Areial photo showing erosion at Popham Beach since 2007
"The river has to turn because it hits a solid object -- the sand dune -- and it turns and heads to the ocean, but every minute, the water is turning and hitting and carving the sand," says 67-year-old Dick Hill, who has been visiting Popham Beach his whole life. Hill's family has owned a cottage here since 1949, and he describes it as a jewel -- one of the few sandy beaches in Maine north of Portland.
However, the rapidly changing river mouth has caused so much erosion that there's little beach left at high tide. Braving the storm that's currently lashing much of the state, Hill points across the estuary towards the privately-owned Morse Mountain beach, where a buildup of sand has been re-directing the riverflow towards Popham.
"So when it hits the edge of the state park up here, it's just been washing, and washing and washing everything away, and it's all sitting right out there."
Tom Porter: "Why is that?"
DH: "I don't know."
TP: "Why is it doing that?"
Hill may not know the reason why mother nature seems to have turned against Popham, but he knows the effects: He points to a collapsed piece of shoreline, which only the day before, he says, was 10 feet closer to the sea.
Hill accepts that shorelines do change over time, but he says losing the beach in the last couple of years alarms him. "And then in '07 to '09, we started losing all of these pitch pine trees that are over a hundred years old -- these are very slow growing trees. And so I think this is the first time in a few hundred years that it's ever been this far back in, because we're losing all these trees that are all over a 100 years old."
The erosion of the last three years has claimed an ever-increasing stretch of waterfront land, with numerous picnic tables and grills also tumbling into the sea. "I think they need to put a bulldozer on the beach and keep the river away from the dunes," Hill says.
Aerial photo showing ocean advancing on new bathhouse
State authorities are also concerned by the ocean's rapid advance. A recently-constructed bathhouse (pictured above) -- part of a $1.4 million development -- is getting within feet of the water's edge. And in an effort to prevent it from getting any closer, conservationists have placed bundles of dead trees along the water's edge.
State Geologist Robert Marvinney says when the bathhouse project was begun less than three years ago, the site of the building was four times as far away from the water's edge as it is now. "Well, I think when we first looked at permitting it was probably 300 feet from the sea and how it's probably 75 feet from the sea," he says.
Marvinney was speaking at a public meeting in Bath, organized by Dick Hill. About 50 local residents turned out, among them, Jim Fortune, who has lived in the area for 10 years. "It's disappearing. An area that we've frequented, my family and I in the past, is gone. So it's really affected how we use the park. I've noticed that one whole side of the beach is disappeared and certainly the building that was just constructed last summer seems to be potentially threatened," he says.
"I see Popham Beach and it is very disturbing the amount of erosion that is occurring along the western side of the beach," says Popham Beach resident Paul Shiebler. "I've been coming here since the early 70s and I haven't seen it this bad."
Shiebler says one way of dealing with the situation would be to breach the sand bar which has built up across the estuary, which would enable the river to flow directly into the ocean without pushing against Popham Beach. This option was discussed -- and rejected -- late last year at a meeting with the owners of the Morse Mountain beach, on whose property the offending sand dune sits.
Nancy Sferra is with the non-profit Nature Conservancy of Maine, which holds a conservation easement on the Morse Mountain reserve. She says let nature take its course. "What's happening there is something that's happened there year after year. That beach is a dynamic system, it's meant to move back and forth. And if you look at a lot of the historical data, what it's doing now it's done before and it's going to continue to move."
Tom Porter: "But I've been talking to people who've going to the beach for 40 years and are alarmed by what they've seen in the just the last two or three years."
Nancy Sferra: "We can probably get used to seeing a lot more of these intense storms that are going to create a lot more beach erosion. One of the things I think we need to consider is we need to make sure these systems remain resilient, so they can move and respond to these storms."
TP: "How would you do that?"
NS: "By not messing with mother nature too much, so the beach and the mouth of the river is going to do what it wants to do, because these are very highly erodable sytems. They're very dynamic and they do this type of movement as part of their natural process."
Unlike most people in the state, fans of Popham Beach are welcoming the fierce storm that's currently battering the coast. The storm, combined with seasonal high tides, could help create a natural breach in the sand bar and re-route the Morse river without any human having to lift a finger.
But if this doesn't happen, and the bathhouse gets ever nearer the sea, state officials say they might have to consider bull dozing rocks onto the beach, something they say would require clearing a multitude of regulatory hurdles.