Exposed roots of red pines at Sebago Lake State Park Beach in Naples, July, 1999. These roots are approximately 18 inches above the existing sand beach. They used to be nearly covered. These roots show the extensive amount of beach sand lost to erosion in recent years due to the manipulation of Sebago Lake levels by the SAPPI paper company.

Second guessing Nature destroys Sebago's beaches

From the Maine Sportsman
Fall, 1999
By Douglas Watts
Reprinted with author's permission


There is a color slide of Roger Wheeler as a boy sitting at the edge of the 30 foot wide beach in front of his Sebago Lake home in 1962. When Roger stands in the same spot today, the water is up to his thighs. The entire beach is gone.

Stephen Kasprzak's family used to play beach volleyball on the wide sand beach in front of their home a mile down the lake from Roger Wheeler. Today, the spot where the volleyball net was planted into the sand is under four feet of water. The entire beach is gone.

Retired Col. Nelson Thompson recalls walking along the two miles of beach near his home at Sebago's Long Point with his wife twenty years ago, saying hello to neighbors and beachgoers along the way. If Thompson tried to take this walk today, he would need chest waders to stay dry. The entire two miles of beach is gone.

Across the lake at Sebago Lake State Park's Songo Beach, the stumps and trunks of 60 foot pine trees, some 150 years old, lie toppled, dead or dying in the spaghetti thin strip of beach remaining at the park. Park visitors spread their beach towels beside tree roots that stand like stilts above the ground. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the beach used to be 25 to 30 feet wide in the summer. Today, most of that beach is gone.

On the southwest side of Frye Island, Frank Speed and his wife have a two foot diameter white pine in front of their house with half of its root system hanging precariously over an eroding bluff. The long wooden stairway leading down to shore collapsed several years ago when the bluff that held it fell into the lake. A thick berm of beach sand used to keep storm waves from eating into the soft clay and sand of the bluff. Today the beach is gone and storm waves plow with full force into the soft bluff. During storms the eroded clay creates a cloud of milky water extending hundreds of feet from shore.

At the southern tip of the lake's south end, 1,200 feet of heavy stone rip rap now forms the shore of Sebago Lake along Route 35 where a natural beach once stood. The rip rap was installed in 1997 by the Portland Water District after the beach disappeared and large land slides caused much of the steep, forested bank to collapse into the lake. The rip rap cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to install, paid by the district's water customers.

All of the beaches described above were completely natural, formed over thousands of years by the same geological processes which created Sebago Lake. In 1989, a report on natural lake beaches in Maine's organized territories was the commissioned by the Maine State Planning Office. It concluded: "Of the lakes surveyed, Sebago Lake was the only lake rated high for beach significance. It warranted this rating due to both the high number of beaches found along its shoreline and the high quality of individual beaches."

Today, a decade after this report was written, many of Sebago's finest natural sand beaches have been substantially shrunken and eroded; others have completely disappeared.

Oops ...


Until the late 1980s, water fluctuations on Sebago, Maine's second largest lake, followed nature's rhythms with little interference by humans. Each year, the lake filled up in the spring with run-off and gradually dropped during the summer and fall to a low point in late winter. Each year, heavy storm waves beat on the shores and pulled some of the beach sand back into the lake. Later in the year, low water levels and smaller waves pushed the lost sand right back up on shore. Its water levels unregulated by people, the beaches of Sebago waxed and waned by small amounts each year, but according to a wealth of old photographs never really changed that much.

In 1987 the S.D. Warren paper company, which owns Sebago's outlet dam, took over control of Sebago from nature. To generate more hydro-power for their mill in the winter when power costs were high, the company began "saving" water for the winter months by keeping the lake as high as possible during the summer and fall. While Warren did this with no notice or permission from the public or state agencies, some members of the public liked it.

The elevated lake levels were welcomed by many of the lake's boaters and marina owners because it allowed larger boats to rove into formerly shallow areas and gave shallow-water marinas much deeper water. In the late 1980s, some marina operators took advantage of the higher water levels and expanded their operations to areas that were formerly too shallow for docks and slips. For these marina owners, a return to historic lake levels would mean a lost investment in new docks, slips and mooring fees.

The higher lake levels wreaked havoc on Sebago's natural beaches. Shorefront home owners watched with alarm as fall storms and high water chewed away their wide sand beaches. At Sebago Lake State park, the high fall lake levels undermined the roots of century old pitch pine trees and sent them toppling into the lake. In 1989, one of the homeowners, Steve Kasprzak, filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Three months later, S.D. Warren said agreed to return the lake to its historic lake level management, ie. virtually no management.
Satisfied with Warren's response, Steve Kasprzak withdrew his complaint. By early 1990, the matter appeared settled and the lake was poised to return to its natural rhythm.

Then a complaint was lodged by marina owners, who opposed bringing the lake back to its historic levels. The state, S.D. Warren and marina owners created a "compromise" which would still leave lake levels higher than they had been historically. In 1991, the state Bureau of Parks and Recreation urged a return to historic levels, saying the high fall water levels were destroying the natural beaches of Sebago Lake State Park.

The bureau's director, Herb Hartman, told FERC: "Lake water levels in recent years, particularly after 1986, have been higher for longer periods of time in summer and fall. We believe this has had three effects on the state park day-use area: a loss of beach width (from the historic 25 feet to 30 feet to the recent 5 feet to 10 feet); erosion of the shoreline and undercutting and loss of shore trees; and loss of sand volume as water levels have not been low enough during the summer and fall to permit progradation of beach sand."

In 1992, the Maine DEP proposed a "new" compromise which left fall lake levels even higher than the last "compromise" which in one season had allowed some rebuilding of the state park beach. In early 1992, Herb Hartman argued to Maine DEP Commissioner Dean Marriott that, "The proposal for 1992 increases water levels during July and Augusta, further reducing beach width during the busiest period of our season. It also grants higher fall water levels to marina and boating interests, altering the historic fall drawdown which may favor beach restoration."

Several years later, with the controversy getting louder, the DEP admitted it had a big problem. Marina owners said the late summer and fall lake levels that State park officials wanted to rebuild the lake's beaches were too low for them to operate their marinas without frequent dredging. Shorefront homeowners and state park officials said the lake levels the marina owners wanted would not rebuild the beaches and would lead to even further beach and shorefront erosion.

The state in 1996 created yet another "compromise" that allowed even higher lake levels in the late summer and fall than the State's 1991 and 1992 "compromises." The new compromise offered one bone to the beaches: for two of each nine years lake levels in the fall would be allowed to drop very low to attempt to rebuild the Sebago's beaches. Accompanied by complex charts, graphs, target levels and schedules, the compromise called for S.D. Warren to micromanage the lake on a week by week basis throughout the year in an attempt to partially rebuild beaches yet still provide unnaturally high water levels for large boats and marina owners. By this time, the concept of returning the lake to its natural fluctuations had been completely abandoned.

Some shorefront owners, tired of fighting, signed onto the 1996 compromise. Others, including Roger Wheeler and Nelson Thompson, did not. Another reluctant signer was the Portland Water District, which provides Sebago Lake water to the Maine's largest city. The district, citing an independent scientific study it had commissioned, said the lake should go back to its historic levels. They signed on to the compromise when it became clear the state officials would not support a return to Sebago's natural fluctuations.

Little signs of improvement


If the State's 1991, 1992 or 1996 lake level compromises were intended to rebuild Sebago's beaches , it hasn't worked. The beach at Sebago State Park in 1999 has not eroded further since 1990s but has not been restored to any degree either. The beach looks about the same as in 1990, except many of the large pines toppled by erosion have been cut to the stump or entirely hauled away.

Tom Skofield, the park's manager, said low fall lake levels in 1998 helped return some sand to the beach in 1999. Last year, he said, beachgoers found baseball-sized rocks had replaced the sand which usually filled shallow water at the edge of the beach. This year Skofield said the rocks have been covered again with sand. Last year's low lake levels in the fall were part of the 1997 agreement, which called for the lake to be allowed to drop significantly for two of each nine years. Skofield asserts the experience this year shows that if the lake is allowed to go back to its historic low levels in the fall, the beach can rebuild itself.

"We got a quite a bit of sand back last fall," Skofield said. "Personally, I think this shows that we need those low fall levels more often than just two years out of nine if we're going to rebuild the beach. The beach resource would be really enhanced if we did this more often."

While the Sebago State Park Beach is still eight to ten feet narrower than it was in the 1970s, when Skofield began working there, he said the return of some sand is a hopeful sign.

"When I started here we never even thought about the beach," he said. "It shifted some from time to time but it was always there. In the early 1990s, we had a number of visitors who asked for their money back. They said, 'Where did the beach go?' This year, the beach is starting to look a little more reminiscent of the way it always used to be."

For those parts of the lake that lost all of their beaches in the past decade, the lower water of last fall restored little if any sand . Friends of the Sebago Lake, which has long fought for a return to the lake's historic fluctuations, says low fall lake levels are now needed every year just to make up for severe storm erosion in 1998 and 1996. Unlike Sebago Lake State Park, many former beaches on the southwest shore are in worse shape now than they have ever been. With beaches gone, heavy waves from storms are now pounding directly into the wooded shore, undermining tree roots and causing sections of steep clay and sand banks to slump into the lake.

Motoring his boat away from the rip-rap being installed by homeowners along Frye Island, Friends of Sebago Lake member Nelson Thompson said, "It seems we have a choice. We can either rip-rap the whole shoreline of Sebago Lake or let the beaches build back so they can protect the shoreline like they always used to."

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