Posted on June 26, 2023
Waves lap up against the narrow shore of North Wildwood as Patrick Rosenello straightens his sunglasses, and leans against the steel seawall, the soft sand crumbling beneath his tan dress shoes.
Quiet as he is, the mayor doesn’t have to utter a word about how important the tiny specks of sediment are to the resort town. His navy sweater vest says it all.
The municipality’s seal features two dolphins flanking the phrase “Sun and Sand.”
The sunshine, he has. But sand? Not so much.
A winter of harsh weather and waves have taken a chunk out of North Wildwood’s 2 1/4 mile coast, leaving massive cliffs and practically no beach in some parts — especially at high tide. In any other year, they would have trucked in sand from sister city Wildwood’s plentiful beaches to replace what Mother Nature washed away. But this year, the beaches were too narrow for the heavy offroad vehicles to get through.
Erosion is Rosenello’s worst enemy.
“It’s getting me from every angle,” says the 50-year-old mayor while standing on a beach incrementally being eaten away.
But the savior always seems to be more sand. In fact, a “beach replenishment” was happening at that very moment, steadily pumping millions of grains of sand slurry onto the shoreline — not in his town but in Avalon just 15 miles away.
This summer, Avalon’s shore will be back to full, offering ample room for beachgoers to lounge on the sand with not an ounce of worry the waves will wash up onto the street.
Like other municipal leaders eager to spruce up their beaches, Rosenello will have to wait his turn.
“It’s worse than that. I can see the dredge from my house,” he says, laughing at the irony. “From the second floor looking out across Hereford Inlet.”
Replenishment — the process of widening the beach by pumping in sand that’s been dredged from offshore and reinforcing dunes to withstand the brunt of nasty storms — is “sacrificial by design” according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The sand is meant to be washed away.
It’s done to protect towns from seasonal flooding, safeguard waterfront homes, and keep Jersey Shore tourism dollars churning each summer — or all three depending on who you ask. And it’s worth every penny, various officials told NJ Advance Media.
This animation from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shows the potential side effects of no beach replenishment project versus a scenario where there was one.
But the never-ending task — what one local group calls “a bad habit” — of pouring millions of cubic yards of sand onto most of the nearly 130 miles of Jersey Shore beaches is only expected to become more needed with beach erosion likely to worsen in the future due to sea level rise and climate change. Besides being more expensive due to the rising cost of materials and labor, the list of offshore sites that are primarily dredged for sand will shrink unless more are found — an uncertain and time-consuming endeavor that requires more taxpayer money amid lengthy feasibility studies.
Critics, who see the cycle of sand replenishment as an hourglass bound to run out, wonder if it’s finally time for New Jersey to take a big-picture look at other options.
The state, some implore, should consider if the sand-paved path it’s laid year after year has drowned out all other alternatives and become a self-perpetuating cycle that only enables more coastal development.
Even, they say, as town officials plead for more sand.
Without imminent replenishment, North Wildwood would see its beach disappear and hundreds of homes put in the path of the ocean’s fury, Steven Hafner, the project manager for Stockton University’s Coastal Research Center’s North Wildwood shoreline studies, said.
“It’s really dependent on storm intensity and storm frequency but it would be a steady process even without storms,” said Hafner. “We’d reach crisis mode probably within less than five or six years without a storm-induced enhancement on that timeline.”
North Wildwood’s mayor doesn’t want to hear about moving away from sand as a solution.
Rosenello’s priority is filling the barren beach before him.
But he fears he’s running out of time.
And beach.
‘You need a lot of sand’
The amount of sand poured onto beaches in New Jersey in the last century is enough to fill the Empire State Building 146 times.
The 200 million cubic yards of sand used in beach replenishment projects between 1922 and 2022, would fill more than 61,000 Olympic pools, 84 MetLife Stadiums, 464 Borgatas and more than 53,000 Camden Ocean Realm Aquariums.
And it’s not cheap.
The Garden State has poured more sand onto its beaches, per foot of shoreline, than any other state, even more than California and Florida which have hundreds of miles more coast, according to the nonprofit American Shore and Beach Preservation Association.
More than $2.6 billion has been spent on beach replenishment projects in New Jersey since 1922 — accounting for 1/5 of what’s been spent nationwide — according to Andy Coburn, associate director for Western Carolina University’s Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines. Yet, New Jersey’s coast is just 1% of the country’s shoreline.
“It’s very expensive and in order for it to be effective, you need a lot of sand,” said Kimberly McKenna, interim executive director for Stockton University’s Coastal Research Center, which releases annual reports on coastal management. “You can’t just do a couple of bags here, a couple of bags there.”
Can’t see the chart below? Click here.
Since the 1980s, New Jersey and local municipalities have been sharing in the replenishment project costs with the U.S. Army Corps, and for the past 30 years, New Jersey has set aside $25 million in the state’s “Shore Protection Program,” the bulk of which is used for beach nourishment.
Towns typically receive federal replenishment every three or four years — even though some may need it every year. Certain projects and problematic “hot spots” are prioritized if the conditions are bad enough to pose a safety threat, explained Steve Rochette, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Philadelphia District. Cape May, for example, has had 13 replenishment projects since the 1990s at a cost of $144 million. Was it worth it? In just 2022 the county generated $7.4 billion in direct tourism spending, according to officials.
Ask any number of Jersey Shore mayors about receiving federal help and you’ll detect a gleam in their eye. They see a benefit in the U.S. Army Corps and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection helming projects, too — echoing the agencies saying it has standardized the process and made replenishment more environmentally conscious.
“What has worked best in the state of New Jersey has been using hydraulic dredges offshore, pumping sand,” Rosenello said in May while one was working just off Avalon’s coast.
That work is part of a $28 million U.S. Army Corps project for both Avalon and Stone Harbor. Avalon’s work was done before Memorial Day but Stone Harbor was delayed multiple times due to weather.
“In an ideal world? I would say ideally it would be done May 20 rather than beginning,” said Stone Harbor Mayor Judith Davies-Dunhour before Memorial Day, not knowing the work would be delayed yet again until at least June.
But a U.S. Army Corps project set to benefit North Wildwood and three other towns is still more than a year away, which has left Rosenello to fend for himself.
North Wildwood received state approval in May to spend $100,000 to smooth out sharp bluffs that formed on the shoreline and regrade paths so walkways don’t end with 3-foot drop-offs, posing a safety concern. That emergency work happened even as a $33 million lawsuit between the city and the state lingers. The legal action stems from the city previously building a steel bulkhead and other coastal defenses in defiance of the state — work the mayor contended was necessary while they wait, but which the state said may have likely made the erosion worse.
North Wildwood is among the Jersey Shore towns that relies on periodic sand replenishment from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. However, because of approval delays and beach erosion issues, the town has not been able to refill its shore with sand, town officials said.
For mayors and other local leaders at the shore, having to sit tight for sand replenishment can be unnerving, so they are allowed to take matters into their own hands — as long as the right permits and approvals are acquired. They also need money.
For the first time, Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City this spring used $700,000 of its own money to truck in sand from a South Jersey quarry to replenish a beach there that isn’t due for a U.S. Army Corps project for another year or two.
“Back in November of last year, we started looking out the windows as we were doing our walks and we realized there was no way we were going to have a beach this summer,” Bill Callahan, the casino’s general manager, said. “That’s when we discussed it with our consultants.”
In Toms River, officials don’t want to wait until the end of this year when they’re scheduled for a $60 million U.S. Army Corps project. Little snowfall this past winter meant surplus money was available and $305,000 of it was earmarked to replenish sand at the badly-eroded Ortley Beach, officials said.
“This is a stopgap measure that we have to do to repair our dunes each year after the Northeast storms we get in the winter months,” said Mayor Maurice “Mo” Hill.
What if Toms River had heavy snowstorms and those emergency funds were not available?
“We’d print our own money,” Hill joked. “No, we’d get it from somewhere. We might have to shift funds in the budget. We’ll do all we have to do to get everything shipshape for the summer.”
“You would like (the U.S. Army Corps) to come on demand,” he continued. “But that’s not always possible. They have to plan these projects out … I can’t say that we deserve it more than Wildwood deserves it if they’re first in the queue.”
Even North Wildwood’s mayor, Rosenello, does not direct his anger toward his neighbors.
“I don’t begrudge the other communities,” Rosenello says. “The entire Jersey Shore exists because of the shore protection project.”
