‘So critical’: Chelsea, Everett lose $50M in FEMA dollars to prevent flooding

A yearslong project to protect Chelsea and Everett’s residents and businesses from flooding is at risk after a major federal grant was pulled earlier this month.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency canceled its $50 million grant for the cities’ Island End River Coastal Flood Resilience Project. The plan includes an above-ground flood wall to block water from spilling over the riverbanks, as well as ecological restoration of the marshes in the Mystic River tributary.

The full project was estimated to cost $120 million, and the loss of FEMA’s $50 million has left leaders scrambling to figure out how they can still get this critical project built.

In the potential flood path: a produce processing center that supplies much of the Northeast, Chelsea High School, a Market Basket, and key transit throughways like Route 1, Route 16 and commuter rail tracks. Local advocates and officials say that means the impact of any major flooding would reach far beyond the residents who are at risk.

Roseann Bongiovanni leads GreenRoots, a local environmental advocacy group based in Chelsea. She says now it will be “nearly impossible” to get the project done.

“I don’t see this project moving forward without these federal dollars,” she told GBH News.

Emily Granoff, Chelsea’s project manager for the initiative, said setbacks to this project could impact far more than just the 5,000 residents of Chelsea and Everett who could be directly affected by flooding.

New England Produce Center in Chelsea, for instance, is one of the businesses that’s closest to the shoreline and most vulnerable to flooding. If a major flood kneecapped the facility, it could threaten the region’s access to fresh produce, she says.

Commuters from the North Shore would also struggle to get into much of the Boston area with potential disruptions to major roads and the commuter rail.

“There are so many people who don’t know about it who are relying on the infrastructure in this area to get to work, to get home, to buy groceries. And it’s so critical that we do find a way to continue constructing this barrier — and Everett and Chelsea can’t do that on our own. We’re very low-income communities,” she said.

“You wouldn’t ask East Boston to pay for Logan Airport, right?” Granoff added. “Like, that’s something that benefits all of us.”

Launched during President Donald Trump’s first term, FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program was completely shuttered earlier this month, cancelling hundreds of millions in allocated funds for infrastructure projects. That includes $90 million in Massachusetts projects, state leaders said this week.

“Chelsea is an environmental justice community that supports a significant share of the region’s essential infrastructure and services,” Chelsea City Manager Fidel Maltez said in a statement. “We urge the administration to reconsider and restore this critical investment in frontline communities.”

Those involved in the project say that, if the project can’t be completed, it will only lead to greater costs down the road.

“The Trump administration has been really focused, in rhetoric at least, on reducing waste, fraud and abuse. This project is the pinnacle example of government efficiency,” said Nasser Brahim, the Mystic River Watershed Association’s director of climate resilience. “Spending a relatively small amount of money to avoid a very large amount of money and costs in the future — protecting economic development, small businesses and people from flooding that could happen anytime.”

In these areas of Chelsea and Everett, flooding on par with Hurricane Sandy could become an annual occurrence in a half-century’s time, a 2022 analysis found.

“Our projections say that in a disaster, there’d be likely to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.6 billion worth of damage,” she said. “$120 million [for the project] is expensive, but it’s 30 times cheaper than that.”