The risks and rewards of owning a home on Scituate’s perilous coast
Recent storms have battered the South Shore town.
Last week’s nor’easter resulted in some harrowing images in Scituate. Kate McRoberts found herself in one.
McRoberts said her plan was to check on her Oceanside Drive home early Friday “before things got really bad.” However, she got held up at a work meeting in Hanover. When she arrived at her coastal home, it was too late. The storm, which resulted in widespread South Shore flooding, had indeed gotten really bad.
“I went down a couple roads that I would normally go to get to our house and they were completely — I’ve never seen them that flooded,” McRoberts said.
Driving a Jeep Wrangler, she nevertheless decided to press on to her house after seeing a smaller car make it through the water coming from the direction of the Scituate Lighthouse. Approaching her house from the south on another coastal road, McRoberts said she had to time her drive to avoid the surging ocean water.
“In between each house, there’s huge waves just breaking and pushing the sand through,” she recalled. “So I kind of was timing it to go when they weren’t coming through that much.”
McRoberts says everything looked OK when she got to her house, but, when she got back to her car to leave, the waters had risen to the point where the route that she had just drove looked impassable. She considered going back in her home, which overlooks the ocean seawall, or trying it out in her car.
“It’s still really bad, but I’m going to wait and see,” McRoberts remembered thinking, not realizing that the waters wouldn’t fully recede at low tide.
As she tried to decide between two bad options, McRoberts said she saw the headlights of a big khaki-colored truck behind her. Inside the truck were several Scituate firefighters, National Guard members — and Boston Globe photographer Craig Walker, who was riding along in the back and captured photos of McRoberts’s escape. McRoberts says they were able to lead her down Oceanside Drive to Kenneth Road, which was also flooded, but not as bad.
“It looks horrific when you see the picture of me, but on my side it didn’t look half as bad as the rest of it looked,” she said. “I got out very happy, very relieved.”
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McRoberts says her family bought the house two years ago and had planned to live there full-time after they sold their home in Pembroke last fall. However, they found another home in Hanover where she works and now only live at 6 Oceanside Drive, which they rent out in the summer, for two or three months a year.
A Cape Cod native, McRoberts says she had ridden out storms before, but never this close to the ocean.
“If you walk out on our main deck and look down, we’re right over the seawall,” she said.
That means that McRoberts has had to take extensive measures to protect against the encroaching sea. The three-bedroom house is raised 14 feet off the ground, equipped with mechanical accordion storm shutters on its first-floor deck doors, and storm protectors on the other ocean-facing doors and windows.
“If we hadn’t had those and had our regular storm protection,” she said, “I don’t know if we would have done as well.”
McRoberts says the damage her home incurred was relatively minor. The house lost some bits of railing and decking and sustained some damage to one of the doors. They also had to dig a table and some deck furniture out of the massive piles of beach sand that the storm had pushed inland. By comparison, the damage they sustained was far less than many neighbors.
“The B&B that’s next to us, they got the whole front part of their deck ripped off,” McRoberts said. “There’s a house that’s coming off its pilings.”
McRoberts says last week’s nor-easter and the destructive storm in January have been eye-openers — “this one in particular” — and that the increasingly destructive events have given even longtime residents pause.
“This past one is probably the worst one I’ve seen,” she said. “If we had another storm like that come along and start to see a pattern, then it would probably outweigh what it offers in the summer and the spring and the fall. If I were living there full-time, I would be a lot more nervous.”
For now, McRoberts says they’re hoping to clean up the home in preparation for the warmer season and have no plans to sell. From the views to the location to the quaint coast community, she says there are still a lot of positives.
“When you go there, it’s very relaxing,” she said. “Besides the storm.”
