The Blizard of 2013 has been put into the record books. And for those of us old enough to remember the Blizzard if 1978, we have survived both these natural catastrophes.
Reflecting on the aftermath of the two storms and their effects on our city is a story of night and day.
Who can forget in 1978 the flooding at Roughan’s Point in Beachmont. Revere Beach being totally decimated. The emergency shelter being used at the Revere High School. Or then Mayor George Colella blocking the roads out of the City so that the National Guard could not leave until Revere and the residents had returned to some degree of normalacy in their lives.
A lot of safety changes have occurred in our city since 1978.
Most notable is the long and at times seemingly endless project by the Army Corps of Engineers at Roughan’s Point to stop the flooding by raising the seawall, putting in tidal gates and using millions of tons of rock to act as a breakwater to have a rolling tide, has worked. One long time resident of this section noted that at no time during the storm did she lose electricity. And the hi-tide came on Saturday morning and decimated homes in Scituate, Plum Island but not one home suffered major damage in Roughans’ Point — a stark contrast to 1978.
Our major streets were all passable and for the most part, residents took the storm in stride. We know that some streets still need to be plowed, however the fault in many of these cases lies not with the city’s efforts but with residents who park their cars in such a way as to make plowing impossible.
Mayor Dan Rizzo and his Department of Public Works employees should be congratulated for keeping ahead of this storm and returning Revere to a functioning city in a short timeframe.
While we dodged a hit with Hurricane Sandy in October, Friday’s Blizard showed that we are still on Mother Nature’s hit list.
We urge our city officials to learn a lesson from any of the minor problems that residents experienced in this record breaking storm because there certainly will be more storms to deal with in the near future.
