Too Earl-y To Tell

For the past couple of days, government officials in North Carolina and Massachusetts - and to a lesser extent Maine - have been gearing up for the possible impact of Hurricane Earl.
As you can see from the map, the hurricane is expected to pass over Nova Scotia, with tropical storm winds in far eastern Maine, mainly Washington County.
Hurricanes rarely reach Maine intact. Those that do blow up the East Coast generally pass far out to sea or break down over land further southwest and are degraded to less powerful storms by the time their effects are felt Downeast.
Earl is expected to remain a hurricane as it passes Cape Cod, with winds between 74 and 95 miles an hour, but probably won't pose a truly catastrophic threat to Maine. Hurricane Bob in brought some havoc to the southern part of the state in 1991, where it blew over as a tropical storm, but nothing like what many southern states have seen and the hands of stronger hurricanes.
But it could get slightly exciting Downeast. Forecasters say there won't be much of a storm surge, and the leading edge of the storm is not expected to coincide with high tide as it reaches Maine's shores. But if there are sustained wind speeds of 40 mph or more, which would be consistent with a tropical storm, people surely will notice.
The lack of a significant storm surge would benefit people in Eastport, which at the far eastern edge of Maine is relatively close to the storm's projected path and is connected to Perry only by a winding causeway that runs between Cobscook and Passamaquoddy bays. A rise in water levels would have the potential to cut Eastport off from the mainland.
The lack of an alternate land route out of town was brought up a few years ago in conjunction with a proposal from Quoddy Bay LNG to build an LNG terminal on Passamaquoddy tribal land in Sipayik, directly next to Route 190. Any incident with the terminal could have shut down the road, which prompted the developer to suggest rebuilding a bridge just west of 190, between the local village of Quoddy and Old Eastport Road in Perry.
The Quoddy Bay proposal seems to be dead at this point, however, with the company having running out of investor funds and the energy industry now being focused on tapping into new types of oil and gas deposits in North America rather than importing it from overseas. A change in tribal leadership and questions about federal review of the project also don't help. But the Quoddy Bay proposal, and now Earl, have brought up a good point: should there be another road route out of Eastport? I am sure there are a lot of different, complicated answers to the question.