Bluffs take a beating

By TUX TURKEL, Staff Writer Maine Sunday Telegram Sunday, October 1, 2006

PEAKS ISLAND ‹ Jim Gilson went outside to fill his bird feeder one morning last November and discovered that a big chunk of his backyard was gone.

"There was a huge pile of trees the size of our house on the beach," he said last week, standing in what's left of his yard and motioning to the ocean, 80 feet below.

Gilson lives in a 90-year-old cottage built on a steep bluff looking west to Portland Harbor. The view from his deck is incredible.
But the bluff, as Gilson has come to learn, is made of glacial-marine mud. It is being eroded by the sea, part of a natural cycle that triggers periodic landslides.

Late last month, the Natural Resources Council of Maine released a study that estimated how much coastal property would be submerged over the next 50 years by rising sea level. The study, which attracted plenty of media coverage, was meant to draw attention to global climate change and steps that people could take to slow the impact.

Largely overlooked by the report, however, is what rising sea level is already doing to coastal real estate, notably through bluff erosion. Roughly 17 percent of Maine's shoreline is made of bluffs that geologists have labeled as unstable or highly unstable. These bluffs are being undermined by the ocean, threatening homes like the Gilson cottage. To the extent that global warming increases the height of the sea, the problem will only become worse with time.
Bluff erosion doesn't rate the headlines that climate change does. Many people who live on the coast aren't aware of it, experts say, and real estate agents aren't specifically required to note the presence of unstable bluffs for prospective buyers.

But bluff erosion is already starting to chew away at some of the state's most prized properties, where homes are perched to take advantage of million-dollar water views. Periodically, something dramatic happens.

In 1973, a landslide covering three acres came close to a couple of houses on Waldo Avenue in Rockland. That event preceded a larger, nearby slide in 1996, which destroyed two homes off Samoset Road.
A year later, a bluff in the Bunganuc area of Brunswick gave way, coming within 100 feet of a house. Last year, a landslide on the banks of the Merriland River in Wells left part of a home's foundation exposed and made the building unsafe to inhabit.

State officials know of other instances in southern and midcoast Maine. Notable hazard areas exist all around Casco Bay, which is peppered with clay bluffs from Falmouth to Brunswick and along the islands.

"As time goes by, more and more shoreline is creeping inland and getting closer to houses," said Stephen Dickson, the state's marine geologist. "We've got problems now. Sea level rise is going to make matters worse."

Media coverage of climate change often portrays rising sea level as a future event, but the ocean already has risen a foot over the past 100 years, Dickson said. Scientists now are debating how much higher the sea will rise over the next century. The study by the Natural Resources Council of Maine suggested the water could go up more than three feet in the next 50 years.

These estimates matter because of the way bluff erosion works.
Storm-driven waves, especially during extremely high tides, eat away the base of the bluff and carry clay and other sediment out to sea. That process steepens the face of the bluff. Continued erosion and "lubrication" from groundwater and heavy rain eventually allow the bluff to give way ­ a landslide.

The landslide creates a more gentle profile on the bluff face and puts the bluff back in balance. Over time, though, erosion will undercut the base and the cycle begins again.

That's essentially what happened at Jim Gilson's house on Peaks Island, according to Joe Kelley, who chairs the department of geological sciences at the University of Maine. Kelley is one of the state's leading experts on bluff erosion. Along with Dickson and others, he has helped map Maine's coastal landslide hazard areas, which include a stretch of Island Avenue where Gilson lives.
"It was coming," Kelley said. "It's just that his time had come and rain triggered it."

Gilson remembers the rain, days of it. But he wasn't prepared to walk outside and find five feet of his yard, covered in a tangle of bittersweet and small maple trees, on the beach below. The landslide left his cottage 25 feet from the bluff edge. Gilson contacted the state for help and made another discouraging discovery: There's no government assistance for landslides.

Gilson had to take matters into his own hands. Last March, crews from a neighboring construction company on the island, Lionel Plante Associates, set out to save Gilson's cottage. They installed drainage pipes and special geotextile to stablize the bank and release groundwater. They built a 50-foot-long wall of large boulders at the bluff base and terraced a section midway up the banking. Then Gilson had roses, perennial flowers and other vegetation planted to hold the soil. The project cost him $55,000.
Some of Gilson's neighbors recognize this ongoing threat and have taken steps to protect their seaside properties.

Jack Soley lives in a 19th-century home a few doors from Gilson. He has driven a corrugated steel buttress 12 feet into the ground between the house and the bluff face. He also has installed drain pipes. At the base of the bluff, a 20-year-old concrete seawall helps fend off angry waves.

Other landowners have armored the shoreline over the years. These efforts are easy to see, at a now-sagging wall of rock and concrete farther up the beach.

These measures might tip off homebuyers to the potential for trouble. But Kurt Goodhue, who owns Port Island Realty on Peaks Island, said these warning signs are often ignored. Look at the ongoing development on hurricane-ravaged beaches in the southern United States, he said. "It seems that people will do silly things with their money to get closer to the water," Goodhue said.
If judgments are clouded by the water view, disclosure laws don't offer much clarity. Real estate agents must note if a property is in a flood plain, for instance, but there's no check-off for coastal bluffs.

Goodhue said that might be a good idea. He sold a small cottage last year on a steep bluff, but not until a geologist looked it over. The consultant's conclusion: The house should be fine for 10 years, but there's no way to know after that.

Goodhue said he didn't realize that the Maine Geological Survey had mapped the state's landslide hazard areas, and those maps are available on the Internet. He said he would tell brokers in his office about the maps.

"When people invest in a property that may not be there in 10 years, they should have that information," he said.

Of course, hundreds of Maine homes, like the Gilson cottage, were built long before the dynamics of bluff erosion were fully appreciated. Now that it's understood, officials want to prevent new structures from being built where they're at risk from collapsing into the sea.

Earlier this year, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection amended the state's shoreland zoning ordinances, which are administered by communities. A key change requires a 75-foot minimum setback from the top of coastal bluffs identified as hazardous by the state. Previously, the setback was measured from the edge of the coastal wetland.

Setbacks have emerged as an issue in Rockland, where a 48-home subdivision has been proposed next to the Samoset Resort's golf course. Last spring, the town's planning board asked for an independent study to learn whether parts of the project will be threatened by an eroding bluff on the property.

William Peterlein, an engineer with Summit Geoengineering Services in Lewiston, found little risk of a landslide on the site, but said ongoing erosion could erase 50 to 100 feet of shoreline and make some homes uninhabitable within the century.

In an interview last week, Peterlein said the development meets required codes and steps can be taken to reduce the risk, such as extending building foundations to bedrock and placing boulders along the eroding shoreline.

"The risk is relative to how it's handled, how it's mitigated," he said.

State experts such as Kelley and Dickson say coastal land buyers should have a greater awareness of rising sea level. They suggest looking at the hazard maps and checking with a town's building code enforcement officer.

That might help property owners avoid the expense and anxiety that Jim Gilson has been dealing with.

Standing on the beach below his cottage last week, Gilson looked up at the erosion control measures on his bluff and admired the work. "We'll see what happens this winter," he said.

Gilson has spent 21 summers at the cottage. He didn't realize the bluff is mapped and labeled unstable by the state. But in retrospect, he said, he's not surprised. "Some of the old hands said this bank has been coming down over the years," he said. "This was our year."

Staff Writer Tux Turkel can be contacted at 791-6462 or tturkel@pressherald.com