and then there were none
Five years later the government began to remove Ocean Falls—that is, to destroy houses, commercial buildings, gardens and everything else by bulldozing them and burning them down. Residents tried to stop the demolition, going so far as to place themselves in front of huge backhoes, but they were forced to give way. “On August 23,” wrote Peter Offerman in a report for the Ocean Falls Improvement District, “dejected residents stayed away from the town site while half a century of history was flattened in just a few hours.”