Saco city leaders meet to discuss plans to prepare for climate change - fox23maine.com

Saco city leaders meet to discuss plans to prepare for climate change

SACO (WGME) – Parts of Maine’s coast continue to clean up after January’s devastating storms, and some cities are taking the cleanup a step further by trying to figure out how to prepare for the next big storm.

A climate resilience information session was held in Saco Wednesday night.

“We saw two generational storms, three days apart,” Saco resident David Plavin said.

Plavin lives right on the water in Camp Ellis. His home wasn’t majorly damaged in January’s storms, but some of his neighbors weren’t so lucky. And he’s worried that now there’s nothing left to protect his neighborhood.

“We have literally no defense down there,” Plavin said. “So, something like this becomes very important.”

He and others are now looking to city leaders for a fix.

In a meeting Wednesday night, the public got a chance to hear and weigh in on Saco’s Climate Adaption and Action Plan, a look into the city’s response plan for the next decade.

“It's gonna look at everything from sharing more information about the climate impacts that we're all experiencing and how we can help mitigate those, to looking down, drilling down, different neighborhood assessments and helping communities understand, different sections of the community, how they can adapt better in climate change overall,” Saco Planning Director Emily Cole-Prescott said.

Saco city leaders have come up with several tentative plans to look at climate impacts across the city. For many, resiliency in Camp Ellis makes the top of the list.

“I’d never seen the water come up all the way up through camp Ellis like that,” Howard Carter, director of Saco’s Water Resource Recovery Department, said.

And whatever the plan’s first action is, Plavin says something needs to be done soon.

“We’re all here to find out what can be done and what can be done soon,” Plavin said.

A timeline on when any implementation might happen is unclear, but the discussion for change continues Monday. A city employee says the Saco City Council is holding a workshop Monday to discuss mitigation efforts like sand dune restoration and sea walls to help protect the coast.