It was a surprise to no one that Five Corners flooded this past weekend, and local officials were forced to close Beach Road for most of the day Saturday as an early-season nor’easter dumped between five and eight inches of rain on the Island.
Other places across the Island — Dock Street in Edgartown, Seaview Avenue in Oak Bluffs, and even Safe Harbor Marina near the museum — were also flooded, as the land appeared to give way to the ocean. But nowhere was as bad or obtrusive as the Five Corners intersection.
Years of frustration from Islanders and significant dangers as the route to both the hospital and the only year-round ferry terminal have pushed state and local officials to formulate a plan to fix the area. The state Department of Transportation (MassDOT), the town of Tisbury, and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC) are partnered on “formulating a robust drainage system,” Kirk Metell, director of public works for Tisbury, said of the infamous intersection.
The project is still in the design phase, and doesn’t have a timeline or cost estimate yet, but does build on a June 2025 study of the intersection, as well as Beach Road and Lagoon Pond Road, which were evaluated by MassDOT for short-term and long-term improvements. The project, called drainage project No. 609459, hopes to “improve stormwater conveyance and reduce flooding” at Five Corners in the “near term,” John Goggin, spokesperson for MassDOT, said.
Beach Road was closed from the intersection to the hospital for most of the day Saturday. Edgartown Fire Chief Alex Shaeffer said that the first closure message went out at 11:14 am, and a local MassDOT employee said the depth was definitely over a foot. The road wasn’t fully reopened until 8:30 pm.
Because there were no ferries Saturday after the Steamship Authority (SSA) canceled all the boats, obstructed travel to the port was less of an issue. The hospital, however, could only be reached from Oak Bluffs; patients could access the campus via the Eastville Avenue entrance.
Noah Brown, spokesperson for Mass General Brigham, said that the storm and road closure didn’t cause any ambulance delays, but “transports requiring moving patients off-Island for higher levels of care via ambulance and ferry were disrupted Friday [and] Saturday because [the] Steamship canceled ferry trips.”
MassDOT confirmed in the Beach Road study that any detours “adds significant travel time.” And still, truck traffic and their cargo can only reach the Vineyard Haven terminal by Water Street, and must go through Five Corners. Especially as the only year-round port on the Island, the area is critical to the Island’s supply chain.
The closure wasn’t unprecedented. Earlier this month, from a rain event that didn’t garner nearly as much recognition as last weekend’s nor’easter, on Sept. 13, Five Corners flooded and Beach Road was closed. There were multiple cars submerged in the water and stuck, and the road was closed between 11:30 am and 5 pm. In an email to town officials, Sean Young, local building inspector and conservation agent for the town of Tisbury, said that the rainfall added an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 gallons of extra flow to the drainage system. He added that the pipes are supposed to drain the water empty at Beach Street, or Beach Road Extension, next to the Black Dog Pier, but because they sit near sea level, are clogged with sand and debris from the tide, and allow seawater to be pushed back up into the system.
The redesigned outfall system would help fix that problem and is based on a layout by the University of New Hampshire Stormwater Center. Young said that a similar project was proposed in 2023, but “fizzled out.” He said he awaits the town’s decision to move forward.
The area around Five Corners is highly vulnerable due to the intersection’s low elevation and position at the “head of a shallow, funnel-shaped harbor [that] contributes to storm surge during” nor’easters, tropical cyclones, and heavy rainfall events, as was seen twice in September, the MassDOT study said. It is the area’s low point (2.5 feet above sea level), where storm runoff wants to go, and because the outfall pipe, which has a tide-control valve that sits below sea level under future climate scenarios, is already blocked by debris and tides, the top of Beach Road Extension floods easily and makes the area a “pooling point.” The study discussed several problems of the drainage, which allows the system to function “more as storage than facilitating stormwater discharge during storm events.”
A tool used by the ResilientMass Action team that allows state agencies and other parties to project flood risk predicts that sea level rises by an average of 1.2 feet and up to 2.4 feet at high tide above the current level by 2030, which is the same elevation where Five Corners currently sits, and is higher than some parts of Beach Road. The risk rating for sea level rise and storm surge, as well as extreme precipitation, is high in Tisbury, based on the tool. By 2050, Five Corners could be flooded on a daily basis, the study said. In a 20-year storm scenario, the wave elevation could also be as high as 7.7 feet; in a 100-year storm event, that could rise to 9.3 feet, and cause six feet of inundation at Five Corners.
The study suggested flood mitigation alternatives that included a revision of the Five Corners “geometry” that would raise Beach Street Extension as well as reduce Water Street to one lane of traffic in each direction. It also suggested a retention tank for stormwater underneath Beach Road Extension, to be pumped out to the harbor after severe weather events; a pump station would be necessary. The study said the tank, however, would probably be insufficient for 2030 flood projections.
A long-term alternative suggested was to reconfigure the intersection and raise the elevation of infrastructure by five feet, to be 7.5 feet above sea level and allow the drainage system to slope toward the harbor outfall, not the one near Five Corners. Then stormwater retention could be expanded under the raised infrastructure. It is estimated to cost (doesn’t include raised infrastructure costs) $3.1 million. There was also the suggestion of a roundabout of five entrance points that would also be raised.
But, currently, MassDOT, Tisbury, and the MVC are at work on a possible redesigned outfall system that would replace the current pipe that exists across the beach. And recently, the state’s Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) program awarded a $387,000 grant to the MVC to “maintain the connection” between the ferry terminal and the hospital, Dan Doyle, special projects planner and district of critical planning concern coordinator for MVC, said in an email. “Several near- and mid-term alternatives will be considered to ensure this infrastructure remains viable in the years and decades ahead,” he added.
Though Lake Avenue wasn’t inundated by water this past weekend, through a separate project, Oak Bluffs is now home to one of 10 overland flood sensors that are part of an expanded network of instruments to monitor the Massachusetts coast.
Attached to a lampost in June in front of the large mako shark replica hung outside Nancy’s Restaurant, the sensor is used to collect data and refine models at the state level and inform local officials.
The network of instruments, which include Hohonu overland sensors (like the one in O.B.), and wave buoys in Ipswich Bay and Buzzards Bay that monitor wave height, frequency, and direction, is operated by the Stone Living Lab, a research partnership between UMass Boston School for the Environment, Boston Harbor Now, and city, state, and federal officials. This new expansion — 10 overland flood sensors, two wave buoys, a “mobile sensor” in Essex, tide gauges, and weather stations — more than double the reach of the network developed by the lab, and is meant to fill in gaps in ocean and flood monitoring, a press release from the lab stated. Over the past year, it’s gone from 10 to 22 instruments across the state.
The lab studies nature-based approaches — monitoring, education, policy, and social resilience — for climate adaptation, and this network of instruments is only one of the lab’s projects.
The real-time and localized monitoring data is provided to local leaders, climate scientists, and even residents, and informs long-term flooding models. The data is publicly available on dashboards, and should help create accurate predictive models, giving flood warnings 7 to 10 days in advance, Kirk Bosma, senior coastal engineer and vice president at Woods Hole Group and engineering director at the lab, said in the press release. It is part of a strategy from the Office of Coastal Zone Management’s ResilientCoasts Initiative, which also recently gave funds to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission to complete a supply-chain study.
The overland flood sensors come from a company called Hohonu, which is based in Hawaii, and the lab set out to locate where beyond Boston there are major flood pathways.
Bosma said that there is good data when there’s a really big storm, like Hurricane Sandy, the Blizzard of ’78, or the bomb cyclone in 2018 that set flood records in Boston, and brought two to three inches of snow per hour. But the idea of these overland flood sensors is to get data from places that flood more often, which Bosma said, due to sea level rise and climate change, happens at a higher frequency. There isn’t a lot of data on smaller storms, even when there’s a big impact to a place like the Island.
Bosma said he knows the area of Oak Bluffs through work, and he whittled down 20 to 50 potential sites to those that were picked. He said he’s seen pictures of cars in pretty deep water on Lake Avenue when storms cause water to overtop the bulkhead.
Bosma said he knows about Five Corners as well, and said there’s a similar problem at an inland intersection in Fall River, where the lab installed a sensor that floods from heavy rain. He guessed that the storm drainage systems, like the catch basins and pipes, are under capacity as well as having downstream problems, like the outfall and where the water goes. He said that Five Corners is probably a compound problem, and has both tidal and coastal influences as well as precipitation influences; Lake Avenue primarily suffers from tidal problems.
He said he’d want a sensor at Five Corners, so “maybe the Vineyard will get another one.”
At Lake Avenue, “put in a data sensor in a location where maybe 90 to 95 percent of the time you’re not actually seeing anything. It feels like a waste, like we’re not seeing it, but that’s the whole point,” he said. The lab reached out to Em deBettencourt, Oak Bluffs harbormaster, and had discussions about where to install the sensor. The Oak Bluffs Select Board was also consulted.
The sensor is not a camera; it measures the water surface elevation and depth, and provides a time series of flood levels at the particular spot. It sends signals down to the surface of the water and bounces off what is there. All data collected from the lamppost at Lake Avenue is uploaded to a dashboard on the lab’s website, to be available to the public and municipal staff. The data is also used to improve models, such as the Massachusetts Coast Flood Risk Model by the Woods Hole Group, which looks at future and evolving flood risk probabilities.
“We simulate thousands and thousands of events in a physics-based model, and determine where risks are now and how that is changing under future climate conditions, so we utilize those results to identify areas that may be prone to flooding on more frequent levels than just big storms,” Bosma said.
The goal is also to develop a model that could predict possible inundated areas days in advance of a big storm. “It’s odd to think about putting a sensor anywhere that’s not wet, and that’s what you’re supposed to measure. But the data is super-critical, and so it provides that real-time community benefit right now. But in the future, it hopefully will provide that model improvement and predictive benefits as well,” Bosma said.
Joe Christo, chief resilience officer at the lab and Boston Harbor Now, said that he hopes the sensor can help benefit the Island through education and awareness, and help local officials make more informed decisions — whether that’s through data from individual sensors or because the data helps refine models.
Dock Street in Edgartown was also inundated, though the storm came to a head at a full-moon tide. James Hagerty, town administrator for Edgartown, said the town is in the preliminary stage of an engineering plan to raise the finger piers and reinforce the bulkhead.
The town also spent money on a climate change resilience alternative assessment for the Chappy Ferry, which floods at the ramp entrances. The ultimate price to raise the ramps and move infrastructure around is between $15 million and $25 million. The town applied for grants last year and this year. Memorial Wharf was recently raised, and can be raised again if needed. North Wharf, which was reinforced last year, can also be raised easily, Hagerty said.
The town wants to do a feasibility study for Atlantic Drive in Katama, which has also been inundated in the past, but didn’t receive a grant it applied for last year.
