HURRICANE HELENE’S destructive path through the south, flooding inland areas considered to be sanctuaries from the impact of serious weather and climate events, shocked the country with the scale of damage and loss of life. For Katherine Antos, the undersecretary of decarbonization and resilience at the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, the Carolinas flooding raised the specter of similar occurrences in the Bay State.
“I will say there are parallels between what we saw with Helene and Massachusetts, in terms of what started with concern about coastal flooding and the storm surge, and then really it was the inland flooding that had such drastic impacts,” Antos said on The Codcast.
Massachusetts’ climate change assessment predicts about two and a half feet of sea level rise by 2050, plus more severe heat, Antos said. “But when you look at the greatest impacts, in terms of impacts on our built infrastructure, it is actually the inland flooding along our rivers and also from extreme rainfall events,” she said. “So it is a similar story to what we saw in the Carolinas.”
Antos came to the resilience and decarbonization post from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, where she had been executive director for planning and sustainability.
Her first year in the job was marked by a series of serious climate challenges, from flooding in Western Massachusetts to heat events that required school closures right as the academic year began. Leominster is still recovering after catastrophic flash flooding last September caused millions of dollars in damage. Earlier in 2024, near record rainfall caused serious flooding in Attleboro.
“Since I’ve been in this role, even though it’s just been a year and a half, you’re seeing front and center that climate change is happening now and we need to deal with the impacts now,” she said. “And fortunately we do have a plan and a strategy that we are implementing to make ourselves more resilient to those changes.”
The ResilientMass plan is focused on predicting, withstanding, and recovering from natural hazard events like serious flooding. While there has been significant time and energy spent on assessing coastal flood risks, inland flooding predictions and mitigation have lagged.
“I will be honest, that is an area when I came in that we had less information, it was a data gap, and it’s not just Massachusetts,” Antos said.
The state is working with the United States Geological Survey and researchers at Tufts University, she said, to develop a mapping and modeling tool to help understand riverline flooding and heavy rainfall events that can overwhelm storm drain systems.
Resiliency strategies – which Antos notes are inherently tied to decarbonization and net zero efforts aimed at slowing the effects of climate change – must be both regional in nature but also tailored to particular areas. A new resilient coast strategy launched a year ago and is expected to wrap up in 2025, Antos said. It makes recommendations for 98 communities predicted to be impacted by coastal flooding, which goes beyond the 78 municipalities designated as Massachusetts coastal communities.
“It’s really easy to feel overwhelmed by everything everywhere, all at once,” she said. “And so we need to chunk it down so this makes sense and we know where to start.”
Flood resilience involves a combination of short-term and long-term strategies, Antos said. The city of Boston recently held its first “deployables day” to highlight new technology to quickly address sudden flooding that can threaten homes and infrastructure.
But areas should be working to coordinate beyond just the individual property scale, she said, as water might be rerouted away from one person’s house over to their neighbor’s if only one has deployables ready to pop into place.
Sometimes the best approach comes down to how much space a city, town, or individual property has available for mitigation, Antos said. An urban area may want a stabilized coastal edge of natural materials that takes a lot of space, “but honestly, because you have shipping channels, because you have property that’s coming right up to the sea edge, that just because of space, some nature-based solutions might not be possible.” A living sea wall, which takes up less space but includes vegetation, may be more tailored for those areas.
As flooding threatens more of the state, Antos points to flood insurance as a necessity still available to Bay State residents, while other coastal regions are increasingly getting priced out of insurance options or denied them entirely. Insurers can also be useful for policy planning, Antos said, and an upcoming convening of insurance experts from around the country should give Massachusetts some insight into how to connect insurance rates to area-wide resiliency efforts.
“We’re trying to support regional approaches so that communities can work together, because climate impacts don’t know political boundaries. It would make it easier if they did, but they don’t,” Antos said. “And so we do have some communities that are thinking about things like managed retreat and what they might do, examples being Hull or Barnstable. We also have some other communities, like Chatham, which are looking at resilient zoning and just saying, ‘Hey, you know what? There’s certain areas where it doesn’t make sense to build.’ I will say none of these conversations are easy. They’re hard decisions to have, but we are ready to have those hard conversations.”