Sandy walloped the Jersey Shore in October 2012. A decade later, experts say our beaches are more secure—but much of the bayfront remains in peril.

By Ken Schlager New Jersey Monthly

Only a series of short bulkheads and a narrow marsh protect the homes on Ohio Drive in the waterfront community of Mystic Islands. Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge damaged or destroyed many Mystic Islands properties. Photo by Joe Polillio

It happens every spring. Massive mounds of sand rise on the beach in North Wildwood. The mounds loom alongside the boardwalk, gray and menacing, like a rogue wave. 

But the great mounds are nothing to fear. They are evidence of emergency beach replenishment, an annual ritual in this oceanfront resort. North Wildwood trucks sand from Wildwood City (which has too much) and deposits it on its own beaches (which have too little). In the weeks leading up to Memorial Day, the mounds disappear as the sand is spread and North Wildwood’s beaches are restored.

The annual beach fill is a temporary fix; it should cease after fall 2023, when the Army Corps of Engineers is expected to take over the care and feeding of North Wildwood’s beaches. At that point, the Wildwoods will become the last of New Jersey’s beach municipalities to sign on with the Army Corps for what is called coastal storm-risk management. This, experts say, will protect all of New Jersey’s ocean-facing beaches from the wrath of major storms—at least for the 50-year duration of the Army Corps deals.

Trucks dump sand from Wildwood onto the beach in North Wildwood, where it is spread in an annual replenishment effort. Photo by Joe Polillio

“New Jersey’s oceanfront is actually in the best shape of anywhere in the country,” says Stewart Farrell, founder, and director of Stockton University’s Coastal Research Center (CRC).

That’s the good news.

Now the bad: Ten years after Hurricane Sandy, the bayfronts and riverfronts of many of New Jersey’s Shore communities remain vulnerable to the twin terrors of sea-level rise and increasingly intense storms. Addressing this risk is in some ways more complicated than protecting the ocean beaches, but it is no less an issue that affects homeowners, seasonal tourism and natural habitat.

An aerial shot of Wildwood’s annual beach restoration. Photo by Joe Polillio

And the threat will only get worse. In its 2022 update, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts sea-level rise of 10-12 inches along the East Coast by 2050. In the continental United States, only the Gulf Coast is at greater risk. What’s more, NOAA predicts that thanks to this rise in sea level, even “moderate” flooding will occur “10 times more often than it does today, and can be intensified by local factors.” 

Rising sea level is not just a 21st-century phenomenon. “Sea level was 400 feet lower 25,000 years ago,” says Farrell. As sea level rises, coastlines are pushed inland. Geologists tell us that during the Ice Age—some 20,000 years ago—New Jersey’s shoreline was probably 80 or 90 miles east of where it is today. Even in the 17th century, as early settlers began staking out Shore property, the beaches in Monmouth County were 2,000 feet farther east than the beaches we know. 

Stockton University’s Stewart Farrell surveys a beach in Brigantine, where sand is abundant. Photo courtesy of Press of Atlantic City

The dominant goal for today’s coastal communities is to keep the shoreline fixed in place. That’s been the case since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the development of coastal resorts spurred human intervention. As the natural cycle of erosion ate away at the beaches, coastal towns created rock structures to trap sand and fend off floods. When developers turned to the bayfronts, they filled marshes and built bulkheads.

That was long before anyone could anticipate global warming. NOAA ties modern sea-level rise directly to the warming, and consequent expansion of ocean water, as well as the flow of additional water from melting ice sheets and mountain glaciers. For U.S. coastlines, the 10-12 inch rise in sea level that NOAA predicts over the next 30 years is roughly equivalent to the total increase recorded in the previous 100 years.

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