Stories
Standing in front of her three-level house in Somerville, Lena Sheehan looks down at the construction of a new high school and transportation hub just a block away. “I can’t get over it, I haven’t been here in so long,” she says. “This is the new T — isn’t that brilliant, right beside the house.”…
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The rain started just before Mother’s Day, in 2006. It fell for days over the Merrimack Valley, causing the worst flooding in decades. Water reached to rooftops. Pipes burst in Haverhill, pouring millions of gallons of sewage into the rising Merrimack River. Streets flooded, highways closed, thousands of people evacuated their homes. Andy Vargas was…
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Catastrophic damage from climate change threatens coastal homes all over the Cape, and Islands, prompting regional planners to eye managed coastal retreat options Whenever a beachfront home goes on the market in Sandwich, it’s going to draw dozens of prospective buyers. “So this is all private beach, which people just love. They want their privacy.…
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A three-story-tall gate creaks open, and reveals a warehouse filled to the brim with brown crystals. It’s a mountain of rock salt. “We filled this shed this past week,” says T.J. Shea, Cambridge’s superintendent of streets. Shea is what some might call a “snow fighter.” It’s his job to keep roads dry all winter using this…
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The Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Boston Nature Center in Mattapan offers a home to more than 150 species of birds. And a winter afternoon offers up evidence of a few of them: Three-toed footprints of wild turkeys dot snowy paths like small dinosaur tracks; and in the leafless trees, robins and white-throated sparrows chirp as they flit…
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A new report by a retired state scientist shows the apparent unintended consequence of the successful push by dairy farmers to reduce nutrient runoff into Lake Champlain. Farmers reduce runoff by planting their corn fields with cover crops, which they then kill annually with herbicides. The report documents an increase in herbicides applied on the…
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At the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in northern New Hampshire, the pandemic broke a decades-long streak of field research. Now, scientists there are adapting with new technology – recording the sounds of the forest, which they hope will transform their long and influential record of a changing world. In late fall, Dartmouth biologist Matt Ayres…
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The lobster industry could be getting a new sound. On a cold January morning, a lobster trap sitting on a table at a manufacturing facility in Wareham is rhythmically beeping. Two final beeps have a special meaning. “So that’s the release confirmation,” explained Rob Morris, who sells acoustic release systems for the underwater technology company…
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Rob Martin has been fishing from the Sandwich Marina for 29 years off his boat, Resolve. “It’s only 40 feet. It was big when I first got it and now it seems small,” he said, while warming up inside his boat’s cabin on a cold January morning. Over the last few decades, Martin, 56, has…
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