Saco, ME Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 2.5 miles southeast of Saco, ME?
2.5 miles southeast of Saco, ME, the coast is advancing, not retreating, at a measured 0.3 feet a year, sediment accumulating faster than any erosion USGS recorded here. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 3 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Saco, ME into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 43.50°N, 70.39°W. Survey years: 2007-2009, method LRR, from USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic shoreline-change assessment. That's how current the data is here, real, but not a live feed, since a shoreline survey is a major undertaking, not an annual check-in.
25 years at this rate
Holding the 0.3 ft/yr accretion rate 2.5 miles southeast of Saco, ME for 25 years would add roughly 8 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
How solid is this number
105 transects feed this segment's number; 0% of them individually measured retreat. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.29 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 962. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. For scale: Camp Pendleton South, CA, 2608 miles away, ranks 1024 of 1211 nationally for growth, 0.49 ft/yr, 1.6x this stretch's rate. 1.8 miles away, Old Orchard Beach, ME is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
One address near Saco: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.