The winter storm that worked its way up the East coast this week brought not only snow when it got to the Northeast Thursday, but also major flooding along the New England coastline. Up and down the Massachusetts coastline, communities saw icy-cold Atlantic waters racing through the streets and into homes and businesses.
At the Landing Restaurant, which sits over the harbor In Marblehead, general manager Robert Simonelli said they opened hatches in the floor to relieve some of the pressure from the waves pounding from below. A video shows the water rushing down a hallway in the restaurant.
“There was about a two-foot wave that came in, came into the kitchen," Simonelli said. "One of my cooks behind the line was there dancing on the sauté station, so we had to get him out of there pretty quick.”
Simonelli said he’d seen water come in the restaurant before, but never like this. That’s because the tide broke records.
“That was the highest ever recorded since official records began in the early 1920s,” said Hayden Frank of the National Weather Service. An unusually high astronomical tide coincided with the strongest winds of the storm.
Further down the coastline, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker visited Scituate Friday. He was shown where the force of the waves broke through a seawall, allowing water to rush into the town. Governor Baker said it’s important to learn from storms like this, and make adjustments. “Let’s face it, folks, this is just one more statement about the fact that it’s really important for us to put time, money and resources into resiliency and adaptability,” Baker said.
In Boston, the Seaport District, which is one of the hottest places for development right now, was one of the neighborhoods under water during the storm. Many of the newer developments there are designed with resiliency in mind. Those buildings raised foundations and critical infrastructure placed on higher floors. But Kathy Abbott, with the non-profit group Boston Harbor Now, says more needs to be done to get ready for this kind of thing.
“We have to deal with the existing development as well as the infrastructure, which I think people are really beginning to focus on in terms of our transportation our roadways our utilities our communications all of it needs to be adapted,” Abbott said.
And that’s likely to become more and more necessary. Kirk Bosma is a coastal engineer with the Woods Hole Group, which has been studying climate change and extreme weather events as a consultant for the city of Boston. Bosma said their computer models predicted this kind of thing — but not quite yet.
“It does give us a little bit of a sneak preview into the future," Bosma said. "This storm kind of looks a lot like what [was] seen for results in kind of our 2030 sea level rise climate change picture.”
And while the year 2030 may still sound like the distant future — it’s worth remembering that’s only 12 years away.
