Gouldsboro has received a $50,000 grant from Maine’s Community Resilience Partnership Program to bring residents and other stakeholders together with engineers and climate specialists to identify new road designs for two Corea Harbor locations. The grant will enable the town to explore how the roads could be redesigned and rebuilt to withstand storms even larger than the one that hammered Corea Harbor on January 10 earlier this year.
Project Overview
The map below shows the roads around Corea Harbor. The project will focus on the areas in the yellow ovals. These are roads that the town manages and repairs when there is damage.
The bright green shading shows which areas will be flooded when we have a tide at the “Highest Astronomical Tide” (HAT) level (about 13.5′) and 3.9 feet of Sea Level Rise (SLR) on top of that. That is just about what happened on January 10, when we had at least 4′ of storm surge on top of a 12′ tide and big waves on top of the surge.
Crowley Island Causeway
The photo at the top of this post shows what the Crowley Island Causeway looked like on the morning of January 10. The Town removed debris and patched the road after that event but recognized that the damage was a wake-up call. Losing access to Crowley Island would be a serious matter, not only for the residents who live there (in some cases, year-round) but also because Crowley Island is home to the Corea Coop. Every week (working from annual numbers and 2023 prices), roughly $200,000 worth of lobsters (boat price), bait, fuel, supplies, and other seafood move back and forth over the causeway. If the causeway was impassable for just a week or two, let alone a month or two, the economic impact would be substantial.
Corea-Cranberry-Francis Pound Road Junction
The other focus area is the junction of Corea Road, Cranberry Point Road, and Francis Pound Road. An enlarged view is below.
The junction marked with the red X is routinely flooded if there is a high tide and onshore wind, even without a storm. On January 10, it was under between one and two feet of water, shifting up and down with the wind and waves. When there is heavy rainfall (the January 10 storm was mostly wind), the culverts under the roads at this point are also at risk because of the water pouring down from higher areas on Cranberry Point Road.
The Project Team
FB Environmental Associates and Streamworks PLLC will provide the technical expertise required for this project. FB Environmental is the firm that prepared Gouldsboro’s Climate Vulnerability Assessment and Action Plan and focuses on community planning for climate change. Streamworks is a professional engineering firm specializing in stream, shoreline, wetland, and stormwater projects.
The project team also includes Josh McIntyre (Town Manager), Mike Pinkham (Harbor Master), and Mike Connors (Code Enforcement Officer and Road Commissioner). Bill Zoellick (chairman of the Coastal Resilience Committee) serves as the volunteer project manager, and the Coastal Resilience Committee’s members round out the team.
Project Plan
The project will engage Gouldsboro’s residents, particularly residents and other stakeholders in the village of Corea, in a year-long collaborative effort to identify and study alternative approaches to rebuilding roads and other working waterfront infrastructure in and around Corea Harbor. The goal is to have roads that can withstand and quickly recover from storm events over the next 50 years, even as the sea level rises.
Over the next three months, the project team will gather data about existing infrastructure, focusing on roads but also considering other working waterfront infrastructure. Members of the Gouldsboro Coastal Resilience Committee have already used the Town drone to collect the images needed to build 3D models of roads, buildings, and other infrastructure around the harbor. FB Environmental and Streamworks will use sea-level rise projections and wave run-up models to identify at-risk infrastructure and begin specifying design requirements for proposed improvements.
A project kickoff meeting in late August or early September will provide an opportunity for community members and other stakeholders to share observations, local knowledge, hopes, concerns, and objectives with the project team. In October, the consultants will return for an “Alternatives Development Meeting,” where residents, other stakeholders, and the project team will develop and consider ways to address the problems at the two focus sites. Over the winter months, the project team will analyze the most feasible alternatives emerging from the October meeting. Once the analysis is complete, the project team and community will meet again in March or April to review the analysis and identify a preferred alternative for each focus area. The project team will present the final report and facilitate a discussion about the next steps at a final meeting in June 2025.
The project’s deliverables will include (1) a detailed description of the preferred alternative emerging from this planning effort, (2) cost estimates, (3) a permitting matrix that identifies permitting activities that the Town will need to complete before construction, and (4) a list of possible funding sources for design and construction that describes the opportunities, relevant application deadlines, and other detail.
Staying Informed
We are now in the first week of what will be a year-long project. This Gouldsboro Shore website and the associated Facebook page are the best ways to keep up with the project as it unfolds. Sign up here to receive a brief email when we add new posts to the site. If you have questions or suggestions, send us an email.
