WELLS, Maine — On Drakes Island Beach in Wells, a long trench snakes several hundred feet along the sand, steadily filling with 10-foot rolls of brown fiber.

The fiber comes from the outer husks of coconuts, and it just may prove to be just the solution for rebuilding the dunes that were devastated during the ferocious storms last January.

It’s the first time the fiber technique has been used in Maine, according to Seth Wilkinson of Massachusetts-based Wilkinson Ecological Design, who developed and patented the technique.

This coconut fiber, the brown outer husk that we don’t eat, has become very valuable. 

“Think about where coconut trees grow. They grow in tropical areas where there is lots of UV radiation and a lot of salt, so it makes sense that coconut fiber would naturally resist high levels of UV from the sun and high levels of salt,” Wilkinson explained. “These are the two things [are] so hard on all the other natural materials we work with.”

RELATED: How Christmas trees are helping restore the dunes at Popham Beach State Park

The design calls for pyramid of the coconut fiber rolls, perhaps 10 or more feet wide at the bottom and tapering up six layers to the top. Each layer is covered with some sand, then sand will cover the whole structure. Each layer is held in place by steel cables, attached to helical piles—long steel screws driven deep into the ground. The cables are wound through and around the fiber rolls, holding them in place.

The cable anchoring system, Wilkinson said, is also a key part of the design.

“It’s the anchors that provide the integrity to keep the rolls from moving when being hit by 5- and 6-foot waves” he said. 

Once the whole structure is covered by sand, it will replace the natural dune that existed before the back-to-back storms devastated Drakes Island Beach and many others along Maine’s coastline.

Wilkinson and Tim Forester, an environmental consultant, had already been working with the beachfront property owners before those storms, looking for ways to stabilize the dunes that protected their houses.

The storms made it urgent.

RELATED: Students help to strengthen coastal sand dunes at South Portland beach after storm damage

“This whole area is a massive sand dune, and those storms annihilated the front and back sand dunes,” Forester said.

They believe rebuilding the dunes will protect the homes and restore the beach environment with its vegetation that is an important part of the local ecosystem.

But the project couldn’t happen until state regulations were changed, which is where Forester stepped in. 

Forester does environmental permitting for Flycatcher LLC of Yarmouth. He and Wilkinson said existing state regulations designed to protect sand dunes didn’t allow for the coconut fiber and cable system to be used.

“We ended up modifying the coastal sand dune protection rules,” Forster said.  

Doing that required him to collaborate with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and the Maine Legislature to get the changes finally approved.

The sand to rebuild the dunes is coming from a huge pile of the material that was dredged from Wells Harbor earlier this year, which is then pumped through long, temporary pipelines to the beach. The harbor dredging was needed, and Forester said at least some of that sand likely had been washed out of Drakes Island Beach and deposited in the harbor. So, in that sense, it’s being put back where it came from.

All of this work will allow dune grasses and other plants to be planted in the dune, so their roots can go down into the coconut fiber to anchor the dune long term.

“Plants can only grow when the sand isn’t moving,” Wilkinson explained. “So, we need to stop the sand from moving, give those plants years. It takes years for those roots to colonize completely.”

Eventually, over 50 years, he said the coconut fiber and the steel cables will deteriorate and the dune will be all sand, with deeply rooted plants. A separate, “front dune” will be bulldozed and shaped, using just sand, and it will provide some added protection from the sea.

The beach will still be vulnerable to strong storms, but this work will make it more resilient and able to resist being pulled away by the waves.

“What we’ve been seeing is climate change,” Wilkinson said. “The storms are coming more frequently with higher intensity. You have to adapt to those changes and what worked 20 years.”

He said the same system has been used on sand dunes and beaches in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, and it has been working. Now that it’s legal to use here, they are already looking at several other beaches in Maine where dunes need to be restored.