ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
A proposed breakwater in Swampscott would control waves like these taken from Red Rock in Lynn.
Drive around Nahant Rotary during high tide and you quickly realize why Swampscott and Lynn, for that matter, need a breakwater.
Ocean waves loom over Lynn Shore Drive before crashing into the seawall and ferociously underscoring the fact that the rotary, just like the stretch of roadway near the Lynn-Swampscott line along the beach, is essentially under water.
During heavy storms and intense rainfalls, both locations flood and residents in their vicinity are flooded. It’s easy to point to coastal homes and suggest the buildings never should have been built on low ground in the first place. But ocean property commands high prices and the notion of turning back the Lynn-Swampscott shorefront to a pristine state is a fantasy.
Then again, it is equally easy to point to the multi-million dollar price tags attached to breakwater projects and ask, “is the added protection from the elements really worth the cost?”
Grand schemes for improving Lynn’s Seaport Marina have envisioned breakwaters and the plans have slid off the drawing board after realistic cost estimates were tallied up. Let’s face it, building a structure as ambitious as a breakwater is the equivalent to investing in a home generator.
Both expenditures come with hefty price tags and often see little or no use until the day they are relied upon to save lives, not to mention property. It’s one thing for a homeowner to throw the price of a generator onto a credit card and avoid the prospect of an outage. It’s another to figure out how millions of taxpayer dollars are going to be dedicated to building something as mundane as a wall intended to hold off the ocean’s mammoth power.
But breakwaters become much more attractive if they end up becoming bulwarks for a reimagined Lynn waterfront featuring high-rise residences, hotels, a coastline boardwalk and an expanded marina. If hundreds of millions of dollars end up invested where vacant lots now stand, then the notion of spending several million dollars to protect that investment from major storm damage will make sense.
A revived waterfront is still largely in the dreaming stage but the eventual necessity for breakwaters could get an early planning boost if a regional approach encompassing Swampscott and Lynn is laid out on a drawing board.