Jersey Shore Magazine

Jersey shore beaches THE NEW BEACHFRONT, continued from page 63 Gordon Hesse Sandy's Impact And The Response The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Philadelphia responded to twenty-seven Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) missions immediately after Sandy, one of which included filling in the breach at the Mantoloking Bridge and constructing temporary housing at Fort Monmouth. According to FEMA, more than 2.6 million homes, businesses, and government customers were without power. Those who had been displaced fended for themselves, often by moving in with friends and relatives; 4,000 people stayed in 107 shelters. In the first month, more than 1.7 million meals and 2.6 million snacks were served to survivors and first responders. Sandy's fourteen-foot waves and j e r s e y s h o r e • F a l l / H o l i d a y 2 0 1 3 temperature in the northeast has increased by two degrees; winter temperatures are rising twice as much. Warming temperatures contribute to sea level rise by melting glaciers and ice caps, expanding ocean water. Portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are currently melting into the sea. Since 2005, the U.S. has weathered six of the most costly hurricanes. Sandy, at $82 billion, takes second place only to Hurricane Katrina. Since the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944, New Jersey has had contact or damaging brushes with an increasing number of powerful nor'easters and at least ten more hurricanes. Irene and Sandy, the two most recent, were slightly more than fourteen months apart. 64 Beach replenishment and construction of the twentyplus foot sand dune at Brant Beach on Long Beach Island. eighty-eight-mile-per-hour winds along New Jersey's coastline washed and blew away protective dunes and tremendous amounts of beach sand. According to Richard Gardner, a spokesperson for the New York District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it is estimated that, from Manasquan to Sea Bright, approximately five million cubic yards of sand was washed away causing, in some cases, whole houses to move off their foundations. In Ortley Beach, houses collided with dwellings that remained in place. In Mantoloking, the high dunes were destroyed because of their narrow bases. The ocean broke through and carved an inlet at the Mantoloking Bridge, which connects the barrier island to Brick Township, sweeping numerous houses into Barnegat Bay. According to the Beach-Dune Performance Assessment by the Coastal Research Center of The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, the worst and most widespread structural damage occurred in Ortley Beach, which was stripped down to a flat, featureless beach sloping into the sea. It is estimated that 122,000 structures were either damaged or destroyed in twentyone New Jersey counties by Sandy. A pressing issue during the cleanup after the storm was that the lowlying barrier islands and coastal areas were critically vulnerable to further risk from high tides and relatively small storms. Front-end loaders, bulldozers, and dump trucks were called into action in the places hit hardest. They returned the sand in the streets to the beaches to provide a barrier, however temporary and fragile, from

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