N.J. Town's Answer to Rising Sea Levels: Lift Itself Up

By: Terrell Johnson

Published: August 12,2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

A view of the Highlands Marina near Highlands, N.J. Local officials are considering a plan to raise the seaside community in the face of rising sea levels in the future. (tedkerwin/flickr)

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For the roughly 5,000 people who live in Highlands, N.J., a tiny coastal town on the end of a peninsula just south of New York City, last October's Hurricane Sandy was a big wake-up call to the threat of rising sea levels and how they could make flooding and storm surge events much worse in the future.
So big, in fact, that local officials are considering a plan that would raise the entire downtown area by at least 10 feet, section by section, at a cost of $150 million to $200 million or more.
Though officials acknowledge the project's cost is high, especially for a community of its size – Highlands Mayor Frank Nolan told WNYC the final price tag could even reach $250 million, or nearly half the assessed value of all real estate in the town –  Highlands' survival makes it worthwhile.
"The cost of doing nothing ultimately would be much higher," he said in an interview with the Asbury Park Press, which noted that the mayor lost his house to Sandy and was forced to live in a storm shelter for several days after it passed.
"We're still going to flood, we're still going to have businesses that are not going to make it," he added in an interview with the New York Times. "We believe the only way to fix this town long-term is to raise the town."
The impact of Sandy – which flooded the eastern half of Highlands' roughly 1 1/3 square miles in 10 feet of water, destroying more than 1,200 homes – was the catalyst for the plan, which calls not only for raising the front doors of every commercial and residential building by at least 10 feet, but for raising "every curb, crosswalk and blade of grass ... as well."
Nolan came up with the plan after Stephen Szulecki, the head of the town's environmental commission, studied what happened after the Galveston Hurricane, which claimed the lives of an estimated 6,000 people in the coastal Texas city in 1900.
Though many who survived the Galveston storm considered abandoning the city, local officials there ultimately responded by building a 17-foot-high sea wall and lifting the elevation of the city by several feet, a project that took seven years. (The project, it turned out, proved its worth – another hurricane struck Galveston in 1915, but just 8 people died in that storm.)
For Highlands, the project that's being considered would raise the elevation of the city's downtown in 500-foot sections. "Once all the structures in a section are elevated, workers would build a retaining wall at its edge and then fill it in, installing new utility connections along the way," the Asbury Park Press explains.
People living in each section would be relocated to temporary housing for roughly a month until work could be completed. Some homes would probably be razed and rebuilt completely, Szulecki told the Asbury Park Press.
A project this extensive would require a combination of federal, state and local tax dollars as well as private investment, Nolan told WNYC. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers agreed to consider the plan earlier this year. Without their approval, attracting government funding would likely prove impossible, according to Robert Young, the head of the Project for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.
The staggering costs has some doubting whether the project will ever be completed. "We're talking millions and millions and millions of dollars," Carla Cefalo-Braswell, president of the Highlands Business Partnership, said in an interview. "I just don't see that happening."
But the alternative for Highlands is a future that most homeowners and businesses can't abide, Nolan counters. "How much are we going to pay if we don't raise up the town," he asked WYNC. "This is two years in a row that people lost everything they have. ... Who's going to stay?"