When Dune Meets Road
The Town of Long Islands fellow, Darsey Trudo, explores the complicated intersection of climate change, dune systems, and infrastructure resilience on Fowlers Beach.
The Town of Long Island, is a three-mile-long, one-mile-wide island on the outskirts of Casco Bay. Every hour or so, a Casco Bay Lines ferry chugs across the water from Portland, dropping off visitors, residents, workers, groceries, construction supplies, and the occasional mystery package. The ride takes about 45 minutes, depending on how much freight the crew has to unload with a crane and a tangle of rusty chains while the boat bobs against each wharf.
Long Island seceded from the City of Portland in 1993 and is now an independent municipality with just over 200 year-round residents who make it through the long, dark winters. During World War II, the U.S. Navy enacted eminent domain to turn the northwest face of the island into a fueling station for the Northeast fleet. After the war, the Navy left, and the town slowly grew into the infrastructure it left behind. The town hall is an old naval office. The snack shop and golf cart storage sit in a weathered shingle warehouse that once held fueling equipment. An abandoned barrack, complete with a rumored basement bowling alley, still waits on a hill for some future life.
The remnants of that history are everywhere, if you know how to look. In the center of the island is a stretch of conserved land full of deer trails, seaside goldenrod, swaying pines, and walking paths that turn into cross-country ski routes in winter. Islanders call it “the area”. Beneath the grasses are massive fuel tanks the Navy once injected into the bedrock. They have since been filled with concrete and cleared by the EPA, but I still find it striking that such an idyllic place grew beside, within, and between so many physical reminders of destruction.
This contrast has shaped the way I understand resilience on Long Island. In 2022, a group of dedicated islanders, many of whom have spent their whole lives visiting or living on Long Island, created the Long Island Comprehensive Plan. After almost nine months in the Resilience Corps, learning what it actually takes to run a small-town municipality, I am still blown away by the power coming out of the volunteers of Long Island. Completing a comprehensive plan without full-time planning staff is a feat.
The plan, backed by an extensive community survey process, identified vulnerable sites across the island for future resilience work. This process has guided my year, even with the four-year gap between planning and implementation. On Long Island, plans do not sit separately from people’s memories, roads, beaches, and homes - they identify risks already visible and serve as living documents.
One of these living documents is Fowler’s Beach, a beloved double-pocket beach known for calm, crystalline water. Starting in 2022, severe winter storms repeatedly battered the shoreline with storm surge and wave energy that exceeded previous records. The once sweeping dune system, held together by beach roses, dune grass, wild sumac, and other vegetation, was torn open. Waves undercut the abutting road and, tragically, swept a beloved multigenerational home out to sea. While I was not in Maine during those storms, the memory of that destruction still lives in the community and in the landscape itself.
Fowler’s Beach is owned and stewarded by the Long Island Civic Association (LICA), which has spent years trying to help the dunes hold on. Islanders have planted dune grass, installed snow fencing, and even used discarded Christmas trees as dune revetment. Those efforts mattered, but they could not fully match the speed or scale of the erosion. So, LICA, the Town of Long Island, and the Community Resilience Team applied for a coastal sand dunes grant through the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. In 2025, that funding allowed the town to hire Tighe & Bond to complete an Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) for the Fowler’s Beach dune system and the adjacent Jerry Point Road.
An AoA was new to me. In practice, it meant engineers studied the site’s ocean dynamics, wetland boundaries, dune morphology, climate projections, habitat, and road conditions -then translated all of that into possible restoration strategies. The options ranged from letting the beach recover naturally, adding sand fencing, nourishing and revegetating the dunes, pairing dune restoration with Jerry Point Road improvements or more intensive stabilization. Each one came with its own mix of cost, maintenance, permitting, ecological impact, and long-term protection.
The technical work became much more real at the Fowler’s Beach workshop in August, when about two dozen residents gathered at the Long Island Community Center with the Greater Portland Council of Governments (GPCOG), LICA, and Tighe & Bond to talk through the future of Fowler’s and Jerry Point Road, and to eat free pizza. I presented on the history of storm damage, restoration efforts, and ongoing resilience work; GPCOG framed the conversation around resilience planning and nature-based solutions; and Tighe & Bond walked through the technical findings and alternatives. What stood out was how quickly the conversation became practical. People wanted to know what would protect habitat, keep the beach public, preserve groundwater, maintain road access, reduce future maintenance, fit within the conservation easement, and actually survive the next storm. The workshop was also a reminder that public meetings are not just meetings in a town this small - they are community gatherings, memory exchanges, rumor mills, oral history archives, and civic infrastructure all at once.
By the end, the strongest support was for an active approach: dune restoration paired with Jerry Point Road improvements and a stabilized dune. That did not surprise me. Working through this project has taught me that climate adaptation is not just about choosing the “best” technical design. It is about explaining tradeoffs in a way that feels honest, useful, and grounded to the people who will live with the outcome. In a town with voters all over the political spectrum, climate communications here cannot rely on slogans or assumptions about shared politics. The conversation must start with what people already know: the road floods, the beach has changed, emergency access matters, homes are vulnerable, and the town cannot afford to chase solutions that only look good in a grant application.
That is also where the gap between small-town realities and big consultancies becomes especially clear. Consultants bring technical expertise, models, maps, diagrams, and language that small towns desperately need to compete for funding. But small towns bring the lived knowledge: which road always washes out, who uses the beach in January, which volunteers have been replacing snow fences for years, and which recommendation will never survive a town meeting. The best resilience work happens when technical and experiential expertise meet each other with humility.
Fowler’s Beach is still awaiting project funding, which is both frustrating and clarifying. Planning, grant writing, engineering, and community engagement can move a project forward, but none of it guarantees that sand will be placed, roads will be raised, or dunes will be rebuilt. Funding does.
This year has taught me that the goal isn’t always about convincing people that climate change is real. It’s about helping a community make sense of what is already happening at the edge of their road, at the base of the dune, and in the memory of a house that once was. This form of climate communication is slower, messier, and more human than any analysis can capture. And it’s a sobering yet essential truth to swallow as I move forward in my life and bid adieu to this fabulous small town come December.
About Darsey
Darsey grew up in Arlington, Virginia and recently graduated from Georgetown University with a B.A. in Anthropology and Environmental Studies. During her time at Georgetown, she focused her coursework on environmental resilience in urban areas, which led to a semester abroad studying environmental urban planning in Copenhagen, Denmark. She also completed a year-long fellowship with the Georgetown Global Cities Initiative, where her research on a DC neighborhood disproportionately impacted by climate change and gentrification solidified her commitment to a career serving climate-vulnerable communities. In addition to her academic work, Darsey has collaborated with the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the Migratory Bird Center. Most recently, she interned with the DC Commission on Climate Change and Resiliency, contributing to its flagship report on the state of climate change in the District. Having grown up visiting family friends in midcoast Maine and fostering a deep appreciation for island communities, Darsey is excited to serve the Town of Long Island with a passion for equitable resilience infrastructure, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and interdisciplinary research and planning. In her free time, she enjoys live music, exploring coffee shops, and attempting to correctly identify birds.
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