MILBRIDGE, Maine — Down East coastal communities are grappling with severe damage to fishing infrastructure after two powerful storms marched through our state, bringing high seas and driving rain.
“This has been … a coastwide devastation,” Monica Chipman, who lost a wharf of her own, said Sunday. “We have other people that we work with that have lost their wharfs [also].”
She and her sister-in-law, Amity Chipman, own Chipman’s Wharf, a lobster wholesaler and retail establishment. They said seeing the bait house and boardwalk collapse into the surf felt like a "death in the family.”
Now, with the ocean too rough and cold for rebuilding efforts, it could be well into the spring lobster fishing season before Chipman’s looks like it did before the storm. The worry is the delay would have a ripple effect among local fishermen. It could take them longer to sell their catch to Chipman’s, which can only be accessed high tide and closer to shore since the damage, or they may need to go elsewhere.
“It’s a trickledown effect on all the fishermen that we service,” Monica added.
In Winter Harbor, workers spent Sunday morning clearing piles of rockweed from Main Street. Another wholesale worker, 17-year-old lobster packer Carlito Moores, noted a similar domino effect.
“Local fishermen, when they get impacted by storms … it impacts us, because sometimes we don't have any product,” Moores said.
But the interconnectedness of the Down East fishing industry, which makes the sum beholden to the vulnerability of its parts, is also a crucial reason this area that stretches along Hancock and Washington counties is so durable.
“We're just gonna do what we always do and tack up together, make sure everything goes smoothly again,” Moores said.
As cleanup gets underway, there seems to be no shortage of volunteers. The Chipmans said they’ve even heard from lobstermen who are promising to start their spring season late to help rebuild the lost wharf.