Old Orchard Beach lifeguard Matt York keeps watch on swimmers near the pier on Tuesday. As of Thursday, lifeguards have rescued 39 distressed swimmers from Old Orchard Beach rip currents this summer. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

OLD ORCHARD BEACH — Lifeguards at some of Maine’s most popular swimming beaches are reporting unexpected fallout from the series of high-water storms that battered the state’s shoreline last winter: More swimmers are being pulled into rip currents and need to be rescued.

The high winds, high tides and high waves that destroyed fishing docks and coastal roads from Kittery to Cutler also reshaped the surf zone, dumping sand scoured from dunes and beaches out beyond the low-tide mark to create a new system of largely invisible underwater troughs and sandbars.

It is that reworking of the underwater topography of the surf zone that has lifeguards at Old Orchard Beach scrambling to rescue swimmers caught in a newly formed rip current near the pier or others who step into a deep 6-foot trough formed between sandbars.

“The beach has always had a few rips, but the storms changed everything, creating rips where we’ve never had them before and making more of them, too,” assistant lifeguard captain Lance Timberlake said. “This summer, we’re flying a yellow flag almost every day.”

As of Thursday, lifeguards have rescued 39 distressed swimmers from Old Orchard Beach rip currents this summer, and the tourist season has only just begun, fire Chief John Gilboy said. For comparison, that’s more than the total number of distress calls – 26 – logged in 2023.

That number doesn’t include all the swimmers saved from Old Orchard rip currents this year. Jen Schofield, a 45-year-old nanny from Sanford, had to be hauled out of a rip current by another swimmer who saw she was struggling to make it back to shore on July 5.

She thought she was being careful. She went into the water near the pier, by the lifeguard tower. She saw people in chest-high water farther out. She didn’t know they were standing on an underwater sandbar or that she was about to step into a deep trough where a rip current would take hold of her.

Schofield tried to swim back to shore, but she couldn’t. She tried to swim to the sides, but that landed her in the breakers, where high surf sent her tumbling. The collapsing waves pulled her under. She could not keep her head above water, much less get her footing.

She bounced back and forth between the rip and the breakers until a big hand pulled her from the waves.

“I’m a decent swimmer, but I was scared to death,” Schofield said. “I felt helpless. The current, it was just sucking me out, and when I tried to get out of that, the waves were knocking me under. I lost my bathing suit top and my sunglasses. I drank a lot of ocean water. I was stunned, and pretty scared, but I was OK.”

Hours later, three boys out boogie boarding got caught in a rip current in the same place, Schofield said. The current carried one of them more than a football field’s length away from the shore. While Schofield was saved by a good Samaritan, the boys were rescued by an Old Orchard surf patrol.

A rip current is a narrow jet of water flowing swiftly away from the shore, through the surf zone and past the line of breaking waves at surf beaches. They are formed when waves break near the shoreline, piling up water between the break and the beach.

Rip currents are usually too slow to be considered dangerous, and begin to dissipate as they move offshore, beyond the breaking waves. But under certain wave, tide and beach conditions, the speeds can exceed 5 mph, which is faster than even an Olympic swimmer can swim.

On average, 71 people drown in rip currents every year in the U.S., according to the National Weather Service. Twenty-seven people have died in a rip current so far in 2024, including 10 in Florida. Maine has never had a rip current fatality, according to a National Weather Service surf fatalities database.

Rip currents account for about 80% of the 60,000 rescues conducted each year at U.S. beaches.

Old Orchard isn’t the only community coping with new rip currents created by a storm-altered surf zone. Lifeguards from York to Popham Beach State Park have reported an uptick in rip current assists as weak swimmers wade into Maine’s cold waters to escape unusually high summer temperatures.

It is why Sean Vaillancourt, who runs the Maine State Park Lifeguard Academy and manages Popham Beach State Park, invites the National Weather Service out to the weeklong open-water-rescue training course to teach lifeguards about where, when and why rip currents form.

But the Old Orchard Beach shoreline – a wide, flat 7-mile sand beach with a steep slope in its surf zone – has always been prone to rip currents because of a deep trough that forms at the end of the slope, according to Peter Slovinsky, a marine geologist with the Maine Geological Survey.

The winter storms in December and January removed anywhere from 15 to 40 feet of beach from Maine’s shorelines, Slovinsky said. Beaches were lowered by as much as 4 feet, exposing the old marsh and, in the case of Higgins Beach in Scarborough, even the clay that lies beneath them.

Four children had to be rescued from a rip current at Higgins this month, according to neighbors.

People swim near the pier at Old Orchard Beach on Tuesday. On average, 71 people drown in rip currents every year in the U.S., according to the National Weather Service, though Maine has never reported a rip current fatality. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

At Old Orchard, the storms washed away 5 feet of sand from under the trademark pier, exposing rocks, debris and two old, unused pipes. One of those pipes has been removed, and the town hopes to remove the second in the fall. It may also add sand to fill the newly formed trough near the pier.

Lifeguards have spent almost as much time tending to cuts and bruises suffered by people who are injured by the old pipes near the pier and newly unearthed rocks – especially during high tide, when nobody can see them – as they do waving people back into the beach from newly created sandbars.

Gilboy is working with a Federal Emergency Management Agency beach specialist on repair options.

The trough and the sandbar that formed near the pier have turned the usually calm area into a hot spot for rip currents, veteran lifeguard Mike Peterson said. In the past, the Ocean Park section of the beach has been home to most of the beach’s rip rescues.

The most dangerous rip currents used to be most likely to occur further out in the surf zone, where weak swimmers are less likely to venture, Timberlake said. But this year, the most dangerous rips can be found closer to shore in what looks like a calm, wave-free area for people to swim.

“They’ll be walking along, they’ll see waves breaking along the shoreline, and they’ll see this area that looks quiet and they’ll think, ‘I’ll go in there,’ ” Timberlake said. “The reason there are no waves there is because that’s where the water is rushing out.”