By Laura Sewall and Dan Hinckley
Phippsburg is a watery place. Our Town Hall sits on Center Pond, the road to Popham winds around Spirit Pond, and another half dozen good-sized ponds are hidden in the woods just off our main roads. Freshwater wetlands stretch along Route 209 and North Creek, fed by Meeting House Pond, gushes under 209 after a good rain.
Parker Head Swamp flows into Meeting House Pond and, along with waters from Spirit Pond, on into the Morse River. The Sprague River seems to be fed by springs arising in upland woods to the north and streams draining from the western slopes of Morse Mountain. We revel in the salt waters that surround us on all sides, and we are typically blessed by rainfall replenishing every living thing.
Several wells in Popham Village have run dry.
But these are not typical times. The state experienced various levels of drought for most of the past year. Sagadahoc County weathered both “severe” and, more ominously, “extreme” drought conditions in 2025. Rains in late June 2026 reduced the alarm and our groundwater status is now cast as “moderate” drought. But temperatures recently soared, potentially triggering what is called a “flash drought.” Nothing is certain.
Still, it’s likely that most of us seldom worry about water supplies. But Evan Goodkowsky, our Town Administrator, recently informed the Comprehensive Planning Committee that numerous wells had gone dry in 2025. New calculations suggest that nearly half of the peninsula’s 30 groundwater basins will be at risk by 2036 (see below).
Like other coastal peninsulas in Maine, Phippsburg has no easy remedy—no underlying aquifers to plumb, no water supply from Bath or another town and no local public water supply system. Nearly all of us depend on rainfall to recharge our wells. Some of us pray for rain. Others wonder who’s responsible when a well goes dry. Is it the landowner, the new next-door neighbor, the developer, or the town?
Calculating water use and availability
In 2002, Woodard and Curran, a Portland-based engineering firm, conducted “The Town-Wide Hydrogeological Study” to determine the availability of freshwater resources within each of Phippsburg’s 30 drainage basins. The basins had been delineated by the Maine Geological Survey, and Woodard and Curran began their analysis by calculating the land area within those basins. Assuming a standard rainwater recharge rate determined by the United States Geological Survey for this region (5% of annual precipitation), Woodard and Curran calculated the local groundwater availability for each basin.
To determine water use, the firm tallied the number of wells within each basin and assumed that 1) each well serves a family of four and 2) water is extracted at a rate of 80 gallons per person per day. The final assumption built into their calculations was that withdrawing more than 20% of the available water was unsustainable and would eventually mean more dry wells. This percentage was chosen conservatively to assure that remaining groundwater would continue to support streams, wetlands and adjacent water basins.
With those numbers, Woodard and Curran concluded that the availability of freshwater varies considerably in Phippsburg, and that 6 of the Town’s 30 basins were overtaxed. That was in 2002.
Updating those calculations
Since then, water use has grown along with development and new wells. But a national study on water use, completed in 2005, found Maine to be among the lowest for per capita water use in the U.S., averaging 54 gallons per day. This is considerably lower than the 80 gallons per day used by Woodard and Curran to calculate water use in 2002.
This prompted Dan Hinckley, while serving on the town’s Water Resources Subcommittee of the Comprehensive Planning Committee in 2023 and 2024, to update calculations. Adding the growth in well numbers and reducing the daily per capita use to Maine’s average, Dan’s conclusions were essentially identical to the earlier analysis: if the criteria for determining sustainable use of water resources is 20% of groundwater availability, the same six basins should get our attention. These basins are located along the shorelines on both east and west sides of the peninsula, with the exception of one large basin located more centrally.
Dan also used the data to extrapolate our future water use. He applied the rate of growth in wells occurring within each basin in the 15 years between 2006 and 2021 to the next 15 years, extending our water use scenario to 2036. At that point, by 2036, 13 basins are likely to be pumped unsustainably; that’s nearly half of the Town’s drainage basins. In the worst case, over 70% of the water available in Basin #1, which encompasses much of the Winnegance area, could be withdrawn in one year’s time.
Woodard and Curran’s primary recommendation was that further development in “low volume watersheds” be conditional, meaning that developers be required “to submit a hydrogeological analysis that demonstrates their development will not have an adverse impact on available groundwater.”
This would assure existing landowners with wells that a greater and unsustainable drawdown would not be on the horizon. This recommendation has not yet been included in Phippsburg’s subdivision ordinance.
However, in a recent conversation, Marie Varian, long-time chair of the town’s planning board, made it clear that the board is always “open to hearing what people are thinking about.” She said the process for proposing an amendment to an ordinance is not hard to do.
Perspective: Laura Sewall suggests some solutions to these challenges here.
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Laura Sewall has been a full-time Phippsburg resident for 25 years. She was the Director of Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area and a professor of ecopsychology at Bates and Prescott colleges. She is author of Sight and Sensibility: The Ecopsychology of Perception and co-editor of the soon-to-be published book, The View from Morse Mountain: Climate Change and Resilience on the Maine Coast.
Dan Hinckley has been a seasonal resident of Small Point since 1990. His career trajectory began with high school teaching, through Outward Bound, director of operations for the Student Conservation Association, maritime museum board chair, and managing internet services for the IUCN in Switzerland for 10 years.