Boston

Friday Marks 1 Year Since Record Boston Flood

This time last year it was a race against the water in Boston.

A storm, which created blizzard conditions atop Milton’s Blue Hill Observatory and in parts of Rhode Island, battered the city just days into the new year.

Downtown streets flooded, and some people waded through knee deep water, but others had to be rescued by Boston Fire boats.

Cars and buses crawled through the flooding near the Rose Kennedy Greenway, just in front of the Aquarium Blue Line station. Inside the station, trains stopped as water cascaded into the subway.

Nearby, in the Seaport District, it was a similar scene, as chunks of ice floated down the road, taking a dumpster for a ride on one street.

The flooding set a new all-time high water mark in Boston with high tide hitting 15.16 feet. It broke the old record set decades before in the benchmark Blizzard of 1978.

In Gloucester on the North Shore, the flood waters swamped cars parked at the high school. It was a similar situation on the South Shore in Quincy.

Through the storm, plows tried to push around not just slushy floodwaters, but also a foot of snow.

In Worcester, snowfall actually reached 17 inches.

On Nantucket, wind gusts hit 76 mph.

Back in Boston, the flooding we saw on Jan. 4, 2018 will likely become more common as sea levels continue to rise.

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