For the most part, Boston’s sewer infrastructure works pretty well. But as climate change causes sea levels to rise and brings more intense storms with a lot of rain, the stormwater system is going to be in trouble.
Rainwater collects on a manhole cover on Marginal Street in East Boston.
With this in mind, it's easy to understand why the worst-case scenario is a big storm that drops a ton of rain quickly during high tide. It’s a recipe for flooding, road closures and other associated public safety or health issues. And as sea levels rise, it will only get worse. “I was at school for one of those storms and I couldn't go home for hours. I had to wait it out until the water came down again,” she said. “The other storm was overnight and we couldn't leave. We were in our house and we couldn’t leave. So it completely cuts off our neighborhood when it floods.”
Years ago, while one of the two roads into Port Norfolk was closed for construction, an older man on her street had a heart attack. His wife called 911 and the ambulance driver mistakenly went to the closed entrance and had to reroute. “When you think about a one- or two-hour disruption where water is pooling up on a road and you can't use it, even that can cost millions of dollars in lost time” and wages, and it can cause huge amounts of “frustration and complexity” if it messes up your work or childcare schedule, he said.
Agrawal and Gleason position the camera on the side of a small bridge overlooking a muddy creek near Neponset Circle in Dorchester. To their back, the mid-day traffic of I-93 roars. Gleason hits a button and the camera begins humming. It lets out three loud beeps and then a long shutter click. Similar to the cameras Google uses for its Street View maps, this little machine could play a big role in helping Boston resolve some of its stormwater problems.
He pulls out his iPad and calls up a map that shows the outline of the drainage area and the outfall. There are stormwater pipes running underground throughout this area, but “these red lines right here,” he said, pointing with the tip of his pen, “show pipes where the bottom of the pipe is below what the high tide level could be in the future. And so you can imagine that's the whole area that could be influenced just by high tide.
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