Coastal communities flooded.⁶ Two months later, another nor’easter produced the third-highest water level on record at the Boston tide gauge, with severe flooding from Portland, Maine, south to Cape Cod Bay.⁷
That’s the winter to worry about: the one that keeps changing its mind.
For a ski town, that means a season of negotiations. Snow, rain, freeze, thaw, ice, bare spots, and another warmup don’t only hurt the trail. They move into restaurants, rentals, gas stations, lift workers, plow drivers, and town budgets.
For a public works director, El Niño becomes salt piles, culverts, overtime, pump stations, road closures, and calls from residents. A forecast like this says where the system is weakest.
That’s the useful lesson. El Niño doesn’t create every weakness. It exposes the ones already there: undersized drainage, expensive shorelines, aging housing, winter economies dependent on snow, municipal budgets built around old seasonal patterns, and roads designed for a rainfall climate that’s changing faster than the infrastructure.
Modern forecasting doesn’t prevent damage. It buys time. The question is whether anyone uses that time to look at the weak places before the weather does.
Water remembers them. The low road. The blocked drain. The basement bulkhead. The culvert that was almost big enough. The seawall that worked until the tide rose higher.
El Niño won’t create those vulnerabilities. It’ll test them.
By then, the forecast won’t look like an index in the tropical Pacific. It may be a bedroom that won’t cool, a road closed under the railroad bridge, a December rainstorm eating the snowpack, or a nor’easter pushing water over the seawall.
The signal begins far away.
The consequences arrive at home.
And somewhere, after the forecast has been issued and before anyone’s ready to call it climate, the pump will start in the dark.
Bibliography
1. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Climate Prediction Center. “ENSO Diagnostic Discussion.” Issued May 14, 2026.
2. U.S. Geological Survey, “Flood of July 2023 in Vermont”; National Weather Service Burlington, “The Great Vermont Flood of 10–11 July 2023.”