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06/06/2023 08:29 AMChester resident Mark Borton has written a detective story, but it doesn’t have a murderer or a body; nonetheless, something very big died.
Mark’s new book, Moondoggle, unravels the mystery of why a project that could have brought cheap electric power to all of New England ended as an inglorious failure. It tells the story of the Passamaquoddy Tidal Power Project, often called just Quoddy, a series of seven miles of interconnected dams designed to harness the tides in the Bay of Fundy.
The dam would have involved the 110-square-mile area of Passamaquoddy Bay, an inlet off the Bay of Fundy between Maine and the Canadian Province of New Brunswick.
The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides of anywhere on earth; at some places, the water rises and falls twice a day, as much as 50 feet. Mark says the tidal dam project could have produced the power of 200 nuclear power plants.
As Mark details in Moondoggle, the project, conceived in the 1920s but not started until the mid-1930s, failed, even with the initial backing of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who knew the Passamaquoddy Bay area well. His family had a summer cottage on Campobello Island at the entrance to the bay just inside the Canadian border. In fact, it was on a summer vacation on Campobello Island in 1921 that Roosevelt contracted polio.
There was an initial appropriation for the project in the mid-1930s, but when that money ran out, there was no second appropriation. The Depression changed the economic picture in the United States. Private power companies opposed Quoddy because it would create cheaper power than what they were selling. Mark describes their continuing campaign of opposition to the power project in the media as “fake news.”
Moondoggle is not Mark’s first book. At one point, he owned a publishing company that put out boating guides, ultimately covering the East Coast from Maine all the way down to Key West, Florida.
He knew about tides as a result of the boating guides and had heard about the Passamaquoddy Bay Tidal Power Project.
“It’s often mentioned in books about tides,” he says, “but a lot of the descriptions didn’t make sense.”
Mark visited the Roosevelt home on Campobello Island on a trip to the Bay of Fundy area to find out more about the tidal power project. The home is now a museum run jointly by the United States and Canada.
“I called in advance,” he recalls, “and told them what I was interested in. They could tell me a little, but not a lot. That’s when I decided to write the book.”
Writing the book took some three years. “I vacuumed up information,” Mark says. He did not invent the word “moondoggle” for the title, but he did research its origin. Quoddy was initially described by opponents as a boondoggle. But, given that it was a tidal project and the moon determines tides, “moondoggle” seemed a natural extension. The word was coined by Michigan Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg in 1936 to describe Quoddy’s cost.
Mark grew up in Philadelphia. He was a dedicated photographer, and his first book was a collection of pictures of Vassar College, from which he graduated not too long after the once-women’s college began accepting men.
Summers were spent at a family vacation compound on a lake in the Adirondacks.
“I must have shared it with 80 or so relatives,” he says. “There was a barnful of boats, kayaks, canoes, small power craft,” he says. “That’s where my interest in nautical things came from.”
He still canoes, kayaks, and sails with his wife, Francine Cornaglia. They met when Mark hired her to do the accounting for his publishing company. Mark, now retired, ultimately left the publishing business and worked in health care technology. He created a plan that won a $560,000 cash prize from the United States Department of Commerce for an economic development strategy for Hartford focused on expanding the health care technology industry in Connecticut. The plan, however, was never put into effect.
There has been talk over the years of reviving the tidal basin power project, but nothing has ever come of it. Mark says that today, the project would likely not be built for environmental concerns, among them the problem of accumulating silt created by the dam and the effects on the abundant fish population.
Still, Mark says, the results of not going through with the tidal power project have been felt throughout New England. Power, as a result, is more expensive in this area than in other parts of the country.
“Economic growth is slower where power costs are higher,” Mark points out. “Those high energy costs have continued to affect New England.”
Mark is now working on another book about the same area, the Tide-Watchers Guide to the Bay of Fundy. The book will be out in 2024.
Moondoggle by Mark C. Borton
Down East Books
An imprint on Globe Pequot
Available online and through bookstores