SCITUATE - Rescue crews, municipal workers and homeowners are digging out this morning as flood waters that inundated coastal neighborhoods Thursday turn to ice.
Crews in Scituate were using front-end loaders to scoop up frozen seawater from coastal roads this morning, while in Duxbury state emergency officials were working to help residents in still-flooded neighborhoods that were just starting to ice up. Many schools and municipal office remained closed for a second day on the South Shore and parking bans were being enforced in some towns, including Weymouth, as crews continued to clearing more than a foot of snow left in places by the storm.
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In Hull, which had about a dozen flooded homes in the Hampton Circle, Town Manager Philip Lemnios said flood waters didn’t recede in some areas until 11 p.m. or midnight Thursday, allowing the water to freeze into “slushy mix” that crews were still working to clear Friday ahead of even colder temperatures this weekend.
“That is the stuff that will freeze rock hard over the next 12 hours,” Lemnios said.
Sue Egan, a lifelong Scituate resident out for her "usual after-storm walk" on Friday morning said she hadn't seen the town's harbor hit by flooding as bad as Thursday's since the Blizzard of ‘78. She said she usually sees seawater reach down to 4th Avenue during storms, but this time the made it to around 7th.
John Woodland, who lives on Oceanside Avenue across the street from a section of seawall that the town replaced last year, said the new structure kept the flooding from being worse.
"It was pretty intense, but the new seawall, I think, helped a lot. The waves were high, but there wasn't quite as much water as we're used to," he said as he cleared snow off of his car.
Woodland said that for residents of the Scituate waterfront, flooding has become a fact of life, something they see with every coastal storm. He said he spent his Thursday clearing storm drains.
"The water is going to come over that wall no matter what. Our thing is how fast you can get the water out, especially now when we're going to get a freeze," he said.
The effects of that freeze were taking hold by Friday morning. Slick sheets of frozen seawater blanketed parts of Oceanside Drive, Lighthouse Road, Rebecca Road, and Sixth and Seventh Avenue after Thursday's three-foot storm surge sent waves crashing over the seawall, bursting through it in sections. With temperatures hovering in the low-20s much of the day, the water froze faster than the tide waters could recede.
By 8:30 a.m. on Friday, the Scituate Department of Public Works had crews manning front-end loaders scraping the brittle ice from the roadways. By mid-morning, barely a frozen puddle remained.
In Scituate Harbor, lobsterman Paul Gillis was red-faced after a ride on a skiff out to the 52-foot boat he works on, the Julia Rose. It was moored about 100 feet out from the docks near the Mill Wharf Tavern, but took over an hour for the crew of five to break through six inches of ice to get to the boat and drive it off its mooring before the ice grew thicker. They're going fishing tomorrow, after all.
"We had to move the boat to the dock. You don't want the ice getting thicker," he said. Wind chills could reach minus -30 degrees tomorrow.
The extent of flooding Thursday caught many residents by surprise. Brian O'Connell, an Otis Road resident who has seen flood waters reach his top steps many times in the eight years he's lived there, thought he was planning ahead when he parked his car Thursday morning a block away on Jericho Road, a harbor-facing street that has never flooded in his memory. This time it did.
"Usually we watch the flooding on Otis. I've never seen the water rise so quick and wash straight through to the harbor," Joe Donnelly, who lives on Jericho Road.
Despite the damage from the near-record tides -- which meteorologists said riveled the Blizzard of 1978 -- relatively few homes were without power. At the height of the storm, more than 20,000 utility customers in Massachusetts were without power, including about 6,000 in Plymouth County, but by 11 a.m. today there were fewer than 500.
Mike Durand, a spokesman for Eversource, said the storm caused "significant" problems for power lines but crews were able to respond quickly, restoring power to an estimated 75,000 customers who lost it at some point Thursday. He said the company was helped by the fact that New Hampshire was largely spared by the storm, allowing Eversource to bring its crews and contractors down into Massachusetts to help out.
"It really becomes 'all hands on deck' when we have this kind of storm," he said.