2 families hang on edge of eroded roadside

GREENBUSH – A pair of families in this Penobscot County town would love to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Instead, they’re stuck between a concrete barrier with a “Road Closed” sign and a 25-foot cliff where a section of the Middle River Road used to be.

The worst is yet to come.

“We’re afraid the bank’s going to cave in and take our home with it,” Edwin Twitchell said this week.

The Twitchell and Mitchell families will learn what ideas town officials have come up with to fix the problem at a public hearing at the Greenbush Town Hall at 7 tonight.

Edwin and Hattie Twitchell are a retired couple who have watched their section of the Middle River Road slip away via erosion each of the 52 years they have lived there.

On May 21, however, instead of the usual annual springtime dip of a few inches or a few feet, more than 300 square yards of road and roadside slid into the nearby Penobscot River, leaving a 25-foot sheer cliff with an additional 30-foot slope down to the water below. In one area, the collapse extended to the middle of the road.

Land directly in front of their home already has dropped several inches and could fall next spring if something isn’t done soon, Edwin said.

If their current road access isn’t improved, the couple is afraid they will be cut off from snowplows and oil trucks in the winter because concrete barriers stop traffic more than 50 yards away from their home on the only road they have access to, Hattie said.

Mike and Kimberly Mitchell, along with their three children, have a different problem.

Their home is at the corner of the Middle River Road and Route 2. While they have lost access to their garage on the Middle River Road because of the erosion, they have access to Route 2 through a small side driveway, Mike Mitchell said. The problem for the Mitchells is that the landslide happened only 58 feet from their garage. Since that time, two additional feet of land has fallen into the river.

The town had been working to fix the road before the landslide, and surveyors had inspected the area the day the road fell away, Town Councilor Al Weatherbee said.

Melting snow every spring had made the 30 feet of clay underneath the road soft, causing sections of the road to settle, usually only a few inches, Town Manager Robert Littlefield said. The weight of vehicles on top of the road and softened clay under the road combined with the Penobscot River eroding the support at the bottom of the hill led to the road’s collapse.

Edwin Twitchell believes the road can be fixed and, with a proper plan, sustained.

“If they had taken care of it like they should have in the first place, this would never have happened,” Edwin Twitchell said. He said proper drainage and erosion planning could have prevented the collapse.

The Mitchells, who have owned their home for seven years, said they complained numerous times over the years to the Department of Transportation about plugged culverts along Route 2 where water was backing up and flowing underneath the Middle River Road to the Penobscot River, but nothing was ever done.

“When [surveyors] tested here after it had collapsed, they found the saturation level to be 46 percent,” Mike Mitchell said. “They told me that it would have become unstable at 26 percent.”

Weatherbee said two phases will be presented for discussion at the meeting tonight.

In the road phase, the town would create alternate routes skirting the 200 yards of riverside considered dangerous, Weatherbee said. Or the town could just make the road a dead end.

The riverbank phase includes restoring and structuring the riverbank to prevent further erosion, Weatherbee said. But that plan is doubtful because of its costs.

“We’re still trying to decide if it’s the town’s place to do anything about that,” Weatherbee said. “We’re doing all we can. This is a major expense to us, and we have no tax base other than personal properties, and at this point there is no indication that anyone is willing to help us with the [river]bank phase, though FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] might help us with the road phase.”

In the meantime, the Twitchells and the Mitchells are left to worry about the possibility of the town shutting down the dangerous stretch of road and forgetting about them.

“Then they wouldn’t have to maintain the bank, and the bank would just keep falling,” Mike Mitchell said. “The roads are supposed to be maintained. That’s what you pay taxes for. But if it’s not a road anymore, what happens to us?”

“Nothing is going to happen,” said Weatherbee, who believes the homes are safe. “Not in their lifetime, or their children’s lifetime or their grandchildren’s lifetime.”

But he admits the road is a point of concern. “We need to make a decision soon because that area will be in jeopardy next spring,” Weatherbee said. “It is impossible to predict when something like [the landslide] could happen again.”