Denise Kress has been living for 35 years with the Belle Isle Marsh as her backyard.  

But as more severe storms hit over the past decade, her life has been consumed by the marsh in ways other than its natural beauty: thinking about water, preparing for its encroachment, laying down bags of sand, living through flooding, and recovering from its wreckage. It’s meant two totaled cars and five repaired or replaced electrical and heating systems, and weeks spent in a hotel in the winter of 2018 after flood waters breached her basement twice in two months and then froze so that you’d need a “pick axe” to navigate it.  

Through all this, she’s stayed. 

But Kress occasionally ponders what it will look like, when the day comes, to sell her house just over the Boston border in Winthrop, given all the flooding the property has endured.   

“I can’t worry about it because there’s little that I can do about it,” Kress said when asked if she’s concerned that disclosing her home’s flooding history could impact its value. “But I would want the next owner to know. People have a right to know.”  

She’s quick to add, though, that even if she had known all the flood damages and insurance price hikes that would come in her 35 years in Winthrop, she may not have changed a thing anyway: “If I had to do it all over again, I probably would,” said Kress, who finds comfort in the vast marsh that drew her to the property originally.  

Such are the complications facing Massachusetts, a high-cost coastal state seeing some of the fastest-warming ocean temperatures in the world and increasing rates of precipitation that are exposing its aging stormwater drainage systems, dams, and culverts. 

Gov. Maura Healey aims to direct a new influx of cash to address those very issues through her nearly $3 billion environmental bond bill, which includes $308 million to upgrade high-risk dams and flood control systems and nearly $100 million for coastal initiatives like seawalls, jetties, and beach nourishments. But as flooding touches more Massachusetts households, she’s also proposing a new requirement to steer people out of harm’s way in the first place: mandating flood risk disclosure when property owners sell.   

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Published by MassINC