Raising the Office
The building we use as an office at Hylan & Brown Boatbuilders was built in 1959 or ‘60 by Captain Havilah “Budsie” Hawkins. Hawkins owned a small coasting schooner, the Stephen Taber, and he had built a tidal “drydock” to facilitate working on her. Our office building sat atop the concrete drydock wall and was originally used by Hawkins to store the tools and paraphernalia needed to maintain such a vessel.
When I acquired the building in 1999 it had not been used in quite some time and needed a lot of work. During what old time Mainers would describe as a “hellaronious” high tide, I had seen the building’s floor nearly submerged. The idea of sea level rise was inconceivable to me at that time — I simply assumed that Hawkins had perhaps set the building a little too low during construction. The big tide I had seen was by far the highest I had witnessed in the 12 years of working next door, a new moon “spring tide” made even bigger by a deep low pressure area and an onshore wind.
Before putting in the renovations necessary to turn it into our office, I decided I should raise the building, jacking it up 12” and installing new pilings for it to sit on. All was well at first, but in recent years, during winter storms that coincided with new or full moon high tides, we could hear ice chunks banging on the bottom of the floor joists with each wave that passed under the building. It wasn’t difficult to foresee a day when the building would be flooded, or even swept off its pilings during a storm.
Our office is now up on dry land seven feet higher than before, enough to be safe for another 25 to 100 years, depending on which expert you ask. There has been a lot of waffling about the rate of sea level rise recently. Alarming new discoveries about the stability of the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves have knocked previous predictions into a cocked hat. What once seemed like a problem for our great grandchildren now looks much closer. Forbes
Hylan & Brown Climate Pledge
Last winter our company signed a pledge with On the Pathway to 100% Clean Energy, a rather cumbersome name for an organization that is attempting to get businesses in Maine to commit to a schedule for reducing their climate impact. The OPCE web site features a calculator that helps you estimates the carbon emissions from various aspects of your business — you enter numbers from your bills for electricity, propane, gasoline and heating oil. It then asks you to set a timetable for removing them. Pathway to Clean Energy
H&B is a small company with about 7-10 employees, but according to the calculator, our emissions were about 18,500 pounds of carbon dioxide each year. Our first step was to install solar panels on the roof of our main shop. These cover all our current electricity usage, almost 50% of our emissions. The next step, coming next month, is installing a heat pump in our office. It will replace a propane heater that accounted for about 6% of our footprint. Next will come heat in our other buildings, and dealing with our fossil fueled truck, tractor and work skiff. We’ve pledged to be 100% renewable by 2030.
I’m forced to admit that there is a whiff of greenwashing around this process. We can put a little OPCE sticker on our door, include their logo on our web site and be featured in their literature. I like to think that this is a definite and important step. But the pledge covers only the emissions from out facility here in Brooklin — the footprint of the materials we use in our boats, the gas our employees use commuting to work and the fuels used in the boats we build are not counted.
High speed power boating is one of the most energy intensive pursuits in the pantheon of methods we have invented to burn fossil fuels. On a per passenger basis, it can leave jet airplane travel in the dust. I give my “low power, low speed” spiel to every potential power boat customer who comes to us. After a moment’s thought, they usually reply, “I see……..but can we install a bigger engine?” Our employees may depend on our saying “yes” to pay for their heat and groceries.
Thanks for reading,
Doug Hylan, Brooklin, Maine
“Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.”
― George Monbiot
Atmospheric CO2 level Oct. 4, 2022 = 415.16 ppm. Level one year ago, 413.46 ppm
Edition # 36 reminds me of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard's commitment to actually do something about global warming. In addition, the story about Hylan & Brown Boatbuilders is great.
Maria and I have become big fans of Doug's Climate Newsletter . . .