Severe drought triples in York County as sand-fed streams draw down

September 19, 2026Sebago-Ossipee Hills and Plains

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A third of York County, Maine is now in severe drought, and it got there in two weeks.¹ On the drought map for the first week of September, severe drought covered a sliver of the county too small to register.¹ By the September 8 map it covered about a quarter.¹ On this week's map it covers 34 percent, and every acre of the county is now in at least moderate drought.¹ No part of the county has reached extreme drought.¹

The deficit that built this was July's. Averaged across the county, July brought 1.4 inches of rain, 2.2 inches under the 1901-2000 average and the fifth-driest July in a record that runs back to 1895.² June had been wet, about an inch above its average.² August came in eight-tenths of an inch short.² The summer as a whole ran two inches under the long-term average for the county.² The lag between a dry July and a severe-drought map in September is what sand does. The Ossipee and Sebago plains sit on glacial outwash, deep sand and gravel that stores rain and feeds it slowly to streams and ponds. That storage kept streams flowing through August. It is now drawing down, and the kettle ponds, which have no inlet stream and sit directly on the water table, drop with it.

meet this at spawning. They begin once water cools below about 48 degrees Fahrenheit, usually from late September on, and the females do not dig nests just anywhere. They choose gravel where groundwater seeps up through the bed, because that upwelling keeps the eggs oxygenated through the winter. Work on a Cape Cod outwash stream, the closest geological match to these plains, found trout returning year after year to a small set of seeps at meander bends where the flow was strongest and carried the most oxygen. A falling water table shrinks that set of usable seeps. Low water can also keep fish from reaching them at all, and fish held in shallow stagnant reaches under direct sun have nowhere cooler to go.

The leaves now dropping into the streams are the winter food base. In normal flow, most leaf litter is chewed up by shredding insects, stoneflies and caddisflies among them. In an experimental study published last year, low flow cut total leaf breakdown by 39 percent and shredder densities by 73 percent. Where fine sediment had settled into the channel, clogging and low oxygen also shut down the streambed refuges those insects retreat into during drought. Sandy outwash channels collect exactly that kind of fine sediment as flow drops.

On the uplands the same dryness reads as fuel. The Waterboro barrens grow pitch pine and scrub oak over as much as ninety feet of sand that sheds rain in hours, and their cured grass and dropped oak leaves respond to days of dry weather, not weeks. That barrens burned in 1947 and has not burned in wildfire since. Statewide, the 1947 fire season followed a wet spring, drought that set in during July, and ground that was dry by the end of September. Maine's Forest Service posts a daily fire danger rating by region through late November, and burn permits stop in any region rated high.

The next weekly drought map will show whether severe drought keeps spreading across York County. At the pace of the last two weeks, it has room to.

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