May 1, 2024 — Chris Hole was busy at work on a sunny Friday morning, taking apart his commercial fishing wharf like a game of Jenga.
After pulling up the surface wooden slats, Hole used a fork lift to lower large wooden beams down to the deck. Josh Saxton, Hole’s right-hand man, would then slip between the large gaps in the deck to put the support beams in place.
Hole owns Henry Allen’s Seafood, a wholesaler and retailer with a commercial wharf that was battered by the series of storms in January that swept away many working waterfronts along Maine’s coast. The storms flooded Henry Allen’s historic buildings and wiped out the dock’s seawall. At a quick glance from above, Henry Allen’s wharf doesn’t look all that bad. But most of the repair work is invisible, the pummeled structure hidden beneath the surface of the deck.
Hole is of course familiar with storms.