Posted on December 17, 2025
PORTLAND – A long-awaited dredging project is underway to keep Portland Harbor clear.
A dredging boat will call Portland Harbor home for the next several months, working to clear out more than 40 marine sites along Portland’s waterfront, many of which have been untouched for the past 70 years.
“This is meant to be a deep-sea harbor area,” Porthole Owner John Jabar said.
Jabar is excited to see the barge in action.
The project will cost an estimated $26 million.
“The big thing that we’re focused on is the opportunity and what this unlocks for Portland’s working waterfront moving forward,” Portland Economic and Housing Development Director Greg Watson said.
Watson says the city has lost more than a quarter of its slips and moorings due to rising sediment in the harbor.
“We’re a commercial bay, we’re working waterfront, we have large cruise ships that come through,” Jabar said.
It’s also an issue for waterfront businesses.
“It put us out of business for three weeks,” Jabar said.
Last year, his restaurant was flooded by an intense storm. Jabar hopes removing the extra sediment will prevent more flooding in the future.
“It’s going to be hard to bounce back from some of these floods, and the destruction it causes if it continues to happen over and over again,” Jabar said.
Some of the sediment is also contaminated.
“Once you start to move material around, when you’re dredging and even moving the boats around to get in place to do that, you stir up these materials and allow for possibly water quality contamination,” University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center Director Sean Smith said.
The contaminated sediment will be dropped into a confined aquatic disposal cell that sits just off of the Casco Bay Bridge.
The city is confident it will not be an issue.
“There is what we call a turbidity curtain around it, and it will keep some of the silt from moving into other parts of the harbor,” Watson said.
