A Month Later, Residents And Experts Consider The Historical Significance Of The 'Bomb Cyclone'

This story is part one of our four-part series on the aftermath of the Jan. 4 "bomb cyclone." Part two can be found here, part three can be found here, and part four can be found here.

On January 4th, Maureen MacAdams stayed home from work. A nor’easter that meteorologists had been calling a "bomb cyclone" was working its way up the east coast, dumping over a foot of snow and bringing brutal winds and frigid temperatures.

“Around 11 o’clock, it was a full-blown blizzard,” says MacAdams, who works as a custodian at Raytheon and lives near the water in Winthrop, just east of Logan Airport. “But I had looked out the window and the ocean was way off. I said, ‘Oh, that’s great we’re not going to get hit.’”

But MacAdams was wrong. She went to the cellar and started doing a load of laundry “when the water came rushing in." She says it sounded like a waterfall and everything began to move. When the water settled, it was several feet deep. “It was really scary.”

In the month since the storm, MacAdams has been thinking about the storm in historic terms. She remembers that the infamous blizzard of 1978 was bad, as was "The Perfect Storm" in 1991. “That was the second one, and then I had live fish swimming in my cellar. And, then this one,” says MacAdams. “This is the worst.”

MacAdams and much of Massachusetts was caught off guard by the flooding. Experts are now looking back to assess why the storm was so bad and what it means for our future.

Andrew Kemp, a professor at Tufts University in the Department of Earth and Ocean sciences who studies climate change and sea level rise, ran some numbers to see exactly how this storm stacked up with the infamous nor’easter of 1978. He thinks about three big factors: how high the tide is, how big the storm surge is, and the sea level.

“What made 2018 the record breaker was the fact that we had 11 centimeters of sea level rise between 1978 and 2018,” he says. That’s more than 4 inches.

Kemp says the best way to think about sea level rise is to compare it to a basketball court. “A storm comes along, and it’s a player trying to dunk a ball into the hoop. And a hoop, for example, is a particular building downtown," he says. "If you raise the floor of the court, it becomes easier and easier for players to dunk the ball.” So with rising sea levels, smaller and smaller storms can reach that downtown building.

Curt Spalding, the former regional administrator for the EPA in New England, says there’s another factor, too. “People don’t appreciate this, but the wind is as big a deal as actual sea level rise in a storm like this, driving water up into areas that are vulnerable,” he says.

Spalding, who is now a professor at Brown University, worries the public only pays attention when ritzy downtown neighborhoods, like the Seaport, are impacted by climate change.

“We ignore housing that is more vulnerable with poorer people in it, rental units, all the challenges that go with that,” says Spalding. “So there’s an equity problem when we think about this.”

He says this equity issue plays out on a larger stage, too. Big cities have the resources to prepare, and small cities without the money and manpower don’t.

 “When you get down to smaller cities — you look at places like Fall River or Waterbury CT, New Haven — all these smaller cities, they don’t have the money,” he says.

Spalding would like to see a different engineering approach: not big barrier walls to keep water out, but houses that float and buildings that use shipping industry strategies for waterproofing.

He’d also like to see action on the state and federal level, but that’s not the only thing. “You first have to have a conversation locally about what’s going on so people actually understand the forces that are threatening them,” he says. 

In Winthrop, MacAdams says she’d like to be part of that conversation, but she doesn’t know if one is happening. Yet, she says she see those "threatening forces" around her and admits, “It’s scary. It’s really scary.” She thinks about it in the evening as she continues to clean out her basement from last month’s storm and as she struggles to get a response from FEMA.

But MacAdams says she doesn’t want to move, even though experts say she’ll likely face more storms, more floods, and more nasty recoveries.