FEATURES
Erosion Control on the Coast

by Carol Brzozowski

Company finds niche

For Lisa Burns, president of Cabins to Castles in Denmark, Maine, and Karen King, the company’s vice president, the focus is on erosion control. The company services the Lakes Region of Maine, with clientele almost exclusively in the residential sector, and primarily those with second homes on the waterfront.

Clockwise from top left: Initial site visit to assess erosion problems. Securing the geogrid with cable and anchors. Installing and securing silt logs. The following spring. Photos courtesy of Cabins to Castles.

Clients have homes on the shoreline, lake or ocean, and are primarily concerned about losing parts of their property to erosion. King says many concerns are site-specific, such as erosion due to wave action and wind erosion.

“We started to pick up a lot of waterfront clients and noticed they were having erosion problems, so we started working with a local lake agency repairing some of these problems we were seeing,” says Burns. “Eventually, we took courses through the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and the United States Environmental Protection Agency whenever they were in our area and learned how to become erosion control specialists and land use consultants.”

Cabins to Castles provides a wide range of services, including land use consulting, erosion control, shoreline restoration, landscaping, stonework, excavation and site work and construction. Regular maintenance includes spring and fall property cleanup, perennial bed and shrub care, arborist services and snow removal. While Cabins to Castles has scheduled maintenance contracts, a lot of the work the company gets is “emergency” maintenance.

“Usually when people call us, they see their preconstructed retaining wall failing or see a large tree fall over on their shoreline that has left a big hole there or is undermining the property in some way,” says King.

“We have very few clients who are really educated about erosion and the effects of it to go into it from a maintenance standpoint alone,” she adds. “They’ll usually see something that worries them where they are either losing big chunks of land or have the possibility of losing big chunks of land, and that’s usually what precedes a phone call.”

The most significant erosion problem with which King and Burns have dealt with was a stabilization effort a year ago on an oceanfront property in Freeport, Maine. The site had clay-like soil with slopes of a 1:1 ratio and shallow root structures. “The top area of the ground would allow the soil to saturate, and when it did, it would slide off the slope and take all of the new vegetation that was trying to get established out with it,” says King. “It was a continuous process, and since we were adjacent to clam flats, which were a protected resource, we had to come up with a creative way of stabilizing that slope.”

From left to right: This is how the area looked before. Boulder terracing completed and planted. Terracing, the following summer.

The solution was a bioengineered combination of proprietary devices and revegetation of the area. Cabins to Castles employees anchored a synthetic Geoweb material to the ground, introduced some organic soils to accelerate growth, and then replanted with seeds collected from the adjacent area so what would grow back would be indigenous vegetation.

“It fully vegetated within one growing season, and it doesn’t look like any erosion took place at all,” says King. “Basically, you would never have known we were there.”

King points out that good maintenance starts with proper landscaping.

“We look at the property as a whole to find out where water movement occurs, whether it’s channelized stormwater, sheet flow runoff or underground water migration, and come up with a design to mitigate water movement as necessary so it won’t create an erosion problem,” she says, adding that several methods can be integrated to accommodate client desires.

Left to right: Collapsed concrete dock ready for removal. Toe stones are set and geotextile installed. Balance of retaining boulders in place, backfilled and mulched for erosion stabilization.

The company prefers to divert water into planting areas. “It also minimizes the amount of maintenance our clients will need to do,” King says. “It negates the necessity for putting in any kind of irrigation system. Planting beds or berms also will divert or slow water down.”

The company also uses rain gardens or hardscaping. The use of permeable pavement allows water to percolate, rather than run off the property. Educating clients on the importance that certifications such as CPESC (certified professional in erosion and sediment control) bring to their landscape needs is key, says King.

Burns adds that because Maine is more progressive than other states with respect to environmental regulations, her company tries to educate potential and current clients on the importance of hiring a qualified professional.

“We experience a lot of contractors who work in sensitive areas that don’t really know or care about the regulations,” she says. “In our particular area, the homeowner is as particularly liable as the contractor if there is a violation.”

“Consulting is the first layer of what we do and is our initial contact with clients,” says King. “Part of that is to educate them about town, state or federal regulations, and the importance of these rules and why they were created.”

Part of that education is understanding the interdependent relationship between the land and the health of the water to which it is adjacent, and “understanding that their property is directly tied to the good health of the lake and their property values will drop if the lake becomes polluted with phosphorus, algae or some other contaminants, so anything to help the shoreline is going to be of interest from a property value aspect,” says King.

Like many companies, Cabins to Castles has seen a downturn in business as the result of the economy and has been developing strategies to respond to that.

“We have certainly seen a slowdown, so we’re not booked as far ahead as we used to be,” says Burns. “By the beginning of fall, we would typically be booking into spring, and although we have a couple of things on the burners, they haven’t committed yet. We’re only working a few months ahead instead of several months ahead,” she says.

The company’s reputation has been its most effective business strategy, Burns adds.

“Occasionally we get an emergency call, but even then, very few of these projects can be acted on in an emergency basis because they require permitting,” says Burns. “We might be able to do an emergency stabilization by bringing in something like an erosion control mix berm and stop some significant erosion quickly, but that doesn’t really address the problem.”

Cabins to Castles must plan in advance for water levels to go down because of freeze and thaw conditions.

“Optimal conditions for us in shoreline stabilization is when the ground is frozen and we don’t have any snow,” says Burns. The small window of opportunity to do that is from the end of November through January.

“By then, we usually have enough snow on the ground where it becomes either very expensive to do snow removal, or we have so much snow we can’t continue, so that’s when we do most of our shoreline work,” she adds.

Going forward, King says Cabins to Castles wants to expand its geographic area and branch out more into the coastal area. “We would like to be doing more maintenance,” she says. “This is a growing area. We’re getting a lot more development, which is new to this area.”

Carol Brzozowski is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and has written extensively about environmental issues for numerous trade journals for more than a decade. She resides in Coral Springs, Fla.