By ANDREW S. LEWIS, NJ Spotlight, JANUARY 18, 2024 |
Just as the last sand-and-seawater slurry was pumped onshore and bulldozed into place on the beachfront at Strathmere, Cape May County, earlier this month, Gov. Phil Murphy declared a state of emergency. Yet another powerful winter storm was bearing down on the New Jersey coast. As the Atlantic began to churn, the inevitable question surfaced: How much sand would be clawed back by the ocean this time?
The Strathmere replenishment is one segment of an ongoing $33.7 million project by the Army Corps of Engineers that, when completed in spring, will see 1,353,000 cubic yards of sand — almost 113,000 dump trucks’ worth — pumped onto barrier island beaches in Ocean City, Upper Township (Strathmere), and Sea Isle City. Another recently completed project, in Cape May City, saw 517,000 cubic yards of sand pumped onto 2.6 miles of shoreline — price tag $16.1 million.
Neither effort is an emergency measure, but periodic “nourishment” cycles that are part of a 50-year commitment between New Jersey and the Army Corps, established in the early 1990s, in which the federal government covers the majority of the projects’ costs. In the case of this winter’s Ocean City/Upper Township/Sea Isle City replenishment, the federal government is responsible for 65% of the cost; the state and local municipalities will split the remaining 35%.
In the replenishment project that just ended earlier this month, Strathmere received another 456,000 cubic yards of sand — almost the same amount that was pumped onto its shoreline in 2016.
Sea level rise, combined with the slight but steady subsidence of the coastal plain upon which southern New Jersey rests, has for years been the climate-change bogeyman most often blamed for the staggeringly fast erasure of equally as staggering amounts of sand from the Atlantic shoreline. While sea level rise does play a role — the Atlantic City tide gauge shows over 18 inches of rise since 1910, a foot of which has occurred since 1950 — more recently, climate change’s impact on localized weather events has been an increasing concern.
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