Jim Shafer desperately pumped water out of the crawlspace of his South Portland home when waves surged over the wall out back. Surrounded by the deluge, he had one thing on his mind: Keep the water out.
His wife, Carol Epstein, was inside their oceanfront home, grabbing towels and sheets to soak up and contain the inch of water that was starting to pool in their front room.
Earlier that day, she helped her neighbors shovel water in the alley out front. But her boots weren’t tall enough to keep the water out.
In January of 2024, southern Maine was battered with a series of devastating storms.
During the first storm, Shafer and Epstein’s house remained unscathed. But the one that came the next weekend was a different story — their street was under 18 inches of salt water.
“It was the perfect storm,” Epstein said. “Torrential rain, astronomical high tide and storm surge.”
Their property and the adjacent dunes were damaged and covered in debris. Fragments from a fishing shack on the point washed three houses inland. Their crawlspace flooded.
“It was an important wake-up call for us,” Epstein said. “By that Monday, it wasn’t a hard decision.”
The pair decided to raise their house.
By next spring, their first floor will be elevated by 5 feet — the product of more than a year of permitting, planning and construction, the project is estimated to cost $500,000.
“It’s proactive,” Shafer said.
When the Shafer and Epstein moved into their South Portland home more than 10 years ago, they weren’t specifically thinking about how climate change would directly impact them. They took the standard steps, like buying flood insurance.
“I think what the storms of January 2024 said to us and to many others is that the impacts of this are happening now,” Epstein said. “They’re starting now. It brought an immediacy to it.”
The sea level in Maine is projected to rise between 1.1 and 3.2 feet by 2050 and 3 and 9.3 feet by 2100, increasing the risks — and impacts — of coastal flooding.
Epstein and Shafer’s home, along with their neighbors along the alley, is in the special hazard flood area on the most recent FEMA flood map. During a current 100-year storm, water levels at the Epstein home could reach 10 feet with waves up to 1.5 feet tall.
More than 50 residential properties in the Willard Beach neighborhood are projected to experience flooding during major storms in the future, and more than 20 are expected to experience intermittent flooding during king tides without storm surges, according to map modeling future vulnerability published in 2022.
Epstein and Shafer might be among the first South Portland residents to elevate their home in response to the rising risk of coastal flooding, but their neighbors are eagerly watching the progress and monitoring results.
Elsewhere along Maine’s coast, homeowners have been elevating their homes for years.
Payne Construction Services elevates about 20 homes in Maine each year, usually between York and Portland, according to Geoff Goss, a project manager. The family-owned business based in New Hampshire, Connecticut and Florida, has elevated more than 7,000 homes since it opened in 1974.
“We’ve always stayed busy,” he said, with a mix of summer homes and year-round occupancies.
Atlantic Structural, a Maine-based company, elevates seven to nine houses a year from Belfast to Kennebunkport, with more projects on the waitlist.
Julie Pietrzak, with Thornton Tomasetti, a global sustainability and resilience company, said that the resiliency practices (efforts to safeguard structures against a changing climate) at her firm were born in response to Superstorm Sandy.
“Once someone is affected, they’re like, I don’t want this to happen again,” she said. “It really depends on what’s the latest storm that’s happened and how people react to that.”
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Epstein and Shafer’s house is tucked away in a dead end street by the ocean, tangled closely with the others in the alley. The ocean can be heard from the front of their house and seen from the back. On a recent stormy day, parked sailboats bobbed with the whitecaps, and the wind whipped the sand.
In the drizzle, Epstein gave a tour of her home, now a construction site.
There was a gap between the garage and the house. “It wouldn’t make sense to elevate that part,” Epstein said, pointing to the empty garage. “How would the cars get in there if it was five feet above ground?” Contractors already removed the walkway connecting the two sections.
Moat-like trenches revealed the current foundation of the main part of the house, which is 3,000 square feet. Rectangles of blue spray paint marked where holes will be cut for steel beams.
“The house will go up in the air by November or December,” she said.
During the construction process, the house will be jacked up 12 feet as the contractors and subcontractors prepare the area for its final elevation. To support its final height, 17 helical piles, or giant corkscrews, will be installed in addition to concrete piers. A steel grid will be placed on top, as will some concrete work.
Ryan Leddy, the general contractor, estimated that the entire project will take four months including a month of preparation, two to three weeks to get the house in the air, four to six weeks to do everything underneath and another week to set the house back down.
Pietrzak, who often does flood risk consulting, helped Epstein evaluate factors that would determine the final height, from the projected sea level rise to rules in the building code.
Epstein and Shafer ultimately decided to elevate 5 feet above the base flood elevation, preparing for high sea level rise from 2050 to 2100.
“I think lifting a house and putting stuff underneath and putting it back down in an open field is probably the easiest thing in the world,” Leddy said.
Leddy has been in the building business for 20 years, and his father, who is also his business partner, was in the business for 20 years before that, particularly focusing on coastal areas.
Though he’s built a number of elevated houses in his career, including one in Higgins Beach that was raised 9 feet, this project is the first time he’s elevated a house to put these specific piles underneath.
“Most of the houses that we do are either here and we tear them down and do a new house, or there’s a house where it’s so close to the ocean that you wouldn’t even have been able to build it there now,” Leddy said.
When Epstein and Shafer decided that they wanted this work done, the zoning ordinance in South Portland did not allow it. In the non-conforming section “it had a lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘thens,’ but it didn’t have anything for if you wanted to raise your house for climate resilience,” Epstein said.
The city adapted the zoning ordinance over the summer to allow homes in flood zones to be elevated, and it’s currently working to identify the most vulnerable areas to coastal flooding to target its efforts.
AN ENVIRONMENTAL PROCESS
Elevating a house is beneficial both for an individual property’s resilience but also for the strength of the greater dune system, according to Peter Slovinsky, a marine geologist with the Maine Geological Survey.
When a house is sitting on posts, waves and sediment can move freely underneath without making violent contact. During major storm and flood events, waves crash into solid building foundations, increasing risk of structural damage and sand scouring. A cubic foot of water weighs 61 pounds. “It’s like a battering ram,” said Carter Jerman, an engineer with Atlantic Structural.
Elevation also allows the dunes to migrate like they have throughout geological history, Slovinsky said. Sand in the front gets deposited in the back, the whole dune moving inland.
“If we were visiting the Maine coastline 3,000 years ago, our beaches would be in very, very different locations than they are now,” he said. “But we would still have a beach, a dune and a marsh behind it.”
Issues arose when humans tried to hold the line, Slovinsky said. In some places in Outer Banks, North Carolina, where what used to be residential lots are becoming surf zones, locals are watching as houses fall into the sea.
Coastal southern Maine is already being impacted by this process, though less dramatically. Oceanfront buildings are being struck by waves during major storms, and nine houses in Wells were condemned with others experiencing serious damage after the storms last January.
Homes, like Epstein and Shafer’s, that are in erosion hazard zones are either experiencing damaging wave action now or will within the next hundred years, according to Slovinksy.
“For this to really work properly, there needs to be elevation of structures on a wide-scale basis, not just on a property-by-property basis,” Slovinsky added.
RAISING COSTS
Raising your house isn’t cheap. Goss said that for a typical beach house, it costs between $150,000 and $250,000.
Other factors, such as the size of the footprint, overall height, number of stories, type of foundation permitted and if it’s in an erosion hazard area, can increase that cost up to $500,000.
When people call Goss asking for a ballpark estimate, he says it’s an impossible task. “It’s so situational,” he said. The lifting of the house alone can cost between $25,000 to $100,000.
Most of the clients he works with have homes worth close to or more than $1 million. “You retain good value in the property by protecting it,” Goss said.
And for buildings close enough to the water that the ocean nearly rolls up underneath it, there aren’t many preventative measures available aside from elevating.
“You either deal with the flooding or you get out of the way,” Goss said.
For those who are really worried about sea level rise, Goss recommended selling while the market is high and finding somewhere safer.
Property owners can also turn their energies toward preserving the natural counters to storm surges.
Slovinsky wrote a report full of recommendations for maintaining, enhancing and restoring beaches and dunes. These measures vary in cost, with cheaper options include scraping the beach and building the dunes up. Higher cost options include dune redesign with an engineered center.
John Pani, who has lived in South Portland for five years, is building a living shoreline outside of his home along Willard Beach. Inside the reconstructed dune, there will be a biodegradable center that is more resistant to storm surge.
“It won’t just wash away and dissolve,” he said. Indigenous grasses will be planted on top of the sand, eventually establishing root systems to stabilize the dune when the core degrades within the next 10 or 15 years.
In exposed sites, these projects can be a six-figure investment, comparable to other engineered shoreline stabilization methods, according Seth Wilkinson, a restoration ecologist and founder of Wilkinson Ecological Designs — the firm that designed Pani’s shoreline. Costs vary by property.
During four extreme storms in the past two years, the dunes outside of Pani’s home were depleted.
“Someday, there will be another one,” he said. “We want to be better adapted than we are right now.”
An excavator and a dozer are already parked on the edge of his street, the shore in view over the shallow dunes. Bikers and joggers pass by on their way to the beach. Pani estimates that the project will be completed in the next few weeks.
“Maine is getting its share of the destruction,” he said. “We now live in a world where you need to protect yourself.”
South Portland couple raising home to counter rising water
