Barrington, RI Hurricane & Storm Risk: What Actually Happened Here

The 1938 Hurricane: Barrington's Own Documented Losses

The Great New England Hurricane hit Rhode Island on Wednesday, September 21, 1938, and in Barrington its clearest local record comes from two independent sources that do not overlap: a 2012 illustrated historical talk by historian Jean MacIntyre, "Summering in Barrington: The Way We Were," sponsored by the Barrington Preservation Society, and a firsthand account collected decades later by a local TV station from a Barrington resident who lived through it. Per MacIntyre's talk, the storm struck at the height of Barrington's era as a genuine summer resort -- thousands of Rhode Islanders arrived by train each season to Drownville, West Barrington, and Nayatt Point for boating, swimming, and fishing -- and the storm hit that resort economy directly: tent villages and waterfront houses in Bay Spring disappeared entirely, summer cottages on Nayatt Point suffered heavy damage, and three named establishments, the Nayatt Hotel, The Gables, and the Mathewson Hotel, all sustained significant harm. MacIntyre's account credits 1938, compounded by the onset of World War II, with accelerating Barrington's decline as a summer destination for Rhode Islanders -- a real, dated cause-and-effect this research turned up that neither Bristol's nor Portsmouth's published storm pages have a direct equivalent for.

Separately, Elizabeth Ricci -- a Barrington resident who was twelve years old and in seventh grade when the storm hit, interviewed decades later at age 96 -- gave a firsthand account of the storm from inside her family's home, located a few blocks from the beach. She recalled her father's reaction in Italian, "This is a tempest," and described wind that was "horrible up until midnight" and "pierced our ears," before one wall of the house gave way and the family evacuated to a neighbor's. Walking through town the next day, she and a friend found "the trees were down, the electric poles were down, homes were broken." Her account is a single household's experience, not a town-wide damage tally, but it is a real, named, dated, on-the-record Barrington memory of the storm -- not a generic regional description repurposed for this market.

A third, independently sourced detail ties 1938 to a landmark still standing today: per the Historical Marker Database's own transcription of the marker at Haines Memorial State Park, a postcard caption displayed at the park notes that "the footbridge that connected Haines Park to Crescent Park washed away in the 1938 hurricane." That pedestrian bridge -- built sometime in the 1930s to link Haines Park to Crescent Park across the water in East Providence -- was destroyed in the same storm that hit Bay Spring and Nayatt Point. (Separate research on this same park's history attributes the era's stonework, including still-standing fireplaces, to Depression-era public-works labor; this page does not assert which specific New Deal program built the footbridge itself, since that detail was not confirmed for the bridge specifically.) No source in this research located a Barrington-wide dollar-damage figure or death toll comparable to the town-by-town detail Bristol's own municipal government has published for its own market -- if a more exhaustive accounting exists, it likely sits in the Barrington Preservation Society's own archives rather than in what is easily searchable today.

Hurricane Carol, August 31, 1954: A Statewide Catastrophe, and Barrington's Modern Echo of It

Hurricane Carol made landfall in Rhode Island on August 31, 1954, and remains one of the deadliest storms in the state's history: at least 17 deaths statewide, roughly $200 million in damage, 620 houses and 83 other buildings destroyed, and a storm surge in Narragansett Bay reaching up to 14.4 feet. Providence's downtown flooded under 12 feet of water. Those are Rhode Island-wide figures, not Barrington-specific ones, and no source found in this research documents a street-by-street Barrington account of Carol's damage comparable to what exists for 1938 -- that is a real, honest gap in the record, not evidence Barrington was spared.

What Barrington does have is a modern, data-driven echo of Carol specifically: per WPRI's Target 12 investigative reporting, drawing on Rhode Island's own STORMTOOLS mapping system, if a storm equivalent to 1954's Hurricane Carol struck Barrington today, nearly half of the town's land would flood -- a finding the same report frames as effectively turning the town into a series of islands, given roughly two decades of sea-level rise since Carol's era. That is not a historical damage account; it is a current risk model using a real 1954 storm as its benchmark, and it is the single most important number on this page for understanding what "hurricane risk" means in Barrington today, as distinct from what it meant in 1954.

Bob (1991) and Sandy (2012): The Two Storms With More Barrington-Specific Detail Than 1938 Itself

Unusually, Barrington's local record for its two most recent notable storms is more granular than its record for 1938. Hurricane Bob made landfall on August 19, 1991, passing just east of Barrington around 2 p.m. and, critically, arriving at low tide -- a timing detail that limited storm-surge damage. Per a 2011 twentieth-anniversary retrospective, former Barrington police chief John Lazzaro recalled the storm's damage as "primarily the damage to trees from the winds" (75 to 100 mph), concentrated in the heavily wooded Hampden Meadows neighborhood, rather than flooding: "The water came in, but not that high," with surge at Town Beach reaching only "past the bathhouse mainly," and minimal interior water at the police station at Police Cove. Low-lying streets flagged for potential flooding at the time included Bourne Lane, Adams Point Road, and Mathewson Road. Stanley's Boatyard reported very little damage, with one employee, Steve Kerhune, noting he didn't think a single boat came off its mooring. The town opened three shelters, at Sowams School and both the high school and middle school, and closed all three by 4 p.m. as the storm passed. The clear lesson embedded in that record: Bob's relatively modest Barrington impact was in real part a function of lucky tide timing, not proof the town's exposure is small -- the same storm at high tide, on the same low peninsulas, would read very differently.

Hurricane Sandy, a hybrid post-tropical storm by the time it reached New England in late October 2012, prompted a documented, town-level response in Barrington even though it did not produce a documented Barrington damage account on the scale of 1938. In the days before landfall, Town Manager Peter DeAngelis Jr. held an emergency-preparedness meeting at Town Hall with Police Chief John LaCross, Fire Chief Gerald Bessette, and Public Works Director Alan Corvi, modeling the town's plan on procedures used during the prior year's Tropical Storm Irene, distributing personal emergency-kit checklists, and stressing that "the first 72 hours is on you." Hampden Meadows and Bay Spring were flagged as the areas needing the closest storm-surge monitoring, and the town set up an American Red Cross shelter at Primrose Hill School. During the storm itself, high tide at 8:36 p.m. was expected to push water 4 to 7 feet above normal on a full-moon tide, and by 4:15 p.m. that day, 96 customers were without power, with outages reported in Nayatt, Rumstick, the town center, Hampden Meadows, and near Haines Memorial State Park. DeAngelis said at the time he didn't think the storm would require a mandatory evacuation, and schools closed the following day. No source in this research found a Barrington-specific dollar-damage figure for Sandy -- the record here is one of documented preparation and minor, dispersed outages, not of major structural loss.

Route 114: The Evacuation Route Modeled to Flood Twice a Day by 2050, Now With Real-Time Sensors Watching It

The single most consequential current fact about hurricane risk in Barrington concerns not a past storm but the road you would use to leave during a future one. Per WPRI's Target 12 reporting, a roughly three-mile stretch of Route 114 -- Barrington's hurricane evacuation route, carrying an estimated 25,000 vehicles a day -- is projected to flood twice daily by 2050. The same report quoted Teresa Crean, Barrington's town planner (formerly a coastal research associate with the URI Coastal Institute), asking pointedly, "at what point do we have to say, this is no longer feasible, and this roadway will be under water twice a day?" -- and noting that elevating individual properties does not solve the problem if the road connecting them stays flooded. Town Manager Phil Hervey, in the same reporting, called finding local climate solutions the town's top priority and put Barrington's exposure plainly: "if you look at the maps, we're one of the more vulnerable communities in Rhode Island." The report also named a real, specific business, waterfront restaurant Bluewater Bar + Grill, whose longtime operator Brian Thimme (an 11-year leaseholder considering buying the building outright) said of the underlying flood data, "it makes it a little bit more real looking at some of the data" -- the building is projected to be surrounded by water by 2035.

Barrington is not treating that projection as an abstraction. The Rhode Island Division of Statewide Planning, together with the towns of Barrington, Bristol, and Warren, RIDOT, and RIPTA, ran a formal "Resilient Route 114" planning process from fall 2023 through spring 2025 -- covering existing-conditions review, a vulnerability assessment, alternatives analysis, and a recommended action plan, built with consultant Fuss & O'Neill and vetted through three rounds of public workshops. Separately, and much more recently, Brown University researchers and the Community-driven Coastal Climate Research and Solutions initiative, funded by the National Science Foundation, launched a real-time flood and water-quality sensor network called NEST in March 2026, deploying close to 100 marine, stream, and over-land sensors across several Rhode Island communities including Barrington, with a free public dashboard at nest.brown.edu (integrating NOAA and National Weather Service data) and email alerts when a monitored spot reaches flood stage. Neither program has a publicly confirmed, town-wide construction outcome as of this writing -- the Route 114 plan's own timeline targeted a completed action plan by spring 2025, and this page does not assert what specific infrastructure, if any, has since been built as a result -- so a reader evaluating this for a purchase or a move should check current status directly with the Town of Barrington and the RI Division of Statewide Planning rather than assume either program's endpoint.

Barrington's Other Adaptation Moves: Walker Farm and Higher Ground

Two more real, dated efforts round out Barrington's current response to its flood exposure, though the record on funding is not perfectly clean and this page discloses that rather than smoothing it over. Per the same WPRI Target 12 reporting, Barrington received a $201,000 grant in 2019 to restore Walker Farm, on the Barrington River, to salt marsh, aimed at slowing the impact of rising seas. Separately, a April 30, 2020 announcement from state legislators (Sen. Cynthia Coyne, Rep. Jason Knight, and Rep. Liana Cassar) documents a $230,745 matching grant from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management for a different-sounding scope of Walker Farm work -- an expanded gravel parking lot, an accessible walkway to the boat launch, a floating dock and platform, and shoreline-access improvements for kayakers and rowers. This page treats those as two distinct, separately sourced figures for the same property rather than assuming one report is simply wrong about the other, consistent with how a build agent should handle any two sources that name different dollar amounts for what may be phases of one larger Walker Farm recreation-and-resilience project.

On higher ground, quite literally: Town Manager Phil Hervey, in the same Target 12 reporting, mentioned the town's plans for residential development at the former Zion Bible Institute campus specifically because it sits on higher ground than much of the rest of town -- a small but telling sign that flood exposure is now a factor in where Barrington plans to grow, not just how it plans to protect what already exists. Beyond these two items, the town also operates a dedicated "Ready & Resilient Barrington" program and has been described in East Bay-area reporting as a municipality "leading the way" on local climate planning; this page does not restate a specific budget or completion date for that broader program beyond what is documented above, since a fuller accounting was not independently confirmed in this research pass.

Practical Steps Before You Buy or Renovate in Barrington

Start with an address-specific flood-zone lookup at FEMA's Map Service Center (msc.fema.gov) -- nothing on this page assigns a flood zone to any individual Barrington parcel, and the two-peninsula, low-lying geography described above means proximity to the Barrington River, Warren River, or Narragansett Bay is not the only relevant exposure; inland low ground on either peninsula can carry real risk too. From there, confirm current floodplain and building requirements with the Town of Barrington's own planning and building offices, and ask directly whether an Elevation Certificate exists for the specific property you are considering.

For real-time conditions rather than historical or projected risk, the new NEST public dashboard at nest.brown.edu is worth bookmarking specifically because it covers Barrington and can email an alert when a monitored location nears flood stage -- a genuinely new, free resource that did not exist for most of this market's history. For evacuation planning, treat Route 114's own modeled 2050 flooding as a reason to know a second way off your peninsula well before a storm is forecast, not something to solve in the hours beforehand, and confirm current evacuation-zone guidance directly with the Town of Barrington's emergency-management office and the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency (RIEMA) rather than relying on this page, FEMA's own Map Service Center, or a prior year's hurricane guide. Nothing here substitutes for official guidance from the Town of Barrington, FEMA, or RIEMA.