Storm Prep Costs for Hull, MA Waterfront Homes

Hull's Storm History: The South Shore's Most Water-Exposed Town

The single most damaging recent flood event on record for the region is the March 2010 flooding: 17.7 inches of rain fell over 19 days (March 13 to 31, 2010), causing $24.2 million in Plymouth County damages, which represents 93% of the county's total flood damages for the entire 2005 to 2023 period covered by the town's own 2024 hazard-mitigation plan. That is not a Hull-only damage figure, but Hull's low-lying, harbor-mouth peninsula geography makes it one of the county's most exposed towns to exactly this kind of event.

The January 4, 2018 nor'easter produced a storm surge of 15.16 feet in Hull, described in the town's own plan as higher than the highest surge recorded during the Blizzard of '78, a genuinely striking comparison given how the '78 blizzard is still the storm every South Shore town measures itself against. Earlier named storms in the same record include Hurricane Bob (August 1991) and a separate, distinctly named No-Name Storm (October 1991), plus blizzards in December 1992, March 1993, January 1996, and January 2005. Flood events in October 1996 and June 1998 are also listed in Hull's hazard-mitigation plan, though the plan does not attach damage-dollar figures to either of those two events.

Hull's repetitive-loss numbers put a fine point on all of this: 295 FEMA-tracked repetitive-loss properties townwide, 261 classified as standard Repetitive Loss and 34 as Severe Repetitive Loss, with combined historical claims exceeding $16.5 million since 1978. For a town with only 2.8 square miles of land, that is an unusually concentrated flood-claims history, and it is the direct reason the town has pursued the named seawall and shoreline projects below.

Crescent Beach/Atlantic Avenue: A Seawall Raised Two Feet, and What One More Foot Would Have Cost

Hull's most fully documented resilience project is the Crescent Beach/Atlantic Avenue Storm-Damage Adaptation, covering a quarter-mile barrier beach on the town's northeast-facing shore. The beach's deteriorating revetment and seawall had been threatening 73 homes, a critical evacuation route, and Straits Pond behind it. The adaptation strategy that was actually built raised the seawall's top by two feet and reconstructed the revetment with armor stone, reducing wave-energy overtopping without eliminating it entirely.

The funding history is specific and worth citing directly: an initial FY2014 Coastal Resilience Grant of $41,250 (paired with a $13,750 local match), followed by a further $3 million awarded in 2015 through the Massachusetts Dam and Seawall Repair or Removal Program, covering final design, permitting, and construction. One engineering finding from the project deserves particular attention for anyone budgeting future coastal work in Hull: accommodating just one additional foot of sea-level rise would have required raising the seawall four feet instead of two, adding roughly 35% to the project's cost. Hull's engineers chose the two-foot, balanced option instead of the more expensive four-foot version, a real tradeoff between near-term cost and longer-term sea-level-rise headroom that any owner near a Hull seawall should understand before assuming a rebuilt wall is a permanent, one-time fix.

Stony Beach, Nantasket Avenue, and Cadish Avenue: Three More Named Projects, One Figure Worth a Hedge

Hull's hazard-mitigation plan and search-result coverage of state dam-and-seawall funding both point to a Stony Beach seawall project, reportedly carrying an $11 million figure, with work reportedly scheduled around December 2024. That figure should be treated carefully: this research could not confirm it through a fully successful direct fetch of the underlying Healey-Driscoll administration press release, which is the kind of primary source that would settle it. Treat the $11 million Stony Beach number as reported via secondary coverage rather than a confirmed, primary-sourced figure, and independently re-verify it against the state's or the Town of Hull's own materials before relying on it for any decision.

Two further projects are confirmed to exist as named, town-tracked efforts on the Town of Hull's own website: the Nantasket Avenue Seawall Project and a separate Cadish Avenue Shoreline Stabilization Project (2024). Neither project's full funding amount or construction scope was extracted in this research, so anyone wanting that level of detail should go directly to the Town of Hull's own site rather than rely on a secondhand summary here.

A fourth project, the Harborview Coastal Bank Stabilization Project at 51 Harborview Road, ties directly into a 2026 federal funding round: Hull was named as eligible for $1.1 million from a FEMA pre-disaster hazard-mitigation program for shoreline protection there, part of a $17 million New England allocation announced in June 2026. That grant and the Harborview project's own background are covered in more depth elsewhere on this site's Hull coverage of hurricane risk; the short version for storm-prep budgeting purposes is that, as of this research, it represented an applied-for or eligible federal contribution, not a completed, fully funded project.

What This Means for Your Own Storm Prep Budget

Everything above is town-, county-, or state-level information: a rainfall total from 2010, a surge height from 2018, and a set of seawall grants aimed at public infrastructure, not any individual house. This research did not turn up individual-homeowner cost figures for storm-proofing a Hull property, whether that means flood-venting a foundation, elevating mechanical equipment, or installing a whole-house generator, and none are invented here to fill that gap.

The honest next step is the one the town's own hazard-mitigation planning points toward: get a site-specific assessment from a licensed contractor familiar with coastal Massachusetts construction, and confirm your property's current FEMA flood-zone designation directly with Hull's own Climate Adaptation and Conservation Department. If your property sits near Crescent Beach, Straits Pond, Stony Beach, Nantasket Avenue, Cadish Avenue, or Harborview Road, the projects above are useful context for how the town is treating its own exposure in that immediate area, but they are not a substitute for a parcel-specific estimate.