By State › Massachusetts

Massachusetts: Overview

Download all of Massachusetts as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Massachusetts exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Massachusetts go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The Worcester tornado: the deadliest in New England history

On June 9, 1953, an F4 tornado tore through Worcester and surrounding towns, staying on the ground for 78 minutes across 48 miles, killing 94 people and leaving roughly 10,000 homeless. It remains the deadliest tornado ever recorded in New England, a region most people don’t associate with serious tornado risk at all. See the Risks page for the full data.

The Blizzard of 1978: a three-day siege that shut down the state

Twenty-five years later, a very different kind of storm defined Massachusetts’s severe-weather history: a nor’easter that dropped 27.1 inches of snow on Boston over nearly 33 hours, killed 54 people statewide, and left roughly 10,000 residents in emergency shelters after more than 2,500 homes were effectively destroyed. Massachusetts was functionally shut down for the better part of a week.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Massachusetts: households need a real severe-weather plan that covers both ends of the spectrum, a practiced tornado shelter plan for summer thunderstorm season and genuine multi-day winter-storm self-sufficiency (heat, food, water, and a plan that doesn’t assume roads will be passable) for nor’easter season, rather than treating either as the state’s “main” risk to the exclusion of the other.

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