On January 13, Salem’s Juniper Beach seawall failed. Enormous ocean waves battered the wall until it collapsed, sending flood waters surging through streets and gushing through homes in the Salem Willows neighborhood. Elsewhere in the city, another seawall was overtopped.
It’s part of an ongoing climate trend that’s only getting worse. Stronger storms, higher storm surges, and rising sea levels are threatening infrastructure, homes, and businesses that even a decade ago weren’t at risk.
“We’ve had flooding in places from storm surge where we’ve not had flooding in the past. And those weren’t even nor’easter-level storms,” says Mayor Dominick Pangallo of Salem. “Those were high winds at king tides.”
Climate change, rising sea levels, and an increase in extreme weather events are threatening coastal communities throughout eastern Massachusetts. That’s why mayors, town managers, and administrators from 23 coastal communities have banded together to form the Massachusetts Coastal Communities Alliance.
“There’s very little that we, individual communities, can afford to do on our own. It will take federal action and state action,” says Mayor Greg Verga of Gloucester. “The goal of this group is to speak with one voice about the need.”
The alliance will help coastal community leaders share information, coordinate plans and actions, and identify funding and technical assistance opportunities for coastal projects. Working together could also help overcome other hurdles, such as permitting delays.
The alliance’s formation came just a few months after the state announced its new ResilientCoasts Initiative, which will work with Massachusetts’s 78 coastal communities to identify regulatory, policy, and funding mechanisms to develop long-term solutions to this issue. The state also added a chief coastal resilience officer to the Office of Coastal Zone Management.
A changing climate
With its 1,519 miles of shoreline, Massachusetts knows all too well the risks of climate change to its coastal communities.
“Here we just look out the window,” Verga says. “We see it.”
But those risks are increasing, including on the North Shore, where waters in the Gulf of Maine are warming faster than many other parts of the world’s oceans.
“We’re having greater sea level rise because of that,” says Barbara Warren, director of Salem Sound Coastwatch. “The climate is not changing uniformly around the earth, and the Northeast, the Gulf of Maine, is going to be greatly impacted.”
Those rapidly warming waters are leading to greater sea level rise, storm surges, and severe, unpredictable weather, from record-breaking heat to heavy precipitation that causes flash flooding. It also results in increased erosion, degrading and failing seawalls, and culverts that are no longer sized correctly for drainage needs, among other problems.
“It’s just more chaotic weather. It’s hard to plan for. It’s hard to accommodate,” Warren said.
It’s also posing threats to infrastructure. Verga points to a 2018 winter storm that flooded a Gloucester High School parking lot. Since people park at city schools during on-street parking bans, the flooding submerged dozens of cars. New flood barriers have so far protected the high school and the city’s wastewater treatment plant, which is also vulnerable to flooding and undergoing upgrades, but “we know it’s just buying time,” Verga says.
Salem’s infrastructure is also at risk. Pangallo points to a 100-plus-year-old sewer line that runs off of Willow Avenue beach and is installed on wood piles.
“It moves up to 2 million gallons of sewage a day. And if that pipe were to be struck by a boat that got loose, or if one of the piles were undermined by storm surge, it could be really problematic, really catastrophic,” Pangallo says. “That is a vulnerable piece of infrastructure that’s critical to a huge part of our city that is particularly susceptible to the climate impacts.”
Confronting the problem together
Gloucester and Salem aren’t alone in these woes. Cities and towns up and down the Massachusetts coast are facing similar issues. The Massachusetts Coastal Communities Alliance aims to be a step toward solving those issues together.
“It’s intended to be a network for communication, peer learning, and shared advocacy around the challenges that we all face with the climate crisis as coastal cities and towns,” Pangallo says.
The alliance is in its early stages, but leaders already are planning site visits to other participating communities to see firsthand what’s happening in those cities and towns.
“Once we start to see what our colleagues are dealing with, I think it makes it more realistic and helps us understand we’re not in this alone,” Verga said.
Those site visits can also shine a light on some possible solutions, like living shorelines, which use plants, sand, and other natural, organic materials to stabilize and protect shorelines and habitats.
“We have a living shoreline along Collins Cove that I think is a pretty exciting project that demonstrates how a natural barrier can be used to mitigate the effects of wave action on a coast,” Pangallo says.
Whether the solutions are short-term emergency measures or longer-term resiliency plans, the Massachusetts Coastal Communities Alliance hopes that it can advocate for needed change.
“Once we know that we’re not alone with the problems, we also realize we’re not alone with potential solutions,” Verga says.