BRIGANTINE, N.J. — With its full moon and stacked high tides over multiple days, last week’s nor’easter left Shore towns with some of the worst flooding and erosion since Hurricane Sandy.
In dramatic fashion, the nor’easter produced some feared Shore scenarios: dunes sliced into cliffs, beaches vertically eroded, popular restaurants flooded to the point of closing altogether for the season, water lapping into ground floors, cars ruined. Days later, firefighters were responding to raging electrical fires, at least one of which was linked to a flood-soaked golf cart.
Still, the nor’easter was also a testament of what went right, a test of flood resilience tactics implemented in the 14 years since Sandy — a series of flood pumps in Brigantine, an elevated artery in Ocean City, raised homes throughout the Shore — that prevented a much worse outcome.
‘Our girl took a beating’
In parts of Holgate, Brigantine, Atlantic City, and North Wildwood, the storm left cliffs six feet or higher, cutting off access to the beach at multiple street ends. Vertical erosion uncovered old structures including rotting old wooden piers.
Streets in Long Beach Township, West Wildwood, and Atlantic City took on water through multiple days of high tide, damaging residential garages and other ground floor spaces.
On Sigsbee Avenue, contractor Vincent Allen of B. Grigoletto Contractors was ripping out ruined insulation and dry wall on two houses, both second homes.
He noted that since Sandy, a lot of the smaller homes had been torn down and replaced by elevated homes, where the ground floors are not, technically, living spaces. “Basically, if you lived on the bay, you got water,” he said. “This wasn’t as high as Sandy, nowhere near it.”
On Long Beach Island and Atlantic City, numerous businesses were mopping up or closing early for the season after flood damage.
“We are truly sick to our stomachs, and it hurts,” Moments at Scannicchios, a restaurant on Fairmount Avenue in Atlantic City, said in a Facebook post. “In the end we will reopen.” The restaurant asked people to help out a nearby corner bodega, El Rinconcito Grocery, it said lacked similar resources.
On Long Beach Island, the ruined insides of the Dockside Diner were strewn across the front of the restaurant. “Our team, our family, is safe,” the owners wrote on Facebook. “But our old girl Dockside took a beating.”
Nearby, Mike Franzoni looked at the charred remains of BLVD Pizza’s Beach Haven location, which suffered flood damage and had a fire a few days later. Another location, in Surf City, was undamaged.
On Long Beach Island, the beloved “karaoke garage,” belonging to the family of Diane O’Donnell, 80, of Yardley, Pa., took on two feet of water, half of Sandy levels.
Last week, an Indigo Girls song was playing out of the space where Kelly Kolbjornsen and her family would recruit people to stop and sing karaoke on their way down Long Beach Boulevard.
“It’s part of having a beach house, but it’s a little overwhelming,” Kolbjornsen said.
‘A good gauge’
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill and U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew brought representatives from FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers to focus on severe damage to ramps from Brigantine’s concrete promenade in the north end and the near breaching of a private retaining wall that was the only line of defense after surging waves destroyed dunes at the promenade’s edge.
But Mayor Vince Sera also pointed out that neighborhoods devastated during Sandy remained mostly damage-free.
“We put floodgates in before the storm came into Brigantine,” he said. “They closed all of the floodgates and prevented a lot of water from coming in. On each low tide, they let the water out to drain, and closed them again for the next high tide.
“Any water that comes into the streets, we have pumps around the island,” he said. “It pushes the water out over the bulkhead and back into the bay. It drains the island.”
Residents near those points of vulnerability took note.
“Without the pumps, it would have been horrible,” said Terri Cunnion, whose home sits on Bayshore Avenue across from the boat ramp, a major thoroughfare of flooding during Sandy (when the previous home on her lot was destroyed). “Without those gates, this block wouldn’t be.”
Through multiple high tides, last weekend’s floodwaters never got past the lip of the garage in the Cunnion’s house, whose living spaces are built 14 feet to new elevation standards.
Ocean City’s newly elevated Roosevelt Boulevard was also credited with mitigating damage from the nor’easter, staying above floodwaters and allowing an evacuation route, said Mayor Jay Gillian. The road was reconstructed so that portions were raised by 12 to 20 inches.
During Hurricane Sandy, bay waters roared right up Brigantine’s municipal boat ramp and surged across Bayshore Road, totaling houses with four feet of water.
Since the installation of eight permanent flood pumps and two portable flood buster pumps, vulnerable spots like Bayshore Drive and the neighborhood around the town’s golf course are newly fortified. In addition, bulkheads were raised.
Atlantic City, similarly, installed pumps at its Atlantis Avenue station and rebuilt bulkheads in Chelsea and Chelsea Heights. It has yet to complete similar projects in its Ducktown neighborhood, which saw major flooding last weekend, leaving some businesses with tens of thousands of dollars in equipment and merchandise loss.
Van Drew pointed to other improvements since Sandy that protected utility infrastructure and homes. Homes that were elevated had ground levels that allow water to flow in and then out, he noted. He is advocating a permanent $1 billion “Coastal Trust Fund,” funded by revenue from federal offshore oil and gas leases to provide a stable source of funding for beach fills, dune restoration, and other coastal remediation.
“The good news is we’ve done a lot of good work,” Van Drew said. “We’ve hardened a lot of structures. When you look at electrical substations, in many cases, they’ve been raised. When you look at transmission lines, rather than being on wooden poles, they are now on industrial grade steel lines that are actually put on much, much stronger holes.”
‘Sacrificial sand projects’
On an Oct. 1 tour from Long Beach Island to North Wildwood, Van Drew made the case for continued beach replenishment funding, despite the storm eating through a good chunk of the $99 million in recent beach replenishment, most recently in Sea Isle City, Strathmere, Ocean City, Avalon, and Stone Harbor.
D. Lee Forsgren, the performing assistant secretary for the Army for Civil Works, who oversees the Army Corps, made a point of calling beach replenishment projects “sacrificial sand projects.” He compared the engineered beaches to your car’s “crumple zones” that are made to take the initial beating.
“We don’t put sand on these beaches to make them pretty beaches,” he said. “They are designed for storm damage reduction.”
Still, he cautioned Van Drew that “the best opportunity to really make progress would be with a supplemental appropriation associated with the storm because there’s not a lot of pocket change sitting around in the core budget.”
That will require a disaster declaration from Sherrill, who toured Brigantine on Tuesday.
Aside from more sand, Van Drew said the towns, state, and Army Corps were looking at funding hard structures — like jetties, groins, and seawall extensions — as ways to keep the elevated tides that accompany storms from overwhelming beaches.
In Brigantine, Mayor Sera rode out the storm at the tip of the promenade, watching railings get blown off, dunes disappear, and the nearby retaining wall nearly buckle. He said city officials had compiled a list of who was in nearby homes in case of an emergency evacuation.
He is seeking to extend the promenade another 250 feet north, and says the state is studying whether adding hard structures to keep the sand in place will help a situation where a sandbar that has in recent years grown into what is now called Horseshoe Island is starving Brigantine of sand.
The city’s flood mitigation efforts since Sandy have resulted in a 25% discount for residents on flood insurance, he said. And he wholeheartedly recommends flood pumps and gates to other municipalities, like Ventnor, whose Ventnor Heights section was cut off at both ends by flooding for hours during high tides.
Sera and other knows the big storms will come again, probably this winter, with the El Niño warming in the equatorial Pacific.
With sea levels rising, some residents who came out to see the federal officials in Brigantine wanted to know about timelines.
“How fast is fast,” interrupted Louise Seitel, of nearby Absecon, as officials spoke of extending the seawall.
“A study is probably going to be 18 months,” Nate Barcomb, an Army Corps deputy district engineer based in Philadelphia, acknowledged.
“Government is tough,” Van Drew said.
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