Seawall Repair In Marshfield

Marshfield fights back against Poseidon this week, as they scramble to repair ruined seawalls before nor'easter season kicks in.

They dodged a bullet last week, as a powerful storm battered the coast for several tides. It never really got biblical however, and things appear to be sailing along well enough this week.

The town is fixing 1000 feet of seawall, mostly along Foster Avenue. It is replacing a wall that has been up since 1931. Recent storms have smacked it around, with the dark spectre of Attrition also having a loud say in matters.

There's no need to fear... FEMA (or the US Army Corps of Engineers, or the DPW) is here. Your tax dollars at work, as they say.

Left without maintenance, these walls would crumble into the sea. When that happens, it opens up the houses of that part of town to direct wave impacts. It also brings about great inundation. Relocation would involve re-settling 10000 souls or so.

That also means losing valuable property tax revenue, business money, jobs, tourist loot and any other of the zillion permutations that would come with telling the Coasties to eff themselves.

It's a lot like gun control.... ideally, there would be no development in vulnerable coastal areas. However, once you have it, it's easier to try to regulate it than it is to go door-to-door seizing property.

"Easier" in this case involves millions of dollars in seawall repairs, but that's cheap when compared to worst-case scenarios.

Joe Deady took the non-blurry, useful pictures.

This wall will be two feet higher than the present wall, and 84 years younger. They'll be using that, uhm, like, modern concrete or whatever they put in that wall. Vauban, I am not.

This maritime Maginot Line is Marshfield's magic against Mean Momma Mer.

Marsh Vegas, depending on how the storm winds blow, sort of alternates the title of First Town That Atlantic Storm Waves Hit Without Breaking On Cape Cod First between themselves, Scituate and Duxbury. This means that she takes heavy shots from the storm waves, and they kinda need the 2015 version of the seawall.

The town (through a loan from a state seawall fund) will split the costs of the project with the state, which will provide half of the necessary cheddar via a grant.

Total cost? $3.94 Million.

If this wall were built by the Donald, it would be taller, thicker, and deeper in the ground... and Mexico would be paying for it.

However, Vegas was happy to pay their half of the loot. Seawalls are like divorce... they cost so much because they're friggin' worth it.

The locals allowed the town some eminent domain mojo, so they can do future repair and maintenance work. From what I saw of this in Duxbury, it may cost you a foot of the lawn if they have to dig down for some maintenance.

That's a small price to pay for a wall that I'm pretty sure is thicker and tougher than the wall in Berlin that the Soviets used to keep the eastern Nazis penned up.

The whole wall is there to protect the Port-a-Potty, which is actually a cleverly-disguised Stargate.

Hawk-eyed readers will notice the 2015 date carved into the top of the stairs. I was gonna park and get a better picture, but the locals are sort of touchy about stuff like that.

Vegas had a tough week, with murder and nor'easters dominating the local news. The people of this particular neighborhood also have had a lot of heavy equipment erecting a Soviet-style cement project just outside their windows. These are the very last beach days, and they've had a few weeks ruined by both storm prevention maintenance and the storms themselves. I didn't want to throw "some moron journalist parked in my road" onto that list.

I never went to school for Journalism, and for most of that time where real reporters were learning Ethics from some professor, I was out learning how to break into cars and stuff like that.

However, I try to be a seamless and respectful addition to any neighborhood I may be visiting.

They still have a lot of work to do for a project that is supposed to be done by December.

Today's entertainment was on 13th St, and they have to get down to 9th for this phase of the project They eventually will go down to 3rd, but I don't have an ETA for that one.

Even if you aren't from Vegas, you should pay close attention to how things go down here. Massachusetts is lined with seawalls, and they cost a lot of money to repair.

Feel free to check our very-much-relative article on seawall repairs that we posted up on the world last summer.

Marshfield is laying the blueprint that a lot of towns may be following as their ancient seawalls fail. This could be happening in your Duxbury or Falmouth beach neighborhoods soon enough.

Otherwise, this could be happening...