North Andover: ‘The street looked like a river’
NORTH ANDOVER — In August 2023, Massachusetts was inundated with unusual rainstorms, packing a punch with damaging floods that devastated local businesses.
One rainstorm engulfed parts of the Merrimack Valley with flash flooding, after a total of 6 inches of rain fell in a matter of hours Aug. 8, 2023. Ten days later, 2 inches more fell quickly on the region after another storm, causing additional flooding.
Town Manager Melissa Murphy-Rodrigues previously estimated North Andover sustained $20 million in damages from the two storms in August 2023.
The state provided North Andover with $725,000 in flood relief funds to cover some costs, but that didn’t even come close to covering all the funds needed for repairs.
Most of the businesses on High Street that were hit by the rising water did not have flood insurance.
Good Day Cafe owner Gregg Lindsay said it took his eatery about five months to fully reopen after the floods. He remembers Aug. 8, 2023 like it was yesterday.
“It was an extraordinarily rainy day,” Lindsay said. “It was coming down in buckets, but the cafe was filled with people.”
Water rose from the basement and made its way through the establishment.
“The hallway here and the street looked like a river,” Lindsay said.
Brides Across America CEO and Founder Heidi Janson said she lost 80% of the inventory for her nonprofit due to the flooding. She estimated $7 million in losses at the hub at 40 High St.
Janson said she wanted to call it quits after the flood.
“I don’t even know how I had the energy to just keep moving on,” Janson said. “It was devastating.”
While the charity endured challenges over the following year, it was able to be moved into a new space, also on High Street, and start over.
“You have a vision and you know it’s going to work, but it took a lot of sleepless nights,” Janson said. “We persevered and kept pushing.
— Angelina Berube, staff writer
Essex County: ‘Last year was a crazy fire season’
Essex County has seen a surge in the number and intensity of wildfires in recent years, particularly last fall when numerous fires burned across the North Shore simultaneously.
A big part of the problem is that nearly all of Massachusetts continues to be challenged by severe drought, which creates fertile ground for wildfires.
Middleton had a particularly difficult time last fall with two large and stubborn blazes that consumed close to 740 acres, fire Chief Douglas LeColst said.
The first, along the wooded north shore of Middleton Pond (the Danvers reservoir) and into North Reading, consumed about 240 acres, he said.
The second, the Boxford Town Forest fire, consumed more than 500 acres of woods in Boxford and Middleton starting in early November.
The fire had largely subsided by mid-month, but only with assistance from multiple other area firefighting teams, as well as a Massachusetts Air National Guard helicopter team that made more than 100 airborne water drops during the worst of the fire, LeColst said.
Salem, Mass., has plenty of undeveloped land in the Salem Woods off Highland Avenue, said Salem fire Chief Alan Dionne, and it’s a prime target for brush fires.
As late as Oct. 29, Salem needed to call on 13 local fire departments to assist in extinguishing the Cain Hill Fire that had started several days earlier, Dionne said.
The fire created smoky conditions across the city and forced early dismissal of Salem High students due to the conditions.
“Last year was a crazy fire season,” Dionne said.
He added that Salem “still has hundreds and hundreds of acres of fuel load that has not burned — with much of it abutting housing.”
– Buck Anderson, Salem News
Newburyport: ‘When it floods … it floods’
On Plum Island in Newburyport, Reservation Terrace resident and at-large City Councilor Mark Wright has been dealing with the fallout of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ faulty 2015 repair to the south Plum Island jetty for 10 years.
The jetty in question is located on the Plum Island side of the mouth of the Merrimack River. Along with the north jetty located in Salisbury, it helps protect the immediate coastline from beach erosion.
In the spring of 2024, the Army Corps of Engineers completed a $9 million dredging project that saw 260,000 cubic yards of sand from the Newburyport and Salisbury sides of the Merrimack River deposited and sculpted into a new beach at Reservation Terrace.
However on Christmas weekend in 2023 the project wasn’t complete when weekend storm badly damaged a vacant home on 73rd Street.
Wright also said Mother Nature has recently built up the beach south of the jetty, cutting off the sand supply to his beach near 74th Street.
“That beach has actually grown significantly from 69th Street, all the way down to the center of the island,” he said.
Other than that, Wright said he and his fellow neighbors understand they live on a barrier island. Some flooding should be expected during winter and spring storms that occur during a full moon.
Plum Island, he added, sees the same flooding concerns it always has, climate change or not.
“There’s really no flooding specific to Plum Island,” Wright said. “When it floods at Center Island, it floods (inland) at Cashman Park too.”
— Jim Sullivan, Daily News of Newburyport
Gloucester: ‘The fish are really different’
At about 9:45 a.m. on April 10, Capt. Al Cottone of F/V Sabrina Maria out of Gloucester Harbor was out targeting flounder.
Talking on his cell phone and warning reception could cut out at any time, he said he would know how things were progressing that morning in an hour when he hauled back.
How has climate change impacted the fishery?
Cottone, the 59-year-old executive director of the Gloucester Fisheries Commission who has been fishing for four decades, said the way he sees it “the fish are really different.”
For example, he’s finding flounder in deeper water. The abundance of fish has not changed much, he said, just the timing of when to target a certain species.
“You have to learn how to target different species because they are reacting differently,” he said.
Some species might show up a week earlier than they traditionally did.
A few years ago, fishermen saw a huge run of yellowtail flounder. Traditionally, they were found at depths of 15 to 40 fathoms, but one year fishers were seeing them at depths of 80 to 100 fathoms around Stellwagen Bank. A fathom equals about 6 feet.
The tides are reacting differently as well, he said. They are a lot stronger than they were 10 years ago.
The other factor he has noticed, especially for in-shore fishermen like him, is the frequency of sustained winds, which create fewer and fewer opportunities to go out. He’s finding that winds have been about 30 knots nearly every day during the winter. As a result, he had only been out three of four times since Jan. 1 by the end of March.
“Everything is off,” Cottone said.
— Ethan Forman, Staff writer