and sell gear, even if lobstermen do have the money, it might be years before they can rebuild. When they do, they’ll likely build wharves and docks higher to escape storms like this in the future, according to Delano.
Delano said he and a group of 15 fishermen are headed to Washington this week to speak with Sen. Susan Collins about their plight in the hopes that federal assistance may come their way.
“I don’t really know where we go from here,” Delano said. “But I think the fishing community is a little bit in limbo right now.”
BDN reporter and Report for America corps member Jules Walkup contributed reporting.
