Archives: An Interview With A Springfield Tornado Witness

Today is the 5th anniversary of the Springfield Tornado. We did an interview with an eyewitness, a Hanover middle school girl.  

Hanover Middle School Student Has Near Miss With Springfield Tornado

One of the benefits that you the reader enjoy when reading this column is that the authors who compose it have a lot of friends who end up in the news.

Remember that family who got shot at by the Route 3 sniper, the one where the window blew out next to the 5 year old kid? The mother went to high school with Stacey. Remember the Wareham double murder? Yours truly may or may not have put that kid's head off a car door a month prior. Abdullah knew the witnesses, too.

The pattern continues today. The Colonel is actually very good friends with the parents of Ceara McLaughlin (one of whom is my nutrition counselor), who was all over the news yesterday. Ceara was in a school bus, and on her way home from a trip to Six Flags amusement park in Agawam. Sounds fun so far, right?

Her bus ride home may have been the worst bus ride ever, or at least the worst bus ride since the one in Dirty Harry or that Speed movie. Before she cleared Springfield, her bus was forced to stop as the Springfield tornado roared across the highway in front of it.

Thanks to brave Ceara and her friends from the Hanover Middle School Chorus, we have some details and photographs of the action.

We immediately dispatched Ted to speak with Ceara and get the first hand info. Ceara is 14, and has that bounce-backedness that all kids have when faced with something that would scare me so badly that I'd start making Apocalypse Now speeches... "You must make a friend of horror, or it will become a formidable enemy..."

Ceara actually seems pretty upbeat about it. In a situation where I would be throwing children aside to escape faster, she kept her wits, got a pretty good description of the whole event, and even snapped some pictures.

Without any further ado, I present to you my good friend Ceara McLaughlin.

Ted- Give me a brief description of what happened....

Ceara- We were riding home from Six Flags and there was a little traffic, I'm not sure which road we were on, but we were on some highway near Agawam.

   We started to see rotating clouds and most people thought it wouldn't become anything, but then it started to make a funnel cloud. It came closer and we saw that there were dirt, shingles, and small boards spinning around, and then it crossed the highway right in front of us.

   It went to the other side of the highway, over a few buildings (picking up more shingles off of roofs of buildings), and then it went over a house on a hill and we saw it ripping up little parts of the roof. Then it disappeared!

   We figured out later that the little one we saw actually didn't disappear over the hill - it went on to become much bigger, and that was most likely the one that ripped through Springfield.

- Did you (or anyone you know) get any pictures of the tornado? (If yes, email it to me)
- A lot of my friends took pictures so I'll attach them, not sure if they're that clear :P (Editor's Note: They're superb.)

- How much did the tornado miss you by?-  It probably missed us by around 50 feet. I was in the back, but the people in the front said it came really close to them, they were almost in it.

- What does a tornado look like that close up?
- Well, it looks weaker than it is. You think it isn't that strong, but then it rips up a tree. It's really, really fast and just whips around wherever it wants to go.

   I was kind of afraid it would double back and go right into us or something, or that it would get close enough that some of the stuff it was carrying would fly into the windows and break them. It was really dark too, especially the clouds around it.

- What did the trip's chaperones tell you to do when the tornado came at you?
- They were kind of amused, but then when it got closer they were telling everyone to stay calm and that we would all be fine. After it went to the other side of the highway and across the hill, they were actually joking around that there was a cow floating around in it.

- Did the bus driver have to jam on the brakes or anything radical?
- Basically, everyone around us was slowing down when they saw it, then they stopped, and a few people even backed up. But no, nothing too dramatic.

- Did anything funny fly by, like a cow or a pickup truck?- Hahahahahaha nope!

- If there was a girl named Dorothy on the bus, would you have ordered her off?- Absolutely xD

- Who was the coolest head on the bus? If this were a movie, it'd be the football player, but I'm wondering if it might have been the Eagle Scout instead, or one of the smoker types.
- I'm not really sure, I was mostly paying attention to my friends around me, I could barely see who was in the front of the bus.

- Was the screaming louder on the bus than on the roller coaster at Six Flags?
- Not on our bus, we were actually relatively calm, just. A few people were yelling or crying, but not quite screaming. There were a few people on other buses who were really freaking out.

- How scared were you?- Well, I saw that it probably wouldn't pick up a person or a car- judging by the fact that it was only carrying some shingles, boards, and other debris- so I wasn't that freaked out. But I was pretty scared that it would come near us and blow us around, or something would fly into the windows. The lightning and other weather we saw afterwards was really scary, though!

- What does a Tornado vs. House look/sound like?
- When it hit an actual house, it was too far away to hear, but it looks pretty odd. The house loses every time!  xD

- Not related to the storm, but what was the coolest ride at Six Flags?
- I went on this older roller coaster called the "Thunderbolt" a ton of times, and that one was really fun!

 Photos courtesy of the Hanover Middle School Chorus

Rainy Memorial Day Traffic Notes And Gas Prices For Cape Cod

It is said that, much like how the Eskimo has 200 words for snow, residents of Bourne have hundreds of different classifications for traffic. They distinguish between weekend and weekday traffic, summer and winter traffic, rain/snow/sun traffic and holiday traffic.

Today is one of those subsets... Rainy Memorial Day.

Memorial Day is when summer starts on Cape Cod. Summer people opening their cottages, winter cottage rentals departing, hotels getting summer volume, places with SEE YOU NEXT SUMMER signs un-shuttering, old people smart enough to come off-season arriving... all of the little omens that the locals know of are in effect.

Traffic heading on-Cape was heavy on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Many of those people have to be on the mainland by Tuesday, and most of them will be making the Drang nach Westen at some point today.

Again, traffic is always going to be bad on Memorial Day Monday. I know it sucks right now, and I haven't opened Google Traffic since I got home from lunch. However, as the list of services offered by the Mustang Ranch in North Las Vegas tells you, there are different kinds of sucking. Allow me to explain.

A nice, sunny Memorial Day means that everyone bails out in the evening, after a day at the beach, a nice dinner and some time spent packing. This has a tendency to put them on the road at the same time. This is where you get those 15 mile traffic jams that Cape Cod is famous for.

A rainy Memorial Day breaks the people up a bit, leading to a heavy-but-lesser flow of the day-long variety. I was writing this article at 8 AM, and there was substantial traffic heading off-Cape even then. Those were the people who saw a rainy Memorial Day coming and opted to bail ahead of the traffic, the Cape Cod version of a guy sneaking out of a Pats game when we're up 42-10 after 50 minutes. Beat the traffic, before it beats you.

Other people, especially those who rented the place they were staying at all weekend, are determined to make a day of it. Cape Cod has shops, museums, galleries, restaurants and all sorts of stuff with a roof over it to pass the time. This tendency to stick it out is not restricted to those who have or don't have children.

Cape Cod will get day-trippers, even with this rotten weather. Some and perhaps many grandfathers who were alive when Hurricane Donna came ashore don't consider this to be real rain, and will insist on hosting a barbecue in it. This effect is limited. We've been keeping an eye on traffic heading both on and off-Cape for most of the day, and there has been no problem at all getting on to Cape Cod.

Even with the people bailing out early, there should be some heavy traffic tonight. The smart people leave early Tuesday morning, but you'll see plenty of the Other Type as you crawl up Route 6 tonight.

We've already had some traffic difficulty, as heavy rains flooded the Cranberry Highway up by the old 99. The road, which was having traffic diverted through the Stop & Shop plaza, is now open.

Note that there comes a time, usually in the Church hours of the morning, where you are under a lesser risk of encountering an impaired driver. Not too long after that, the risk goes up, and it gets to roll-them-dice levels on days where disappointed tourists have been drinking all day.

If you must go, don't forget to fuel up! You don't want to run out of gas in a ten mile bumper-y-bumper traffic jam while a tropical storm is pouring water up from Carolina at you. Here are the best (reported) prices for each Cape Cod town.

Eastham: $2.39 a gallon, Tedeschi's, Vandale Circle

Orleans, $2.34/gallon, Cumberland Farms, Route 6A

Chatham, $2.31, Cumberland Farms, Main Street and Roundabout Gas, Main Street

Brewster, $2.36, Cumberland Farms, Main Street

Harwich, $2.32, Harwich Gas And Propane

Dennis, $2.23, Mobil, East-West Dennis Road

Yarmouth, $2.29, Speedway, Main Street and Cape Cod Farms, Main Street

Barnstable, $2.29, Sunoco, Falmouth Road and Gulf, Falmouth Road

Hyannis, $2.26, Airport Gas, Mary Dunn Road

Mashpee, $2.26, Stop & Shop, Falmouth Road

Sandwich, $2.34, Shell, Route 6A

Bourne (Capeside), $2.35, Mobil, Clay Pond Road

Bourne (Mainland), $2.26, Bay Village Full Serve, Main Street

Wareham, $2.23, Speedway, Main Street and Joe's Gas, Main Street

Plymouth, $1.89, Mobil, South Street


3 PM UPDATE: Traffic on Route 6 heading off-Cape is stretched back to Exit 6, while traffic on 28 is jammed back to the Otis Rotary.

Holiday Weekend Weather, And Early-Season Tropical Storm Information

We wish you the best on this Memorial Day weekend. Many plans, both solemn and joyous, will be influenced by the weather. We'll try to get you prepped for this.

Today should be nice. Aside for an isolated-but-powerful thunderstorm pushing ESE off of Nantucket at 8 AM, sunny skies should rule the early part of the day. Cloudiness will increase in the afternoon, and we'll have the chance for some sweet late-night thunderstorms.

High temperatures will push 80 on Cape Cod (a SW wind will help cool us off), and aim for the 90s inland. Here are some record high temperatures for the day that I stumbled across:

Boston -- 92 set in 1931
Providence -- 91 set in 1931
Hartford -- 93 set in 1977
Worcester -- 88 set in both 1911 and 1929
Milton/Blue Hill -- 90 set in 1929

HHH, friends... Hazy, Hot and Humid.

Sunday looks to be a mix of clouds and sun, and it will be a bit cooler (60s-70s). Some rain may arrive on Sunday night, which is where we get to that spaghetti chart with the tropical storm in it from at the top of the page up yonder.

Don't worry about a tropical storm hitting us Monday. Our water isn't warm enough to support it, even if it raced up at us. Although the season has begun, New England's tropical storm threat runs more August-October. Tropical storms are heat engines, and the waters south of us (water temperatures are in the 50s) presently have no fuel for her.

However a tropical storm does look like she will sample a bit of South Carolina cooking. Presently known as Tropical Depression Two, she is forecast to become Tropical Storm Bonnie by tonight.

Bonnie should be no big deal, sort of a nor'easter with an attitude. After striking the Carolinas, she looks to take a run up the coastline at New England, guided by an area of high pressure offshore and with an eastern-moving frontal boundary throwing her precipitation at us. That's where we get our taste of Bonnie.

She'll be a soaking rainstorm if we get a direct or even indirect hit out of her. The worst for SE Massachusetts looks to be in the late afternoon, but the threat of rain will be on us all day. If you have some shindig planned for Monday, you should have a strong indoor backup contingency plan.

She doesn't look to do much for the surf, as she won't be that strong when she's near us. There could be some rough surf on the South Coast and the Cape once she's been churning South of us for long enough. Don't board up the house or anything.

June tropical systems are rare in New England, and May ones are pretty much unheard of. This is a pretty concise list of New England hurricanes, and you don't see much/any early season activity vis a vis the Tropics. Even July is pretty weak historically up here.

Tropical Storm Agnes, which was a hurricane south of us, came ashore near New York City in June of 1972, but the effects on New England were minimal. Remnants of tropical storms like Alison (2001), Arlene (2005), Alberto (2006) and Barry (2007) also tapped New England in June. Barry dropped 3 inches of rain on Taunton. The dominant feature with these storms for New England, and especially eastern New England, were rain. Expect more of the same with Bonnie.

Ominous Storm Notes.... I used to roll with a girl named Bonnie when I was a younger man, and with God as my witness, and she once rendered me unconscious.

Volunteers Needed To Plant Flags At Veterans Cemetery

Hey folks!

We thought we'd pass on a request from Operation Flags For Vets.

OFFV is an effort to plant 66,000 flags on the graves of military veterans in Massachusetts National Veterans Cemetery in Bourne. They need volunteers.

"OPERATION FLAGS FOR VETS
May 28, 2016

Operation Flags for Vets will again be placing flags on the graves at the Massachusetts National Veterans Cemetery in Bourne, Massachusetts for Memorial Day. We are looking for volunteers to help with this worthy and solemn endeavor. People of all ages are welcomed to help in the placement of the 57,000 flags on the final resting place of our beloved veterans. 


Operation Flags for Vets is a program of the SFC Jared C. Monti Charitable Foundation established in memory of Medal of Honor recipient SFC Jared C. Monti; KIA Afghanistan 6-21-06. Donations to our foundation may be mailed to Paul Monti 408 Center Street Raynham, MA 02767."

We'll be there in some form. It's good for the kid to get a little patriotism, and a bit of work in the sun is good for me. With 66,000 flags to plant, they're going to need some diggers.

Archives: 2007 Nor'easter Hits Duxbury Beach

We're transferring our photo archive from one spot to another, and we're unearthing a few pictures that we'l be sharing out over the upcoming weeks.

One theme you will see a few times is "Duxbury Beach, Nor'easter."

We have a pile of pics on this topic, so brace yourselves over the next few weeks.

Hurricane season is actually the calm time on Duxbury Beach, so these storm photos will hopefully keep the storm-lovers happy during the off-season.

My memory is notoriously spotty, but I'm pretty sure that these pictures are from a 2007 nor'easter.

My sister Sheila is on the camera, and these pictures are from Ocean Road North on Duxbury Beach

These pictures ran on Cape Cod TODAY, who used to go off-Cape now and then if a writer maybe had a sister trapped in a beach house during a coastal storm.

It is technically Cape Cod Bay, I suppose. It also is part of why the Irish Riviera is included in this article.

If you'd like a scale of reference, take note of the fence in the lower left hand corner.

Keeping a lawn is a tough business on Duxbury Beach. Every winter, the storms take big chunks of it away, and what's left has been power-soaked in Atlantic salt water.

When I lived there, I had a lawn, a garden and a high-maintenance cobblestone patio to the right of that fence. Re-did it every year. I'm one of the very few people walking around in 2016 with a permanently deformed finger relating to a "cobblestone accident."

We're looking north in this picture, down northern Duxbury Beach towards Green Harbor.

It's almost impossible to see the town line, but it's about where the really large (100-150 yards) break in the seawall is if you're ever taking a walk down there. The break exists because the residents there decided that they were highly-enough elevated, and passed on paying the fee being charged to put up the concrete seawall in the 1950s.

Green Harbor gets a bit more of a curve to their seawall. This results in some spectacular surf-to-seawall crash spraying, as the wave hits the wall and rolls down it. You get some sweet house-high spray.

Duxbury has more of a straight-line frontage to storm winds, and they get the more foundation-shaking direct hits.

It looks worse than it is. The seawall takes most of the shots, and the spray- however impressive it may look- isn't as bad as it gets when the actual waves start coming over the wall. It's why the pay so much to repair the seawalls.

A photographer shooting pictures from this vantage point in the Blizzard of '78 or the Halloween Gale of 1991 would have been killed.

This storm did some damage, though. It tore down decks, flooded the street, smashed through fences, ruined yards and scared witless everyone who had moved into the neighborhood since the last really bad storm.

A lot of people in that neighborhood buy a cottage, renovate it, and then realize a bit too late that the area is Poseidon's punching bag. There's a lot of turnover for a neighborhood that is Heaven-on-Earth for the other 364 days of the year.

Again, this is like a C+ storm. It did damage, but it wasn't ripping houses down.

Beach people have a high bar vis a vis How Scared They Get During Ocean Storms. While this is a bit heavy for it, kids in the neighborhood do risk-taking games with slightly smaller storms.

What they call a "Death Run" involves dropping onto the beach between waves ad running as far down the beach as you can before you have to desperately claw your way back up and over the seawall.

"Death Runs" may have died out with my generation. I go to a lot of beaches during storms, and I never see anyone doing them.

... on purpose, anyhow.

The area behind the house we were shooting from is a meadow. Locals call it "Bradford's," after a family that ran a beach parking lot there. It's the Low Ground of the neighborhood.

You can see the remnants of the last of WWII-era cottages below. That house in the background is no longer standing. Someone was going to build condos there before this storm. I believe that the effort has since been abandoned.

Bradford's, like the rest of the neighborhood, sits between Cape Cod Bay and a rather large marsh. The marsh fills up during really high tides, and it spills over into the neighborhood.

The whole Gurnet Road area of Duxbury Beach becomes an island during storms, and the nearest dry land is over about where Duxbury High School is used to be. At the moment this photo was taken, Duxbury Beach was an island, about a half mile offshore.

It's basically why Duxbury Beach won this contest.

Duxbury Beach, MA

The French Atlantic Cable Comes Ashore On Duxbury Beach, 1869

I may have run these before, not sure if I did it on this site or not. I lifted the pics from this site.

This is the Trans-Atlantic Cable coming ashore on Duxbury Beach on July 23rd, 1869. It's what Cable Hill is named for.

At the time, it was a big event. The cable stretched 3500 miles, from Brest, France. It cost a then-ridiculous $1.5 million. Everyone in town came out to watch it come ashore (there aren't many on the beach, but there was a 600 person tent on Abram's Hill across the bay), as did dignitaries from around the state. One of the first messages was sent to Napoleon III.

It came ashore at what is now Cable Hill. Since the cable hadn't landed at the time, locals called the area "Rouse's Hummock," after a farmer who was the sole inhabitant of the area for a while. Rouse's Hummock is what Hummock Lane is named for. Ironically, a "hummock" is a hill, while Hummock Lane is the lowest-lying inhabited land in the Gurnet Road area.

Nothing in the Gurnet Road area of Duxbury bears Rouse's name, and it is lost to history.... save for here, of course.

This is the area where the first opening in the seawall is now. The guy standing alone on the dune is about where my(Steve) house would be 100 years later.

Duxbury had a very impressive dune in place. It seems much larger than the dunes down on the uninhabited parts of Duxbury Beach are presently. There was no jetty in Green Harbor at the time. The jetty there went up after the Portland Gale in 1899, limiting the flow of sand down to Duxbury Beach.

Notice that there are no houses around the dunes. A storm in 1806 (my source says 1806, but a Category 3 hurricane hit Massachusetts in 1804) closed the outlet to the sea for the Green Harbor River, Her mouth was further South than it is now, with "now" meaning where the Green Harbor Marina is. The water in the area became stagnant, and was a mosquito factory for 150 years or so. The Cut River was dug out after the GHR mouth closure, but Duxbury Beach was just sand and dunes for a while.

They did subdivide 300 cottage lots in 1888 further down the beach (they're why the Powder Point Bridge was built... prior to the bridge, if Duxbury residents wanted to go to the beach they just took a boat across the bay), but the Portland Gale tore Duxbury Beach to shreds and nixed those plans with the quickness 10 years later.

I'm not sure when the cottages on the north end of Duxbury Beach went up. Duxbury historians have generally been very interested in the Beach Reservation part,of Duxbury Beach while concurrently having no interest at all in the Irish Riviera part further North on the beach. Many people from Duxbury Proper think that this neighborhood is in Marshfield.

Back to the cable....

They (the workers, who may be French, are the ones in the light-colored work shirts, and were the only barefoot ones in the pictures when they are on the actual beach) dragged the cable into what most residents of the area refer to as Bradford's Parking Lot. You can see Bradford's in the bottom picture.

It went into the wooded area at the foot of Cable Hill. If you stalk into the scrub pines on the south end of the hill, you can still find some of the wreckage from the relay station.

From Cable Hill, it went across the marsh into Duxbury Proper, ending at the Cable Office house on the banks of the Bluefish River.

The cable was very busy for a while, and 40 francs would buy you 10 transmitted words.

It was used heavily until a 1929 Grand Banks earthquake/tsunami created an undersea avalanche that destroyed several cables. The Duxbury/France cable was among the casualties.

My dad, in a good example of making busy work, used to pay me $5 per foot for hack-sawing pieces of the cable. It was already snapped by this point, and the sharp edges were sticking up from the beach, so it was more of a public service than it sounds like.

Most Ghetto, Southeastern Massachusetts Edition

New Bedford

Eastern Massachusetts is not without her faults. However, one thing we are not is Ghetto.

Granted, we have Fall River. You can get the Fear nice and easy in Fall River. It's a tough town. Most famous resident? An axe-murderess. Most beloved? Probably the same girl.

Taunton, Brockton and New Beddy are no walk in the park, either... or they're a walk in the park where you get beaten up by a gang of thugs for no reason. After that, there is what skiers call a precipitous drop-off.

Some of the tougher parts of our region aren't THAT tough. I'm not taking about individual citizens. I'm sure there's at least one bad-ass Kennedy (found him!) drawing breath somewhere, and you can get beaten up at the Bia Bistro in Cohasset just as badly as you can get handled at a Fall River Popeye's if you cross the wrong opponent.

Still, if you put on NWA and drive around Brockton, it sort of makes sense as long as your eyes don't go to the rear view mirror at the wrong angle. Try going down King Caesar Road in Duxbury with Bring The Ruckus playing. Your own silliness might strangle you.

There's nothing wrong with this. "Escaping an urban nightmare" is a top reason for moving out to the countryside. "Good visual environment for my Nasty Nas CD" isn't.

Still, if someone establishes a scale for Ghetto, and if the numbers on that scale can be applied to any town anywhere, you can rank towns with it. Lo and behold, that's just what someone did.

They used a simple formula.

Ghetto Bird

Household income levels
High school graduation rates
Number of convenience stores
Number of drug stores
Number of discount stores
Crime
Twitter mentions of #ghetto

It's a flawed formula, but it should be fun to play with.

Here's their Top 15:

Lawrence
Springfield
Chelsea
New_Bedford
Brockton
Holyoke
Lynn
Lowell
Fall River
Worcester
Everett
Revere
Boston
Fitchburg
Wareham

Wareham

Wareham is sort of the WTF on this list, IMHO. I feel badly knowing that she'll be 4th once I start a whittlin' everything North and West of Bristol and Plymouth County out of the master list.

There are definitely some flawed criteria. Twitter references are worrisome. I was a teacher for a while, and I heard kids describe every town on earth as "ghetto." Kids own Twitter, I suppose, and may lack the seasoning to know True Ghetto and why Whitman-Hanson isn't it.

They say that they use "5000 residents" as a cutoff point. Yet, I don't see Duxbury or Bourne or Marshfield or a dozen other towns with populations over 5K. If its a typo and the number is suposed to be 50,000 residents, why is Wareham there?

I was very much looking forward to the bottom of this list, as I wanted to see how the silver-spoon towns fared against each other. It'd be fun to imagine a couple of stockbrokers arguing about whether Cohasset is more thugged out than Sandwich. Alas, the list plays out before we get to the Blue Bloods.

The convenience store angle seems to be ranked right up there with Poverty and Crime, which would to throw a wrench into things. I think that if a Cumby's opens up near the Tedeschi's in your cow town, it shouldn't suddenly make you more Gangsta than someone from Lowell.

Straight Outta Hingham!

However, only my love of Wareham and the lower ranking of Boston makes me really have any issue with the Top 15.

I may get a bit of static from my readers, and I just ask them to remember that I am merely passing along the information on this list. I'm not smart enough to factor that many variables into an equation, even with My Damned Aunt Sally helping. I am smart enough to take a Top 100 list and chop it down to just show the towns in our region, and that's just what we're about to do.

Fall River

Regional Rank  City   Crime Score Original Rank

1) new_bedford 161.7 4
2) brockton 146 5
3) fall_river 190.3 9
4) boston 155.6 13
5) wareham 115.4     14
6) quincy 169.1 26
7) taunton 143.5 33

Well, maybe they have some points after all. Some people might flip Fall River and New Bedford, Most people might see the flaws in not having Boston as the anchorman. Larger towns suffer a bit in the ratings, as the sheer number of people make for lower rates.

Wareham seems to be ranked too highly, but maybe they just try really hard. I worked Boston in mostly to knock the 'Ham down a spot.

Our coverage area showed well, taking 4 of the top 14 spots.

Now, remember when I said "precipitous drop-off" earlier. Here we are!

bridgewater 172.5 39
west_yarmouth 124 41
attleboro 116 42
middleborough_center 154.3 43
fairhaven 117.3 46
barnstable_town 168.1 48
plymouth 149.9 52

I went to college in Bridgewater, and it's more bucolic than ghetto. A great bit of the town is structured around the fact that there is a college in town. The college is not the only entity in town that may be weakening the stock. As someone on a Bridgewater Facebook page said, "The nuthouse down the road lowers our ratings, as does the mental hospital."

Just kidding, I went to BSC. Class of 2000, blogga!

West Yarmouth? How? Ah, 5% margin of error and all.

Plymouth and Barnstable have their rotten parts, but rarely would one fear to stroll through them. They do the service of grouping their poor into certain areas. Bourne is good at that, too. They stash them right by the highway.

Kingston

weymouth_town 152.8 59
middleborough 69.3 60
nantucket 115.8 61
east_falmouth 149.7 64
foxborough 62.9 64
south_yarmouth 105.9 66
kingston 80.3 69

Foxboro is plummeting down the list now that Aaron Hernandez Inc. is within the system. They should sign Greg Hardy.

I wonder if Nantucket is America's most ghetto island? I suppose that Long Island has them beat.

I have no idea what Kingston is doing there, unless the guy who made the list counted Halifax and Plympton's dropouts from Silver Lake as all being from Kingston.

yarmouth 136.5 76
mashpee 115.7 77
somerset 154.1 78
abington 85.9 78
hull 166.3 81
harwich 71.8 83
rockland 112.4 88
mansfield_center 49.4 96

We're really reaching here, and I sort of understand why the list gets cut off where it does.

Conspicuous in their absence....

Sandwich
Marshfield
Chatham
Halifax
Rochester
Scituate
Carver
Hanover
Whitman
Cohasset
Duxbury

Duxbury

Content Reblogged from roadsnacks.net