"The waves hit the seawall and they go straight up about 60, 70, 80 feet."
That's Kevin Gill, describing what happens to his oceanfront house every time the wind swings northeast. He said it to CBS News Boston as this weekend's storm bore down, and by Saturday afternoon it was doing exactly what he'd described: sending walls of water over a seawall and into a house that wasn't built to take a direct hit from the Atlantic in September.
Gill lives on the exposed side of town. Most of Scituate doesn't. The storm that arrived Friday afternoon and is only now loosening its grip didn't hit one Scituate this weekend. It hit three, and which one you experienced had almost nothing to do with how you feel about storms and everything to do with which side of a 128-year-old breach you happen to live on.
The Harbor Side Treated It Like a Chore
Days before the rain started, boaters were already at the town ramp on Jericho Road, backing trailers down toward the water. Larry Riley told CBS he'd checked the forecast that morning and figured he "might as well get it out now before it gets worse." Down the ramp, boat owner Shey O'Grady was doing the same math, telling WHDH his family had hoped for more time to prep but decided it was worth pulling the boat out "when we could" rather than risk it.
None of this looked like panic. It looked like a chore, the kind that has a known sequence and a known location. The Jericho Road ramp, sometimes called the Tom Chessia Boat Ramp, is a no-fee, double-wide launch with room for 43 trailers and another 30 vehicles, and it went through a state-funded renovation in 2025 that redid the seawall, the rip rap, and the lighting. It's built for exactly this kind of traffic, boats coming and going in bulk on short notice, and the harbor community treated the storm as a scheduling problem rather than an emergency. Get the boat out, get the trailer parked, watch the rest from dry ground.
Humarock Was Never Watching the Sky
A few miles south, the storm looked like a completely different event, and 88-year-old Bob Jones explained why while picking up his mail at the Central Avenue post office near Humarock Beach. Nor'easters, he told the Boston Globe, "come and go here in Humarock all the time." What worried him wasn't the wind. It was the tide, with a noontime high expected to be topped by an even bigger one at midnight.
Jones wasn't being stoic. He was describing a place that has flooded on its own schedule since 1898, when the Portland Gale tore through a thin strip of beach that had connected Third Cliff to Fourth Cliff and cut Humarock loose from the rest of Scituate for good. The breach never healed. Today, Humarock is only reachable by road through Marshfield, which means the neighborhood shares a beach with the rest of town but not a route to it, and its residents have spent well over a century learning to read tide tables instead of wind forecasts. A storm that rattles Turner Road with wind might barely register in Humarock. A storm that raises the midnight tide by another foot changes everything, wind or no wind.
The Bluffs Are Where Everyone Else Went to Watch
Between the harbor and Humarock sit the four bluffs that define Scituate's exposed edge, First Cliff, Second Cliff, Third Cliff, and Fourth Cliff, and this weekend they did what they always do during a big storm: they pulled people toward them.
A partial list of where residents showed up despite the weather:
- Turner Road, where a wave the Globe described as huge slammed into seaside homes as high tide approached Saturday
- Oceanside Drive in the Sand Hills section, where one resident got soaked walking out to look at the surf
- Peggotty Beach, pounded by surf through Saturday afternoon
- Minot, where Jason and Corinne Savery brought their three young children, ages one month to four years, because, as Jason put it, the family needed to get out of the house before being stuck inside for days
Town Administrator Jim Boudreau spent the weekend trying to talk people out of exactly this. "We keep saying it, and it doesn't seem like anybody's listening," he told the Globe by phone, after warning residents to stay off the coast while the storm was still active. Earlier in the week he'd described the town's other line of defense, telling WHDH the town was "taking the precaution of getting the flood gates in at the beach entrances" to keep surge from reaching further inland. The National Weather Service framed the risk plainly over the weekend, citing beach erosion, coastal flooding, and wind damage as the main concerns, with rain expected to linger into Monday before the system finally pulls away Tuesday.
The bluffs don't flood the way Humarock floods, and they don't have a boat ramp the way the harbor does. What they have is elevation and exposure, which makes them the best seat in town for watching a storm and also the exact spot officials keep asking people to avoid.
The Light Sits at the Hinge
Nearly every photograph taken in Scituate this weekend, from news crews and residents alike, includes the same landmark: Old Scituate Light, standing at the mouth of the harbor where the calm water the boaters were protecting meets the open ocean the bluff crowd came out to watch. It's a fitting place for a camera to land, because it's also the literal dividing line between the two.
The lighthouse has stood there since 1810, and it's carried town lore since the War of 1812, when the keeper's daughters, 17-year-old Rebecca and 21-year-old Abigail Bates, spotted a British landing party approaching and had no way to warn the town in time. So they grabbed a fife and drum and played loud enough that the British sailors assumed a militia was mobilizing and turned back. Scituate still calls it the story of the American Army of Two. Two girls with instruments held a stretch of coastline that a seawall and a flood gate couldn't have.
Same Storm, Different Address
By Sunday morning, more than 10,000 Massachusetts customers had lost power. By Sunday evening, that number had fallen to a little over 700, a recovery that happened in a single day even as the storm was still expected to linger into Monday. That kind of swing, a 90-plus percent drop in outages within twelve hours, says something the storm-watching photos don't: for most of Scituate, this was disruptive but manageable, cleared quickly once crews could get to it.
What decided how disruptive it felt, though, wasn't luck. It was geography that was set in place before anyone currently living in town was born. The harbor crowd hauled boats because their stretch of coast is built for exactly that kind of routine. Humarock watched tide charts because a storm in 1898 turned their neighborhood into a place you can only reach through another town. The bluffs drew crowds because they're the highest, most exposed ground Scituate has, close enough to feel every wave and just far enough back to feel safe doing it. Ask a longtime resident which one they did this weekend, and you'll know which part of Scituate's coastline they actually live on.
If you're thinking about where in Scituate you'd want to be for the next one of these, or just want to talk through what a particular stretch of coastline means for a property you're watching, Alice Pierce has spent 23 years learning this shoreline street by street. Let's Connect.
