Flood voyeurism
Glades Road in a frequently flooded section of Minot, a neighborhood of Scituate, Mass. “The Glades” is a summer compound of Massachusetts’s historically famous Adams family. Hit the links below to see the area in a more exciting situation.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
When I was kid, we much enjoyed the coastal flooding that accompanied Nor’easters in Cohasset, my hometown on Massachusetts Bay. Sometimes the water would cover some stretches of streets from which you couldn’t see the ocean because of the woods in the way. Sometimes we’d get to row on these roads. Cheap thrills indeed.
But a better show was in nearby Scituate, where a densely packed community on a point, with both summer and year-round houses, is massively flooded every few years. The houses shouldn’t be there, but federal flood insurance, which started in 1968, sustains this seeming idiocy even as rising sea level makes places such as Scituate more vulnerable.
After I got my driver’s license, I’d go to Scituate alone or with friends to watch the show and take some pictures.
Hit these links to get a sense of what we’d see: