On a stormy day in December, a promising new storm-deployable barrier arrived in Provincetown’s East End — in pieces. Each segment was waist-high, shaped like the letter “L,” and made of bright red plastic. It took a six-man crew from the Department of Public Works some moments of puzzling to figure out how the 50-odd pieces fit together.
“So I think this goes on the ground, right?” Jim Vincent, director of Provincetown’s DPW asked the men around him. “You think it’s going to go this way? Just like that?”
But soon, the sound of red plastic pieces interlocking overtook the sound of coastal wind gusts.
“There we go! Now it’s tight,” Vincent said.
“Now we have motion,” agreed DPW worker Nate Edwards.
In less than a half -hour, the crew was able to assemble a 150-foot-wide, water-tight wall and weigh it down with heavy sandbags. The idea was to direct storm water away from a few dozen historic homes in this neighborhood. Vincent said he hoped to prevent flooding here for what would be a third winter in a row.
“We’re ready to try something different,” he said. “That’s really the goal here.”
Locals say the East End of Provincetown historically hasn’t flooded often. But a combination of sea level rise, erosion, and global warming has changed that. Since 2018, four major storm-driven floods have struck, wreaking havoc for home and business owners in the low-lying area.
Now, in a world of no perfect answers, Provincetown is experimenting with ways to try to help the people who live here, stay here.
Quinn Taylor, a local restaurateur, bought his home in the East End in 2011.
“You know, the house has been here since 1850. She’s withstood many storms,” he said. “But climate change is real, kids.”
In December 2022, Taylor looked out his bedroom window during a storm and saw waist-deep water in his front yard. Within 20 minutes, he said, water had begun rising through his floorboards.
“Everything was destroyed, because it was saltwater, and dirty saltwater at that,” he recalled. “It was floors, baseboards, doors, foundation. The whole kitchen was all wiped out.”
The event came as a shock. Taylor said the only time this house had flooded previously was in 1971 — and that was from heavy rainfall, not seawater. After the 2022 flood, he said, he spent a high six-figure sum and a lot of time on renovations. And then, a year later, almost to the day, it happened again.
“We were literally unloading my furniture,” he said. “The kitchen flooded again.”
Experts from Provincetown’s Center for Coastal Studies say wind and waves, even during small storms, have been chipping away at East End beaches for years. And then, in 2018 a major storm weakened a dune, which prompted one beachfront homeowner in the East End to elevate their home, allowing water to pass underneath it. That opened up a major new stormtide pathway for floodwaters to flow into low-lying streets behind it.
Only a few of these pathways are needed to make a coastal location vulnerable.
With this in mind, during that 2023 storm, Taylor and his neighbors laid out sandbags.
“I’ve got great friends who — I call them ‘the sandbag brigade,’” Taylor said. “They’re awesome.”
But sandbags weren’t enough. More was needed to protect this area. And to Taylor’s relief, the town agreed. Enter: the red plastic flood barrier — a temporary structure meant to be set up and taken down in any area of town, all in a couple of days, whenever bad weather makes it necessary.
“We sort of need to try things,” explained Dan Riviello, Provincetown’s assistant town manager. “Because not doing anything and leaving people to fend for themselves is sort of the way things have historically been done. However, we do believe — I think this is the philosophy of the town manager and the select board — that local government should be here to help. So what can we do? Let’s try some things. Let’s be nimble.”
Town residents recently approved a $150,000 fund to buy a quick-fill sandbag machine, conduct a deep cleaning of catch basins, and purchase the red plastic flood barrier for the East End. The experimental barrier itself cost just $12,000. The rest of the money will likely be spent exploring other ways to redirect stormwater.
“We ordered another type of barrier that has a metal frame and sort of a skin overtop of it that we’re going to test in the west end of town, to help sort of raise the height of a very low wall that’s on the coast in that area,” Riviello said.
And for the longer term, town officials are working on a coastal resilience plan with the Woods Hole Group, a coastal engineering firm. It looks at sea level rise, storm surge, and likely erosion impacts over the next 45 years. It also offers practical solutions for looming problems posed by climate change.
“We’ll figure it out,” Riviello said. “But in the interim, we’re sort of in that test-and-see phase. Let’s see what small things we can do now, while we figure out what that big picture means for the future of our coastline.”
Flood waters didn’t end up breaching the East End’s sea walls during last month’s storm, so the DPW’s quick deployment of the temporary flood barrier acted more as a dry run, and the system itself remains untested. But if the last few years are any indication, it won’t be long until Jim Vincent’s DPW team pulls out those red plastic pieces and snaps them together again.
As for restaurateur Quinn Taylor, he said even if he does face more flooding at his 1850s-era home, he’s not going anywhere.
“I survived this far,” he said. “I better survive anything else.”
This story was originally published by CAI. It was shared as part of the New England News Collaborative.
