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Optimism antonym11/19/2022 Even for those who spend their days on or near the ocean, it can be hard to imagine that the places we love, where we’ve been living, working and playing for years or even generations, might be at risk of being swallowed by the sea.īut many of those places are at risk, even if we cannot always see it for ourselves. Therein lies one of the central problems of getting humans to act on climate change, and sea level rise in particular. “That just comes with the weather and the elements down here.” “Most of us just deal with the deterioration of wharves and piers and pilings,” said DiMillo. He still found it hard to believe that sea level rise is really happening or that it’s any worse than it was years ago. There were days when you couldn’t drive to the next pier because it was underwater or sinkholes had sprouted up in the restaurant’s parking lot. He watched as the effects of storms and flooding swept over the waterfront. He remembers a new restaurant, the Holy Mackerel, that was devastated by flooding in the Blizzard of 1978 and later replaced by the condominiums on Chandler’s Wharf. He remembers the rail line chugging down Commercial Street and its cables that ran from the rail cars to giant coolers that brought in slabs of frozen beef. Over the decades, Steve DeMillo has watched as the waterfront morphed. Apart from the occasional maintenance, it has remained there for the better part of four decades, serving as the site of countless weddings, banquets and first lobster dinners. Steve’s father, Tony, bought their property in 1978 two years later the hulking ship that would become Maine’s most famous floating restaurant, DiMillo’s on the Water, was tugged into its berth in downtown Portland, having served in previous lives as a car ferry, housing for a youth center art colony and yacht club clubhouse. The DiMillo name has been synonymous with the Portland waterfront for decades. He said, ‘I’ll show you where it’s higher.’” DiMillo has had the same conversations with his brother, who runs the marina side of the family business and who also sees the change: the tides lapping higher and higher on the pylons, the storm surges that flood over and into parking lots. “I said, ‘I really don’t see a whole lot of change,’” DiMillo recalled. DiMillo pointed to the lowest corner of the lot, where the sea washes in during storms and King Tides. Early this summer, Steve DiMillo was standing in the parking lot of the floating restaurant in downtown Portland that bears his family name, having a conversation with Bill Needleman, the waterfront coordinator for the city of Portland.
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