The persistent and perilous flooding at Five Corners in Vineyard Haven is no secret. Frustration for years around the lack of visible action is also well-known in the public sphere, especially as a crescendo of voices calling for action continues to increase. More rainfall, propagated by global temperature rises, and an overdeveloped Island with insufficient plans for runoff just mean the problem will continue to stare us all right in the face, as it has for decades.
Discussions about flooding and infrastructure and how to handle Five Corners and Beach Road are happening in backrooms of the State House, in county and town offices, and on the street, and all of these rooms seem haunted by the ghosts of the past. Years of research and studies have made no tangible headway. There were workshops conducted, studies done on roads and drainage, vision plans and master plans made, and yet any time there is more than an inch and a quarter of rain, Islanders often find the infamous intersection unnavigable. We’ve heard about projects to fix the area that were proposed and failed, and some that were even proposed, approved, and yet were never made a reality. And despite all that effort, officials said that the studies and proposed projects only looked at near-term solutions.
But now there is no time to dwell on the past, as there is an urgent need to focus on the future. In fact, there is a potential public safety threat when the main road leading to the hospital is persistently flooded. This is a clear and present danger, according to climate scientists, including those who have come to our Island to speak on the issues of sea level rise and storm surge that are only projected to get worse.
Recently, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC) announced a $387,000 grant award from the state Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program that may finally begin to address the problem head-on. The town of Tisbury also received $500,000 in state funding to get a project to “shovel ready,” though there is currently no project proposed. Separately, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT), which owns Beach Road as a state highway, is at work on redesigns of the outfall system, which is supposed to direct groundwater from higher elevation out to the harbor. But as anyone who has bothered to look down Beach Road Extension to the harbor can see, it often doesn’t work.
As an Island, we need to come together to make sure these urgent repairs to Five Corners actually get done, and that they don’t fall by the wayside, as they have so many times before. As the Island has already seen this year, funds can be pulled and disappear, as they were for a project to address Oak Bluffs erosion.
Finding adequate funding to finally repair Five Corners is no small matter. Projects of this scale, especially ones that have to look to the future and ponder what Tisbury might look like 50 years or 100 years from now, are challenging. Knowledge costs money, and so the town as well as the MVC has had to vie for state grants just to do the research on what could work here. And there’s already been a lot of that money spent without tangible results. We need to make sure these new grants, which the Island recently received, are used to get a project across the finish line.
It was clear throughout discussions over the past month that state officials in Boston and local officials know how bad the problem is, and how important a fix to the integral corridor that connects Islanders to the Steamship Authority’s main ferry terminal and hospital is. But Sakiko Isomichi, climate resilience planner for the MVC, pointed out to The Times a painfully obvious concern: There hasn’t been a dedicated person or team on this problem. And, as she explained, the MVC is a planning body, and much like a lot of places on the Island that are understaffed, doesn’t have the bandwidth to carry out this project all alone.
It is crucial for this Island to remember that this isn’t a single-town problem, but an Island-wide priority and urgent public safety matter. It is too big and too expensive for one town to handle.
Five Corners, as frustrating as it is, offers the Island a rare opportunity to find new ways to work together. It is in many ways the perfect, initial test of what impact can be achieved through regionalization. We need to wake up from a gauzy New England pipe dream of the benefits of small towns and their distinctive features, and recognize that towns can keep their character and still work together with country and state officials on a regional basis to solve a problem that should greatly concern us all. To sum all of this up in three words: Fix Five Corners!
