The long, expensive battle for N.J.'s receding coastline

After a three-day nor'easter in September scoured away all the sand in front of his beachfront Strathmere home, Jack Monaghan beseeched the state to build a jetty - quickly - at the mouth of Corson's Inlet.

New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection urged him to be patient.

The Army Corps of Engineers was about to launch four massive beach-replenishment projects along New Jersey's barrier islands, the DEP told him, and new sand would be pouring out of pipes onto Corson's Inlet by December.

It was cold comfort for Monaghan, 80, who feared a killer winter storm might carry his home away. "I'm definitely not in favor of waiting," he said at the time.

He is waiting still.

It has been 25 years since the Army Corps began its long entanglement with Mother Nature along New Jersey's long, crowded, capricious shoreline.

Call it combat. Call it a dance. Since 1990, the Corps has poured 73 million cubic yards of sand onto 130 miles of beaches between Sandy Hook and Cape May.

And for 25 years, wind and waves have been taking it back.

"Detractors say: 'What a bunch of pork. It washes away,' " said Ed Voigt, spokesman for the Corps' Philadelphia district. "But it's a sacrificial system.

"Yes, it costs money to keep putting it back. But it's like being in a car accident and only seeing your crumpled fender, when you should be grateful to be alive."

While now a champion of beach replenishment, which it calls "nourishment," the Corps was summoned to the task reluctantly a quarter-century ago.

For decades, Cape May City had howled that two enormous jetties the Corps built in 1911 at the mouth of the city's harbor had destroyed its adjacent beaches. In 1989, Cape May won a years-long lawsuit against the Corps demanding it restore the beaches, and the Corps got to work.

So successful were the results that other Shore townships took notice and petitioned for their own projects. Ocean City was next, in 1991, followed by a five-year project in Monmouth County that placed 23 million cubic yards of sand from Sea Bright to Manasquan.

"It's been quite successful," said Stewart Farrell, director of Stockton College's Coastal Research Center and adviser to the state DEP. He estimates that the state and federal government spent $800 million, not adjusted for inflation, on beach replenishment in New Jersey between 1985 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

While costly and labor-intensive, the process is simple. A dredging vessel offshore draws sand from the ocean floor and pumps it through pipes to shore.

There, it emerges as a roaring slurry of water and sand that crews spread and grade into broad, flat planes, or berms, and shape into dunes.

On Ludlam Island, for example, where Strathmere sits, the impending replenishment project calls for 100-foot-wide berms reaching from the ocean to dunes about six feet tall.

The higher, longer beaches will surely be the scene of children's happy squeals and sunbathers' slow bronzing, but the hugely expensive berms and dunes are there for protection, not recreation, says Voigt (pronounced "vote").

When big storms hit, he explained, long berms backed by dunes dissipate the force of wind and waves, control flooding, and mitigate erosion, usually sparing damage to roads and buildings.

And while dunes are unpopular with some beachfront homeowners, who object that they obscure their view, Voigt says the case for dunes is clear.

"If you have a direct line to the ocean," he said, "the ocean has a direct line to you."

By the start of last week, Monaghan, a retired business owner, was growing increasingly anxious. First told that sand replenishment in Corson's Inlet would start in March, there was talk it would hold off until fall.

"I understand the story is that the piping plover," which breeds along the inlet, "lays its eggs in March or April," he said. "It seems the puffing plover is more important than the people."

But on Thursday he and other homeowners got good news.

"The Army Corps and the DEP have basically waived the restriction" on work in the breeding ground, explained Richard Palumbo, mayor of Upper Township, Cape May County.

"The plovers' nesting habitats are not there" because of last year's erosion, he said, and so replenishment should begin in March or April.

"I'm happy with that," Monaghan said Friday, although he admitted he would feel safer with something "permanent," like a jetty.

As if Monaghan needed further evidence of just how fickle barrier-island beaches can be, he said that a broad swath of sand had reappeared in the inlet in recent weeks, visible even at high tide. "I was quite surprised," he said.

Corson's Inlet, which comprises a state park, is just one piece of an eight-mile-long project that will start at 34th Street in lower Ocean City and reach south along Strathmere and Sea Isle City, both part of Upper Township.

Contracted to the Illinois-based Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co., the $58 million job will put 4.1 million cubic yards of sand in place, according Jeffrey Gebert, former chief of coastal planning for the Corps' Philadelphia District.

It is one of four Corps projects designed and approved years ago but which were not federally funded until Hurricane Sandy made landfall over Atlantic City in October 2012, killing 37 New Jersey residents and wreaking havoc along the coastline.

"Sandy was, in a sense, a windfall for these projects," said Gebert. "Windfall is not the best word, but, after Sandy, Congress finally funded projects that had been unfunded for years."

The Ludlam Island project, for example, had been approved in 1999, said Gebert, who now wears the title "Hurricane Sandy planning technical expert."

The three other beach-renourishment projects slated to start this year are:

Manasquan Township to Barnegat Inlet. The 14-mile project has not yet been contracted.

Long Beach Island. Four miles of the island's beaches were replenished a decade ago. The planned project, contracted for $128 million, will replenish along its remaining 12 miles.

Absecon Island. Plans call for beach restoration in Ventnor, Margate, and Longport estimated at $74 million, but Margate has sued to block the state's and Corps' plan to build dunes - which it says it does not need - to the dismay of its neighbors. Atlantic City and Ventnor, also on the island, saw their beaches replenished in 2004.

Gebert said that while federal funding for beach replenishment had been unpredictable during the last two decades, New Jersey lawmakers have committed $25 million to it each year for more than a decade - more than any other state but Florida.

"It's a measure of how seriously a particular level of government takes this issue," he said.

But Bill Cowan, a neighbor of Monaghan's who has owned a house on Corson's Inlet since 1980, takes a philosophical view of beachfront property.

"Where I live is about as beautiful as it gets," Cowan said. And long beaches and dunes, backed by boulders and steel bulkheads, afford some peace of mind when nor'easters howl and waves crash.

"So I view every day here a gift," he said, "but you never know. We're messing with God."

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