Twenty-five Gouldsboro residents met at Corea’s Black Duck Inn on Saturday, November 16, to review solutions to chronic flooding and storm damage at two critically important locations: the road junction connecting Corea Road to Cranberry Point Road and the causeway connecting Crowley Island to the rest of Corea.
Gouldsboro’s Coastal Resilience Committee organized the meeting, building upon what the committee heard from residents in an August meeting where more than 40 people described their experiences in the January storms this year and their concerns about safety. Since that meeting, engineers and environmental scientists at Streamworks PLLC and FB Environmental Associates developed design concepts addressing the risks of flooding and storm damage. This second meeting gave residents an opportunity to discuss the design alternatives and share thoughts about how they might work and be improved.
The Corea/Cranberry Point Road Junction
The flooding problem near the Corea/Cranberry Point Road junction is at the culvert on the curve just before the junction when coming from Corea. This area floods multiple times yearly when tides are high and winds blow the ocean into the harbor. During the January storm this year, it was under more than 2 feet of water and impossible to drive over safely, cutting everyone on Cranberry Point off from emergency services.
Joel Ballestero, the lead Streamworks engineer on the project, presented the three alternatives illustrated below. The first alternative would raise the road 2 feet about its current height at the culvert, the second doubles that to 4 feet, and the third doubles it again. Since we have observed two feet or more of water over the road, but only rarely, the first alternative would address the problem in all but the most powerful storms. Raising the road more would provide greater protection if we continue to see powerful storms and as sea level continues to rise, but each successive alternative would affect a larger length of roadway, cost more, and require modifications to more driveways.
Ballestero noted that it is possible to design the alternatives so that they could be implemented over time, raising the road incrementally as it becomes necessary, without needing to tear out and replace the previous work completely. Although this would, in the end, increase the cost of getting to the 8-foot alternative, the cost would be spread out over perhaps 50 years or more. At this early stage of the design process, Ballestero did not have reliable cost estimates for the alternatives, but he noted that because each successive alternative affects a larger extent of the road and more driveways, moving from one alternative to the next would more than double the cost.
Several participants asked whether the planning included replacing the existing corrugated plastic culvert. Ballestero said “Yes” and noted that a larger culvert, perhaps a rectangular concrete “box culvert,” would help keep water from bottling up and causing erosion on the upstream side. Dan Rodgers, who owns a wharf close to the junction on Francis Pound Road, noted that his family has a painting from 1956 that shows a bridge at the location of the current culvert and flooding problems. Ballestero said that if the culvert is sitting on a rock ledge, a bridge might be an ideal solution.
The Crowley Island Causeway
Corea is Gouldsboro’s largest and most productive working harbor. The Corea Lobster CoOp is the center of this economic activity, buying lobsters and selling bait, fuel, and other supplies worth more than $10,000,000 a year. All the lobsters, crabs, bait, fuel, and supplies are transported along the causeway connecting Crowley Island to the rest of Corea. The causeway is also the only access to approximately three dozen residences on Crowley Island. The January 10 storm overwhelmed and closed the causeway.
Participants in the initial August planning meeting were emphatic in requesting that the Town make improvements to the causeway to reduce the risk of future storm-driven closures. Ballestero presented three approaches to that goal, illustrated below. The first would raise the road 1.5 feet and increase the height of the rock revetment that protects the road from the ocean accordingly. Doing this would restore the road and revetment to the Army Corps of Engineers’ December 1988 design specifications. This alternative would be the least expensive but provide only a small amount of additional storm protection.
The second alternative would raise the road and revetment by 4 feet, providing substantially more storm protection. The construction cost for this alternative would probably be more than twice the construction cost for the first alternative. In addition, this alternative would almost certainly undergo regulatory scrutiny that could increase the overall cost by hundreds of thousands of dollars and delay starting construction.
Ballestero explained that the second alternative would likely encounter regulatory difficulties because the state classifies the area where the causeway was built long ago as a coastal sand dune (see map below). While the state recognizes that the causeway exists, regulators may be reluctant to expand structures in conflict with dune protection regulations. That is why getting approval for Alternative 1, which merely builds back what the Army Corps of Engineers did 35 years ago, is likely to be easier than getting approval for Alternative 2, which expands and strengthens the causeway. Put simply, Gouldsboro may be stuck between new dune protection regulations and work done long before such regulations were in place. Yes, the current causeway is “grandfathered,” but expanding it might be difficult.
To get around needing to protect a dune that is no longer there, Ballestero developed Alternative 3, which would move the crossing to Crowley Island back into the harbor, remove the existing causeway, and replace it with a sand beach. The participants gathered at the Black Duck did not immediately reject this alternative; some even showed interest in it. However, others expressed concerns because this alternative would involve making many changes, impacting many properties. It was evident that the amount of design, modeling, and construction involved would make this alternative very expensive and feasible only if significant outside financial support became available.
Ballestero also noted that the amount of protection from storms associated with all these alternatives could be increased by placing breakwater structures in Gouldsboro Bay to interrupt and slow waves as they come toward the causeway. The curved lines with small X’s to the right of the causeway in each map below represent such structures. He noted that they would be farther from the shore than indicated on his drawings. Meeting participants suggested that a jetty reaching into the bay just south of the beach area might be another way to reduce wave damage.
Where To From Here?
This meeting helped residents understand the options open to the town and how some options might be more expensive because of permitting difficulties. It gave the Coastal Resilience Committee and project consultants a better understanding of the concerns and preferences of those attending the meeting. The next steps include reaching out to more residents, including those not living in Corea, to understand thinking about these problems, the possible solutions, and how to pay for them.
Other near-term tasks for the Coastal Resilience Committee and the consultants working on this project include developing well-researched estimates of the design, permitting, and construction costs associated with the alternatives and additional design and permitting work on the most feasible and affordable alternatives.
As noted at the start of this post, this was the second of four meetings in the Corea Resilient Working Waterfront project. In the next meeting in early spring, the Coastal Resilience Committee will provide participants with cost estimates and projected performance in different sea level rise and storm scenarios for the most attractive and fundable alternatives. Our goal will be to identify a preferred alternative for each location.
At the fourth, final project meeting, the committee and consultants will present the preferred alternatives and potential funding sources for design, permitting, and construction. We will hold this meeting in May before Gouldsboro’s annual town meeting.
Please Share Your Thoughts
The Coastal Resilience Committee would like to hear from Gouldsboro residents, including those outside Corea and those who have not been part of the meetings. If you have thoughts or questions about the work planned for Corea, please share them. We have set up a simple form to make that easy. Just use this link:
Thanks so much for this thorough briefing!!!