The Dorchester Reporter

Assessing the state of readiness for Boston to blunt the ravages of the monster storm

By Bill Walczak, Reporter Columnist

January 29, 2025

The death and destruction of the Los Angeles fires has caused me to think about what devastation our region of the country needs to fear, and whether we’re prepared. If the Achilles heel of southern California is the Santa Ana winds, ours is a major hurricane at high tide.

When Hurricane Sandy struck New York City on October 29, 2012, meteorologists determined that Boston had dodged a bullet because when the storm reached here, it had missed high tide by five and a half hours. The Boston Globe estimated that had Sandy hit the city at high tide, flooding would have engulfed almost seven percent of the city.

The waters around New York City were at high tide when Sandy hit, killing 44 people, destroying 300 homes, damaging 69,000 residential units, leaving hundreds of thousands without power, and causing $19 billion in damages. The coastal areas of New Jersey suffered $30 billion in economic losses. This was because the hurricane, which came out of the tropics, ran into another storm coming from the west, which resulted in a high-tide northeaster and enormous flooding.

The low-tide damages in New England were significant but not devastating. At the time, Boston leadership saw the destruction in New York City as a wake-up call for the city to bump up preparation for strong storms and rising tides.

The result was a series of plans by Boston agencies and government departments, starting in 2013 with the issuing of The Boston Harbor Association’s study, “Preparing for the Rising Tide,” followed by the 2017 publication of Imagine Boston 2030, which assessed many aspects of life in the city as a lead-up to the 400th birthday of the Puritan settlement of Boston.

Regarding climate, Imagine Boston stated that it “must take aggressive (my emphasis) action to reduce emissions and address climate change impacts.” It noted that hurricane flooding by 2030 could inundate five percent of Boston’s land area and cause $20 billion worth of property damage. A companion plan, called “Climate Ready Boston,” was produced in 2016 and updated in 2022. It stated that “rising sea levels and increasing extreme precipitation will exacerbate stormwater flooding.”

It has been thirteen years since Sandy and eight years since Boston urged aggressive action.

So how are we doing?

The headline over a Globe article on Monday, January 20, read: “The latest state climate report card shows a mixed bag.” The article noted that while there has been progress on the power grid, electric vehicles, and installation of electric heat pumps, the state is not where it needs to be to achieve its 2030 goals.

With regard to the coastline and areas and buildings vulnerable to flooding, the paper said, the state is “still working on metrics to track resilience measures.” The report noted that FY25 has “roughly $155 million” in “resilience-related funding,” which is up from $90 million in FY24.

To put this in context, for more than a year, the Morrissey Boulevard Commission has been studying how from Neponset Circle to Preble Circle (about 3.5 miles) the boulevard can become resilient to future flooding. It has estimated the cost to make this corridor climate resistant at between $273 million and $352 million, not including the cost to fix Kosciuszko Circle or to replace the Beades Bridge in Savin Hill at a cost of $122 million, according Mass DOT.

Think of the damage that would be done from a major storm hitting the South Boston Innovation District, which has seen over $22 billion in development over the past 30 years and has already seen flooding during storms. This district is the subject of an award-winning documentary on coastal flooding with a title that plays on the district name – “The Inundation District.”

It’s clear that making our Massachusetts coastline resilient to flooding from climate change is likely going to cost tens of billions of dollars. A study by UMass of the proposed sea gate system that would create a barrier protecting the entirety of Boston Harbor indicated that it would cost $11 billion.

Former Mayor Marty Walsh rejected that idea and instead proposed a system of elevated roads, new seawalls and other natural barriers, with an estimated cost of $4 billion. Either way, at the rate we are proceeding, it will take decades to achieve protection of just our 47-mile Boston coastline, let alone flooding threats to other Massachusetts coastal and riverside cities.

We need a reliable, dedicated funding source, like our gas tax for transportation, to address this issue in a timely way. Our electric bills offer a good example of a funding mechanism that could be used to produce the dollars we need to protect our cities from catastrophic hurricanes and blizzards like the January 26-27, 2015 storm and its aftereffects that took out much of MBTA operations for two months and cost $40 million in removal costs just in Boston.

Special fees on our electric bills generate funding to advance our energy transition away from fossil fuels, including the $10,000 grants available to replace furnaces with heat pumps, which are managed by a utility-funded agency called Mass Save.

The money generated by these fees is significant. I recently received information on them from Eversource. The chart below lists the charges on our Eversource bills that relate to climate change, what they are used for, what the charges generate annually just from Eversource, and the percent of my bill the charges represent.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” was Boston’s native son Ben Franklin’s exhortation to the firefighters of Philadelphia to make incendiary places in that city less so. We have been very lucky in not having a massive hurricane that causes billions in damages strike us in quite a while.

History teaches us that we get hurricanes every few years, and massive storms every few decades. We can spend money to prevent catastrophic damage or to rebuild following it. Prevention is the cheaper option. Let’s get on this now.

Charge                                   Purpose                Annual income   % of my bill

Distributed Solar Charge   payment for solar customer output $68,699,647. 2.4%

Renewable Energy Charge    wind, solar, & water power $11,218,145. .2%

Energy Efficiency Charge      heat pump & induction $136,748,441 9.5%

Electric Vehicle Charge         EV charging infrastructure $21,941,578       .4%

Net Metering Recovery        cost recovery for onsite generation $258,768,717 5.0%