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Happy Thursday!
The sunshine will return later today, along with highs in the 70s across the state. More rain is expected Friday, but then we appear to have a dry and sunny weekend ahead. So hang in there.
A slow-moving convoy has been attracting lots of attention this week. The 684,000-pound load departed from the former paper mill in Jay on Tuesday evening for the South Portland waterfront.
But what was supposed to be a two-day journey has stretched to seven days. That’s because the convoy, which is hauling old mill equipment, failed to reach a particular bridge as scheduled.
This will be the first of nine such super oversize convoys slouching to South Portland’s Turner Island, home to shipping and gas terminals. But the schedule for those later shipments has yet to be released.
If you happen to find yourself in Turner, Oxford, Gray, Buxton, Scarborough or South Portland the next few nights, you might catch the behemoth crawling down the road.
Water supply for Maine’s Navy shipyard is draining months ahead of schedule
The southern border towns of Kittery and Eliot have been rationing drinking water for months while watching the ponds that supply that water shrink to levels more typical of midwinter than early fall.
Recent rains from the nor’easter didn’t do much. Now the towns are approaching the cold season, when the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard predictably ramps up its demand on the same water supply.
The shipyard effectively drinks more than half the water that passes out of the Kittery Water District every year. At the same time, long-term droughts and heavy development in the region are increasingly sipping around the edges.
The water district’s superintendent, Matthew Berube, sees the development as the likely undoing of the system.
“It’s got to be thought of differently,” he said. “We can’t just keep building to infinity because I don’t have infinite water.”
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