Visitors to the working waterfront in Portland approach the Coast Guard Cutter Sitkinak, which was open for tours as part of the ‘Walk the Working Waterfront’ event in early June. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

The U.S. Department of Commerce announced Friday it is giving Maine a $69 million grant to prepare and defend its coastline from the worst impacts of climate change, including flooding, storm surge and extreme weather events.

This grant – the state’s largest-ever federal climate investment – will create a new state resilience office that will help Maine communities adopt nature-based solutions, strengthen their working waterfronts, and build enduring capacity to prepare for and respond to climate change impacts.

“Every week we hear another story about communities across the country experiencing the devastating impacts of climate change,” said Rick Spinrad, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “If we do not make coastal communities more resilient, it will be the communities that rely on the ocean that will pay the price.”

Rick Spinrad, NOAA Administrator, speaks on Friday. Spinrad was a former post-doctorate student at Maine’s Bigelow Laboratory. Penelope Overton/Staff writer

In its application, Maine vowed to pour $21 million into the Maine Infrastructure Adaptation Fund to develop a pipeline of 20 grant-ready public infrastructure resiliency projects and build living shoreline demonstration projects on the Phippsburg peninsula and the west branch of the Pleasant River.

A living, green, or soft shoreline is a stabilized coast made from natural materials like plants, sand, or logs designed to minimize the impact of sea level rise and storm surge. They are considered a greener alternative to hard structures like concrete seawalls, bulkheads or riprap.

These projects installed at the Columbia-Addison salt marsh and at Popham Beach State Park, Popham Colony and Fort Popham will offer opportunities to educate the public about climate change and living shorelines. Other communities will be encouraged to adapt resiliency strategies piloted here.

The grant will fund new bluff mapping procedures, create a resilient design manual, build an inventory of vulnerable working waterfronts, design a saltwater intrusion monitoring network, and launch a new Shore Corps to help local communities and public landowners adopt new green infrastructure projects.

The grant also will fund a new Climate Resiliency Conservation Fund to help address ecological gaps in protected lands, such as boosting Maine’s carbon storage capacity and protecting wildlife habitat. It also will help the state achieve its goal of conserving 30% of its lands by 2030. The state is now at 22%.

A car is nearly submerged by flood waters behind the Roak Block apartments in Auburn in December 2023. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal

Although the damage left behind by storms last winter was caused by waves, storm surge, wind and rain, scientists say it was the rising seas and rising temperatures that Maine is experiencing because of the increase in heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that gave these wet winter storms their powerful punch.

Warm air can hold more moisture than cold air. For every degree of increase, the atmosphere can hold about 4% more water per unit area. An unseasonably warm atmosphere feeds off the moisture provided by the nearby Gulf of Maine.

In a traditional winter storm, with temperatures down in the 20s and 30s, the atmosphere would not have been able to hold as much moisture, leading to less overall precipitation. And that precipitation would have come in the form of snow, not torrential downpours like it did during last winter’s storms.

Rising temperatures lead to rising sea levels, scientists say, causing glaciers and ice sheets to melt and add water to an ocean that is already expanding in volume as it warms. The Gulf of Maine is rising faster than the global average because it is susceptible to changes in the Gulf Stream and seasonal wind shifts.

Last winter’s storms rushed in on seas elevated by climate change, buckling coastal roads, scouring sand beaches and washing away much of Maine’s working waterfronts, which were already under pressure by increasing shoreline development and gentrification.

Climate change’s one-two punch – sea level rise and extreme weather – are remaking Maine’s shoreline.

The Commerce Department announced coastal climate grants totaling $575 million to 18 states and U.S. territories Friday. Maine’s award was one of the biggest of the lot; only Alaska, Washington, New Jersey and California received more.

‘HISTORIC INVESTMENT’

After last winter’s storms, Gov. Janet Mills said Maine knows the devastating impacts of climate change.

Curt Brown of Cape Elizabeth, a lobsterman and biologist at Ready Seafood in Saco serves on the state’s new Infrastructure Rebuilding and Resilience Commission. He talked on Friday about how important grant money funded through the Climate-Ready Coasts initiative was to repair the working waterfront destroyed by last winter’s storms and will help take steps to protect what is rebuilt from the higher seas, warmer temperatures, and stormier weather of the future. Penelope Overton/Staff writer

“This historic investment from the Biden-Harris Administration will accelerate and expand our already aggressive work to make our state, especially our vital working waterfronts, stronger and more resilient to the severe storms we know are ahead,” Mills said.

This money is essential to helping Maine’s working waterfront and fishing economy recover from last winter’s storms, said Curt Brown, a Cape Elizabeth lobsterman and marine biologist at Ready Seafood who serves on Maine’s new coastal infrastructure rebuilding commission.

He and his young son, Finn, woke up at 4 a.m., left Deke’s Wharf at 4:30 a.m., bought bait at Custom House Wharf, and then returned several hours later to sell their lobster catch to Ready Seafood at the State Pier just before coming to the news conference at the Portland Fish Pier.

“This is the working waterfront of Portland,” Brown told the crowd of politicians. “This infrastructure that you see right here all around us supports tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars worth of commerce. That’s billions with a b. This is vital to Maine’s economy and communities.”