As if the debate over Liquefied Natural Gas terminals wasn’t hot enough already, now there are plans for not one, but two competing LNG terminals on Passamaquoddy and Cobscook Bays. Theoretically, at least, the Eastport region could become home to duplicate terminals, the nation’s first underwater LNG pipeline and two rival tank farms located within one mile of one another.
It’s not the first time an energy project of national significance has been proposed on the shores of Maine’s easternmost embayments. Plenty of people in Eastport remember the Pittston refinery proposal of 1968, which provoked a divisive, 15-year controversy over whether to build what would have been the nation’s second largest oil terminal. But there are few left who can remember the unveiling of the most grandiose energy project of them all: Dexter Cooper’s ambitious scheme to dam the bays and reap power from the gravity of the moon.
Cooper’s scheme, first presented to the public in 1925, has some remarkable parallels to the current LNG proposals. It provided for a large number of jobs in the construction phase, but the long-term benefits to the local economy were vague. Then, as now, scientists, fishermen, hoteliers and cottagers feared the project would cause irreparable harm to winter fisheries and summer tourism alike.
Cooper, a veteran dam builder and summer cottager at Campobello Island, had been captivated by the strength of the tidal currents that swept between the islands skirting the entrance of Passamaquoddy and Cobscook bays. While recovering from appendicitis in 1919, Cooper hatched an audacious scheme to capture that power. He would dam up Passamaquoddy Bay and use the sluices to keep it at near high tide levels throughout the day. Dams sealing up neighboring Cobscook Bay would allow engineers to keep it at approximately low tide levels. A series of power dams would be strung across the island channels that connect these two bays, which would now have a difference in water levels of up to 20 feet. Two billion tons of water would fall through the turbines with every tide, generating upwards of three million megawatt-hours of electricity annually. He shared his idea with neighboring cottager Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and, after a year of full-time research and surveying, with the public at large in 1925.
Unfortunately for Cooper, the economics of the tidal scheme weren’t nearly as impressive as his engineering plans. One government agency after another pointed out that while the Quoddy project would produce huge quantities of power, there was no clear market for it within 200 miles of the site. Even if it were delivered to Boston — a difficult proposition in those days (some proposed doing it “by radio transmission”) — the power would cost several times more than simply building another hydro plant on a Maine river.
Undeterred, FDR secured $10 million in relief funds to start construction on the project and, for a few months in 1935, Eastport became a boomtown. Workers assembled a model village of more than 100 houses, plus dormitories, a school, hospital, machine shops and a power plant. The first dike was constructed; today it serves as the causeway carrying Route 190 from Perry to Eastport.
But even FDR’s support wasn’t sufficient to keep the project alive. Congress was skeptical of a scheme that appeared to have little economic rationale beyond job creation. Outside of Washington County, most Mainers were ambivalent, even hostile. “The Quoddy project was conceived by the president… in the hope of influencing the voters of Maine to support the New Deal,” the Portland Press Herald editorialized. “When he found that the people of this State could not be bought, he simply tossed Quoddy on the scrap heap…”
Indeed, just seven months after receiving funding, Quoddy’s federal allocation was slashed in half and layoffs followed. While FDR made speeches at Campobello promising a resumption of construction, it never happened. With the outbreak of World War II, Quoddy began looking militarily vulnerable as well.
The idea was occasionally revived every few years, usually just prior to a contested election. John F. Kennedy ordered a reevaluation of the scheme in 1961, but the experts concluded that it would be more economical to dam the Allagash and the Upper St. Croix instead, shifting the controversy to the north, to the site of the proposed Dickey Dam.
Today little remains of the first Quoddy energy project: some remnants of the workers’ settlement at Quoddy Village and the Route 190 causeway, which made traveling to and from Eastport by land quite a bit easier. But the most compelling relic is a 210-square-foot working model of the scheme — three-dimensional, built of concrete, complete with dams and mechanical pumps — now housed at the Quoddy Maritime Museum in downtown Eastport. When renovated — it has had some hard times since FDR viewed it in 1936 — it can be flooded with water and cycled to demonstrate how the scheme might have functioned. Perhaps models of the proposed LNG terminals will wind up there as well, either as testimony to completed plans or another aborted energy scheme on our far eastern coast.
Colin Woodard is the author of The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (Penguin). He lives in Portland and has a website at colinwoodard.com