How greed, politics nearly destroyed the Jersey Shore

• Of the 17 counties hit hardest in superstorm Sandy, Ocean County fared worst
• Of 836 homes and businesses destroyed in a three-state region, 28% were in Ocean County
• Queens County, N.Y., was second with 22% of the total; Monmouth County, N.J., had 13% of the total

ASBURY PARK, N.J. — New Jersey's beachfront devastation was years in the making, fueled by greed, elitism and self-interests that left much of the area ill-prepared for the blow from superstorm Sandy.

Significant parts of the shoreline in Ocean and Monmouth counties were left vulnerable — despite more than a decade of warnings from experts, residents and some local officials.

Defiant beachfront and business owners, multiple local governments and a fractured shore-protection system allowed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals to decide how, when, where, and even if, beaches and dunes should be built stalled life-saving protection, which covers 24 of the 50 miles of largely developed oceanfront in the two counties, in many areas.

With Congress and the White House mulling the $37 billion that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie requested to rebuild his state, little has been discussed on how to prevent damage from the next Sandy.

The state has yet to make public a detailed list of where the money would go.

At the root of New Jersey's disconnected approach to shore protection is the state's traditional home rule, an Asbury Park (N.J.) Press investigation found. For decades, local politics have trumped statewide initiatives simply because of their numbers: 566 municipalities, 585 school districts and 21 counties, each dependent on local property tax money for survival.

The toll of this disarray?

Houses tossed across the sand like toys; communities burned to the ground from natural gas-line leaks; businesses abandoned; thousands of residents displaced for weeks, if not months.

As New Jersey recovers, the thought of a unified approach to shore protection remains a germ of an idea more than two decades after it was first suggested. What if just one agency, with one goal, is created to protect the state's coastal areas?

"That is not specifically under consideration at this time, though it is a thoughtful idea," said Christie's spokesman, Michael Drewniak. The governor's recovery office plans to look at these issues.

Costly experiment

New Jersey's fractured approach to shore protection has turned neighbor against neighbor in some areas.

The anger boils in Raymond B. Sullivan Jr., 68, when he thinks about how flooding to his Long Beach Island home could have been prevented — if his beachfront neighbor across the street had given the government permission to build a higher dune on his property.

"That guy there, he's one of them," Sullivan said, pointing eastward, his eyes flashing with disgust. The town "did everything but beg this guy" to sign the easement for a new dune. Sullivan spent part of the storm in his house, across the street from the beach, and "we were afraid that house was going to break loose and kill us."

He and his wife fled, driving to a street protected by newer, higher dunes. They spent a restless night in the car as the storm swirled around them.

The owner of the beachfront house has not signed an easement, township officials confirmed. The owner could not be reached for comment.

The Oct. 29-30 superstorm was a grand experiment for coastal engineers.

The outcome can be seen on Long Beach Island, a popular mecca for summer tourists as far north as Canada, where its 18-mile-long beach had various states of protection. The half-square-mile borough of Harvey Cedars, N.J., the beneficiary of new 22-foot-high dunes courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, survived the storm without losing a house.

Six miles south, in Sullivan's home town of Brant Beach, N.J., the older, lower dunes were unable to stop the rush of waves.

Unlike many other coastal states, New Jersey law allows a home or business owner to rebuild on a lot even if the building is washed away.

Destruction followed by reconstruction is the mantra of the Jersey Shore.

Major storms of 1962, 1991 and 1992 flooded many of the same areas Sandy hit. Not all the flooding was on the oceanfront. Much of the wetlands and low-lying bay areas suffer from tidal surge, a rapid rise in the water that is virtually unstoppable. But on the oceanfront, a properly crafted shoreline can halt advancing waves.

Despite its small size, New Jersey has claimed the fourth-highest number of flood losses, 123,000, at a cost of $1.6 billion to the federal flood insurance program since 1978. Florida was third and Louisiana was first, both frequent targets of hurricanes. New Jerseyans alone filed 22,000 claims and were paid close to $500 million from Oct. 1, 2010, through Sept. 30, 2011, the most of any state, National Flood Insurance records show.

Yet in the two decades since the last major storm, more of New Jersey's coast has seen more construction than ever before. In Ocean County's 12 shore towns, the number of residential properties grew 6% from 2000 to 2012, for a total of 27,134 units, according to tax records.

The growth is a combination of New Jersey's quest for more property tax money from beachfront tourism, the lifeblood of local towns, and the high demand for beach homes.

Properties along the Monmouth and Ocean counties' shoreline top $55 billion in assessments and bring in an estimated $160 million a year in tax revenue. The state government also benefits from the estimated $3 billion from sales and income taxes on tourism-related businesses across New Jersey — about 10% of the state's budget.

Following the 1992 storm, building rules were tightened but remained among the weakest on the East Coast, compared with states such as North Carolina and Maine, each of which makes a homeowner back away from the waterline if more than half of their house is deemed destroyed.

Christie, a Republican, has said that the Jersey Shore has no choice but to rebuild and already has allowed hard-hit towns to reconstruct roads, bridges and other infrastructure without considering protections against the next storm.

"We'll rebuild it," Christie said days after the storm. "No question in our mind we'll rebuild it."

Reliving past mistakes

Some building improvements have been made through the years that required new homes to be elevated above the flood plain.

Yet following hurricanes Katrina and Rita and a handful of other natural events that have left the Federal Emergency Management Agency with an $18 billion flood insurance deficit — plus at least $60 billion more for a multi-state Sandy rescue package — a new line of thinking may be on the horizon.

"There actually is motivation on the part of the federal government to not rebuild, restore and forget," said Stewart C. Farrell, director of the Coastal Research Center at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Galloway. "FEMA has a record now of repetitive damages," mostly among individual property owners who have been "cajoled, convinced, pressured to sell, for an offered price, their floodable property to relocate."

Overall in New Jersey, "there's got to be some soul searching that's going on," he said.

Soul searching inevitably leads to reviewing past mistakes. And the Jersey Shore has had many. The Asbury Park Press found:

• Easements are king. New Jersey beachfront living generally entitles the owner to some, if not all, of the sand in front of the house down to the high-tide mark. This makes beach replenishment and dune construction a complicated affair.

And many beachfront homeowners are wealthy business people, doctors, lawyers and retirees who can afford to fight city hall for a very long time.

• Small towns have little leverage. In Harvey Cedars, a court ordered the town of 340 to pay one beachfront homeowner $375,000. The reason: the out-of-town couple said the new 22-foot-high protective dune ruined their view of the ocean, thus decreasing the value of their $1.7 million property.

If the Harvey Cedars case is upheld on appeal, the end result may be no dunes in many areas because the high cost of compensation — projected at $45 million for Long Beach Township alone — will make shore protection too expensive for small towns.

• Business can trump protection. Seaside Heights, N.J., one of the most popular tourist destinations in the state, rejected high dunes because it would be bad for business. The town fathers wanted visitors to see the beach unobstructed from its iconic boardwalk.

The town, though, was severely damaged by Sandy's flooding.

Once known for the rowdy MTV show Jersey Shore, the borough is now better known for this: A full-sized roller coaster that broke from its pier and fell into the ocean.

• Fear of outsiders hindered widespread dune protection. The Jersey Shore has had a love-hate relationship with tourists for more than a century. The first beach badges, made of tin, were issued in 1929 by Bradley Beach, N.J., as a way to keep the summer sands for locals only.

While most beaches are now open to the public, some local beach fees are set as a way to regulate, at least through economics, who visits.

• Home rule killed a statewide coastal protection commission. During the 1980s, then-governor Thomas H. Kean spent three years pushing for a state coastal commission to do master planning and beach engineering on all 127 miles of the Jersey Shore, from Cape May to Sandy Hook.

But the commission plan foundered on opposition from many shore towns and the building industry that saw it regulating growth and usurping local control. Another stab at proposing a shore master plan during Gov. Christine Todd Whitman's administration in the early 1990s failed, too.

Now would be a good time to try again for such a coastal commission, said Kean, a Republican.

"It's worth a try, given what happened. People react together in a crisis. If we'd had it in place, we'd have less damage," Kean said. "If the global warming people are correct, and I believe they are, this is going to happen more often."

The Long Beach Island 'fiasco'

On a biting, cold day in November 2006, beachfront property owners packed the St. Francis Community Center on Long Beach Island, anxiously awaiting the Army Corps and the state Department of Environmental Protection's plans to protect the island's inadequate dunes and beaches.

As officials from the two agencies discussed their $71 million plan to construct a 125-foot-wide berm and 22-foot-high dunes along the barrier island, the audience became agitated.

The meeting set the stage for the ongoing battle between property owners, many with second homes topping a million dollars in value, and state, local and federal officials. The property owners refused to sign easements because of worries it would increase public access to their beaches.

"Nothing has changed since that meeting," said Kenneth Porro, who represents about 60 homeowners on Long Beach Island who have refused to sign easements. "Why can't we just put that there will be no parking and no boardwalk in the easement? That is what we have been asking for."

Harvey Cedars and Surf City, N.J., are the only municipalities of the six on the barrier island where the project was completed.

Of the 32 miles of oceanfront in Ocean County, just 6 miles are protected by an Army Corps project. In Monmouth County, 18 of 21 miles are protected.

Christie has raised the likelihood that the state now will side with towns to force a resolution of the easements impasse.

"If you're going to build on a beach, you have no right to not sign off on that investment," Christie said Nov. 20 during his monthly radio show on WDHA-FM in Dover, N.J.

$210 million beach fix

Since 1994, about 22 million cubic yards of sand have been pumped onto most of the oceanfront beaches from Sea Bright, N.J., to Manasquan, N.J., under a program led by the Army Corps, according to Anthony Ciorra, civil works program manager for the Corps' New York District.

That's enough sand to fill 1.1 million dump trucks — each holding 20 cubic yards. It's the largest beach-fill project in the world.

The cost of all that sand pumping: an estimated $210 million over 50 years, including periodic renourishment projects, according to Daniel T. Falt, Corps project manager for the Sea Bright-to-Manasquan beach-replenishment project.

What keeps Kathy Barisciano up at night is fear — fear that the ocean will roll unimpeded into Ortley Beach, N.J., plowing into homes that already were splintered and smashed by superstorm Sandy's powerful surge.

"I am so worried," said Barisciano, president of the Ortley Beach Voters and Taxpayers Association, as she stood in the gutted first floor of her home. "We are so vulnerable to another storm. There is almost no beach left."

There are no dunes, either. Sandy's waves slashed through the narrow dune line there, destroying dozens of homes and flooding hundreds more. Of the 2,500 houses there, only about 60 are thought to have escaped damage.

Some simply disappeared.

Ortley's beach has been losing sand for 25 years, according to the coastal research center.

A $200 million federal project to add sand to Ocean County's northern barrier beaches, including Ortley, was proposed more than a decade ago, but ran aground after beachfront homeowners in Mantoloking refused to sign easements.

Barisciano said she is frustrated that some of the other beach associations may not support the long-delayed replenishment project she believes is needed for Ortley Beach's protection.

"We need to get this help down here," she said. "They have to do this. The frequency of storms is increasing. We have lost so much beach over the years. Without replenishment, we are really going to be in trouble."

Contributing: Todd B. Bates, Jean Mikle, Paul D'Ambrosio, Shannon Mullen, Asbury Park (N.J.) Press and Asbury Park Press archives

Private beaches rare in United States

New Jersey's private beaches are a product of legal history and big money, dating back to the creation of 19th century resorts.

But landmark court decisions in the 1970s and '80s decided that property rights on beaches are not absolute — that the public still has a right of reasonable access to the water's edge.

The public trust doctrine dictates that the state owns the shoreline and tidally washed lands in trust for all the people, a common law element that dates back to the Roman Justanian code around 500 A.D.

Nevertheless, when Bay Head and Mantoloking, N.J., were created as affluent resort towns, lots extended to the high water mark. For some, the state granted tidelands ownership 1,000 feet into the ocean.

But in 1987 the state Supreme Court ruled the Bay Head Improvement Association was obliged to provide equal public access to its beach even though it was still considered private property.