Bourne Hurricane Season Primer I: Inundation

                                Run To The Hills...

We got ourselves a look at the current evacuation zone and hurricane inundation maps for Bourne, and the results are quite frightening. The Cape Cod Emergency Traffic Plan isn't exactly comforting, either.

Cape Codders often consider Bourne to be almost inland when compared to a Nantucket or even an Orleans. Heck, we're technically on two bays, we're not even open ocean. Cape Cod itself is our barrier beach, and maybe not that much will happen to us if the barometer drops hard. That is the sort of attitude that gets a man and his family killed in Bourne.

I have personally heard an 80-something year old guy talk about houses washing down the Cape Cod Canal in the 1938 storm, about people drowning in their attics as they tried to claw through the ceiling with their bare hands, about 5 feet of water rushing down Main Street, about old-school fisherman tough guys from the Great Depression getting blown off their feet and hurled down the road, and about power being off for months afterwards.

Bourne has an Achilles Heel, and it is the body of water known as Buzzards Bay. Buzzards Bay is sort of shaped like this ^ symbol, and water funnels up into it. It is a distinct geographical feature that we share with Bangladesh, and it leads to extensive flooding.

Hurricanes have storm surges, which are a wall of water that is pushed ashore ahead of/with the storm. If you were standing with your toes at the edge of the water at high tide and a ten foot storm surge suddenly appeared, you'd be under ten feet of water. Imagine how far that water would reach inland in such a situation, and mix it with 6-12" of rain, river/stream overflow and sewer backups to get an idea of what an Inundation Map represents.

We are just as vulnerable to a big storm now as we were in 1938. We are actually more vulnerable, if you think modern medicine, more accurate forecasting (Boston forecasters have blown mega-storm forecasts in 1978 and as recently as 1991's Halloween Gale and 2010's Hurricane Earl, but they didn't know the 1938 storm was happening until it hit them), and greater transportation capabilities are offset by the fact that 170,000 more people live here now and still only have two roads off of the Cape.

We'll get to all of that in a moment, but first, let me hit you up with some links. They'll help you out with the discussion.

- Hurricane Evacuation Zones

- Hurricane Inundation Map

- Cape Cod Emergency Traffic Plan

CYA, people. We live in dangerous times, and Bourne has been God's punching bag more than once.

We intend to cover Inundation Zones and Evacuation Zones. About halfway throuh the former, we decided that this would be a two-part special. Today is Inundation, tomorrow is Evacuation. If you are a Bourne resident or visitor, this is Disaster Porn right down to your very neighborhood.

I can play with this map all day, and I already have. It tells you what sort of hurricane would flood your neighborhood. They work by Saffir-Simpson scale, a la Category 1, Category 5 and what have you.

While I get the sense that some people would disagree with their findings, few would contend with the level of detail. You can check things not only to your town, and not only to your street, but also to your side of the street.

I had some rookie trouble getting the pics from their site to the Photobucket to here, and I apologize for the blurriness. I also apologize if I cut off the map right before it got to your house, I hate when people do that to me.

You can go to this link yourself and zoom right in on your own home, and I'd recommend doing so. It's always a wise move, getting a feel for the lay of the land around you.

To assess risk in Bourne, we'll go village-by-village.

**Yes, I'm aware that the map has my boyfriend and three Hooters waitresses on it. You get used to it after a while. Sorry girls... he's taken.

Buzzards Bay has 4 borders, and only one of them isn't liquid. Buzzards Bay (water) owns their South, the Canal bisects it, and Buttermilk Bay sits on the North and West. The trouble starts at Cohasset Narrows, out where the Massachusetts Maritime Academy is. They become inundated by a Cat-1, and you might be able to sink a boat by gouging out the bottom of it on the tallest building on Taylor's Point in a bigger storm.

It wouldn't take much of a storm (note: "much of a strorm" = "Category 2 hurricane") to inundate the Belmont Circle rotary at the mainland side of the Bourne Bridge. The rotary Capeside looks a bit better suited for Hell and high water, or at least the latter.

That trouble runs pretty much all from Taylor's Point through Buzzards Bay's Main Street area down to a bit past the Bourne Bridge. A Cat-2 storm would push the flooding over Main Street into the residential neighborhoods, and would inundate the police station, the fire station, and the Veteran's Community Center, which I presume is what they would use as a shelter. A Category 3 would be all-she-wrote for the Armory, which is the last place we could put refugees.

Bournedale, which is all wooded hills, would be untouched, save for the river flooding where the Herring Run meets the Canal. They would most likely lead the Cape in fallen trees and in boulders washing into roads, however. I live along the Bournedale/Sagamore border, on a hill, and that explains the relatively light-hearted tone of the article.

Sagamore and Sagamore Beach are basically Sagamore and North Sagamore. Route 3/6 is generally considered to be the western border. Sagamore Beach benefits mightily from Cape Cod's barrier beach effect, and only the direct shoreline is in danger. That danger would be immense in a bad storm, as there is nothing but sand between Cape Cod Bay and the first houses.

Sagamore would be at the mercy of a storm large enough to overflow the Canal. A storm of Cat-3 would flood into residential neighborhoods, although 6A would be spared up until the 130 intersection. The railroad and the power station would be fish toys in this hypothetical storm. The 3A part of Sagamore would be untouched by the sea.

Scusset Beach is Sandwich, so a Category 3 storm would end Sandwich's presence on the mainland, at least in an above-water sense. A much smaller storm would swallow up all of the revenue-generating parts.

While we're on the topic, I just want it on the Internet somewhere that we should trade south-of-the-Canal Sagamore to Sandwich for Scusset Beach, and I'd throw them a chunk of Bourne Village if they insisted upon it. It makes sense with the maps, with the cops, and with me. It would tie up a lot of loose ends.

Now, this destruction I've served up is bad. However, we have only gone through the mainland, landlubbing part of Bourne. Once you cross the bridges, it gets really dangerous.

Bourne Village is easy to describe. Once the Canal overflows, they are going to lose some houses. Houses on the Cape side of the Canal by the RR bridge would suffer heavily even in a smaller storm. As 1938 showed, the Canal isn't afraid to dine upon a few waterfront homes when the barometer gets low.

Where it gets sketchy is the if/when/where part of water creeping across and blocking Sandwich Road. Sandwich Road would be the Rubicon where a storm might start trapping refugees trying to get between bridges... assuming the bridges are open, as they presently are shut down when winds hit 70 mph.

Monument Beach, Gray Gables, and Mashnee all look to be completely under water in even a Cat-1 storm, with the inundation reaching County Road. These people would have to leave if the storm was coming, and they would, to their benefit, get to the bridges first if they were ready to move quickly when the deal went down

Shore Road looks to be where a regular-bad storm would reach, while worse ones would push past it.

Mashnee shares a problem with other parts of Bourne that we'll discuss in a moment, the problem of already being out in the water before the Inundation calculations start getting calculated.

Cataumet and Pocasset also have large sections of village that are sticking out into Buzzards Bay.

Wing's Neck, Mashnee Neck and Scraggy Neck all become a series of high-ground islands in hurricanes, and those islands are divided by hills in larger storms. Anyone riding out a major storm there is beyond foolish, although I'm sure that some of the hardcore have done it.

If an area like Sagamore Beach gets catastrophic storm damage, someone will eventually get a truck full of water or an ambulance out there soon enough. If the only road to land from where you live is, say, Scraggy Neck Road, they may have to carry your people out on boats or helicopters.

Flooding looks like a sure bet to close Shore Road and Red Brook Harbor Road.

Cape Cod's other towns have similar problems. The entire coast of Cape Cod is subject to inundation. Northern Cape Cod's shoreline is especially bad at Barnstable Harbor and Yarmouth Port, while the sea's push inland against the Nantucket Sound side would move exponentially according to storm intensity.

Route 28 would be inundated from the 28/Main Street merge in Hyannis to South Harwich in a strong storm. 6A gets covered in Sandwich and again in West Barnstable. Route 6 would need a James Bond car from Provincetown to Wellfleet

Just due to the lay of the land and the lack of overflowable rivers, Cape Codders can avoid flooding by moving inland a mile or so. Duxbury or Wareham are far, far more at risk for inland inundation than Cape Cod is. Our greatest danger is the wind, but that's a whole other article.

Again, Cape Codders can generally escape the sea by moving inland, but that's starting to bleed into tomorrow's evacuation article.

Speaking of escape routes....

The South Shore can divided in half. Much of it is protected by Cape Cod, one of America's biggest barrier beaches. This southern South Shore is also a relatively straight coastline, with few Bangladeshian water funnels. From Sagamore Beach to Plymouth Harbor, areas where coastal flooding would reach more than 100 yards inland are few.

At this point, you amazingly have to look to Provincetown for a trend. Imagine that you are a big ocean wind. You are moving from east to west at 125 mph. At a certain latitude/longitude, the first thing in Massachusetts you will hit is Provincetown. Above that latitude, it becomes Duxbury and Hull. Where the wind goes across the water, the storm surge is sure to follow.

Duxbury, Kingston, Marshfield and Scituate are also estuaries, meaning that there is a lot of salt marsh behind the barrier beaches, and salt marshes flood very easily in storms. The end result is all that nor'easter flooding you see on the news. A stretch of coast from Duxbury to Scituate inundates heavily, with houses on Duxbury Beach frequently finding themselves effectively a mile out in the ocean when the marsh floods in even cupcake storms.

The North River is unique in that it would bring coastal flooding as far inland as Hanover and Pembroke. Pembroke is funny because, when you buy a house 15 miles inland, you don't really expect "pumping water from ocean storms out of your basement" to be part of the bargain. However, the South Shore doesn't play fair.

If it makes Hanover residents feel better, a storm bad enough to push water damage to you will probably have blown your house down like the Big Bad Wolf long before.... so, like, no worries. 

The South Coast is the opposite of the sheltered side of the South Shore. They get the surf pushing up from the South Atlantic, and they take the landfall in many cases. Rivers empty there, and all of the land is relatively low-lying. It is where the storm surge smashes into Massachusetts.

A swath of coastline from Mattapoisett to Marion would be soaked several miles inland in a big storm. The Sippican River confluence, the Acushnet River Valley Golf Course (which is just below New Bedfords reservoir) and Tihonet Pond would all get ocean storm water in a Katrina-style storm.

Route 195 would be submerged from about where Tabor Academy is in Marion to the Weweantic River in Wareham. This detour-by-God also occurs in what looks to me like the region that is most at risk during a large storm.

Wareham gets her own paragraph. If the storm gets bad enough, all of Wareham east of Wareham Crossing would be underwater to some extent. Route 25 would be impassable from Wal-Mart to Wareham Crossing. Water could push 3 miles inland, to the cranberry bogs off of Route 25. The entire Cranberry Highway business district would be underwater.

If the storm gets bad enough (Category 3 or higher) and made a direct hit, Wareham would suffer worse than any region of the state. It would take years to recover.

In closing, we just want to remind you that Massachusetts is a dangerous place if a hurricane is coming, Cape Cod and the South Coast are particularly dangerous spots in Massachusetts, and Bourne is a particularly dangerous spot on both the South Coast and Cape Cod.

Residents or even visitors should study those maps, learn them, know them and live them. They should check back now and then, to see if any relevant opinions have changed. This is information you should be fully aware of.

Having your house wrecked by a storm sucks pretty hard, but what sucks worse is getting killed while it happens. We need your site visits, and we care about you... so keep informed.