On a bright, cold November morning, Julie Erb drove a shovel into the soft sand at one of the remaining dunes at Popham Beach State Park. Then Erb gently lifted a strand of beach grass into the hole and covered its roots.
Erb is among a few dozen volunteers transplanting grass from Popham's eroding sandbanks into its imperiled dunes. The hope is the grass can help reinforce the beaches' dune system against further erosion.
"It's just to help preserve the dunes, and bring the beach back," Erb said. She lives in nearby Phippsburg and has witnessed the dramatic changes to the beach in the last several years.
"It's a totally different beach," Erb said. "The river's changed its course dramatically, and it's eroded a lot of the beach people are used to enjoying."
Popham Beach is one of Maine's most popular day-use state parks, attracting about 200,000 visitors a year.
It's also eroding faster than other beaches in the state according to the most recent beach mapping data from the Maine Geological Survey.
Popham has been losing more than 91 feet of beach a year since 2017, according to the survey.
Park Manager Sean Vaillancourt said that Popham is very dynamic — it gains and loses sand and changes shape.
"But the changes we’ve seen in the last few years have been increasingly dramatic and in a frequency we’ve not seen in the past," Vaillancourt said.
The high water mark now reaches nearly up to the main path visitors take to get to the popular east beach. On its website the park warns about walking out to explore rock Fox Island — visitors can't get there without crossing the Morse River and two hours after low tide the sandbanks are covered with fast-moving cold water.
Vaillancourt said people planning a beach day should time it around low tide. Otherwise there's not much room to lay out a beach towel or sun umbrella.
"Every day at least two or three people say, 'what happened?'" he said. "'What happened here? Tell me why this is happening, I didn’t realize it was this bad, I didn’t expect this much dune to be gone or these paths to be closed,'" Vaillancourt said.
Peter Slovinsky, a marine geologist at the Maine Geological Survey said a shift in the Morse River is mostly to blame for severe erosion.
The river's typical course is to the west of Popham Beach and allows sand to build up and grow the beach and sand dunes, Slovinsky said. But sometimes the river changes course and cuts east along the shoreline.
"When it does that it kind of eats away and erodes all of the dunes that have accreted over 5 to 10 years and this process happens about every 10 to 15 years,' Slovinsky said.
Heavy damage from back-to-back winter storms almost two years ago added to Popham's stress. And higher tides linked to sea level rise could have an effect too, Slovinsky said.
After the storms, officials asked people to donate used Christmas trees that were arranged in a way to capture sand and rebuild Popham's dunes.
But even that project has mostly succumbed to erosion from the river, Slovinsky said.
"Until the Morse River relocates itself back to where it traditionally is we're going to continue to see erosion problems," Slovinsky added.
Those problems have prompted state officials to take a deeper look at the long-term sustainability of the park facilities at Popham Beach.
Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands Director Andy Cutko said the agency intends to hire a consultant to develop a range of options for the long term future of the park. Meanwhile, it is trying projects like the dune grass replanting to shore up the dunes in the near-term.
That could mean relocating, replacing or removing infrastructure, including the bathroom and shower house and its septic tank sitting steps from eroding bank.
"I think what we've learned in the past several years is that nature is increasingly unpredictable," Cutko said. "It is hard to have 100% confidence in any coastal infrastructure like Popham holding up for the future."
