We’ve all seen the flooding. Tides rising higher than ever spilling into the streets and causing damage and delays. Well, Mayor Marty Walsh has a plan and it involves a group effort from big businesses like Procter & Gamble, GE and don’t forget about all those wealthy developers. Walsh is also seeking FEMA grants and state and federal funding. So with all this capital will Boston build a wall straight out of Game of Thrones? No, it’s going be a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, project-by-project plan.
Walsh presented this plan at a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce breakfast meeting on Wednesday. According to the Boston Globe, the plan involves creating new parks along the coastline in the hopes it will act as a buffer for the neighborhoods. New parks could be in the works for Tenean Beach and Belle Isle Marsh in East Boston. Low-lying streets like Morrissey Boulevard would also be raised up! (Thank God, finally!) Moakley Park will could also be built up by several feet to protect from flooding in addition to the banks of the Fort Point Channel.
The plan also includes building sea walls along privately owned parts of of the Harborwalk in the Seaport District.
So big changes on the horizon for the neighborhoods in danger of damaging flooding but of course it ain’t cheap. The total price tag is estimated to be $1 billion. Holy Moly.
You can learn more about Resilient Boston Harbor here!
Image via BPDA – rendering of Fort Point Channel
I applaud the effort to do something, although all of this is a short term band aid to a much larger problem. It’ll just be a billion now, but when the seas get higher, it’ll be another few billion, and then more and more. What really needs to happen is we need to stop building and revitalizing property abutting the ocean. Crazy idea I know but it’s really a lost cause at this point. The decision to dump billions into the seaport was extremely short sited, luckily most of it was private money so we won’t get burned too bad. It’s just sad to see people thinking we can just throw money at some barriers and hope we can stem the tides of ocean, it’s not how it works. We concede, and that’s that.
A great example of a smart company is John Hancock. They are vacating their entire building in the seaport to lease to other companies and then they’re going to sell it once it’s fully leased. They know what’s coming.