The fishing pier in Keyport, days after it was destroyed by a flood surge during the superstorm. STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER ERIC SUCAR A s bad as superstorm Sandy was, the unprecedented event served as a learning experience for communities throughout Monmouth, Middlesex and Ocean counties.
But as time passes and memories of the frustration and chaos fade, some officials and advocates say the region is in danger of forgetting those lessons and repeating mistakes in the future.
“It’s starting to fade out, from what I’ve seen,” Christopher Huch, a community resiliency specialist with Rutgers University’s Jacques Cousteau National Estuarine Research Reserve, said on Jan. 24 at a seminar on coastal resiliency.
“We’re a year and a few months removed from Sandy, and already we’re getting to the point where community members are saying, ‘Oh, it was a once-in-a-lifetime event.’ ”
To refocus on this region’s vulnerabilities and highlight the work that has yet to be done to address them, Huch and other stakeholders from throughout the state came together at Monmouth University for a workshop titled “Coastal Community Resilience.”
Led by the Hawaii-based National Disaster Preparedness Training Center (NDPTC) and co-hosted by the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium, the four-hour seminar sought to identify risks that still exist in communities throughout central New Jersey and ways in which stakeholders could work together to solve them.
The dozens of attendees — including representatives of the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP); the American Red Cross; local officials from towns such as Middletown and Long Branch; and county health, planning and emergency management officials from Monmouth and Middlesex counties — said protecting against future storms continues to be a top priority. Russell Hendrickson, assistant director of the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management, said the next Sandy is not a question of if, but when.
“In the last three or four years, we have had a major storm, and each one has been worse than the last one,” he said.
Through a variety of group exercises, presentations and open discussions, NDPTC trainers discussed how communities throughout the state can implement resiliency based changes and ensure future disasters don’t pack the same wallop as Sandy.
“You can’t redirect a storm, but you can amend your community’s building codes to be stronger,” said Allison Harden, an NDPTC trainer and the city planner for Myrtle Beach, Md. “You can amend your land-use plan to put fewer people in harm’s way. You can educate your population to be more resilient on its own so you have to respond to fewer people.”
True resiliency, however, goes well beyond building higher houses and dunes, Harden said. Each must have a core of informed and involved citizens who truly understand the risks they face. Each community must also have a network of local organizations that provide specific services and support, surrounded by official departments that are prepared to respond to, and recover from, disasters.
If any of these areas are lacking, a community may not have the ability or resources to recover from a disaster without help, and could find itself in a decades-long recovery process, according NDPTC trainer Bonnie Canal.
“The goal of any resiliency plan is to lessen the distance between response and recovery,” said Canal, who was evacuated from her New Orleans home during Hurricane Katrina. “The longer the distance is between the two, the longer the long-term recovery is going to take.”
Nearly 10 years removed from Katrina, Canal said New Orleans is still in the recovery stage.
Toward the end of the workshop, attendees were split into groups to discuss 13 different aspects of issues in central New Jersey, including land-use management, energy, water, transportation, emergency management, health and safety, waste management, and buildings and housing.
The groups were tasked with rating current conditions in their communities on a scale of one to five, with one being the lowest; and suggesting ways in which they could be improved to better handle extreme weather events and disasters in the future.
Some of the lowest-scoring categories include watershed management and energy, which Monmouth County Deputy OEM Coordinator Kevin Stout rated a “two” due to electrical blackouts and the vulnerable infrastructure that failed during Sandy.
Martin Rosen, manager of the DEP’s Office of Coastal Land Use Planning, joined his group in rating land-use management a “1.5,” citing the “home rule” ethic that allows towns to zone vulnerable areas for development and value tax ratables above long-term safety.
“Towns are willing to put people and structures in harm’s way, despite the evidence,” Rosen said. “I think there is a lack of understanding at the local level between land-use decisions and risk management.”
Rosen said stronger restrictions on local land-use decisions could help prevent development in floodprone areas, and that money is needed for the DEP’s Green Acres program to help fund open space buyouts throughout the state. State legislators have yet to approve funding for the program for 2014, he said.
Carl Anderson, resource specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Fisheries Service, lauded improvements to some of the area’s Sandy-damaged marinas, which include floating docks and elevated fishing piers. For residential buildings, he said the state should look into expanding buyout programs to relocate homeowners in lowlying, flood-prone areas.
The workshop trainers offered recommendations for improvements, citing successful examples of resiliency initiatives currently in place throughout the country.
In San Francisco, Harden said, the city used a federal hazard mitigation grant to strengthen and better protect the operations building for its BART subway system in 1989. Soon after, the city was rocked by a powerful earthquake, but the building survived.
“While the roads were closed, the BART was open,” Harden said.
In Mississippi, a hazard mitigation grant was used to elevate machinery and an operations building at a vital power plant, successfully keeping the plant operational during an ensuing flood.
But Harden said one of the most comprehensive resiliency strategies was initiated in Hilo, Hawaii, after the community was rocked by two tsunamis. The town implemented a coastal development plan that included a new waterfront promenade, a realigned highway, and a new “tsunami forest” to break up wave action.
The successful program was only developed because Hilo residents remembered the disasters of the past, Harden said.
“In Hawaii, they have a tsunami museum and regular events to keep it in mind,” she said. “In Myrtle Beach, the city constantly remembers [Hurricane] Hugo. You have to remind yourself of what you went through, and that you don’t want to go through it again.”