North Wildwood seeks emergency permit to build a bulkhead where recent storms have broken through dunes

What used to be a dune is now more like “a kid’s sand castle,” North Wildwood Mayor Patrick Rosenello said Tuesday morning, after yet another storm hammered the shore city’s failing dune system.

“Once you get a hole in the dune, every high tide, it just keeps growing,” Rosenello said. “It dramatically accelerates the deterioration of the dune. That’s what’s been happening. Every high tide, it’s coming over.”

The city is seeking an emergency authorization from the State Department of Emergency Protection to expand its bulkhead system behind the dunes as another measure of protection, while it awaits a promised large-scale reconstruction of its beaches.

“It’s still two years out,” Rosenello said Tuesday of the large-scale beach replenishment.

Three recent storms in the last week have pounded the city’s dunes, finally breaching a hole through the dune altogether.

Rosenello visited the site around midday Tuesday and described a “small little sand pile,” that is now “completely wide open.” After the storms, he said, there’s nothing structural or “shore protection wise,” between the ocean and city infrastructure — including North Wildwood’s main storm sewer line, an electric utility pole, a motel and the city’s beach patrol building.

Caryn Shinske, a spokesperson for the state DEP, said the department will review the city’s application once it is received. The state and North Wildwood have been locked in legal battles over the city’s determination to build a bulkhead as it awaits further beach replenishment.

Shinske said construction to replenish the North Wildwood beaches was “expected to begin in 2025.”

“The department continues to work toward obtaining easement for the project for both public and private properties,” she wrote in an e-mail.

On Saturday, PJ Hondros, an administrator of the North Wildwood Coastal Processes Facebook page, posted that the dune had been breached.

Rosenello said the city would submit its emergency authorization as soon as Tuesday or early Wednesday, even as another storm bore down on the region.

Monday’s snow coated Jersey Shore towns with a few fluffy inches of snow and made roads slippery and snow covered, but by Tuesday morning, rain had washed away most of the snow.

Rosenello said he was most concerned about overwhelming the city’s storm sewer line with ocean water and the potential for “massive flooding.”

A constructed bulkhead, which the state does not generally favor, would solve that immediate problem, he said: “the lack of any shore protection at that location.”

The state and North Wildwood have sued each other over the city’s building of the bulkhead, which the state describes as “an illegal 400-foot long steel bulkhead.” North Wildwood, in turn, is suing New Jersey for $21 million, saying that’s how much it has spent fighting beach erosion the last decade because the state Department of Environmental Protection hasn’t been doing its job.