KITTERY, Maine — The signs of climate change have been getting worse lately, with recent storms cutting off access to local roads along the southern coast.
"It gets pretty bad. We have anywhere between three and six roads that end up getting cut off that are important thruways for community members and for just general traffic in town when we have storms with high wind and high tide," Kittery town manager Kendra Amaral said.
It’s gotten so bad that Amaral says something needs to be done before the next coastal flood emergency happens.
"The shipyard employees and contractors can get off the island and safely away from the danger area, and our community members can get away from the coast in a safe manner without being blocked by flooded roads," she added.
Abbie Sherwin has been leading the team working on a project focused on coming up with designs to increase the resilience of vulnerable roadways in Kittery. This includes areas like Route 1 over Spruce Creek, and Whipple Road over Gate 2 of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard entrance.
"These two roadway segments are really important for local and regional travel. They're also emergency and evacuation routes," Abbie Sherwin, senior planner and coastal resilience coordinator for the Southern Maine Planning and Development Commission, explained. "They provide critical access to and from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, but they are also really important from a local commuting perspective. So, they're important regionally as well as locally."
Important roads flooding and becoming impassable during heavy rain events like we’ve seen recently are among the issues worsening with climate change. But these problems are not just happening in southern York County.
"We know that vulnerable transportation infrastructure is not unique to Kittery. It's a common issue up and down the coastline as was highlighted with the recent storms that we experienced," Sherwin said. "So part of this project would focus on transferring the information that we glean from this project but also some of the design aspects on how we could possibly incorporate nature-based solutions into these infrastructure projects and share those with other communities."
The Southern Maine Planning and Development Commission partnered with the town of Kittery and the shipyard to assess site conditions and get a better understanding of vulnerabilities.
"This project is focused on helping the community move from the planning stage to get to some designs that will eventually or possibly lead to construction projects to enhance the resilience of the road," Sherwin added.
Sherwin said sharing information and lessons learned from this project with communities in the region and across all of Maine will help fight the effects of climate change in the future.
The grant is more than half a million dollars and is funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Department of Defense, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The town of Kittery is on board.
"This grant was just the appropriate and obvious next step for working on solutions for an area that we've identified as being very vulnerable,” Amaral said.
Sherwin said the plan is to reach out and speak with residents, partners, and officials in order to get input on designs that will lead to construction.