Marsh Madness: The South Shore Coastal Flooding Rankings

 

Our goal today is to rank South Shore beaches by their vulnerability to coastal storms.

Keep in mind that most of the storms we get around here are nor'easters. If we worked hurrciane damage into this list, it would significantly alter the ratings, putting places like Cape Cod and New Bedford into the top of the mix while kicking Marshfield and Scituate way down the list.

We are going to mix the rubric in with the rankings, rather than explain it here. We'd be here all day, trust me.

We're not claiming the state title. The North Shore has her own problems. We're just leaving that for some North Shore writer to figure out. Cape Cod also is in a class by herself, in that they get far worse hurricane damage than the South Shore gets nor'easter damage. They also get larger waves from storms than the South Shore gets. Their problem is that hurricanes don't happen that often here.

We are using town-by-town rankings. Ideally, we would rank this category by neighborhoods, as conditions vary across a town. Check out Duxbury Beach in a storm, then check Duxbury's more sheltered Washington Street area. The differences during a storm are massive, with the worst stom conditions ever on Washington Street being about the weakest storm conditions on Duxbury Beach.

If we ranked by neighborhoods, we'd get a homogenous top ten of Duxbury, five Scituate beaches and four Marshfield ones. If we ranked every neighborhood, this throwaway spam article would reach Stephen King lengths. Stephen King's talent merits 1200 pages. Stephen Bowden? Not so much.

Besides, it's more fun to just drop this article in various Facebook groups, then watch the locals slug it out over whether Brant Rock gets it worse than Green Harbor.

Our rubric includes beach length/width, population, past damages, loss of life, barrier beaches, behind-the-beach wetands, orientation, development, wind direction, type of storm, length of storm, latitude, longitude, offshore rock formations, jetties, groynes, currents, property values, media coverage, breaching, erosion, sand dunes, seawall height/age, gut instinct from a veteran storm chaser... you know, the whole nine.

I've put as much thought into this as anyone has, and you can break it down into three categories... Minor, Moderate, Major. If those are boring names, feel free to use some other trinity- Larry/Moe/Curly, Regular/Extra Crispy/Grilled, Parish/Bird/McHale, Stink/Stank/Stunk... whatever you're into, people.

Here we go...

MINOR

KINGSTON

Kingston enjoys a cushy spot on this list, as it is sheltered by three barrier beaches. Two of them, Duxbury Beach and Long Beach, are miles long. The other one, Cape Cod, is dozens of miles long.

Kingston gets storm damage, but it is always exponentially less than her barrier beaches will get. Kingston is where you flee to when a storm chases you out of Duxbury. I know this for a fact, as I lived in the Howard Johnson's there for a few months after the Blizzard of '78 wrecked my Duxbury house.

Big K is also the southernmost town on the Minor list. Most of the other Minor beaches have Hull blocking for them.

If you are from Kingston and are offended by her last place ranking, know that the thing that made them last was that I had a cool picture of Kingston's shore. If you wanted to vault them over Hingham or Weymouth, feel free.

WEYMOUTH

Weymouth has an itty-bitty shoreline, and is comfortably stashed behind the blind-side protector that is Hull.

She may have the lowest ranking, although we give her crdit for the Fore River, which can flood out during bad storms and may water a few houses. Weymouth is heavily populated when compared to other towns on this list, and that can be a problem when the creek rises.

Weymouth is one of the few towns I don't have a stormy waves picture of. I think the one I used here is actually from Wellfleet. I cover a lot of ground storm chasing.

HINGHAM

Hingham is literally tucked in behind Hull. Spacemen looking down on Massachusetts might logically conclude that Hull was built to protect Hingham, and for all we know, they could be right.

Yes, a town that has something called World's End can end up in the Minor section.

The 'Ham is located on a bay, and has a lot of businesses on that bay, so there is some risk in this town. It will, as we mentioned with Kingston, be exponentially less than what a Rexhame or Town Neck Beach might suffer.

Hingham looks like a tshirt when viewed on a roughly-drawn town map. I just wanted that on the internet somewhere.

Hingham's threat level is low enough that I didn't even stop the car to get a Hingham shot, instead choosing to bang one out the car window at 45 mph as I headed towards Nantasket or somethin'.

QUINCY

Quincy is a unique fish, in that if you measure the distance between Quincy's border with Weymouth and Boston as the crow flies, it would be about X miles, while the actual shoreline is X times 3. There are lots of nooks and crannies to Quincy's shoreline, as the english muffin people say.

Quincy's coast has a pincer-like design that funnels water towards the city, a more Irish Catholic version of the problem that Bangaldesh has. The funnel aims the water at very populous neighborhoods, too.

Why aren't they in the Moderate group?

Quincy is the northernmost town on our list, so many storms passing by don't reach far enough north to pummel the Q. She is also sheltered by, to some extent, Hull, the Boston Harbor islands and even Winthrop.

Quincy also loses the "Should a heavily populated area with minor storm damage potential be ranked higher than a place like Duxbury which gets major storm damage on a beach that is mostly uninhabited?" argument.

COHASSET

Cohasset is the least likely town to appear on the Minor list. She has miles of shoreline, has no barrier beach in front of it and can claim coastal-flooding superheavyweight Scituate as a next door neighbor. 

Cohasset "loses" on intangibles. They are the rockiest coastline on the South Shore ("Cohasset" is bad Algonquin for "long rocky place"). She has numerous rockpiles just offshore, which serve to blunt incoming waves.

She sits higher than the rest of the South Shore, often on rocky hills. She is also pretty far north for the South Shore, with her northern border being about the same longitude as Boston's southern border.

Cohasset has a lot of rich folk, and rich folk sometimes handle the coastal flooding problem unilaterally and expensively, and thus the problem gets solved and they don't end up on TV all that much. That's a good thing 99.9% of the time, and the .1% is basically a lower ranking in this article.

She also draws the short straw vs places like Marshfield in regards to "Is damage that hits a poorer town worse than damage that hits a wealthy one?" Similarly tony Duxbury overcomes this section of the rubric via catastrophic storm damage that you just don't see in the C.

MODERATE

BOURNE

We borrow Bourne and Sandwich from the Cape for this list, as each of them have unique coastal flooding problems that make them of interest to this article.

Bawn (I'm originally from Dorchester, sorry) is the only town on this list which has Canal Flooding issues. Canal Flooding sounds silly, until you talk to old people who can recall the storm in 1938 that swept local houses into the Canal, with the families inside drowning as they tried to claw through their roof to escape.

Bourne is unique on this list in that it has shoreline on both Cape Cod Bay and Buzzards Bay. This means they get nor'easter damage and hurricane damage. Remember that a two-front war is what did Hitler in. Bourne has been Poseidon's punching bag many time in her history. 

Don't sleep on the distinction between hurricanes and nor'easters hitting Cape Cod or the South Shore. Top tier players on this list like Duxbury and Scituate were barely touched by Hurricane Bob, while quasi-Cape Wareham and Bourne were torn to shreds.

If we raised the value of Hurricane Vulnerability in our rubric, Bourne would vault up to the top spot on this list, rudely shoving Marshfield and Scituate aside. In this regard, Bourne may even be in a class of her own on this list.

However, hurricanes are rare events, and Bourne doesn't get it that bad from nor'easters. This peaks them at Moderate.

SANDWICH

Sammich has a coastal flooding problem that could force them into the Major list pretty soon. Every town has this problem to some extent, but Sandwich has it to the extent that a neighborhood may disappear and Route 6A could get washed over.

The Cape Cod Canal is very helpful, but it hurts Sandwich. The Canal has a huge jetty built at the east end, which keeps sand from washing into the canal and beaching crusie ships. The jetty works so well that Sandwich beaches are suffering sand depletion. 

Sand which would normally wash down from the South Shore, and especially from Plymouth's massive sand cliffs, is blocked by this jetty. This gradually erodes Sandwich away, while concurrently ensuring that Sagamore and Scusset Beaches are thickening.

The erosion problem is compounded when ol' Mr. Strom washes sand away from Sandwich beaches, dumping it into the coastal marshes of Barnstable. I weigh 250 pounds and may be biased, but it is never good when your Sandwich gets smaller with every high tide.

The Scusset jetty means that Sandwich can't even build their own jetty to screw Barnstable over. You can't trap sand that isn't coming.

This is a Major list sort of problem, but Sandwich also sits behind the barrier beach that is Cape Cod. That limits damage, as does Sandwich's northerly bearing. They also lose a letter grade for the same reason Bourne does, in that hurricanes don't get here as often as nor'easters do.

Much like our next player, Sandwich is difficult to keep in the Moderate list, but Moderate is what she is.

HULL

H-U-Double Hockeysticks on the Moderate list is, aside from whoever we put in at #1, the town where we expect to get told to eff ourselves over the most. Hull is one of my favorite places to watch a storm from.

Hull has no barrier beach, and, in fact, IS the barrier beach that protects much of the northern South Shore. They take direct hits from ocean storms, and are sticking out into the sea like some strange, sandy phallus. They are also close enough to Boston that they should get better media coverage.

I also score them points for only having one road out of town, and that one road can be washed over in a strong storm. This factor is part of what put ____ as the top town on the list, but it can't save Hull from Moderate. 

Why?

For starters, Hull is very rocky. Rocks break the surf better than sand does, especially flat sand.

Hull is also far enough north that they don't get clipped by storms that may hit harder further South on the Irish Riviera.

Hull also enjoys higher elevation in vulnerable spots when compared to places like Duxbury.

That said, if you wanted to watch storm waves, I'd have no problem sending you to Hull.

PLYMOUTH

America's Hometown, which is the largest town in Massachusetts by land area, has a lot of coastline.

They have Cape Cod standing in front of them, and that saves them a lot of storm damage. The difference between having the Cape as a blocker and not having it is best exemplified by watching a storm hit Plymouth and Scituate. Scituate gets it worse, every time.

The main part of town, including their central business district, is protected by a barrier beach and a massive jetty. Jetties and groynes are scattered down the remainder of Plymouth's coastline.

Plymouth would actually be in the Minor list, but they have one unique issue that is generally seen on the Outer Cape. They have houses sitting on sand cliffs. The sand cliffs are eroding rapidly.

The sand cliffs are ten stories high in some places, and storms in places like Cedarvile are only a threat to sand and beach grass... right now. I would be very remiss in my duties if I failed to mention that every house on the water in Cedarville stands a pretty good chance of suddenly falling down a 100 foot cliff if La Mer decides to eat a big enough chunk out of a sand dune.

Plymouth also is unique in that other towns don't have to worry about "What happens if coastal flooding hits our oceanfront nuclear reactor?"

Please note that the Gurnet and Saquish, while politically part of Plymouth, are geographically part of Duxbury Beach, and counted as Duxbury when we were formulating our rankings.

MAJOR

MARSHFIELD

Marsh Vegas, Deluxebury and Skitchuate are truly 1A 1B and 1C on the major list. You could make arguments for and against any town in the top 3. Marshfield comes in at #3 overall on this list, but the distance between #3 and #4 is substantial, while the distance between #3 and #1 is only visible to experts.

You can easily see Marshfield on the news, having houses or seawalls wrecked by the surf. That's the action that divides the Major and Moderate, player. 

Marshfield has 5 miles of shoreline, much of which (Rexhame) serves as a barrier beach. Sexy Rexy is also one of two Moraines (straight-line glacial deposits of sand and stone) on the East Coast of the US that serves as a barrier beach.

Vegas also has- and needs- the most Jetty action on the South Shore, although I'm pretty sure that Plymouth has the largest jetty.

Marshfield is the perfect town to represent the top tier of our rankings. Direct northeast frontage? Check! Far enough north to not have the Cape blocking for it, while far enough south to get clipped by every storm? Check! Heavily populated shoreline? Check! They even draw the TV crews from Scituate now and then, which is important because Media Swagger factors into our rankings. It almost did in our #1.

Marshfield's jetty system does block a lot of sand from flowing down from the Scituate cliffs, and this leaves them with higher seawalls than somewhere like Duxbury or Hull. This is actually a plus in preventing storm damage... right until the seawall gets undermined, of course.

However, Marshfield is nothing but Major, and was never even considered for any other section of this list. I wouldn't argue too much with someone who felt they should be atop this list.

SCITUATE

"Scituate" is what most people would say if asked which South Shore town gets it worst from nor'easters. 

They own news coverage for nor'easters. I bet that, if she still draws breath, Shelby Scott has Scituate nightmares. The sea screams out of every picture you take there, and the town name even sounds nautical. People have, if you will allow me the double adverb relatively recently, died in Scituate during coastal storms.

However, to a seasoned observer, this media coverage is why Scituate does not have the top spot. You can get to it during a storm.

More than one person (or perhaps it was me, doing it multiple times)  have remarked that only the Irish have that Catholic tendency for self-punishment needed to build their Irish Riviera right smack in the middle of Nor'easter Alley. I'm a Dorchester-level Mick, and I actually look forward  to these storms. I also live on a hill.

I went to several Scituate pages on Facebook and tried to stir up discussion about which beach in town gets it worst from storms, but I chose a bad news time and got little action on the matter.

Scituate has a lot of coastline, all of it precarious. Humarock, which a lot of people think is Marshfield, is actually a part of Scituate that was sawed off from the town during the 1898 Portland Gale. This storm also changed the mouth of the North River.

Scituate, like Hull and Marshfield, has jammed people in along the coast. If you value that a lot in your own personal rubric, you can put Scituate at #1 and pretend that I just forgot Duxbury in the Moderate section. Again, I would not argue much with someone who felt Scituate should be #1.

DUXBURY          

Duxbury at #1 is the toughest call on the chart, as you rarely see Duxbury on the news during a storm. Hardly anyone (2% of Duxbury's population) lives there. If you were reading this list and only knew Duxbury's coast by the Standish Shore section of town, you might think that Duxbury missed the cut on this list before finding her at the peak.

Duxbury is a tale of two shorelines. One is a sheltered cove, and the other is an exposed barrier beach. If we decided to split them, Duxbury Proper would be in the minor category, very much akin to Hingham. Even merged, the activity out on the barrier beach is enough to carry the mainland into the top spot.

Duxbury has several factors that no one else has. The barrier beach is thin, low and mostly uninhabited. There are not many trees at all. Other than Cable Hill and High Pines, which are 5 miles apart, there are no plots of trees with a larger fooprint than a box truck. Trees moderate storm winds, and Duxbury basically doesn't have any.

Duxbury Beach gets seperated from the mainland a lot. It is only attached to the mainland still because 500 trucks full of sand were ferried out there and dumped every day for a year after the Halloween Gale breached southern Duxbury Beach. Northern Duxbury Beach is saved from this treatment only by a seawall.

Duxbury, in an editorial decision, gets the Gurnet and Saquish from Plymouth for these rankings. Gurnet Point is the high ground on Duxbury Beach, by a substantial margin. Saquish was most likely an island when the Pilgrims arrived. Anyone with a basement on Duxbury Beach has part of their house below sea level, usually by a few feet.

Duxbury Beach lays between the ocean and a 1000 acre salt marsh. The marsh fills up quickly during storms, and once water gets into the neighborhoods and cuts off the roads, every house is an island. The island is about a half a mile out to sea at this point, by the way.

Duxbury Beach, like Hull, has only one road in and out. If you get stuck there at high tide, you may be there a while. Because of this, the local news never sends a news crew to Duxbury Beach for storms. A news crew sent to Duxbury Beach for a morning storm tide would not be able to get out of Duxbury Beach in time to be back in the station for the evening edition. I've called in sick from Duxbury just by texting my boss a picture of the road.

Duxbury Beach is bad enough that it is the only town on the South Shore with a beach that they just stopped trying to develop housing on. The last of the no-seawall beach shacks were destroyed in the Blizzard of '78, and they had been husks for decades before then. Housing is impossible past the end of the seawall.

Duxbury is also the first town on the South Shore where the Cape no longer affords barrier beach protection. The line is close enough that southern Duxbury Beach gets it a little less than northern Duxbury Beach.. Without the seawall, northern Duxbury Beach would be an island or a series of islands.

Again, haters might point to the low population, and if they insisted on a greater rank for higher populated beaches, Duxbury would be unable to hold the top spot. Until that day, the title goes to the DBC.