While the weather in Mashpee on Sunday was far from the hoped for fall crispness many of us have been anticipating after a very humid summer, it was nothing like what my neighbors in Sandwich were experiencing. Sure, the sky looked a little ominous to the north, but I was shocked by the reports that the Sagamore Bridge was closed due to flooding of the approach roads from heavy rains on Sunday. Combine that with the flood alerts received by my visiting kids for the portions of Somerville where they live and the pictures of utter devastation along Rt. 2 in central Massachusetts from Monday’s rain and its increasingly clear that the future of climate change is upon us.
Equally clear from examples local, national, and global is that our stormwater infrastructure is not designed to handle new precipitation patterns. When undersized and antiquated infrastructure is combined with the destruction of wetlands, designed by nature to give flood waters someplace to go, is it any wonder that the damage to buildings and roads is increasing? The message here is obvious and one ignored at our own peril; we are all vulnerable to loss of property and even life from sudden and severe storms.
The only rational response we can have is to improve the capability of our infrastructure to handle these new storms while also preserving undeveloped wetlands and restoring degraded ones. An approach to climate response that neglects working with nature will be unnecessarily expensive and ultimately a failure. Investing in additional open space protection and wetlands restoration will save the public money in the long run and will enhance our ability to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of the climate changes already in the works.
With a hurricane likely passing just offshore this week, Cape Cod appears poised to survive this latest risk to our collective well-being. But it is inevitable that we will have a storm that makes the flooding of this past weekend look minor. We should be putting the time we have before the next storm to good use by encouraging our towns to pick up the pace of open space protection, strengthen wetlands protection and modernize stormwater infrastructure with an emphasis on the use of green infrastructure like that which APCC has helped numerous towns implement.
Willful ignorance or seeking higher ground is not a strategy. We need to do better and it is clear what that looks like.
