Kennebunk, ME Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 3.2 miles south of Kennebunk, ME?
Nothing alarming measured 3.2 miles south of Kennebunk, ME: whatever shift USGS's transects picked up here is too small to call reliably one way or the other, which this site reports as "no significant trend" rather than forcing a direction.
What "Kennebunk" means on this page
Kennebunk, ME is the nearest named place, 3.2 miles away, to a ~3.5-mile stretch of coast USGS has surveyed - the reading below covers that whole stretch, not a single property in it. Segment center: 43.34, -70.54. The survey behind it runs to 2007-2009, in USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic assessment, using the LRR method. Shoreline surveys aren't repeated every year, so this is the most recent long-term measurement USGS has published for this coast, not a live reading.
What backs this reading up
This reading comes from 65 individual transects averaged together, 29% of which measured erosion rather than growth. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.34 ft/yr either side. The unadjusted figure here, 0.13 ft/yr, would place it 876 of 1211 if ranked directly - but an unreliable rank isn't a useful one, which is exactly why "no significant trend" is the headline instead. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Rank 919 nationally for growth belongs to Smith River, CA, 2680 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.19 ft/yr. Kennebunk, ME, 2.2 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
One address near Kennebunk: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.