Coastal Engineer Anna Johnson of BayLand Consultants & Designers speaks at the flood mitigation meeting Sept. 9 while project leader Larry White looks on.
Flooding is the country’s primary natural disaster. In Cambridge, it is mainly due to the city’s location as a coastal community. In order to counter the effects of flooding here, Cambridge resident Larry White and a team of experts decided several years ago to create a mitigation plan. On the evening of September 9, the team provided an update on the project in the form it has today.
The flood mitigation endeavor is part of what became known as the Cambridge Shoreline Resilience Plan, the purpose of which is “to comprehensively evaluate factors and conditions contributing to both existing and future flooding problems.” Elements of the plan include documentation of the planning process, identification of flood hazard risk, and development of strategies to reduce floods risk vulnerability and improve resiliency.
The meeting opened with comments by City Manager Glenn Steckman, who said the flood mitigation project must go through or Cambridge will continue to have flooding on and beyond Water Street, by the marina. Appealing to citizens concerned with economic impacts, Steckman mentioned that greater flooding would affect events such as Ironman. He also reassured taxpayers that all the funding is federal money. For these reasons, he said, the mayor and city council support the project.
White recounted the origins of the project, which were previously covered by the Spy in this 2024 article. As he told the attendees of the meeting, the project has acquired 10 grants totaling $22 million, but they’re applying for more, including from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), requesting an additional $20 million. Next April, the city will seek a construction grant of $4 million, by which time the final design for the project will be well on its way to completion. However, FEMA will have another six months to decide if it will provide more money. All told, the project is looking at wrapping up in 2028.
Anna Johnson and Megan Barneia of BayLand Consultants & Designers went over the design, explaining that proposed flood protection would include an embankment (earthen, rockfill, and road raising) and a living shoreline with such features as a reef protection structure, stone breakwater, shallow water habitat, and sand dunes with plantings.
The design would deal with stormwater in several ways. Underground storage areas would include storage pipes with stone bedding, and drainage for smaller rainfall events would be accomplished with gravity while larger storms would be handled by pump stations, located in underground wet wells, that discharge over earthen berms.
After that part of the presentation, Dr. Kenny Rose of Horn Point Laboratory talked about the focus on habitat benefits of the living shoreline, which will be studied through species models and lists as well as field sampling.
For more information, visit the project website.
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