Nor'easter hits Jersey Shore towns, but beaches survive

OCEAN CITY, N.J. — As a powerful nor'easter finally began to move away from the  Jersey Shore, municipal officials in the state's four coastal counties began making preliminary assessments of damage and beach erosion Tuesday in the northern communities that apparently bore the brunt of the storm.

In Atlantic and Cape May Counties, problems were mostly limited to downed power lines and the accompanying outages and coastal flooding during three successive high tides. The 48-hour weather siege began Sunday afternoon, with the storm's greatest impact occurring Monday and finally ending Tuesday afternoon with a break in the almost steady rain and sustained high winds.

Wind gusts reached as high as 63 mph in Cape May, and higher-than-usual tides and ferocious waves chewed away at beaches and dunes up and down the coast.

Here in Ocean City, the storm took huge bites out of the 15-foot-high dunes along the beachfront at Fifth Street and at Waverly Boulevard, where access to the beach was closed Tuesday, according to Doug Bergen, a spokesman for Ocean City.

Bergen said that elsewhere in the town, especially in the south end where a beach-replenishment project was completed last year, the beaches "held up well."

And while there was minimal to moderate damage being reported Tuesday along beachfronts in Atlantic and Cape May Counties, beaches north of Long Beach Island, in towns such as Ortley Beach and Mantoloking in Ocean County, up to Long Branch and Asbury Park in Monmouth County, were preliminarily reporting "extensive damage" Tuesday.

"It's the devil that we live with at the shore," said Harvey Cedars Mayor Jonathan Oldham of winter storms like Monday's that often damage homes, businesses, and infrastructure — especially the beaches — when they strike.

Oldham said he and other officials on Tuesday were still assessing the extent of the storm's damage — calling it severe — where about three-quarters of the town's dunes had been chewed away along its two-mile stretch of Long Beach Island. He said officials hadn't yet put a price tag on the damage, nor had a chance to create a plan to mitigate it.

Oldham said federal funding that Harvey Cedars is expecting to receive to help pay for damage from a nor'easter last year — which occurred a year to the day of Monday's storm — will help the town deal with some of the problems from this storm.

But down in North Wildwood, in Cape May County — where Mayor Patrick Rosenello said about three blocks of beachfront were denuded of sand and dunes Monday — plans are already in the works to make the repairs that are expected to cost about $200,000.

The damage has left one of the town's main thoroughfares, John F. Kennedy Boulevard, so vulnerable to more flooding that crews will likely begin as early as Friday to position equipment that will move thousands of cubic yards of sand back onto the beach between Second and Fifth Streets next week.

"There are homes, businesses, condos, hotels there and infrastructure there that we just cannot leave unprotected," said Rosenello, noting it will take about a week to make the repairs.

Diane F. Wieland, Cape May County's emergency management spokeswoman, said Tuesday that county engineers and officials were working with individual municipalities to determine what the storm may have cost the shore region in damage, but that crews had only begun to make their assessments. Preliminary reports from emergency management officials indicate that the erosion along Cape May County's shoreline was "mostly minor," she said.