REVERE — Officials across five communities along the Saugus River Watershed sought residents’ input on the development of a plan to identify flood risks in the area and potential solutions during a public forum Tuesday evening.
Everett, Revere, Lynn, Malden, and Saugus shared more than $150,000 in grant funding, announced last fall, as part of the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program, which awards grants to communities across the Commonwealth to develop climate change resilience. The funds allowed the five communities to come together and form a working group comprising stakeholders from each community that would work to develop a regional Saugus River Watershed vulnerability and adaptation study.
The city’s open space and environmental planner, Elle Baker, serves as the project’s lead. She explained that the study will examine critical infrastructure across the region and employ models to predict future risks to areas based on previous storms and patterns.
Baker quickly ceded the floor to Conor Ofsthun of Woods Hole Group, an international environmental, scientific, and engineering consulting organization headquartered in Falmouth. Ofsthun said the region already faces “extreme vulnerability” to flooding, pointing to the Point of Pines and Riverside areas in Revere, Strawberry Brook and the EDIC Pier in Lynn, and the area of Saugus from Bristow Street to Ballard Street as areas of particular concern.
Ofsthun then asked those in the audience to pinpoint areas on a map of the region where they live, work, visit often, or have seen flooding. Most of the stickers audience members placed on the map were concentrated in the Revere Beach area, likely at least partially a result of the forum being held in the city.
In developing the quantitative vulnerability assessment of the region, Ofsthun and other members of the team surveyed locations deemed to be critical infrastructure, determining their elevations and the risks they face due to flooding.
Areas of public critical infrastructure that face risks due to flooding include the Massachusetts Highway DPW Yard in Revere, the MBTA Bridge in Saugus, the Bridge Street Substation in Lynn, the Linden School in Malden, the MBTA Bus Terminal in Lynn, and the Lincoln Avenue Bridge in Saugus. Those areas are just the tip of the iceberg, Ofsthun said.
“In reality, we have many things to address all around the region,” he said, pointing to areas of transportation infrastructure such as the Commuter Rail and state roads in the region that could be severely impacted by flooding.
With areas at risk identified, the next step, Ofsthun said, was to figure out how to adapt those specific locations to ensure they could be more resilient to flooding.
“In terms of adapting, we are focusing in on critical infrastructure and winding our view back out to determine why it is vulnerable,” he said. “Flood pathways is this kind of lens that we look at flood risk because there are often pinch points, very narrow, low-elevation areas that flooding might come up through.”
Those flood pathways include the Blossom Street Waterfront in Lynn; the Saugus River Waterfront; Lynn’s Strawberry Brook; the area from Bristow Street to Ballard Street in Saugus; Town Line and Linden Brooks in Malden; and North Shore Road, Revere Street, Point of Pines, Riverside, and Revere Beach in the city.
Addressing those areas “can help us address regional risk with a smaller footprint project,” Ofsthun said, explaining that if flooding can be addressed at its source, it’s easier to manage.
“If we wanted to address flooding at a large scale, we can start to look at those flood pathways,” he said.
He then laid out a number of adaptation strategies, including avoiding areas at risk to flooding in the first place by not building new developments there. Another mode of adaptation is accommodating flooding by retrofitting buildings or other structures to “make it OK for water to flow through there.”
Ofsthun also suggested that nature-based infrastructure or hard infrastructure could play a role in protecting from flooding.
“We can also look to build regional resilience through addressing assets on a general scale … looking at low-lying roads can be one way of building regional resilience,” Ofsthun posited.
“We need to be ready for the floods when they come,” he added.
The work funded by the grant will be compiled into a written report, and Baker said the group is preparing to request another round of grant funding from the state to continue the work. The scope of the project remains broad, but will eventually be narrowed down to identify solutions for specific areas.
