Commission starts work to prepare for damaging storms, climate change [Video]

STONINGTON — Gov. Janet Mills signed an executive order Tuesday that created a new Infrastructure Rebuilding and Resilience Commission to help Maine recover from a string of winter storms and prepare for the long-term impacts of climate change.

Within hours of its creation, the 24-member board held its first meeting in Stonington, Maine’s most lucrative lobster port, whose working waterfront, public roads and connecting causeway were battered by the wind, waves and storm surges of January’s back-to-back storms.

Travis Fifield, a fourth-generation lobsterman and local selectman, recalls using chains, rocks and $50,000 forklifts to anchor his family’s fishing wharf after the first January storm. He was afraid the second one would wash the $400,000 rebuild away altogether.

“You just pray your entire livelihood doesn’t float off,” Fifield told the commission. “The anxiety of that day is coming back. It was a very frightening thing to watch. We had just rebuilt our wharf, raising …