Natural dunes are created by winds blowing off the ocean and take decades to form. The dunes might just as well not have been there.” “And if a public path was cut through the dunes at street level, or some homeowner had trampled down their own private path, forget about it. “Even towns with dunes had essentially no protection if the actual beach was narrow,” explained Farrell. Chris Christie’s office in the months following the storm. The lessons learned from Sandy are more subtle, however, than “build dunes,” which has been the dominant message from Gov. All 521 buildings on the island were either damaged or destroyed. On the other end of the spectrum were places like Mantoloking, which had no dune system. While the ocean claimed half of the beach here, and made off with at least one third of the total sand volume of the dunes, the dunes were never breached and the homes and businesses behind them were spared the brunt force of the storm.
The towns that weathered the storm the best, Harvey Cedars, Surf City and Brant Beach, all along Long Beach Island, had massive dune systems, 22 feet high, and set back from the high tide mark by an additional 300 feet. These humble heaps of ground down rock and shell are fueling lawsuits, emptying federal pockets and, at the same time, are being heralded as a solution for coastal erosion.
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Despite this, however, dunes, which are essentially glorified piles of sand, are taking center stage in a battle over how to rebuild from the storm. The takeaway message from Farrell’s post-Sandy surveys was simple: dunes work and living on a unprotected coastline in Jersey does not. Clean up continues 75 days after Hurricane Sandy struck the shore in October 2012. “Sandy showed us, without a doubt, what kind of configuration of dunes and width of beach worked best,” said Farrell, who spent the weeks from Halloween to Thanksgiving out on the shore at the survey sites, measuring the storm’s impact.Ī bulldozer in front of destroyed homes on Januin Lavallette, New Jersey. CRC has 27 years of mile-by-mile data on the shifting position of the shoreline, fluxes in sand volume and dune dynamics. In some areas, the local municipalities have used the sand to widen their beaches while other towns have built artificial dunes or some combination of the two.Įvery year, twice a year, Farrell and his team survey 105 sites on the Jersey coasts, from Sandy Hook in the north to Cape May in the south. Over the past 25 years, 73.2 million cubic yards of sand have been dumped along the water’s edge to hold the shoreline against the Atlantic Ocean. Of its 127 miles, 90 are developed and 55 percent of those, or about 53 miles, are routinely replenished by the Army Corps of Engineers. The Jersey Shore has been routinely reinforced on a large scale since the 1980s.
“It was the destroyer of homes, the devastator of lives, and a giant laboratory experiment running in real time, testing the strength of the New Jersey coastline.” “Sandy was many things,” said Farrell, director of the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey’s Coastal Research Center (CRC). He’s a scientist, and knowing the storm must have dramatically altered the coastline, he was getting ready to assess the performance of New Jersey beaches in the wake of a test no one thought they would be expected to endure. As dawn broke over the storm-ravaged state, where 346,000 homes had been damaged or destroyed during the night, Farrell was getting ready to go to the beach.įarrell is not a surfing fanatic hoping to catch the last of the storm’s wave action or a natural disaster tourist who enjoys taking pictures of destruction. Stewart Farrell was one of the few on the move. For some people, stranded in their homes by high water, there was nothing to do but sit and wait, hoping that help would come soon. Most people sat stunned, not sure just what had happened or what to do next. On the morning after Superstorm Sandy slammed into the eastern seaboard, the New Jersey coast was paralyzed.
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