Battle of the Century: New Jersey vs. the Atlantic
Shore took a modest hit this week; researchers confident it’ll get worse.
Predictably, nor'easter damage varied among Shore towns in Jersey, where the natives have seen far worse than this.
"It's the devil that we live with at the Shore," Harvey Cedars Mayor Jonathan Oldham told our Jackie Urgo.
Tom Avril's companion piece about rising sea levels suggests that something far worse is brewing, and not that far into the future.
New Jersey has been wrestling with that devil for over a century, fighting back with groins, jetties, seawalls, bulkheads — and in the last 50 years — more and more taxpayer-subsidized beachfill.
Jersey's shoreline has been called the most-engineered in the country, and it likely is, since it was one of the first to become developed, spurred by the railroads in the 19th Century.
A geologist told us years ago that some beaches are so engineered it has become all but impossible to determine the course of "natural" erosion.
A classic case is the Wildwood-Cape May paradox. The Army Corps of Engineers built a stabilizing inlet jetty north of Cape May between 1908 and 1911.
Over time the jetty robbed Cape May of sand, leading to a costly federal beachfill project, and allowed the Wildwood beach to grow almost comically to a point where the town basically has no oceanfront property.
Rising sea levels, the result of melting ice and thermal expansion, are likely to add further torment to the Shore in years to come.
But the hazards have done nothing to discourage coastal development.
The Army Corps did not become seriously involved in beachfill projects until after the devastating 1962 Ash Wednesday storm.
The damage was so frightening that it was followed by an unprecedented coastal building boom. Today some of the most-endangered properties in the nation are among the most valuable.
With so much building against shorelines, federal and state governments have invested vast sums of money to hold back the seas, and federal storm-cleanup disaster assistance has increased exponentially in the last 20 years, driven largely by hurricanes.
Researchers say while rising sea level is a documentable threat, it is not at all clear whether worldwide warming is having an intensifying effect on hurricanes and nor'easters.
What is clear is a strong anthropogenic signal: Human development.
Industry officials estimate that properties in hurricane-vulnerable areas have an insured value of $10 trillion.
Before Hugo in 1989, not a single storm had caused $1 billion in damages to the United States.
Disaster experts have warned that before mid-century a $500 billion storm certainly is possible.