Maine
What did Hallowell learn from the December 2023 flood?
Sam Joyall, co-owner of Rusticators Emporium on Water Street in downtown Hallowell, points out Thursday the high-water mark of last year’s December flood, the fifth-highest in the city’s history. Joyall says he noticed the water rising fast on the morning of Dec. 19, 2023, and he quickly called his wife. “I did a quick U-turn around, she booked it up there, and then we spent the rest of the day watching as that graph kept projecting it to go higher and higher for flooding.” Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal
7:30 a.m., Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023
Kennebec River at 17.3 feet: moderate flood stage
HALLOWELL — Power was out on Water Street, and Sam Joyall knew there was a cold spell coming. He drove from his home in Richmond to insulate his storefront, The Rusticators Emporium, from the dropping temperatures early Tuesday morning.
Joyall passed the boat launch on the southern end of downtown. It hadn’t rained for almost a day, but water encroached on the launch parking lot. Noted.
He continued on to his store, two blocks north of the launch, insulating supplies in hand.
“By the time I had stuffed the doors and was like, ‘OK, this is all I came here for,’ and was leaving, I noticed how — in that brief period — substantially higher the water was at the boat landing area,” he said.
A slow-moving storm had dropped 4-8 inches of rain across much of Maine over the previous two days, melting snowpack and quickly increasing river levels.
Joyall was seeing the beginning of what would become a historic flood. A year ago this week, riverside communities across central Maine suffered damage they will remember for decades — and as the climate changes, the storms that led to the flooding are expected to only increase in intensity.
It’s a time the communities can’t afford to forget. That December morning, experts say, will be repeated more frequently in the years ahead.
Front Street, which borders the river and lies much lower than the rest of downtown, had flooded the evening before. Hallowell’s bulkhead — where the famous colorful Adirondack chairs sit for much of the year — was already covered by several feet of water. The Kennebec River was rising by nearly a foot every hour.
Joyall called his wife, Lexi, who checked on the river’s flood gage predictions — and it did not look pretty. The duo, who co-own the store, scrambled to take action.
“I did a quick U-turn around, she booked it up there, and then we spent the rest of the day watching as that graph kept projecting it to go higher and higher for flooding,” Joyall said. “We were just in the shop, doing whatever it was we could — we took out some of our most expensive items, fearing that we were probably going to see some water come into the shop by that point.”
Floodwater soon lapped at the doorsteps of Water Street storefronts and completely inundated Front Street basement spaces.
And the river was still rising.
The town center of Hallowell was unreachable on the afternoon of Dec. 19, 2023, with both sides of Route 201 closed and cars coming from Gardiner being directed to turn around. Emily Duggan/Kennebec Journal file
10:30 a.m., Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023
Kennebec River at 19.27 feet: major flood stage
Joyall spent the rest of the morning moving merchandise and watching the flood gage read higher and higher. Business owners up and down Water Street had the same idea — many scrambled to get their belongings to higher ground. Upstairs, up the hill — anything would do.
Down the street, Joyall saw volunteers, including Mayor George Lapointe, moving stock out of Vignettes of Maine — a gift shop near the corner of Water and Wharf streets — as the business took on water.
Chiseled into the building across Wharf Street, notches marking Hallowell’s biggest floods from the past 200 years loomed over Lapointe’s parked pickup truck. Nine months later, this flood’s high-water point would be marked on that building — the fifth-highest ever recorded in Hallowell and the highest since 1987.
Joyall called across Water Street to make sure Michel-Paul Cyr, who owns Michel Paul Artist Studio, had all the help he needed while water crept up to his gallery’s back deck. Lapointe jumped from business to business, asking owners how he could help.
On Front Street, the Quarry Tap Room’s back patio was submerged in 8 feet of water. Easy Street Lounge was filled with water “to the rafters,” and it took months for owner Bruce Mayo to rebuild and restock, Lapointe said.
Joyall said he stayed at The Rusticators Emporium for several more hours, watching the water slowly rise outside. He said the store’s lights and heat, which had been out since the day before, flickered back on, even before the water stopped climbing.
“Oh, this is a reverse Titanic situation here,” Joyall said to himself.
9:30 a.m., Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023
Kennebec River at 17.97 feet: moderate flood stage
With power back on the western side of Water Street, City Manager Gary Lamb powered up the city’s computers and opened City Hall doors for business for the first time in two days.
The river had already noticeably dropped from its peak of 22.49 feet around 9 p.m. Tuesday, but roads were still impassable on the southern side of downtown until about midday, according to a memo Lamb wrote recapping the flood. Public works employees removed barricades and began cleanup, using the city’s snowblower’s power broom.
A swollen Kennebec River floods buildings on the back side of Water Street in Augusta after a severe rainstorm in December 2023. File photo courtesy of Dave Dostie
Much of downtown was covered in inches-thick silt that was “greasy as heck,” Lapointe said. Granite City Park, which had been underwater for about 36 hours, was caked in sediment. The building housing Vignettes of Maine and what was then Traverse Coffee Co. was lifted slightly off its foundation and required substantial structural work. The Quarry Tap Room’s outdoor stage had floated over a railing and onto Front Street. Several buildings in the southern part of downtown were evacuated due to a propane tank leak near Café de Bangkok. Floats from the boat launch had traveled downstream, despite being stored across the Water Street, away from the river. Merrill’s Bookshop lost eight tons of books.
Buildings on the western side of Water Street were mostly spared from the worst of the flooding, including Berry & Berry Floral, where Lapointe said he saw a “small puddle” inside during the worst of the flooding. The Rusticators Emporium, on the western side of the street, was kept mostly dry, too.
But on the eastern side of Water Street, closer to the river, flood waters were slow to recede, and power was still out through Wednesday night.
Lamb contacted Central Maine Power early Thursday morning, wondering when electricity would be restored and hoping businesses wouldn’t freeze up during the impending cold snap. He was told by customer service representatives that building owners and tenants would need to sign CMP’s post-flood power restoration form, signaling they understood the risks associated with turning power back on.
“Because so many of the services were inundated, they required this form to be filled out and signed by a master electrician who’d actually done an inspection,” Lamb said. “For obvious reasons, safety reasons; it could start a fire or hurt somebody.”
Lamb said he didn’t know about the form before the flood — buildings downtown hadn’t flooded this badly since he became city manager — but that city staff and other volunteers jumped in to contact relevant people as quickly as possible. Power was back on by Saturday morning.
“The critical part was people were going to have to drain their buildings,” Lamb said. “It was getting much colder after the waters receded and buildings were going to freeze up because they had gone for four or five days without power, and most of those places are relatively uninsulated. We were ecstatic that, right before Christmas, we got the power back on that Saturday.”
11 a.m., Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024
Kennebec River at 6.55 feet: well below flood stage
Almost exactly a year later, city officials’ fears about another river flood were growing. Conditions were similar to the December 2023 event: A powerful storm capable of dropping several inches of rain, rising temperatures, high winds that knocked out power to thousands and the potential for substantial snowmelt.
Lamb watched the flood gage predictions closely, and Lapointe mentioned in a City Council meeting earlier in the week that the city may have to deal with significant flooding again.
No such flood came.
But Maine State Climatologist Sean Birkel said events like last December’s will only get more severe with climate change.
“We’re much more uncertain about the frequency part,” Birkel, also a research assistant professor at UMaine’s Climate Change Institute, said. “However, as climate warms, we have seen an increase in the intensity of storms, and in particular with the amount of precipitation that these storms are producing.”
The Dec. 17-18, 2023, storm produced more than 3 inches of rain in most of the Kennebec River watershed. Warm, strong winds from the southeast created an “atmospheric river” event, which ushered massive amounts of rainfall, especially in central and western Maine.
When added to snowmelt, Birkel said, the conditions for widespread river flooding downstream were ideal.
“We have seen that a cold-season cyclone can produce this much flooding and damage, and in a warming world, there’s increased risk,” he said. “And so as we prepare in the future, we have to bear that in mind and incorporate that into our planning, especially at the state and municipal level.”
Lapointe said, while Hallowell does not plan on building a seawall to keep floodwaters out, city officials can take some steps to improve emergency response and prepare for future flooding events.
He said he and other city leaders should lean on the U.S. Geological Survey’s river gage — which Joyall watched intently during the flood and which Lamb said was “worth its weight in gold” — as a useful resource during floods. He said he would also like to standardize the city’s automatic emergency notification system for downtown businesses and residents and learn more about flood prediction, so the city is not scrambling to respond.
The water level from last year’s December flood is carved in a granite corner piece of the building at the intersection of Water and Central streets in downtown Hallowell. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal
Lapointe said it took two to three months for downtown Hallowell to feel normal after the December flood. Several businesses were closed for extended periods of time, and others never came back.
Some received aid from a City Council-approved relief fund, which directed $50,000 to businesses, with a cap of $2,000 per business. Others got help from private fundraising: One Quarry Tap Room employee’s husband raised more than $10,000 for the staff’s lost wages.
Vision Hallowell — a downtown support organization of which Joyall was recently appointed president — distributed more than $17,000 to downtown businesses following a monthslong fundraising campaign with other Hallowell community groups. The city matched that fundraising with another $17,000, which also went out to businesses impacted by the storm.
Lapointe said it would be easy for the city to beat itself up over its response to the flood. Not all business owners and tenants on Water and Front streets were on the city’s emergency contact list. Power restoration took longer than hoped. Lamb faced criticism for not invoking the city’s emergency management ordinance — which would have convened an eight-person committee of city leaders to coordinate response to the flood — but Lamb said the committee had never met, was not trained in emergency response and likely would not have been any more effective.
But above all the controversy and frustration, Lapointe said Hallowell should be proud of how it responded: The community came together to support its downtown, he said, in a relatively short amount of time.
“When there’s only so much you can do, people help out,” he said.