Living on the shore of the sea does have some benefits, but there is what actuaries and lawyers call Inherent Risk.
We're going to explore some of the consequences of that risk in today's article, which heavily leans on pictures given to us by the Bedford Family, formerly of Ocean Road North on Duxbury Beach.
They show damage from the 1991 Halloween Gale, which people from Inland might call The Perfect Storm or the No-Name Storm.
No one who lived through it calls it "the Perfect Storm," as it is sort of cruel to use positive superlatives when talking to victims. "Hey, Jackie O.... sorry about the dead husband and everything, but you gotta admit, that was some splendid shooting."
The only non-Bedford, non-1991 picture is the one above. It is from the Federicci family, and shows an incoming high tide during a nor'easter last year.
Everything else was post-Gale carnage.
The gale arrived around Halloween Eve, Devil's Night. The local forecasters blew it (the better forecasts spoke of a storm at sea), and we had practically no warning.
A hurricane offshore (Grace) met a nor'easter, got absorbed, re-formed into a hurricane, and spun around in a crazy course off of the Massachusetts coast. Mammoth waves with hurricane winds behind them pounded the Massachusetts coastline. Damage was in the hundreds of millions in 1991 dollars.
The storm was never named, even though it was a hurricane. This was officially to avoid confusion, but also most likely because there was a bit of shame involved among the weatherheads. To be fair, the hurricane never made landfall, and the nor'easter (which later became the hurricane) did most of the damage.
This storm gentrified Duxbury Beach faster than a BMW parade of yuppies.
Some people could take no more, and sold out. The people who bought the old propertuies built them up. Other people cashed in insurance checks and built much larger houses. Throw in the stilts under the houses, and this storm changed the whole skyline of the neighborhood.
The houses you remember from the 1960s and 70s were gradually and emphatically phased out by the Halloween Gale, and the Blizzard of '78. Cottages in front of the dunes were gone by 1978. Little cottages on the seawall were leveled in 1991.
Every house you see here was rebuilt into a much more valuable property. This drives up property values, leading other families to sell. A cycle ensues, and the Irish Riviera fades into history.
The storm was a monster, every bit the equal of 1978. You'd rank them 1 and 1A. The Gale far surpassed damage done to Duxbury by Hurricane Bob, who had visited about a month and change before. Bob was a cakewalk in Duxbury, but the Gale was taking no sh*t.
This house washed back into the street. It was not the worst destruction of a house on that street, as a cottage at the other end of Ocean Road North pretty much disintegrated.
Even the houses on Cable Hill lost decks, which is very unusual.
The Gale was a slow mover, and it hit the beach with 8 storm tides. This article is being published on the 24th anniversary of the day when you could finally get back into the neighborhood and stay for a high tide.
Everyone with a brain had fled on the morning of the 30th, when waves were smashing the seawall 4 hours before high tide. Smart people run to get away from stuff like that.
Unless you're me, of course... then you run to Get To the besieged house so you can watch the storm.
A friend of mine and I watched this storm from the 2nd story of 65 ORN. I had to swim to get to my house. I had to wade through my house to get to an upper floor. We had ostensibly gone there to rescue a schnauzer, and decided that we wouldn't survive an escape attempt.
The episode of Beavis & Butthead where they go to the trailer park to watch a tornado hit is a good allegory. It even rivaled the damage ("A tornado can smash a poodle's face with a brick!" "Yeah, it can rip out your heart and show it to you!") the boys were seeking to witness.
The storm was as nasty as they tell you it was. The neighborhood was under about 6-10 feet of water, depending on the wave wash.. The ocean was level with the seawall, meaning that waves could just roll right into your house and smash it. My yard was level with the seawall, so waves would actually break on my house. I watched a few hours of it from inside my house, a few hours more from Cable Hill.
The waves were 8-10 feet high, which is funny because I have read a storm damage potential assessment for Duxbury Beach which said that waves can't get beyond 6 feet.
If they had YouTube back then and if I had a video camera, I'd be as YouTube famous as Jenna Marbles or the Epic Meal Time guys. We were right in the belly of the beast.
