A home on Harris Avenue in Union Beach had to be raised an additional 13 feet above sea level after being ravaged by flooding during superstorm Sandy. Residents throughout the state still face complex obstacles and difficult questions as they attempt to rebuild. JEFF GRANIT staff A full six months out from Sandy, the true power of the Oct. 29 superstorm has finally set in.
Throughout the state, residents and officials are still facing tough, complicated choices — whether to rebuild quickly or safely, to move ahead or wait for aid, or for some, to uproot their families and move to higher ground. “I’m on the fence. I don’t want to deal with the flooding anymore, ever,” said Sayreville resident Frank Mazzaroni, who along with more than 200 neighbors is considering giving up his home as part of a federal buyout program.
“But this is a nice, quiet, old-school neighborhood. You can let your children play in the street. … To move into another home in the area with these amenities is a tall order for a 50-year-old.”
A pedestrian passes a raised house on East Avenue in Bay Head, Ocean County, on April 9. The borough suffered significant damage during superstorm Sandy on Oct. 29. PHOTO BY JEFF GRANIT staff On Long Beach Island, Mayor Joseph Mancini said residents are rebuilding and returning home, but are being thwarted by what they consider to be flawed flood elevation maps produced by the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA).
“I think it was criminal. You’ve got these poor people sitting in hotel rooms, waiting to go home, waiting on new information … I’m recommending people take care of their repairs right now. The raising process is going to take years.”
Mancini, who said the barrier island will be nearly 100 percent reopened for the summer tourism season, recently testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on the maps, which govern how high homes must be elevated above sea level to qualify for flood insurance.
Mayor Joseph Mancini “They are incomplete,” he said. “We asked for more data, and they can’t give us any because none exists.”
In Union Beach, a homeowner is considering bankruptcy and litigation against his insurance provider after the company offered him a settlement far below the cost of repairing his flood-damaged home.
“I carried enough insurance to even build a new house, and right now I don’t have enough to fix my house, lift it or rebuild it,” said Bart Sutton, who has been living with his family in a rented Keyport apartment since shortly after the storm.
“And my house would have to be elevated an additional 9 feet, which would cost about $100,000 … who knows? Taking another mortgage could put me upside down. I can’t do that.”
As pages continue to fall off the calendar, residents struggling to pick up the pieces have an additional worry: the impending hurricane season, which officially begins in June and peaks in mid-August.
In a “Statement of Imminent Peril” released April 16 by the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), Commissioner Bob Martin called attention to the dunes and other flood-protection structures damaged during Sandy, leaving many coastal towns more vulnerable to future flooding events.
“It is imperative that the state take immediate steps to ensure that any damaged shore-protection structures be repaired or replaced as soon as practicable,” the statement read. “Taking these actions will help protect the state, its residents and their property from future storms, which can occur at any time.”
New Jersey has experienced at least one major disaster declaration from FEMA in each of the last eight years, according to the DEP. In 2011, FEMA issued five major disaster declarations in New Jersey — four of which were due to flooding from “severe weather events.”
The approach of the 2013 hurricane season also puts added pressure on towns rushing to reopen beaches, boardwalks and businesses in time for the lucrative summer tourism season.
Coastal communities from the Raritan Bay to Cape May have come to depend on summer commerce, filling out their budgets with tax revenues from occupied homes and storefronts. Since shortly after the storm, state and local officials have focused on being “open for business” by Memorial Day.
To expedite the recovery process, the DEP and state officials recently approved regulatory changes allowing for easier and quicker repairs of storm-damaged dunes, structures, marinas and more. But larger flood mitigation projects — including the engineering of comprehensive dune systems — are beyond the means of most municipalities.
This summer, the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) plans to award contracts for beach renourishment projects along 21 miles of coastline from Sandy Hook to Barnegat Inlet, the largest such project ever undertaken by the agency. However, there is no date set for work to begin or be completed, according to an ACE spokesman.
“It could be several months, but it all depends on the contracts. This is a very big project, involving millions of cubic yards of sand,” the spokesman said.
With towns waiting for federal aid and ACE projects to safeguard against future storms, residents are under more pressure to elevate their homes and protect themselves, said former DEP Commissioner Mark Mauriello, who currently serves as a planning and development professional.
“Obviously, this year we will be a lot more vulnerable due to the loss of dunes and other infrastructure,” Mauriello said. “The conditions, the costs and the vulnerabilities have been changing over time. We’ve known this for a while, even before Sandy. We’re seeing more intense storms, flood levels are increasing. I’m encouraging people to move forward however they can.”
In LBI, however, FEMA’s flood elevation maps incorrectly place more than 10,000 properties in higher-risk zones, with costlier mitigation requirements and potentially higher flood insurance premiums, Mancini said.
While waiting for new maps and new data from FEMA, LBI has been working day and night to push temporary sand berms up along the coast and protect the township as best it can, Mancini said.
“We’re concerned,” he said. “But we are as protected as we are going to be, with the funding and the sand available to us.”
Comprehensive dune systems, however, are not a be-all, end-all solution, Mauriello said. They are labor-intensive, expensive and need continual maintenance.
“In Monmouth Beach and Sea Bright, we’ve spent probably $100 [million] or $150 million in the last 25 years on beach replenishment. It’s probably the most-engineered beach we have in the state.”
In Sea Bright, a town so severely damaged by Sandy that close to half of its 1,400 year-round residents have yet to return home, local officials are using the storm as an opportunity to create a “smarter” system, focusing on more long-range initiatives. Officials invited a graduate class from the Rutgers University Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy to provide planning guidance.
“The truth is [that] this town is located on a barrier island. If this barrier island were not urbanized today, it never would be urbanized in the future,” said lecturer Carlos Rodrigues, noting that the class would present the results of its studies in May. “The question is: What do you do going forward?”
Right now, flood-prone municipalities should be performing vulnerability assessments to determine which areas should be targeted for future development and in which areas development should be scaled back, said Peter Kasabach, director of the nonprofit planning and policy organization New Jersey Future.
“I think there are certain places where we are going to have to look at time horizons — what is this town going to look like in 20, 40, 60 years?” he said. “There will very well be places that don’t make a lot of sense to rebuild back at all. And I think this is the time to be looking at those things.”
More immediate projects, such as sea walls and berms, also have the potential to erase the benefits of living near the Shore, Rodrigues added.
“You have to be very conscious of the consequences of those barriers. The higher they go, the more you lose your connection to the water; the very element that sort of justifies being there in the first place.”
But looking to the future is a luxury many towns still don’t have. Following Sandy, which caused $37 billion in damage throughout the region, many residents and town officials are still weighing difficult choices, waiting for aid and seeking answers.
“Imagine not being able to go home,” Sutton said. “That’s the worst part. Everybody just wants to go home.”