Warren Busteed steps over a section of concrete flooring that buckled from flooding in the January storms at the former Contented Sole restaurant near Fort William Henry in New Harbor. Busteed and Beth Polhemus, owners of the restaurant, salvaged what equipment they could from the restaurant and opened it in a new location on the east side of New Harbor. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer When the first storm hit on Jan.
10, Warren Busteed got a call that the river was rising. He raced from his home in Pemaquid to Bred in the Bone, a restaurant that he, his wife Beth Polhemus and a business partner had opened in downtown Damariscotta less than a year earlier. The restaurant, in the historic Gilbert Gay building on Main Street, is precisely one built-on-fill town parking lot away from the Damariscotta River.
“We better get in front of this,” Polhemus recalled saying, and soon it was all hands on deck. “Sure enough, the water came up 4 feet in the basement. It was a lot.
It was a lot .” The storm still hadn’t let up when Polhemus went home to let out the couple’s dogs. She decided to swing by their other place, the seasonal Contented Sole on Pemaquid Harbor, to shut off the power.
In the nearly two decades the couple had run it – serving local seafood and pizza in the former lobster pound and cannery in Fort William Henry State Park – it had never once flooded. “Nothing. Not even a little bit,” said Polhemus, who found to her astonishment that the storm had ripp.