Expert says N.J. needs way to move people away from coast

Erosion described as formula for cataclysmic flooding

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 03/30/07

BY TODD B. BATES ENVIRONMENTAL WRITER MIDDLETOWN -

With the sea rising and its coastal land sinking, New Jersey should develop a strategy for moving people out of hazardous coastal areas, a coastal expert said Thursday. Instead of waiting for "the whole coast to be demolished . . . in a major storm," New Jersey should look at ways to encourage better management and planning, said Norbert P. Psuty, a Rutgers University professor emeritus. "Sooner or later, we have to develop strategies to deal with this," Psuty said during a presentation on sea-level rise in New Jersey that he gave at Brookdale Community College.

Joseph Corbett, a second-year Brookdale student who will attend Rutgers, said his family has a house on Manasquan Inlet. "My parents are actually thinking about selling it and actually moving a couple of blocks inland" because of concerns about flooding, said Corbett, 22, who lives in Manalapan. "We have to take . . . steps ahead of time before it gets worse than it is." Psuty's talk followed the recent release of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projecting an approximately 7- to 23-inch rise in global sea level by 2100. In New Jersey, the water level may rise 2 to 3 feet or more by then, experts have said.

The relative rate of sea level rise in New Jersey is now about 4 millimeters a year (or about 16 inches a century), with probably half of that from the rising sea and the rest from the coastal zone going down, said Psuty, director of Sandy Hook Cooperative Research Programs for Rutgers' Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences. Rivers are not bringing any new sediment to the Jersey Shore, and "the water is creeping onto the edge of the continent," he said. In what he called a "coastal paradox," increasing concentrations of people, industry, investment and development are in the coastal zone while it is eroding, drowning and being subjected to "greater and greater risk" of damage and destruction, Psuty said.

With sea-level rise, storm surges from previous big storms, if they occurred in 2050, would result in "greater flooding than we have ever experienced in the historical record of coastal New Jersey," he said. "We really need to have . . . some kind of strategy" to an-alyze vulnerability and "then develop the means to help people move," he said. The state Coastal Area Facility Review Act allows rebuilding, "so we cannot move people out of existing developed areas where they have existing homes/development unless it is by voluntary acquisition and relocation," according to an e-mail from Elaine Makatura, a state Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman.

For undeveloped areas, the DEP has rules to protect beaches and dunes and has erosion hazard area setbacks, among other provisions, and has had some success in limiting development in high hazard areas, the e-mail said. This story includes material from previous Press stories.