SHORE PROTECTION IN THE STATE OF
NEW JERSEY:
New Jersey is considered the most developed and densely populated
shoreline in the country, but out of a 130-mile distance between
Sandy Hook and Cape May Point, there are 31.2 miles of shoreline
with no human development between the salt marshes and the sea. The
Sandy Hook National Seashore was established on the northern spit in
Monmouth County, long used for military defense of New York harbor.
Continuous development extends from Sea Bright south to Seaside Park
in Ocean County. The 10.5-mile Island Beach State Park provides a
nearly pristine coastal environment utilized in ever increasing
recreational and eco-tourist activities. Long Beach Island has the
Holgate unit of the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge at its
southern tip as part of a 10.8-mile gap in development consisting of
Holgate, Little Beach Island and the northern part of Brigantine
Island. Shorter segments of undeveloped shoreline exist on Pecks
Beach (Corson’s Inlet State Park), the Two-Mile Beach Unit; Cape May
National Wildlife Refuge, and the Cape May Meadows in Cape May
County. Seventy six percent of the coast is developed, with
intensely crowded public and private land use activities of great
economic value to the State and its citizens.
Shore protection is the science and strategy of devising methods,
structures, and practices that together, promote the art of living
safely within a geologically unstable environment with the constant
threat of storm damage. Made of unconsolidated sediments, the New
Jersey coastal zone is not able to resist alteration by waves, tides
and storms that move sediment from place to place. The total absence
of bedrock along the shoreline means that all the oceanfront is
vulnerable to be removed and re-deposited elsewhere over relatively
short periods of time.
Protection has involved many different structural solutions
beginning with timber bulkheads and piles of brush contained inside
a double row of cedar pilings (early groins). During the 20th
Century truck transportation of large rocks added to the ability of
placing large armor stone along erosional shorelines. Concrete came
into play to create seawalls and other structural solutions.
Finally, the development of large-scale methodology for moving
millions of cubic yards of sand from areas of surplus at inlets or
offshore to eroded beaches created the beach replenishment
“industry”. Between 1990 and 2005 over a half billion Federal, State
and local dollars were expended at over 50% of the developed
shoreline placing 10’s of millions of cubic yards of sand on beaches
between Sandy Hook and Cape May Point.
36 years of State regulation of the coastal zone has produced a
large volume of policy designed to guide a safer development history
especially along the inlet and oceanfront shorelines. Implemented by
the Land Use Regulation Program (LURP) within the New Jersey
Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), the shore protection
aspect of the regulation has focused on building design, setbacks
from the shoreline and the creation of a wider beach with a storm
resistant dune system built between the development and the beach.
There has been abundant conflict between those who would build right
to the high tide line on the beach and some who would advocate the
abandonment of all public and private development on barrier
islands. Since most individuals, corporations, and municipal
governments fall close to the center between that range of
positions, the major battle has been over how large a setback, how
wide a beach and controlling dune growth.
As the Federal/State and local municipal beach restoration program
emerged in the late 1980’s, the wider beaches created by bringing in
new sand have reduced storm damage to public and private property.
The first reaches completed under the Federal program were northern
Ocean City to 34th Street and Cape May City, NJ. Ocean City was
completed in the summer of 1992 following the October 31, 1991
northeast storm which did over $4,000,000 in damage just to the
municipal boardwalk and other public infrastructure along the
shoreline. In December 1992 an equally intense event produced
another Federal disaster declaration for New Jersey, but damage to
the Ocean City oceanfront infrastructure was negligible. In Cape May
City there was one minor area of overwash into the community at the
very northern oceanfront street intersection.
Following the two early 1990’s northeast storms, the State Division
of Engineering and Construction reviewed the damage history and
looked for ways to accelerate the Federal Shore Protection Program
for other New Jersey beaches. In 1994 the NJ legislature established
the “Shore Protection Stable Funding Act” that initially provided
$15 million dollars annually for the specific purpose of conducting
shore protection projects along the coastline. The policy was to
provide 75% of the project cost with the State funds, with the local
contribution equal to 25% of the project. Following consultation
with the New Jersey Shore Partnership, local coastal public
officials, coastal consultants, public and private, the decision was
made to use the Stable Funding Act revenue to provide the required
35% local partner(s) matching funds to seek future Federal
assistance. With the Federal Government paying 65% of the project
cost, the State/local funds became tremendous financial leverage to
proceed with far larger efforts than could be undertaken by the
State and municipal entities alone.
The State and its municipal allies began the process of lobbying the
Congress for authorization of Shore Protection work along the New
Jersey shoreline. The Federal US Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) is
the agency charged with initiating, planning, designing, and
carrying out the construction of these projects. With three distinct
phases required to take a project from concept to construction, the
effort proceeded to get started on nearly every shoreline reach in
the State. By far the largest project was the Monmouth County Shore
Protection Project covering 21 miles of shoreline between the Sandy
Hook National Seashore and Manasquan Inlet. The New York District is
the division of the ACOE responsible for Monmouth County. The first
step is a Congressional authorization directing the ACOE to
undertake a Reconnaissance Study of the selected shoreline to
determine the nature and magnitude of the erosion or storm damage
threat and recommend moving to the Feasibility Study phase. Federal
funds cover the reconnaissance study, with the State matching funds
required for the Feasibility Study that follows. That study is
conducted by the ACOE and is focused on providing engineering,
geo-technical, environmental, and economic answers to the questions
raised by the reconnaissance study. In order to proceed to the next
step the Feasibility Report must (among other things) show a ratio
greater than 1.25 when the value of project benefit is divided by
its cost.
The Planning and Engineering Design phase is where the actual
project is laid out and cost documentation with predicted benefits
to the region is formulated into a sizable document that will be
used to generate a funding request from Congress to go to
construction. Finally, after approval and signature at Department of
the Army in Washington DC, the project is authorized to go to the
construction phase. Most of the effort is expended in lobbying
Congress, pursuing the goals of the project and seeing that the
State is on-board with the project design in order to go from
reconnaissance to construction in less than 8 years. Projects were
authorized in rapid succession for nearly all developed shoreline
sections in the State. The political activism did move the Monmouth
County, Absecon Island, and Seven-Mile Island projects to
construction following the initial success of the Cape May City and
Ocean City projects. Work is completed or near complete on the two
studies for all other reaches in the State. Construction funding
authorization from Congress has become increasingly difficult. As
the need for beach maintenance has increased, the willingness of the
Congress to fund these projects has decreased with multiple attempts
to return the burden of funding back to the States and local
communities. Coastal communities and economies are clearly important
to New Jersey’s prosperity and quality of life, but they are
vulnerable to devastating affects from northeast storms and
hurricanes. This was demonstrated during the 2004 hurricane season
in Florida. This threat came to pass again along the Gulf Coast in
2005, which may continue a 20-25 year long trend of enhanced
activity in the Atlantic basin that began in 1995. This increasing
trend in storm activity coincides with a decreasing trend in Federal
funding for shore protection and beach nourishment. Funding for the
2006 budget proposal is 32% lower than was proposed for 2005, and
nearly 50% lower than was proposed for 2004. Responsibility for
protecting and maintaining the coast is incrementally shifting to
the State and municipal governments.
The details on each of the projects follow in the body of this
report under the county in which they are taking place. New Jersey
is pursuing the continuation of projects already authorized to
ultimately achieve their construction status, especially Northern
Ocean County, Long Beach Island, and Ludlam Island. The relatively
minor effort on the northern Brigantine Island shoreline was
completed in the spring of 2006. Each project authorized for
construction comes with an agreement to support the maintenance of
the project for 50 years from the date of signature of the final
Planning and Engineering Design documents. At the present moment the
Federal government provides 65% of the maintenance costs as well,
with the “local” share at 35% of the project cost. The “local”
sponsor of any Federal project may comprise local, county or NJ
State funding agencies. With the State’s program of 75% cost sharing
of coastal projects, the municipal share of any Federally sponsored
project is 25% of the 35% “local” share which amounts to 8.75% of
the total Federal project cost. That means for every million dollars
in project cost, the municipal share of the project is $87,500. This
is the fantastic local economic leverage built into Federal Shore
Protection Projects.
The geomorphology of the New Jersey coastline was defined by
Nordstrom, 1977 and has been used to divide the State’s coastline
into five distinct zones with different characteristics. The
variation is most dramatic between the bluff where the upland
surface ends at the beach as a cliff in the older sedimentary
deposits and the barrier spits or islands. The bays and lagoons are
found to the south of Bay Head, NJ where the bluff finally is
submerged at the edge of the rising sea level and its Holocene
deposits. There are two long sand spits attached at the north end of
the bluff (Sandy Hook) and at Bay Head, extending south to Barnegat
Inlet. Tidal inlets occur about every 10 miles and number 11 from
Shark River to Cold Springs Inlet. Finally, a shore segment of
uplands bluff is exposed at Cape May Point where the Cape May County
peninsula extends into Delaware Bay. A detailed discussion on the
geologic changes and the present-day emergence of the New Jersey
coastal plain and coastline has been included for a number of years
in previous reports. This information is still found on the website
devoted to the New Jersey Beach Profile Network data generated by
the Richard Stockton Coastal Research Center (CRC)(page 5,
2002-report).STORM
VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT OF THE NJ COASTLINE:
With the upsurge in intense hurricane activity since 2004, the CRC
began to focus on just how susceptible the New Jersey coastal
communities were to storm damage from dune breaching and overwash
during storms. Data on beach elevation and width combined with dune
parameters were factored into an analysis designed to predict just
when a particular storm would breach the beach/dune system and
produce damage inland. Research found initial attempts at
quantifying the damage potential from coastal barrier erosion
(Williams & Johnson, 199?) where the national shorelines were
categorized as Stable, Moderately Eroding or Severely Eroding. The
northeast portion of the US is displayed in Figure 1a left, below
showing their color scheme with New Jersey shown as severely eroding
along all but Atlantic County’s shoreline. To the right is an
illustration from a 2001 USGS report, which took the analysis of the
southern Atlantic shoreline up a level to evaluate the relative
elevations of the primary dune along the coast with indications of
decreased vulnerability to overwash and breaching based on an
increase in dune elevations.
In 2002 the CRC commenced development of a storm vulnerability
assessment for the New Jersey shoreline based on new technology
called LIDAR. LIDAR is a laser light pulse sent from an aircraft to
the ground and detected in reflection from the ground and converted
to an elevation based on GPS determination of the plane’s position
and elevation and the time for the light to reach the ground and
return to the plane’s detection system. Digital elevation data with
points about every square foot form a swath along the shoreline from
the low tide line back landward of the dunes. Water penetration is
imperfect at present, but is under development and sub-aqueous data
is improving.
The initial project evaluated the relative effectiveness of a
stretch of Long Beach Island dunes in Holgate to storm damage based
on width, elevation, seaward slope, and vegetation density. The
dunes were subdivided based on existing oceanfront property widths
and categorized into five classes of increasing ability to resist
breaching. In 2004, the Borough of Mantoloking requested that the
CRC evaluate the community dune system and add the model impact of
multiple storms defined by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
into probability of occurrence between a 2-year event up to 100-year
storm intensity. Each storm’s defined parameters of wave height,
storm surge elevation, etc, were entered into the ACOE computer
program called S-Beach. This one-dimensional model uses the LIDAR
data and offshore NJBPN data to provide the “existing dune beach
conditions” for the test to see if the system can withstand a
particular intensity storm event. If the dune crest is compromised,
the determination is made that dune failure occurs and overwash into
the community occurs. Figure 1b to the right shows the 50-year FEMA
storm event imposed on the Mantoloking oceanfront dunes based on the
width of individual oceanfront properties. The digital tax map was
provided by the community and used to segment the 2000-dated LIDAR
and digital aerial photography. Cooler colors indicate dunes that
resisted the 50-year storm surge and waves with the yellow color in
the upper set of color bars showing a 90% erosion to the dune crest.
The red color indicates dune failure. The lower set of color bars
shows the relative performance of the dune/beach system among the
141 properties along the Mantoloking oceanfront. Reds and yellows
indicate below average performance, blues and greens indicate above
average with white the average dune performance for a 50-year storm.
This effort is being expanded, funded by the NJDEP Division of
Engineering and Construction to include all of Northern Ocean County
on a 250-foot width increment. Designing this for individual
oceanfront property widths proved to be an impossible task since not
every community has or is willing to provide its digital tax map
with geo-referenced coordinates for the project. Work is expected to
be complete by June 2007. |
