New Bedford Hurricane Special

New Bedford is about as salty as it gets, and they get that salting by being exposed to the ocean, both as a profession and as residents.

This puts them in the path of some potentially serious storms.

New Betty had a 5.8 foot storm surge during Hurricane Bob, and one of her fishing boats off of Cuttyhunk reported a peak gust of 182 mph. NB had wind gusts over 90 mph during Hurricane Gloria, 110 mph during Hurricane Donna, and a 20 foot storm surge from Hurricane Carol.

Yup, you can get messed up pretty smooth in New Bedford, really get your hat handed to you. They also have bad hurricanes.

You have to be ready to deal with the sea if you're even thinking of living in New Bedford. The town does their best, throwing up a hurricane barrier to protect most of the city from anything but the worst hurricanes. You can see it up in the lead photo. It protects the Acushnet River, and, therefore most of New Bedford.

What you see below is a Hurricane Inundation Map for New Bedford. It shows what areas of New Bedford would be flooded in a direct-hit hurricane. The map comes from FEMA, MEMA, NOAA and NHC.

It also shows what strength of hurricane (strength measured by the Safford-Simpson hurricane intensity scale) would be needed to inundate certain areas. It does not depict freshwater flooding.

Light Green = Category 1 hurricane... Hurricane Gloria was a weak Category 1 hurricane. Yes, "weak" and "hurricane." are tough words to use in the same sentence, but this is how we Do.

Dark Green = Category 2 hurricane... Hurricane Bob was a Category 2, and he beat up New Beddy like she stole something while concurrently saying something awful about Bob's mother.

Yellow = Category 3 hurricane... only 5 of these have hit New England since the Other White Meat arrived in 1620, the most recent being Hurricane Carol in 1954.

Pink = Category 4 hurricane... we've only had one in our recorded history, in 1635.

Flesh = 100 Year FEMA Flood Zone. This is the hundred year storm you hear people speaking of, although you have to go pre-Colombian to find some in New England history. They (people who study this stuff) use salt marsh soil analysis techniques to study prehistoric hurricane histories, and New England was hit by storms above Category 3 in the 1100s, 1300s, and 1400s. Only the Native Americans saw them.

I don't have a better Art term for the 100 year storm color than Flesh. Blame whoever was running Crayola in 1973.

Here are a few things of note:

- FEMA and company developed these estimates based on the zany weatherman titled SLOSH model of storm surge inundation.

- I'll leave neighborhood-by-neighborhood analysis to you. I'm from friggin' Duxbury, what do I know?

- Once that hurricane wall goes, things get ugly fast in New Bedford. It's funny when the seawall gets topped over on Duxbury Beach, and 50 rich people have to drive the Land Rover up the hill. It's not so funny when 20 feet of water is rushing at 100,000 poor people.

- Just about anything south of the hurricane barrier faces a serious threat from even minor storms.

- Parts of Route 195 will be under Buzzards Bay in a bad enough storm.

- Clark's Cove didn't get a 20 foot boulder wall to protect her people.... so, uhm, have fun out there, folks.

- Cranberry County Magazine strongly advocates seeking out a local old-timer who was in your neighborhood for a major storm like Hurricane Carol. Find out whatever he/she can tell you about what happened to your neighborhood. The folks from the Old School watched hurricanes hit your neighborhood, and most of the FEMA kids haven't.

- New Bedford lost 2/3 of her fishing fleet in the 1938 hurricane.

With all of this stuff we're kicking around, it might make sense to flee New Beige if a hurricane is coming. Which parts of town will the authorities be evacuating?

The map below is an Evacuation map, and it is what The Man will be using as a template when issuing evacuation orders.

The differing colors are for differing intensities of storms, with Pink meaning "Get Out," and Yellow meaning "Get the **** out, now!"

The hurricane barrier pays off here, as only the areas to either side of it would be evacuating in a milder hurricane. Once the barrier is topped, however, it's every man for himself.

Notice that Route 195 and Route 6 get cut off by seawater in several spots, so plan to be Audi early.

New Bedford doesn't evacuate for just any storm, but when they do evacuate, they evacuate several miles inland.

That's pretty much what we have for you today. You should learn it/know it/live it.

If you disagree with something in here, let me know in the comments section. I had some disagreement with FEMA on my own beach.

Check the maps for yourself:

Hurricane Inundation Maps

Evacuation Maps

Fairhaven Hurricane Primer: Inundation And Evacuation

Ladies and gentleman, friends, Romans, countrymen, and children of all ages.... we proudly present to you the Fairhaven Hurricane Primer!

We're here today to tell you what parts of town will flood, how bad of a storm would be required to flood them out, and where the authorities will be evacuating people. This article will make you expert in all that stuff.

To be 100% cool, you want to either A) draw upon your knowledge, gained from you being in Fairhaven for a signature storm like Hurricane Bob, Hurricane Donna or even- if you're 0ld/old- the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, or B) talk to an old-timer who lives near you and has all that Bob/Carol knowledge down in his memory.

Local knowledge is immeasurably important. I study weather, I grew up on a Massachusetts beach, I live on a beach off Buzzards Bay now, I date a Fairhaven girl and visit her home beach once a season or so... and I still don't know Fairhaven in my bones. I have just this morning found out that I can't say the word "Fairhaven" properly. I say "Fair-haven," which audibly makes two words of it. My girlfriend, who grew up on West Island, says "Fa'haven," which is somehow less than one word.

I have a lot of scientific knowledge, and I have some informative maps to share... but in the end, you don't want to finalize your plans before you talk to a wise old local.

This map is what they (FEMA, MEMA, NOAA and NHC) call a Hurricane Inundation Map. It projects where the storm surge will go, and what intensity of storm would be needed to reach certain areas. They are based on the aptly-titled SLOSH model of inundation forecasting.

Storm surge, as you know, is the water pushed ashore as a big storm hits. It is the big killer in hurricanes, and even in history. The worst disaster related to lives lost in US history wasn't terrorists with planes or an earthquake, it was the storm surge associated with the 1900 Galveston hurricane.

OK, I think Antietam has it beat, but I digress...

Storm surge can also be called a Deathflood or Liquid Misery if that gets your people moving quicker. Either way, it's what those colors on the map above are showing. The differences in color depict where a more powerful storm (power = Saffir-Simpson hurricane intensity scale) would be required to inundate an area.

The maps depict a direct hit from a hurricane at mean high tide. They do not and I repeat NOT account for freshwater flooding, river swelling, sewers overflowing, and 7 inches of rain.

Your colors:

Light green = Category 1 storm. Hurricane Gloria would be a good example of a Cat 1. If you worked your way over to Fairhaven from the South Shore, the Halloween Gale would be a good example of a strong Category 1.

Darker green = Category 2. Hurricane Bob was a moderate Category 2 hurricane ("moderate" and "Category 2 hurricane" are tough words to string together, but that's how they roll at the NWS) upon landfall in Rhode Island.

Yellow = Category 3. Only 5 storms of this intensity have struck New England since the Other Man arrived in the 1600s. The most recent was Hurricane Carol in 1954.

Red = Category 4. We've had one storm of that intensity, the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635.

Flesh = 100 year FEMA estimates. I presume this is the "100 year storm" that you hear about, and we haven't had one in modern (read: "white guy") history. "Flesh" is my non-artist word for that color, and is drawn from my Crayola days, before Crayola realized that black kids liked to color, too. It may be "apricot" or "off-whitey" these days, I'm not 100% sure.

Inundation-wise, Fairhaven is indeed A Tale Of Two Cities (and a few island/peninsula things). You have the area by the Acushnet River. This would normally be a death zone, but they built a hurricane barrier (seen, from what I hope you notice is the Fairhaven side, in the picture at the beginning of the article) at the river's mouth. That protects everything behind it from anything other than a biblical, build-an-ark style flood. We may be wrong, but SLOSH says that only a Cat. 4 storm can get past it.

A storm in the Cat. 4 range wouldn't flood a large % of Fairhaven, but it would flood the area where most everyone in Fairhaven lives. That means we're evacuating about 15,000 souls. We'll get to that in a minute.

The other part of Fairhaven, which is a nice way of saying "the part without the 20 foot stone wall built in front of it," doesn't have it so good. They'll be hurtin' for certain in smaller storms. You can check your own neighborhood (or laugh at the suckers in other neighborhoods) by viewing the links I'll plop down somewhere in this article.

A pretty bad place to be in a storm would be West Island and/or anything off Sconticut Neck Road. The swampy parts go under right away, and an intense storm would start taking houses. A storm of Bob size floods almost 75-90% of these land masses.

If you live on West Island, you want to do this:

- Go find a topographical map, or zoom in really close on the FEMA map.

- Figure out who lives on the highest ground.

- Befriend that person, and butter them up like a biscuit. You want him saying "Come on in" when you show up at his house in a tempest.

- Have an evacuation plan that not only includes "get to the town-designated shelter," but also "get to High Ground Guy's house." If the only road out gets cut off, he may be your best bet.

A few other things stand out when you look at this map.

For starters, a storm of Bob's strength would cross over Route 6 right about where the Stop 'n' Shop is. A storm of Katrina strength would put most of Route 195 by the Acushnet River underwater. Weaker storms would flood Route 6 and Route 195 in Mattapoisett, in case if you decided to think outside of the box and flee East.

West Island is actually East of everything. I'd ask Jessica about this, but she's at work. Keep in mind, I thought that Fairhaven was where Popeye lived until I opened the Wikipedia. Either way, be off of West Island if a storm comes... even a small one.

If you live in the White section of town (hurricane maps are egalitarian, and I have discovered that "white" sections of town are often poorer, while "colored" sections of the map are usually inhabited by wealthier, less swarthy waterfront home-having people), you might think you're off the hook. Remember that these maps only show storm surge, not freshwater or river flooding... and also remember that trees tend to blow over during storms.

In an Andrew-style storm, every single road leading out of Fairhaven would be compromised to some extent. Even the side streets will be under. That means you can't get out, and it means that help can't get in.

You want to be Ghost before then, which leads to our next map:

This is an Evacuation Map. It is what the authorities will use to decide who has to stay and who has to go. You don't HAVE to go, but you also don't want to rely on the cop you were just reading the Constitution to risking his neck to pull you out of the maelstrom.

The map is easier to read than the Inundation map. On this map, Red means "they have to leave," and yellow means "you have to leave, too."

This is the cell phone version of the map, you can zoom in for much better detail using the map on MEMA's page.

Route 240 looks like a good evacuation route, even though you'd eventually get pinned in a bad enough storm.

If you live in Fairhaven or if you plan to vacation there, you should have at least the bones of an evacuation plan in place. Fairhaven, unlike other towns we cover, stands in line for a possible direct hit from a hurricane that approaches New England.

We want you alive. We want you alive for selfish reasons, as- if you are reading this and may return- you are our source of revenue. We want you alive for professional reasons, i.e. "If they listened to us, they'd be alive." We also want you alive for homeboy reasons, as one of the founders of this website is a Fairhaven girl, and we consider Fairhaven to be our spiritual South Coast road office. We also want you alive for regular, kind person reasons.

Hurricane Inundation Maps

Evacuation Maps

That Ol' South Coast, She Don't Play Clean....

New Beffuh

Before anyone starts hating The Kid about this, know that I'm a resident of Buzzards Bay. I'm from the South Coast.

Sure, Bee Bay is part of Barnstable County. Yes, I know that we have clam shacks, summer rentals, Cape traffic, and that life gets Mighty Different after Columbus Day.

It doesn't matter, though. Buzzards Bay is the extreme eastern end of the South Coast. I wouldn't admit it if I weren't so sure it was true.

I wanted to lead off with this because we're going to rough up the South Coast a bit today, and I wanted everyone reading this to know it was being done with Love. I believe in the South Coast enough to move here. When I say things like "the armpit of Massachusetts," know that it's just one South Coast brother kidding another one.

The Real Cape just produced a scathing analysis of certain trends in their article "Wareham Coming In Hot As The 11th Worst Place To Live In Massachusetts." They use the wiggle room all Gateway area writers use to work ?ham into a Cape Cod article. I used to do it all the time on Cape Cod 2Day. "It's the Gateway," as a Celtics cheerleader from Wareham once told me.

I'm not doubting Wareham's spot in the top 11, which is headed by New Bedford and also includes Fall River, Gardner, North Adams, Fitchburg, Ware, Brockton, Southbridge, Taunton and Athol. They crunched a bunch of numbers like crime rate, school quality, things to do, transportation, culture, etc.... and then they done disparaged dat ol' South Coast!!

Here are my quick thoughts on each non-South Coast town.

Gardener... part of the FAG corridor down Route 2 (with Athol and Fitchburg), this is an industrial mill town in the post-mill era. Yes, I know it's "Gardner," I just like to tweak noses now and then. Gardner is the home of the World's Largest Chair, in case you're arguing about that at the bar as you read this.

North Adams... Nor'Addy is the smallest city in Massachusetts. Following a theme you'll see repeatedly in this list, North Adams used to be great when the mills were working. The mills aren't working now, however...

Fitchburg... Even though it's a rotten mill town in decline, I'd keep Son Of A Fitch off the list because A) they make UTZ potato chips there, B) it figures prominently in both the Harry Potter canon and Return To Peyton Place, and C) there is no third reason. Worst "picture of downtown (insert town here)" picture on all of Wikipedia, too. Kowloon, China is second. The Walled City ranked first before the city was demolished.

Ware... With 9800 souls in the middle of nowhere, they must have had to work hard to not call it "Where?" Care to guess if the 1850s mills are still prosperous? There are several maps of the region that depict the town name merely as a question mark (?).

Brockton... Club Homeboy should be higher on the list. You could put on a money shirt and walk through Ware unmolested. Just wearing a shirt is offensive in some parts of Brockton. It is very funny that only 15 miles stand between Bee Rock City and tony Duxbury (which it used to be a part of, Myles Standish essentially founded Brockton), but that's about how it works. Brockton is the only representative of the South Shore on the list, but it is less South Shore and more an entity unto itself. Currently ranks 41st among American cities in violent crime, which isn't bad for a town that is historically West Duxbury.

Taunton... Some discussion went down before we removed Brockton from the group of South Coast towns we'll discuss in length later in the article, even though Brockton isn't South Coast. Taunton is also off Wikipedia's list, even though it's just a Berkley away from Fall River.

Southbridge... Just across the state line from Woodstock,CT.... known as "Honest Town," The former Eye Of Massachusetts and her optical factories faded into insignificance when the Mexicans or Chinese started making glasses cheaper. Worry you not, they still have a sizable population of displaced Puerto Rican and Laotian factory workers hanging around town.

Athol.... I drove through this town on my way towards visiting girls at Franklin Pierce College in NH. It looks like the kind of place you'd see a Yeti. Athol may not deserve her spot on The Real Cape's list, as the material they are working with gives Athol over 50,000 people when, in fact, the town holds 16,000. My favorite thing about Athol was a WBCN/Billy West skit about Peter Falk visiting various New England towns. It made no sense at all at first when he went to Athol... "Wow, look at the firehouse... Hey, they have a post office!" The joke was in the last line of the skit... "This week... Falk, In Athol."

Say it aloud a few times, lisp if you have to....

The fun part here is that the South Coast has a pretty good grasp on some of the top spots, outpacing numerous North Cambridges and Lowells. Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin... didn't/couldn't get past the Sketchy Sketchy South Coast. Little San Juan Holyoke didn't make the list. No Chelsea, no Murderpan, no Dot, no Gloxbury, no Winter Hill, no Mishawum.

Does the South Coast really merit a 1-2 punch on the top spot, and a few other towns wedged into the Top 11? How did it come to this?

Fall River, Wareham, Brockton, Taunton and New Bedford have a coastal version of the problems that Gardner and Fitchburg have. They were built to support industries that are no longer profitable in the manner they were run back in the proverbial Day.

Fall River was all about textiles, especially whatever Print Cloth is. When the states who grow the cotton realized they could build the textile machines in their own states and cut out the middleman, Fall River went into decline. There's also the small problem of the town's most famous resident being America's only axe murderer with an eponymous nursery rhyme.

Fall River

Fall River also got a cut out of the New York City garment trade, but that fell victim to globalization and Kathy Lee Gifford having skirts stitched together in Asian sweat shops... which is the same thing, but I digress...

Brockton has a similar story, but the industry was shoemaking. New Bedford was, at various times, whaling or textiles. Taunton was iron and silver. Wareham, to my knowledge, was Tourism.

In each case, a dominant industry failed, and the town went into economic decline. With that, you get the crime, the shoddy schools, the crumbling infrastructure, mass (Mass?) unemployment and, in the end, Exodus.

There's not much race to it. Blacks, Hispanics, white folk... they all trend towards poverty when the factory closes. Economic decline is color-blind, although she does like to keep a nice mix.

Depending on if you include Brockton in the mix (and it is very much like New Bedford, and very much not like her neighboring towns of the Bridgewaters, Avon, Whitman and so forth), the South Coast holds 5 of the top 11 spots, including the two 2 spots.

Wareham is a unique case here, although her story is just a different take on the same Mill Town concept.

Wareham, and Buzzards Bay (town), used to be the hosts of the only road that led to the Bourne Bridge. They lined that road with gas stations, clam shacks, mini golf, ice cream, antique shops, restaurants, package stores and anything else that could suck money out of a tourist. The towns fattened on this trade, and Tourism is primarily why mainland Wareham and Buzzards Bay are often considered to be part of Cape Cod.

Then, they extended Route 25 to the Bourne Bridge in 1987. There was no need for someone going to Cape Cod to have to slog through Wareham and Buzzards Bay. The tourist dollars flowed onto Cape Cod without the Gateway getting their cut. Even the road itself killed jobs (and, more importantly, industry), as the highway rambled through the state's best Cranberry growing region.

Once the clam shacks closed, the waitresses had no money to spend at the supermarket, which also closed. The supermarket clerks had no money to spend on mini-golf, so the mini-golf folded. A plaza with a Wal-Mart and a Staples stemmed the bleeding for a while, but they both moved into more prosperous West Wareham as soon as the land was zoned.

Pretty soon, all that was left of the Tourism trade was the traffic gridlock as people drove around Wareham and Buzzards Bay. As the villages spiraled into decline, anyone with money left moved away. Businesses closed, and no new ones moved in.

Soon enough, only a hard-working criminal element kept them in the news at all, and Wareham slipped towards ?ham.

Enough of the South Coast abuse. Let's all kick back and learn something, shall we?

South Coast Trivia

Wikipedia scores the South Coast as:

Fall River

• Acushnet, Massachusetts
• Dartmouth, Massachusetts
• Fairhaven, Massachusetts
• Fall River, Massachusetts
• Freetown, Massachusetts
• Little Compton, Rhode Island*
• Marion, Massachusetts
• Mattapoisett, Massachusetts
• New Bedford, Massachusetts
• Rochester, Massachusetts
• Tiverton, Rhode Island*
• Wareham, Massachusetts
• Westport, Massachusetts

- While I may be stretching it to include Buzzards Bay (village) in the South Coast, other people feel that the Rhode Island towns of Tiverton and Little (Straight Outta) Compton are sort of honorary members of the South Coast.

- Taunton gets left out. No love for the Triple S of Swansea, Seekonk and Somerset, either. I assume they are grouped with more northern towns like Attleboro and, uhm, whatever is next to Attleboro.

- The term "South Coast" has been traced to weatherman Todd Gross, who came up with the term to differentiate between Southern Plymouth/Bristol County and the South Shore. Why the South Shore, which faces East, is called the South Shore is beyond me. Either way, we have a South Shore and a South Coast now. People in the region actually got angry when the New Bedford Standard-Times began to use the term.

- The adoption of the South Coast moniker sort of displaced the formerly-used Greater New Bedford designation. A media blitz accompanied the adoption of the term, pointing out that the Sow Co had "the Cape's climate, better infrastructure, and cheaper land prices."

- "South Coast" and "Metro West" are relatively recent terms, invented by local media. "MetroWest" displaced "Middlesex" among the locals, again with some difficulty. It was invented by the guy who used to own the former Middlesex Daily News.

- I'd guess (and might be wrong) that "Cape Cod" and "Plymouth County" are the two longest-standing regional names.

- The South Coast is an odd mix of larger and smaller towns. You can light a smoke in downtown New Bedford, the worst place in the state, and pitch it out your car window 8 minutes later in rural, bucolic, backwater Acushnet.

Mattapoisett

- We have discussed the Irish Riviera at length in this column, but the South Coast is very much a Little Lisbon, a Baby Brazil. The corridor running between Providence, Fall River and New Bedford has the largest concentration of Portuguese-Americans in America.

- Massachusetts leads America with a Portagee population of 392,000. MetroBoston has 192K of that number, and the South Coast has a lesser-but-major share of the remainder. Massachusetts is 6.2 Portuguese, while Rhode Island leads America at 9.7%.

- Fall River is 37% Portuguese, and 8% Cape Verdean.

- New Bedford is over 33% Portuguese, 10% Puerto Rican, and almost 9% Cape Verdean.

- Wareham is 87% white, with an unknown number of Portagee. I did see a figure of 9.29% somewhere. They represent hard enough to host the Cape Verdean Festival every year.

- The source that coughed up 9.29% for Wareham ascribed Fall River over 43%, and New Bedford over 36%.

- Taunton isn't really South Coast (it lays a bit North of the area proper, and is the seat of Bristol County), but we consider it to be a fringe SC area, with a stronger grip than Brockton. If you consider it South Coast, I'm cool with that. If you think it stands distinct, I can see your side, too.

- The northern South Coast touches upon the southern base of the Bridgewater Triangle.

- New Bedford, trying hard to take the crime title away from Fall River, has no criminal to match Lizzie Borden (who, I might add, was not convicted). They compete by volume. The New Bedford area had her own serial killer in the late 1980s. You couldn't get out of your car to take a whizz on Routes 195 or 140 without stumbling onto some prostitute that he had killed and dumped there. He was never caught. New Bedford is also where Big Dan's Tavern was.

Hey, she's tough... she's a harbor chick

Most Famous Citizens:

Fall River: Lizzie Borden, no contest

Wareham: Geena Davis, also winning in a rout. #2 is Pebbles from JAM-N 94.5.

Westport: Pixies singer Frank Black edges out abolitionist Paul Cuffee, ESPN girl Wendy Nix and Hillary from the The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Westport has a disproportionate talent-per-population ratio for a small-town backwater, although Marion reigns the roost in that regard, as you will see in a moment.

Rochester: Joseph Bates (founded Seventh Day Adventist Church)

New Bedford: Frederick Douglass

Mattapoisett: Oliver Wendell Holmes lived there is some capacity

Marion: Claiming 4000 souls, this town has been a temporary home to FDR, Grover Cleveland, Admiral Byrd, Dom DiMaggio and Geraldo Rivera. It is also the port of Benjamin Briggs, last Master of the doomed ship Mary Celeste. I'm leaving out several other semi-famous people.

Freetown: Former Miss Massachusetts and current NECN newsie Jackie Bruno.

Fairhaven: A good three way race between Gil Santos, Joshua Slocum and Christopher Reeve (had a sailboat moored in Fairhaven).

Dartmouth: Choose between died-there General Phillip Sheridan and summer person Tea Leoni.

Acushnet: Doesn't have a notable resident list on Wikipedia, but Herman Melville once sailed on a whaler named Acushnet. That's close enough.