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| Sara Flynn on the camera, Sara Flynn's dog on the stick. |
This last storm was fun to take pictures of, but it was a D+ grade storm historically, maybe a generous C if you value Staying Power. The dog enjoyed it heartily.
No one, except the guy I photographed jumping the Sandwich boardwalk on a parasail, is going to look back on this storm in 20 years with anyone who will remember what he was talking about. It doesn't merit historical consideration, other than the tragedy down in the Bahamas with the MMA kid.
However, even minor storms can mess up the neighborhood pretty nasty, and things will be a bit ugly until Toil and Tide smooths everything over.
We'll try to give you an idea of how the coastal people deal with storms.
This is an old picture, from a 2006 Duxbury nor'easter, To my knowledge, there were no houses torn apart in this last storm.
If the storm is bad enough to take houses, it goes without saying that the cleanup will be lengthier and more complicated.
Some storms can even alter the look of the neighborhood forever. To keep it Duxbury, I can recall the Blizzard of '78 being the end of the road for cottages in front of the dunes. The 1991 Halloween Gale knocked over the last of the 1950s-style cottages, and future gales will put the rest of the neighborhood up on stilts.
Again, this storm wasn't a home-killer. We're just establishing one end of the spectrum for the discussion.
The next level of storm is where the houses are up, but the road is ruined. This is the Ocean Bluff/Brant Rock area, after one of last winter's blizzards. That's not a dirt road, that's heavily-used and trust-me-it's-paved Route 139.
The ocean, when it moves from shoreline to street, isn't just water. It is moving large piles of sand and stone with it, as well as anything that might be in the yard of whoever owns the land the ocean is washing through.
When I was trapped in my house for the Halloween Gale, you couldn't stand in front of a window, even on the second floor, when waves were breaking on the house. Each wave would slam a Shirley Jackson story worth of stones off of the house. That's why you board the windows up, player.
Those stones also wash past the house, and that usually puts them in the street.
Sand also shifts, remember...
This was the most damage I saw working the Sandwich-Barnstable-Yarmouth-Dennis run during the storm last weekend. Some DPW guy can sweep that ish back up onto the dune or whatever happens to it in this town.
Duxbury usually has the other sort of problem, with the ocean slicing through from ocean to bay. That makes parts of Duxbury Beach- as well as Saquish, where people live- into islands. Most of the town's effort after the 1991 storm involved making the beach whole again.
Otherwise, people get cut off, supplies get low, panic ensues, and the people from the Gurnet rise up and slaughter the people of Saquish for food and goodies.
Even tony Sandwich takes her lumps now and then.
Sammich is located on the wrong side of the Cape Cod Canal jetty, and it gets very little replenishment sand from more northern towns.
Prior to the construction of the jetty, this was the sole benefit that Sandwich gained from nor'easters. Once the jetty was up, Sammich was having sand washed down the beach from them without getting any sand washed down to them.
This eventually leads to large chunks of Sandwich being claimed by the sea. The sea then starts touching things that she isn't supposed to be touching, like highways.
It's probably not going to come to that on Route 6A, at least from what I saw this weekend. There were some houses taking shots, and I'd bet that they lost a lot of sand.
If the street an the beach got messed up, you can bet that the wall that was supposed to be protecting the street has been compromised.
Seawall repairs are ugly business, for several reasons. One, if you need them, you most likely just had a damage-doin' storm. Two, seawall repairs are costly, with coastal towns sitting on potential seawall repair bills running into the millions. Three, there will almost always be a fight between homeowners, the town, the state and the US of g*d-damned A over who will be footing the bills for the seawall repair.
I am related to at least one guy who had to run down to Town Hall and wave deeds and contracts in their face before getting off the hook for thousands of dollars worth of seawall repairs that the town was supposed to pay for.
You have to watch the towns, as they try to get off "cheap" on the repairs now and then. Duxbury, which can hardly plead poverty, had a wooden seawall until the mid-1950s.
This is more of the Brant Rock/Ocean Bluff damage from last winter. If the elements and the budget won't let you build a fancy seawall, a bunch of boulders will have to do.
You just want something tall enough to slap down even huge waves, and you want it heavy enough to not be washed away when the Atlantic Ocean leans on it. If a little bit of water gets by it... well, hey, you live at a beach, right?
If you don't build a seawall, the ocean gets to tee off on you for 5-12 waves a minute for 3 hours of nor'easter tide, twice a day, any time the pressure drops. You want to try to avoid having that happen.
Seawalls are like divorces.... they cost so much because they're worth it. The town and state will complain, but it will get fixed in the end. The alternative- again, like the divorce- is too ugly to countenance.
The seawall houses in Duxbury are known for their beautifully maintained lawns and just-like-God-planned-it soft sand yards. Oh, wait... this is a post-blizzard shot of Duxbury Beach.
I swear to God that one of those houses in this picture above (the foreground, with the ice) is owned by a golf course groundskeeper, and his lawn is kept at putting-green-trim levels all summer.
In order for that to happen, you have to shovel (or hire someone to shovel) the beach back on to the beach. My yard on Ocean Road North would pick up what I would conservatively estimate to be 1000000000 rocks every nor'easter.
Rocks are handy to have around if you, say, need to fill large holes in your lawn.
Once the yard is cleared, it must be repaired.
Even after you fill the large holes (snow doesn't count, lazybones!), you still have problems. All of your grass has been washed and soaked on salt water.
The Romans, after razing Carthage, covered the ground with salt and sea salt. They salted it down because, as Sam Kinison said, "Nothing grows in sand, nothing's gonna grow in sand!"
Grass is no exception, which is why beaches tend to be sandy. If you want the grass back after a storm ruins it, you have to skim the top layer of soil and replace it with unspoiled topsoil. Then you plant the grass, and then you see if you removed enough salty soil.
This is why some people say "Screw lawns," and just go with natural sand yards. It turns out that these also require tireless maintenance. I did that with the patio near the seawall, as we would lose the front 10-20 feet of lawn with every storm.
This wonderful beach scene, as we noted in a previous article, would be perfect sand-water-dunes-lifeguard chair Cape Cod if this were not the parking lot of Sandy Neck Beach.
It'll all wash away at some point. It's marshy over there, and the DPW can sweep up and re-deposit that sand where it belongs. A parking lot is less of a touchy maintenance job than that of a million-dollar Hyannis Port beach house. You can't just let the Kennedy Compound drain, and then hire some townie to sweep it up whenever.
This can be touchy with October storms, as no coastal resident with any brains makes yard repairs on the nor'easter damage until late April. June through October is hurricane season, but October through the Ides of April is noreaster season, and we get several storms a year.
The beach suffers during those storms. People like the natural aspect of a soft-sand beach, in theory. In reality, "natural" beaches look a lot more like the picture with the dog at the beginning of the article.
The tide will take care of the lower beach, but the upper beach can get a little bit ugly.
Anyone who lives on a seawall knows this scene, represented perfectly by Duxbury Beach.
Several somebodies let the storm sneak up on them, and didn't take their stairs up (in the local patois, stairs are taken "up" onto the seawall, as opposed to being taken "down" from the seawall) in time. The stairs bang around in the surf until there isn't a seawall to prevent them from being tossed up past the wave-wash.
Eventually, you sneak on the beach with a Jeep (the "Duxbury Cadillac" of legend, in case you heard the term and never knew the reference), tow the stairs back to your house and hopefully store them a little more securely.
Duxbury Beach gets lots of odd stuff washing up. Every now and then, a barge loses a cargo container over the side, whch busts open and disgorges her contents into the sea. They eventually wash up on the beach somewhere. One winter, it was oil filters. Another winter, it was Nikes. If they had EBay in 1980, I would have sold more sneakers than that Air Jordan motherf***er.
Lobstermen get caught slippin', too.
For reasons I don't know but that some salty dude (or dudette, the only lobsterman among my Facebook friends is a girl known to me as Tornado) could tell us, wire pots don't wash ashore as much as wooden pots do.
When I was a kid, we'd go out after every nor'easter and snag lobsters out of the wooden traaps that washed ashore. We'd get several dozen this way, as pots, buoys and so forth were all over the beach.
You never steal the pots, however, and even the buoys were a rough proposition. I don't know if lobstermen can shoot you for touching their gear, but I know that many think they can... and that's all that will matter if the heat comes out on you, friend.
This is the Mystic River, courtesy of Paul Walker... no, not THAT one.
While this isn't ocean damage, what you see here are leaves. Those leaves, still green, should be up in a tree, getting ready to be in my fall foliage shots.
If those are lily pads or something, just try to work with me here.
Massachusetts, and especially Eastern Massachusetts, doesn't really get around to fall-foliaging until late October. Some places on Cape Cod (I noticed this while bell-ringing at the Sagamore Christmas Tree Shoppe) don't even go over until mid-November.
That overlaps with the October-April nor'easter season, and is one of the many reasons why coastal Massachusetts isn't really top-notch foliage country. We rock pretty hard compared to, say, New Mexico, but New Hampshire people laugh at our foliage... they LAUGH at it.
Of course, they don't have ocean storms up there, so they can just shush now.
