Superstorm Sandy: The Inevitable Destruction and Reconstruction of the Jersey Shore

By Diane C. Bates

Sandy was the costliest hurricane in U.S. history after Katrina, but the waters had barely receded from the Jersey coast when massive efforts began to “Restore the Shore.”  Why do people build in areas open to repeated natural disasters?  And why do they return to these areas in the wake of major devastation?  Drawing on a variety of insights from environmental sociology, Superstorm Sandy answers these questions as it looks at both the unique character of the Jersey Shore and the more universal ways that humans relate to their environment. 
 
Diane C. Bates offers a wide-ranging look at the Jersey Shore both before and after Sandy, examining the many factors—such as cultural attachment, tourism revenues, and governmental regulation—that combined to create a highly vulnerable coastal region. She explains why the Shore is so important to New Jerseyans, acting as a key cultural touchstone in a state that lacks a central city or even a sports team to build a shared identity among the state’s residents. She analyzes post-Sandy narratives about the Jersey Shore that trumpeted the dominance of human ingenuity over nature (such as the state’s “Stronger than the Storm” advertising campaign) or proclaimed a therapeutic community (“Jersey Strong”)—narratives rooted in emotion and iconography, waylaying any thought of the near-certainty of future storms. The book also examines local business owners, politicians, real estate developers, and residents who have vested interests in the region, explaining why the Shore was developed intensively prior to Sandy, and why restoration became an imperative in the post-storm period.
 
Engagingly written and insightful, Superstorm Sandy highlights the elements that compounded the disaster on the Shore, providing a framework for understanding such catastrophes and preventing them in the future. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9780813573410

Book preview

Superstorm Sandy

Nature, Society, and Culture

Scott Frickel, Series Editor

A sophisticated and wide-ranging sociological literature analyzing nature-society-culture interactions has blossomed in recent decades. This book series provides a platform for showcasing the best of that scholarship: carefully crafted empirical studies of socio-environmental change and the effects such change has on ecosystems, social institutions, historical processes, and cultural practices.

The series aims for topical and theoretical breadth. Anchored in sociological analyses of the environment, Nature, Society, and Culture is home to studies employing a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives and investigating the pressing socio-environmental questions of our time—from environmental inequality and risk, to the science and politics of climate change and serial disaster, to the environmental causes and consequences of urbanization and war-making, and beyond.

Superstorm Sandy

The Inevitable Destruction and Reconstruction of the Jersey Shore

Diane C. Bates

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bates, Diane C.

Superstorm Sandy : the inevitable destruction and reconstruction of the Jersey Shore / Diane C. Bates.

pages cm. — (Nature, society, and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–7340–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7339–7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7341–0 (e-book) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7342–7 (e-book web pdf)

1. Hurricane Sandy, 2012. 2. Coastal zone management—New Jersey. 3. Hazardous geographic environments—New Jersey. 4. Shore protection—New Jersey. 5. Human ecology—New Jersey. 6. Social ecology—New Jersey. 7. Environmental sociology—New Jersey. I. Title.

HT393.N5B37 2016

304.2'509749—dc23 2015012450

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2016 by Diane C. Bates

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

For Laura, Nicholas, and all of the children of the Jersey Shore

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Prologue: Down the Shore, (Not) Everything’s All Right

Chapter 1. The Inevitable Sandy

Chapter 2. The Shore of Memories

Chapter 3. Shore Resorts

Chapter 4. The Suburban Shore

Chapter 5. Government, Bureaucracy, and Technical Fixes

Chapter 6. Restoring Security at the Shore

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Preface and Acknowledgments

In a social milieu of constant media access, disasters like Sandy have provided an endless stream of images and narratives that can inform but may also be used for less noble purposes. Movies and television shows have long dramatized human tragedies for entertainment; now real-world disasters offer the same sort of vicarious thrill, albeit with real humans, real losses, and real suffering attached. I have deliberately tried to avoid such disaster porn in favor of largely structural explanations. At times, however, structural explanations have been complemented with the stories of individuals, such as the oral histories in the prologue, collected through the Hurricane Sandy Oral History Project, led by my colleague Dr. Matthew Bender. The personal stories included here were chosen because they personalize rather than sensationalize the Shore. At the same time, with the exception of public officials, I made the decision to obfuscate the identities of the individuals to avoid the potential for drawing unwanted attention to them.

In addition to Dr. Bender and his students, and all of the Shore residents who participated in the Hurricane Sandy Oral History Project, I would like to acknowledge the support for this project from many of my colleagues and students at the College of New Jersey. Among them are: Rachel Adler, Elizabeth Borland, Winnifred Braun-Glaude, Tim Clydesdale, Pat Donohue, Karen Dubrule, Chris Fisher, Lynn Gazley, Mohamoud Ismail, Jean Kirnan, Margaret Leigey, Rebecca Li, Michael Nordquist, Brian Potter, Ben Rifkin, Miriam Shakow, Jon Stauff, and Bruce Stout (who also served as the pilot for the aerial photographs I took that are included in this book). Lynn Gazley, Michael Nordquist, and Martin Bierbaum all read early chapter drafts and provided useful suggestions, and Margaret H. Bates helped edit the first complete draft. Discussion with the students in my environmental sociology class in spring 2013 heavily influenced how this project developed; among these, Pete Peliotis, Joanna Peluso, and Jigna Rao made important contributions to the way I approached this material. My former professors at Rutgers University exposed me to most of the theory on which this book is based, and for this I thank Patricia Roos, Lee Clarke, Karen O’Neill, Ira Cohen, Eviatar Zerubavel, and the world’s best academic mentor, Thomas K. Rudel.

This particular book grew out of an item I wrote in the American Sociological Association’s Environment and Technology newsletter, which was strongly encouraged by then-editor Michael Agliardo. Peter Mickulas, my editor at Rutgers University Press, read that short piece and believed in a book-length project long before I did. He deserves my warmest thanks and gratitude. Two anonymous reviewers provided very valuable feedback. Willa Speiser had the Herculean task of copy editing and improving the clarity of the manuscript; she made vast improvements in the manuscript, but cannot be faulted for problems that remain—these are mine alone.

I also extend gratitude to the Hive Mind, who helped brainstorm titles for this book: Maggie Benoit, Joanna De Leon, Kelly Dowd, Dave Harker, Lauren Heberle, Marla Jaksch, John Lang, Hannah McKenley, Jo McMullen-Boyer, Emily Meixner, Lynne Moulton, Kevin Muoio, Brian Musikoff, Juan Felipe Rincón, Paulina Ruf, Rebeca Sharpe, Christopher Sieving, Jon Stauff, Felicia Steele, Debi Stephens, Kirsten Streiff, Susan Strickland, Sara Tomczuk, Amy Tridgell, and Mort Winston.

My extended family have provided the support needed to undertake a project of this magnitude, and have shared with me much of the context and decades of experiences that I needed to be able to make sense of my adopted state; special thanks to Marge Bates, R. C. Bates, William Bates, Carol Bates, Juan Felipe Rincón, Debbie Bogstahl, Alexandra Press Maguire, Michelle Press, Joyce Malanga, Ralph Malanga II, Cheryl Malanga, Jenny Howell, and Allison Zicchinelli. Finally, I am particularly grateful to my husband, Ralph, and my kids, Laura and Nicholas, who have served as cheerful companions and research assistants, sacrificing weekend after weekend, as well as much of their summer vacations since Sandy, for fieldwork on the boardwalks, beaches, and neighborhoods of the Jersey Shore.

Prologue

Down the Shore, (Not) Everything’s All Right

In October 2012, much of the Eastern Seaboard was preparing for a late-season storm that had intensified to become a hurricane while lingering south of Jamaica on Wednesday, October 24. Along the Jersey Shore, residents prepared as they always have: filling up gas tanks, purchasing batteries and food staples until stores were bare, storing patio furniture and flowerpots. Waterfront homeowners secured windows and boats; those who were second-home owners locked up securely and headed home to ride out the storm elsewhere. Year-round residents prepared emergency kits containing all of their personal and legal information, just in case they had to be evacuated from vulnerable areas. Shore residents had practice: Hurricane Irene had made landfall just over a year before, and many had evacuated in its path. Atlantic City even closed its casinos for just the third time since they had opened in 1978. Irene lashed the region with high winds and caused river flooding, but most of its major damage was elsewhere, as the storm released record-setting rains in New England. There was little reason to think that Sandy would be any different.

As the storm grew nearer, Ocean County residents began to take the storm a little more seriously. Hurricane Sandy had grown and intensified, and most weather models predicted landfall somewhere on the Jersey Shore. In an interview one year after the storm, Mayor Thomas Kelaher of Toms River recalls the warning given by a representative of the National Weather Service: Mark my words, there is nobody alive in the State of New Jersey who has ever seen what we are going to see when this storm comes ashore.¹

The region’s emergency management officials and first responders increased pressure on residents to evacuate, while the residents themselves scrambled with last-minute preparations. A stubborn few refused the evacuation order and continued to move furniture and valuables to higher locations within their homes. They brought blankets, flashlights, candles, nonperishable food, and pets into their attics, or decided to relocate to more elevated homes of friends and neighbors. Everyone paid close attention to their televisions, computers, and phones, which streamed nearly constant coverage of the impending storm.

By Sunday, October 28, most of the residents in mandatory evacuation areas were gone and only officials remained.² Louis Amaruso, the director of public works for Toms River, crossed over the Barnegat Bay to check on the township’s beachfront neighborhoods. Although landfall was still nearly thirty-six hours away and the storm was hundreds of miles off shore, Amaruso remembers, I went up to see how the secondary dune line was doing and it was already gone. It had already been taken out. The permanent dune line was starting to be eroded and [one house] had already lost its deck and water began rushing through the house. The house was starting to come apart. He told his companion, Take a good look around because none of this is going to be here, it’s all going to be gone. This whole area will be lucky if there’s an island left after this.³

Up the coast in Mantoloking, the police force was still patrolling this nearly deserted town of large, expensive second homes. Officer John David Barkus spent a long night helping prepare for the storm; by 5:30 the next morning (Monday, October 29, fourteen hours before landfall), he reported the first breach of the dune line in Mantoloking, and water flowing freely across State Highway 35 shortly thereafter. By 8

AM

, he observed that the protective dune was completely gone and waves were crashing onto the decks of houses. An hour later, Barkus met with a caretaker of a seasonal home and recounts: We were standing in the living room and the waves are crashing on the bay window on the ocean side of the house. So at that point there, we know we were in for a big event. At around 3

PM

, Barkus received a call from his sergeant, who had been hit by a wave on Route 35 and was told that even emergency personnel would be evacuated across the Mantoloking Bridge to the mainland in Brick Township.

Sandy made landfall north of Atlantic City at 7:30

PM

, while the storm’s northeastern quadrant continued to batter the Ocean County shoreline. The Point Pleasant Beach Weather Center recorded a gust at eighty-four miles per hour before its instrument was ripped away by the wind. Sometime between 10 and 11

PM

, the ocean punched through the barrier peninsula in Mantoloking and water rushed into the Barnegat Bay, which rapidly rose six feet or more, flooding up inlets, lagoons, lakes, and rivers on the mainland, well beyond the evacuation zones. Toms River Police Captain Steven Henry later noted water rescues two or three miles inland. Councilman William Robert Mayer explained that in Point Pleasant Beach, west of the tracks, most of the damage was from the [Manasquan] River, east of the tracks it was a combination of the river, the lakes, and the ocean. Harry Chip DeCorsie, a Point Pleasant Beach Office of Emergency Management (OEM) dispatcher, described the office’s phones as ringing off the hook with people needing assistance. Toms River’s OEM coordinator, Paul Daley, estimated 3,200 emergency calls: We had people calling that had kids in their attic. Their houses were filling up with gas and we couldn’t get to them. Bob Burger of the Point Pleasant Beach Weather Center offered the following advice: Bunker down, hunker down, and wait for the lights to go out. Hope that a tree doesn’t fall on your house.

Despite high levels of compliance in the evacuation zones, a record high tide overnight thwarted rescue efforts even on the mainland. In Point Pleasant Beach, Deputy Emergency Management Coordinator in Charge of Operations Kyle Grace explained that even high-water rescue vehicles were unable to reach people calling for help. An attempt to cross the Toms River Bridge resulted in an army vehicle nearly floating off into the Barnegat Bay. Toms River Public Works sent front-end loaders into the flood waters at the height of the storm, despite howling winds and no electricity, eventually completing more than five hundred rescues on the mainland overnight. For people remaining on the barrier peninsula, first responders could do little more than record the addresses of callers, with a promise to get to them as soon as possible. Overnight, they huddled in their upper floors and attics, seeing the ocean wash away their neighbors’ houses, hearing the wind tear off roofs, and watching the water rush into their homes from under the door, then through heating vents and electrical outlets.

After helping rescue twenty-two people from flooded vehicles in Brick on the mainland, Mantoloking police officer John Barkus tried to catch some sleep on an air mattress in the attic of a local business. Unable to rest, at 4:30

AM

he joined a group of Brick Township police officers and volunteer firefighters who attempted to cross over the Mantoloking Bridge. He describes what he saw: I could see waves obstructing, coming from the ocean on the north side of the bridge going from the ocean right into the bay—five- or six-foot waves going through. There was a wall of debris on the east side of the bridge seven to eight feet tall. . . . We watched [a] house come off its foundation, flow out into the water, and crash into the bridge while we were on it. They retreated from the bridge but eventually convinced two Ocean County Public Works employees to drive them to Point Pleasant Beach on a front-end loader to assist in recovery efforts there.

As daylight returned to the Jersey Shore on Tuesday, October 30, the damage was worse than people had imagined. First responders and Good Samaritans entered flooded areas on watercraft and helicopters, carrying stranded residents to safety before heading back to find more. Water receded slowly, and residents who tried to return to their flooded homes spoke of wading through chest-deep water, filled with debris, fuel oil, and Lord knows what else. Fish swam in the water, or lay dying or dead on dry land; one resident reported seeing harmless sand sharks swimming in the streets of Seaside Heights. Lawns far inland were covered in flotsam—not just small debris, but chunks of buildings, docks, and entire boats. A hot tub sat in the Point Pleasant Beach train station parking lot. Foul, menacing smells of muck and natural gas persisted, despite strong winds from the retreating storm. Residents reentered their homes to find massive water damage, as well as sand and mud throughout lower floors. Floodwaters had overturned refrigerators and freezers, bins of dog food, and fuel oil tanks, contributing to the stench of disaster.

Near the ocean beach, nuisance does not adequately describe the magnitude of the sand, said Point Pleasant Beach councilman William Robert Mayer; the sand was described by many as being like snow after a blizzard. In fact, sand was removed from major highways with snow plows and consolidated into massive dunes. Firefighter Robert S. McIntyre, who also serves as Mantoloking’s OEM coordinator, describes the return to his home on the barrier peninsula: There was six feet of sand in our driveway—like [the driveway] had never been there—but you could hear the gas shooting up from the mains. So first of all, I started with the gas company. I told them to shut off Mantoloking and I said immediately. They said, ‘We can’t do that . . . because if we depressurize the system, there will salt water intrusion and we’ll lose our system.’ And I said to them, ‘You don’t have a system, so turn it off.’ Such advice came too late for the community of more than one hundred homes in Camp Osborne on the Barnegat Peninsula in Brick Township, which all caught fire and burned to the ground, casting an ominous glow that was noted by first responders miles away in Point Pleasant Beach.

Mayor Thomas Kelaher describes his first trip across the Toms River Bridge to the Barnegat Peninsula in detail:

We got out and walked up by where the boardwalk was gone, and I mean, literally. . . . Down one of the side streets from the ocean, we saw a chunk of blacktop up against a wrecked building, and it had part of the blue handicap decal which had been up by the boardwalk. Three years ago, we had dedicated the opening of a brand-new lifeguard tower at the south end of Ortley Beach, public bathrooms opening up onto the boardwalk, three-story-deep pilings, two-foot concrete slabs, masonry walls, steel stairways, and we went to see how that held up. It wasn’t damaged; it was gone, just plain gone. And down the street later we found chucks of the masonry, which we could later identify because it had a yellowish hue to it, and that was it. Police told me weeks later they found the roof of the lifeguard tower on top of the Chinese restaurant down on the highway.

More troubling to the mayor—and residents who trickled back into the area, often without official sanction—were the number of homes that were destroyed or had simply vanished. The people who left for a couple days thinking it would be like Irene, only left with the shirts on their backs, worried Mayor Kelaher. These people aren’t going to be able to go back, there’s nothing to go back to. Residents and officials cite various engineering reports that indicate that from Mantoloking to Toms River, waves higher than thirty feet had scoured the coast. Houses that were carried by these waves smashed into houses farther inland, with sand erasing all evidence of their original footings. When the water receded, some of homes were left in awkward positions, listing against other structures or abandoned in the middle of Route 35. Other homes and all of their contents disappeared entirely into the ocean or the bay, although detritus from the Barnegat Peninsula was later recovered miles from its point of origin, up and down the beach as well as on the west side of Barnegat Bay.

Trying to capture the damage in words, residents turned to comparisons far from their everyday experiences. Residents compared the landscape to movies, Ground Zero, or a war zone where someone had set off a bomb. Officials trained in emergency management echoed these sentiments: the devastation was literally like a movie, like Beirut or Iraq or Afghanistan; they made comparisons to Louisiana after Katrina. Captain Steve Henry of the Toms River Police Department asked, "Have you ever seen the movie Planet of the Apes? Not the remake, the real one. The actor walks onto the beach and [he sees] the Statue of Liberty [buried in sand]. That’s exactly what we thought it was; it was like Armageddon and the end of the world. It was insane, it really was."

And yet, reconstruction began almost immediately, even in those communities that had been most devastated by the storm. The Jersey Shore quickly proclaimed itself on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and billboards to be