MARBLEHEAD — Local and state leaders gathered along the town’s coast to welcome state Climate Chief Melissa Hoffer for a discussion about the region’s coastal resiliency efforts on Friday.
Hoffer was appointed to the role in April 2023 by Gov. Maura Healey. Not only is she the first climate chief in Massachusetts, but the position is also the first of its kind in the country.
Hoffer described one part of her role as formulating a more consistent and unified coastal resiliency effort for different communities.
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense for each individual community to be planning how it’s going to address a problem when it has a problem that’s similar to its next-door neighbor,” Hoffer said. “We maybe don’t have to spend as much time thinking about particular impacts when we can come up with a more regional strategy for helping folks deal with it.”
Another one of her responsibilities is to support the mitigation of climate change’s effect on the state’s coast until a long-term solution can be reached.
“Even if you turned off all the sources of greenhouse-gas emissions, like if we had a magic wand and we could do that, there’s still a lot of warming baked into the system,” Hoffer said. “So we’re still going to see a tremendous amount of sea-level rise and we’re still going to see those impacts.”
She applauded the Marblehead community for its awareness of coastal flooding dangers and its concrete efforts to minimize them.
State Rep. Jenny Armini, Town Administrator Thatcher Kezer, Director of Public Works Amy McHugh, and others joined Hoffer as they showed her multiple locations along the coast that have been negatively affected by flooding and other events related to climate change.
Harbormaster Mark Souza informed Hoffer of the damage the State Street Landing endured during a storm in 2018.
“In 2018 where we’re standing right now, there was nothing here,” Souza recalled.
He added that when the landing was first built, the degree of potential flooding was not taken into account. Armini noted that rock beaches, like those in Marblehead, could provide better protection against flooding than sand beaches.
However, Souza said that the way the ocean’s currents interact with the rocky shore of the State Street Landing poses a problem.
“We don’t have the absorption, we have the deflection,” Souza said. “So this becomes a washing machine here, facing directly northeast. So everything comes straight in here and has nowhere to go.”
Hoffer was later shown the beach on Front Street, which McHugh noted is in need of structural reinforcement. On Fort Beach Lane, the group was joined by resident Felix Twaalfhoven, who showed photos of severe flooding during a storm in 2018.
“We’d be up to our knees right now,” Twaalfhoven said.
Armini asked Hoffer what some of her interim solutions are for minimizing the threat of a flood.
“People are doing more nature-based solutions, where you will have an oyster shell break or something out there. Some people are doing effectively like a gate or a wall that will close or protect the harbor during certain times,” Hoffer said. “Some people are thinking about ways to shore up the infrastructure and resilience while you are easing back some of the stuff that’s super close (to the coast).”
