A Walk Past Boston's Flood Barriers on Sept 30

The City of Boston’s calendar lists a Third Annual Deployables Day Walking Tour for Sept 30, 2026. The listing describes it as a chance to learn about flood resilience with both public and private deployable flood barrier owners, and it’s free. If you’re buying near the water, it’s a look at work you’d otherwise only read about in a building’s documents.

What the tour is

It runs 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sept 30, with Chief Climate Officer Brian Swett and Chief of Planning Kairos Shen, and the listing gives the neighborhood as Downtown. It asks you to register with an email you check, because route updates go out that way. The tour begins at Martin’s Park. Registration runs through an Eventbrite link on the listing, and that page showed the tour as sold out the day before this post went up. The listing gives a city contact for accessibility questions and inquiries about the tour.

The three stops

The first stop is Martin’s Park, where the city shows its latest deployable. The second is Atlantic Wharf, where Boston Fire runs a technical rescue drill over a deployable flood barrier with specialized vehicles and equipment in a flood scenario. The third is Harbor Towers, where the city says residents have come together to pool their funding and expertise to make two 40-story residential towers more resilient to coastal flooding and storm surge.

The third stop, if you’re buying

A privately funded barrier is a capital project, and capital projects show up in the documents a buyer reads: the reserve study, the budget, the minutes, the special assessment history and the insurance binder. When you tour a building near the water and ask what it has done about flooding, the answer should be in those documents. Knowing what one of these projects looks like helps you know what to look for in them.

Where the city’s resilience work came from

The City of Boston released the Climate Ready Boston report in 2016. It included a citywide climate vulnerability assessment and strategies to address the impacts of climate change, and the city says it laid the foundation for later actions across the city, including additional planning efforts, policy and regulatory changes, and the formation of the Office of Climate Resilience. The Climate Ready Boston team transitioned to that office in August 2024, and the office now coordinates the city’s resilience work with other departments, state and federal agencies, and the private sector.

Going

The route is paved sidewalk along the harbor with frequent stops, which the city describes as about a mile. The registration link is on the city’s calendar listing. If you’re shopping near the water this fall, go with the questions you’d ask at a condo showing anyway. Diana Kim, REALTOR®, eXp Realty.