Nor'easter damaged Jersey Shore beaches

On what otherwise would have been the perfect beach day, officials at the Jersey Shore yesterday assessed erosion caused by Monday's nor'easter and vowed to get their resorts in shape for the Memorial Day weekend.

The storm's roaring winds and surging tides transformed dunes into cliffs as high as 12 feet in towns including Harvey Cedars, Atlantic City, Ocean City and Avalon, and left some barrier island beaches only the width of a footpath.

"My beach is gone," marveled Eleanor Manning, 72, a lifelong resident of Ocean City's north end. "It makes me want to cry."

Municipal and state officials said it would take several days to evaluate what must be done.

"We're really in the middle of collecting data and photographing the beaches up and down the coast," said Steven Hafner, a coastal geologist at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

The school's Coastal Research Center will calculate the amount of "scarping" - carving out of cliffs by erosion - that the storm caused, and recommend how to repair or groom beaches.

In some places, Hafner said, the center is likely to recommend trucking in sand to fortify dunes or plump up denuded areas.

Damage varied widely within short distances. On Long Beach Island in Ocean County, there was little damage to the beach in Surf City, which last year concluded an extensive replenishment.

"Previous beach replenishment did its job for Surf City," Hafner said. But elsewhere on the barrier island, "when we looked at Harvey Cedars and Holgate, where no new sand had been brought in, we saw a lot of dune and beach scarping."

How much beach repairs will cost, and who will pay for them, is to be determined. Along much of the state's 127-mile coast, towns will have to rely on Mother Nature to deposit sand through accretion, Hafner said.

"What will be done is going to be a very regional response based on what is best for a particular beach," he said.

Though Ocean City's north-end beaches were among the hardest hit, the town was lucky, said Jim Rutala, its business administrator.

A $6 million beach-replenishment project from northernmost Ocean City to 12th Street was supposed to start earlier this spring but was postponed, Rutala said.

"We're very fortunate that we have a state-funded beach-replenishment project waiting in the wings that's starting within the next few days," he said. "It had been delayed because of funding, but now it will turn out to our advantage."

The rare spring nor'easter caused widespread power outages and extensive back-bay flooding that paralyzed traffic on roads and bridges Monday.

Mike Culligan, who owns a three-story home on the bayfront in West Wildwood, did not heed the townwide siren that warns residents of a flood.

"When I hear that alarm, I know to move our vehicles to higher ground," said Culligan, who usually takes his cars over a small bridge to a Wildwood restaurant's parking lot. "It hasn't been bad here in years, and I figured we were safe, but I was wrong. I lost a car, and our basement flooded."

So many West Wildwood residents remained stranded yesterday morning that a scheduled Borough Commission election was reset for next Tuesday.

On the mainland, residents spent the day clearing driveways and yards of debris while utility crews tried to restore power to about 12,500 Atlantic City Electric customers - all in Atlantic and Cape May Counties - who had been without power for more than 36 hours.

The storm's sustained winds - about 40 m.p.h., with gusts to a hurricane-strength 78 m.p.h. - resulted in an unusually large number of downed power lines caused by fallen trees and limbs.

At one point, more than 48,000 people had no service. A small pocket of homes in Ventnor Heights is likely to remain without electricity until today, a utility spokeswoman said.

"We have never been without power this long," said Frank Sullivan of Northfield, an inland town near Atlantic City. "It's been horrible."

Some Shore property owners were more sanguine.

Betsy Reynolds, a New York resident whose family has owned a beachfront home in Avalon for years, arrived yesterday to survey the damage.

"The beach was pretty wide, pretty nice when we were here a couple of weeks ago," Reynolds said, scanning the dunes. "It's definitely skinnier today.

"But that's the way it always is here. Sometimes we have a nice, wide beach. Sometimes we don't. That's Mother Nature."