Registering History: When Cape s Fires Raged
Robert Leaversuch
Forest fires have always posed a threat to life on Cape Cod and still do. The danger is rooted in our natural environment, but by the late 19th century it was greatly exacerbated by more invasive human practices.
Indigenous, colonial and modern inhabitants in turn have adopted fire as a weapon for clearing our once-prolific vegetation to help them hunt, cultivate, harvest wood and shortcut travel. By around 1880, some two-thirds of the original landscape, including much of the woodlands, had been displaced by farms, fields, settled areas and the expanded reach of new means of transport. The remaining one-third had evolved into a secondary growth consisting mostly of pitch pine and scrubs entangled in thick, dry mantles of undergrowth.
Cape Cod Times
Gordon Peabody likes to say that his company, Safe Harbor, uses the power of the wind and waves to rebuild natural shoreline protections like beaches and dunes.
One technique involves placing thousands of slats in random patterns on a beach mimicking stalks of beach grass. In theory, they slow down wave velocity causing the sand it carries to settle out and bulk up a beach instead of destroying it.
If there s one trend Peabody has noticed in over 30 years of work, it s the raw power he thinks climate change has injected into storms. It s what he saw at Ballston Beach in Truro in 2013. A megastorm, one of several big powerful winter storms that have besieged the Cape in recent years, developed off the coast as arctic air collided with a warm southern air mass. The storm spun hammered the coastline with hurricane-force winds, breaching an offshore sandbar and overrunning a coastal dune.