York/New Jersey Baykeeper. “There has to be access to the mean high
tide line, and as intervenors in these cases we’re asking for 30 feet
above that.”
“The homeowners are just trying to make it as hard as possible,”
says Unger, who has run for the State Senate on the Green Party ticket.
“But at some point you have to take a philosophical stand and say, ‘No,
I won’t buy a beach pass because the beaches belong to the people.’ But
from Deal to Sandy Hook you have to really work hard to get on the
beach without paying.”
SHIFTINGSAND
With no access to the municipal beach and no parking even if there
was, Unger sits in his van and points to the surf as it crashes on the
beach. “We’ve already lost 30 feet of beach since they replenished this
stretch a few years ago. It’s something that we’ll have to keep doing,
and it’s galling that for the most part it benefits only a few wealthy
property owners.”
But dire predictions that all the replenished sand would be washed
out to sea within 2 or 3 years have not yet been borne out. “It’s staying
longer than I thought it would stay,” admits Dery Bennett. “But every-
body knew from the beginning that it’s only a temporary fix. There will
probably be five to seven replenishments within the next 50 years.”
In his office at Sandy Hook, Bennett points to a chart of the Jersey
shore. “Do you see how skinny those barrier islands are? Because of
global warming there’s faster erosion and these barrier islands are
drowning. The Army Corps of Engineers ignores the accelerating of
sea-level rise because some of them believe in a flat earth.”
The Army Corps does not, in fact, officially ignore sea-level rise.
Anthony Ciorra, project manager for the Army Corps Beach Erosion
Control Project that stretches from Sandy Hook south to the Barnegat
Inlet, said in 2003 that all but a few miles of the 21-mile replenishment
project is completed. “We definitely factor in sea-level rise as part of the
project design,” Ciorra says. We calculate what it has been over the last
50 years for our benchmark.”
But, of course, most scientists believe that sea-level rise will accel-
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