Hull, MA Hurricane & Storm Risk: Living on 2.8 Square Miles of Land
Hull sits on a hook-shaped, seven-mile chain of glacial drumlins connecting Nantasket Beach to Pemberton Point, and of its 26.9 square miles, only 2.8 is land — 24.1 square miles, nearly 90 percent of the town, is water. That is the most water-dominated town in its entire South Shore cluster, and it is the reason Hull carries 295 FEMA-tracked repetitive-loss properties and a storm record stretching from an 1888 hurricane rescue to a 2018 nor'easter surge higher than the Blizzard of '78. This page centers on that storm record and on Joshua James, the Hull-born lifesaver whose station at Point Allerton is still the town's clearest answer to the question of what this coast can do in a bad storm. Where this research could not confirm a Hull-specific figure, that gap is stated directly rather than filled in with a guess.
Why Hull Is Different: 2.8 Square Miles of Land, 24.1 of Water
Every South Shore town in this cluster has a real relationship with the ocean, but Hull's is the most extreme by a wide margin. Total town area is 26.9 square miles, and only 2.8 of that is land — 89.6 percent of Hull is water, well above even Cohasset's already-notable 68.9 percent water share. The town occupies the Nantasket Peninsula, a narrow, hook-shaped spit forming the southern entrance to Boston Harbor, built from a chain of glacial drumlins that formed roughly 14,000 years ago and are connected by narrow necks of land — an 1867 Massachusetts gazetteer described the settled area as "five small hills, connected by very narrow necks of land," and that description still holds today.
That geography is not just scenic; it is a flood-exposure problem shared by very few towns of Hull's size. With roughly 10,000 to 10,150 year-round residents packed onto 2.8 square miles of land, Hull is one of the most densely populated small coastal towns in Massachusetts on a per-land-square-mile basis, and nearly the entire town sits close to sea level on a peninsula with the open Atlantic on one side and Boston Harbor and Hingham Bay on the other. A storm approaching from almost any direction has a direct line at Hull's shoreline.
Joshua James: A Childhood Tragedy That Became a Six-Decade Rescue Career
Hull's single strongest storm-history figure is a person, not a building or a storm. Joshua James was born in Hull in 1826, and at age 10, in 1837, he watched his own mother and infant sister die in the wreck of the schooner Hepzibah in Hull Gut — the narrow, current-swept channel between Pemberton Point and Peddocks Island that still carries heavy commercial traffic today. That loss set the direction of his entire life. James began actual rescue work at age 15, on December 17, 1841, leaping aboard a surfboat to help save the crew of the ship Mohawk, and he kept doing that work, in one capacity or another, for the next sixty years.
Over his full career, James is credited by the Massachusetts Humane Society and the U.S. Life-Saving Service, combined, with saving more than 500 lives. A separate secondary source renders this as "over 1,000 people," but that figure could not be independently reconciled with the more specific, directly sourced count and should not be treated as established — the defensible, citable figure for James's full career is 500-plus lives, not 1,000-plus.
Point Allerton Life-Saving Station: Bypassing Retirement Age at 62
In 1889, the U.S. Life-Saving Service established a new station at Point Allerton, on Hull's northern tip, and James — then 62 years old — received special Congressional authorization to become its keeper, bypassing the Service's normal mandatory retirement age of 45. That exception was a direct, formal recognition that no one else on the Massachusetts coast had a record like his. Over the following 13 years, James and his crew at Point Allerton are credited with saving 540 lives and protecting roughly $1.2 million in cargo value — a station-specific total on top of, not separate from, the career figure above.
The station building James commanded is gone in its original form; the current Point Allerton Coast Guard Station, still an active facility today, was built in 1969 and commissioned April 18, 1970, replacing the 1889 original. The Hull Lifesaving Museum, housed in a related station building, preserves that history, and the town commemorates "Joshua James Day" each May 23 at his grave in Hull Village Cemetery.
The Hurricane of 1888: A 36-Hour Rescue and Nine Gold Medals
Hull's clearest documented hurricane-rescue account predates the Point Allerton station's founding by one year, when James and his crew were still operating under the Massachusetts Humane Society. During the Hurricane of 1888, James coordinated a 36-hour, multi-vessel rescue operation that saved 29 people, including a dramatic rescue of the schooner Gertrude Abbott's crew using the surfboat R.B. Forbes — a boat that struck rocks on the return trip but stayed afloat long enough to reach shore. All nine surfmen involved received Gold Lifesaving Medals, the U.S. government's highest such award, for that single operation.
A decade later, the Hurricane of 1898 — the same storm documented at a regional level elsewhere in this South Shore cluster as the Portland Gale, which killed more than 400 people regionally and sank the SS Portland with all 192 aboard — brought James back into another 36-hour rescue effort, this time coordinating the rescue of 41 people, including crews from the Calvin F. Baker and the Henry R. Tilton. This research did not find a Hull-specific damage account for 1898 distinct from those regional facts, so it should not be assumed Hull suffered damage comparable to what neighboring Scituate documented at Humarock — though as a low-lying, harbor-mouth peninsula, Hull plausibly experienced serious impacts from the same storm.
Death in Service: "The Tide Is Ebbing"
James stayed active in rescue work into his seventies. On March 19, 1902, at age 75, he collapsed of a heart attack on the beach immediately after conducting a training drill with a new surfboat during a gale — reportedly having just remarked, "The tide is ebbing." He was buried, per local tradition, with a lifeboat as his coffin. The U.S. Coast Guard's Joshua James Ancient Keeper Award, established in 2003, and the National Security Cutter USCGC James (WMSL-754), commissioned in 2015, both carry his name forward.
No other town in this South Shore cluster has an equivalently decorated, specifically named lifesaving figure with this volume of corroborated detail. Joshua James is Hull's answer to the question every coastal town in this region eventually has to answer: what actually happens here when a hurricane hits, and who is there to respond.
Named Storms and Flood Events Since 2010
Hull's Hazard Mitigation Plan, a 2024 update prepared for the town, documents a specific, dated record of recent storm and flood damage. March 2010 flooding is the single most damaging recent event on record: 17.7 inches of rain fell over 19 days, March 13 through 31, 2010, causing $24.2 million in Plymouth County damages — 93 percent of the county's total flood damages for the entire 2005-2023 period the plan covers. A January 4, 2018 nor'easter produced a storm surge of 15.16 feet, described in the plan as higher than the highest surge recorded during the Blizzard of '78, a striking, specific comparison figure for a single storm.
Hurricane Bob, in August 1991, and a separate, unrelated "No-Name Storm" in October 1991 are both named, dated storm events affecting Hull specifically in the same plan, alongside additional listed blizzards in December 1992, March 1993, January 1996, and January 2005, and flood events in October 1996 and June 1998 for which this research did not extract specific damage-dollar figures.
295 Repetitive-Loss Properties and 14 Named Flood-Hazard Areas
Hull's own 2024 hazard-mitigation plan puts a number on the town's flood exposure that is unusually large for a town this small: 295 total FEMA-tracked repetitive-loss properties, 261 classified as standard Repetitive Loss and 34 as Severe Repetitive Loss, with combined historical claims exceeding $16.5 million since 1978. FEMA flood-zone designations referenced somewhere within Hull include AO, AE, A1 through A30, X500, and VE zones, covering both 1-percent-annual-chance (100-year) and 0.2-percent-annual-chance (500-year) flood areas as well as high-velocity wave-action zones. This research confirmed Hull's participation in FEMA's Community Rating System program but could not confirm the town's specific current CRS class number, and that should not be assumed to match any neighboring town's rating.
The same plan names at least 14 locally identified flood-hazard or seawall-need areas, including Atlantic Avenue, Nantasket Beach, Stony Beach, Point Allerton, and various "alphabet streets" on the ocean side of the peninsula. Hull is also seeking a $1.1 million FEMA pre-disaster-mitigation grant, announced June 22, 2026, for repairing and enhancing shoreline protection along Harborview Road — a live, unresolved application as of this research, with a July 22, 2026 deadline, not a completed project, and it should be described as applied for rather than awarded until its outcome is confirmed.
What This Means for Anyone Evaluating Storm Risk in Hull Today
Hull's narrow, low-lying, largely water-surrounded peninsula geography, its 295 repetitive-loss properties, and its documented run of named storms since 1991 all point the same direction: this is a town where flood and storm-surge exposure is not a theoretical risk but a repeated, dollar-and-square-footage-documented one. That does not mean every property in Hull carries the same exposure — flood-zone status varies block by block on a peninsula this narrow, and a home on Telegraph Hill sits in a very different position than one on the ocean side of Nantasket Avenue.
Anyone evaluating a Hull property for storm risk should pull the parcel's current flood-zone designation directly from FEMA's Map Service Center at msc.fema.gov, check current guidance and any evacuation-zone status through the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA), and contact the Town of Hull directly for the current status of its Harborview Road, Stony Beach, Nantasket Avenue, and Cadish Avenue coastal-resilience projects. Nothing on this page is a substitute for that official guidance, and it should not be treated as a professional flood-risk assessment, insurance determination, or engineering evaluation for any specific property.
Ready to talk to a local Hull agent?
Get a Free Agent Referral →Independent research. No ads. No sponsored listings. Hull's total area (26.9 square miles, 2.8 land / 24.1 water, 89.6 percent water), its drumlin-chain peninsula geography, the 1867 gazetteer's "five small hills...connected by very narrow necks of land" description, and Hull Gut's location and character are drawn from Wikipedia's "Hull, Massachusetts" and "Hull Gut" articles and an 1867 Massachusetts-gazetteer excerpt reproduced on accessgenealogy.com. Population figures (roughly 10,000-10,150 residents in recent years) are drawn from Wikipedia's Census infobox and Neilsberg.com and DataUSA estimates, presented as a range because these sources do not fully agree. Joshua James's biography — his 1826 birth in Hull; the 1837 Hepzibah wreck and the deaths of his mother and infant sister; his first rescue at age 15 in 1841; his credited 500-plus lifetime lives-saved figure; his 1889 appointment as Point Allerton keeper at age 62 under special Congressional authorization bypassing the Life-Saving Service's normal age-45 retirement limit; his station's 13-year, 540-lives/$1.2 million-cargo record; the Hurricane of 1888 rescue of 29 people including the Gertrude Abbott's crew via the surfboat R.B. Forbes and the resulting nine Gold Lifesaving Medals; the Hurricane of 1898 rescue of 41 people; and his March 19, 1902 death in service at age 75 — is drawn from a direct fetch of Wikipedia's "Joshua James (lifesaver)" article. A separate secondary source's claim that James saved "over 1,000" people could not be reconciled with this more specific, directly sourced 500-plus figure and is flagged here as unverified rather than used. The current Point Allerton Coast Guard Station's 1969 construction and April 18, 1970 commissioning, replacing the 1889 original, are likewise drawn from that Wikipedia research. Named storm and flood-event detail — the March 2010 flooding and its $24.2 million Plymouth County damage figure, the January 4, 2018 nor'easter's 15.16-foot storm surge, Hurricane Bob (August 1991), and the October 1991 "No-Name Storm" — is drawn from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council's "Town of Hull Hazard Mitigation Plan, 2024 Update" draft. The 295 repetitive-loss-property count, the $16.5 million in claims since 1978, and the FEMA flood-zone designations referenced within Hull are drawn from the same plan. The Portland Gale of 1898's regional death toll and the loss of the SS Portland are drawn from Wikipedia's Portland Gale article, already documented at a regional level elsewhere in this South Shore cluster; this research did not find a Hull-specific damage account for that storm distinct from those regional facts, and that gap is disclosed rather than filled in. The June 22, 2026 FEMA pre-disaster-mitigation grant application naming Hull's $1.1 million Harborview Road shoreline-protection eligibility is drawn from a direct fetch of FEMA's own June 22, 2026 press release and corroborating Boston Globe coverage of the same date; this is described as an application, not a completed award, and its outcome should be independently reconciled against the July 22, 2026 deadline before being cited as awarded. For current flood-zone determinations, evacuation-zone status, and hurricane-preparedness guidance, contact the Town of Hull directly, FEMA's Map Service Center (msc.fema.gov), and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA). Nothing on this page is a substitute for official emergency-management guidance or a professional flood-risk, insurance, or engineering assessment of any specific property.