(waves crashing) - There's, I dunno, there's something special about living here at the shore.

Yeah, we're lucky enough to have a view of the water from the house and every night when the sunset goes down, it's different glistening over the water.

A lot of core people visit us in the summer and they come and they say, "Wow, it's really relaxing here."

- Well, I've always been a person that goes to the shore.

My mother would take us down the seaside on a vacation every year.

I always, you know, some people like to go up to the mountains and some people like the shore.

I'm a shore person.

- And it's remarkable how many people come for the day and then say, "Man, I wish we could come overnight and stay."

There's just something about being on this barrier island.

I don't know, maybe you connect with nature.

I don't know what it is, but there's something that's monstrously attractive to living by the shore and the New Jersey shore.

- So when this house came up for grabs and it's on the water and you could have a boat, as opposed to the beach, this was where I wanted to be.

- [Narrator] The water is a paradox.

Its beauty is enticing for so many who are drawn to oceanfront and Bay Shore living, but it also slowly creeps up onto the land.

And from time to time, it's a small nuisance, but the water's strength can cause chaos and fury.

- [Paul] Our neighbors who live across the way here, they had a holiday party planned in December and with our friends up north, they called in the morning and canceled it and said, "We're gonna have a high tide and west wind.

The water's gonna be a foot deep at the end of our driveway.

You won't be able to get in the house."

They had to cancel a party for like 25 people, the morning of the party.

People say, "Is it really making a difference?"

Well, yeah!

- You start to learn how to live in the rhythm of the tides.

And I think it's your responsibility when you live on a barrier island to understand that.

Put some waders in the back of your car, you know, something like that.

Park your car across the boulevard.

Learn to understand that there's gonna be these lunar high tides and understand what that means.

- The dunes will protect us, I hope, as long as they're maintained from the ocean flooding that we had during Sandy.

But we get these seasonal high tides now, and when we get a seasonal high tide, especially with the west wind, the bay water is what's pouring in now coming from the bay side and you know, where I'm standing now on the street in November and December, the water had been almost up to my knees.

So from here to behind me all the way to the bay, this entire street was underwater.

And so it used to happen maybe once a year.

I'd say it probably happened three, four times a year now.

And I think the ocean's rising, storms are getting more severe and we're just gonna see more and more days when people can't drive down their street because it's underwater.

- That daily person living here, we just understand it.

It's like, you know, gotta move the car.

We all know where the high spots are, you know, things like that, that's sort of just a rite of passage if you wanna live here year round.

- [Narrator] For as long as people have settled along the Jersey shore, they've learned to adapt to tides, storms, and periodic flooding.

Today, many, many communities have found ways to do that.

But history offers cautionary tales like South Cape May, the former resort that was built on land now underwater.

- The South Cape May was incorporated in 1894 and the first houses built in the area were built in 1888.

It started with about a dozen houses and a hotel that were all lined up on the beach front.

And before very long, those houses had to be moved away from the beach front because storms and the encroachment of the ocean.

Over time, the storms had wreaked havoc on the shoreline.

And because South Cape May was separately incorporated as its own borough, it didn't have the tax base that Cape May City or Cape May point had, and they didn't have the wherewithal to build jetties or groins as they're called, to protect the shoreline.

It's as if the ocean took a huge, huge bite out of the shoreline, and that's where South Cape May was, underwater.

What remains of South Cape May, we have those beautiful homes.

They're still standing.

And we have this beautiful nature preserve.

- [Narrator] After South Cape May was virtually wiped out and abandoned, the land laid vacant for decades.

The Nature Conservancy bought it in 1981 and created what is now the South Cape May Meadows Preserve.

- This preserve was basically just open ground.

There was plans for a campground at one point.

There was cattle being, you know, someone, a local leased cattle that used to use this place and run up and down it.

There's still paper roads in here that we use as trails.

So it was kind of just sitting as an open piece of ground.

- [Narrator] In the decades since South Cape May dissolved, climate change has begun fueling stronger storms, storms made even more destructive by steadily rising sea levels.

Scientists project that New Jersey will see 1 1/2 feet of sea level rise by 2050 and up to five feet by 2100.

- I know the level is rising 'cause I can see regular high tides coming in further, right?

But what's made the most difference is the increased intensity and frequency of storms.

In the past five years, we had six or seven storms that came in and flooded our beach end to end.

One mile of beach, three, four feet deep, 200 feet wide.

We have hundreds and hundreds of endangered and threatened birds that nest on our beach.

They require this beach to come here to nest and raise their young, and if water comes up while their eggs are there, it's all over.

So it's another huge challenge that we have to deal with.

- The ocean as a whole, average sea level is rising, and it's rising primarily from two things, right?

The ocean is warming up as a result of climate change and that causes the ocean to expand in volume.

And secondly, ice sheets and glaciers are melting, also as a result of rising global temperatures.

And that increases the amount of water in the ocean.

In the 20th century, there was about half a foot of sea level rise from these processes.

In New Jersey, we had more like a foot of sea level rise compared to the global average.

And that's primarily because the land here is sinking, as a result both of natural processes and also processes associated with the fact that the coastal plane here we're sitting on is sinking both from natural processes, but also as we pump out groundwater, we cause the sediment to sink.

(waves crashing) - [Narrator] Superstorm Sandy slammed into New Jersey the fall of 2012, causing massive destruction and setting a frightening new benchmark for what storms could do to the Jersey shore.

- My conditions here are just going from bad to worse, so bad that I'm just trying to do everything I can to keep my feet planted on the pavement here.

Check out this street sign behind me.

We are on Beach Avenue, we are on the street right now, but as you can see, the street has turned into a beach.

- [Narrator] Sea level rise made Sandy even more dangerous, giving the storm surge a head start as it rushed on land.

Analysis done by Climate Central attributed $8 billion worth of damage caused by Sandy in the tri-state area to sea level rise alone.

- It was harrowing.

We didn't know if we had a house or home.

Fortunately there was some aerial, some satellite photography taken.

And because we had some solar panels on our roof, I could see from that photography that our house was still here.

But we will never forget the first day we came back, they put everyone on a bus over on the mainland.

They gave us a police escort in the school bus to the neighborhood.

You'd walk to your house, you had three hours to get all your personal belongings and then get out.

And it was, so we walked in the house and we had a house, which was fantastic.

My friend Jim got back on the bus.

I said, "How's your house?"

He said, "I have no house.

There's nothing left."

And it was his permanent residence.

We will never forget that day.

- Was about a week or 10 days before they let us back in.

But everything, so we came in the house, everything that could float had floated.

- [Narrator] It's been more than 12 years since Sandy.

Despite the billions in damage, some stayed and rebuilt.

- It was a big deal to me.

I like it here.

I like the town.

I like being on the water.

- [Narrator] After Sandy, communities up and down the shore grappled with how to be more resilient for the next storm.

And that work can come with a steep price.

- After Sandy, we had to replace three of our water treatment plants.

We had to build them up at higher elevations for a 500 year storm, whatever that is.

And that cost us, with replacing the infrastructure, almost 50 million.

So we had to bond that.

Raising street end, bulkheads and that, we're probably at 20, 25 million right now, and we have another 20, 25 million to go.

We bonded some, but most of it we expense as we move forward.

- [Narrator] It's not just storms.

Rising seas means high tides flood streets and bayside neighborhoods more frequently than ever.

And solving that problem isn't cheap.

- Beach Haven had quite a problem with what we call nuisance flooding, which is on a beautiful, nice day.

There's no rain, there's no anything.

And you know, our streets were flooded and it was becoming a problem and get a lot of calls and a lot of questions about what are you going to do about it.

And this predates my time in office, but the previous administration had gone down, I don't know, Avalon or one of the towns down below and saw storm pumps in action.

And they decided that would be a good thing for Beach Haven to try.

And we did.

Since the pumps have been operational, the flooding has been much, much decreased.

If the water, if it's a high tide and the water comes up and over the bulkheads, there's nothing that we can do about that.

But as far as the nuisance flooding, yes, the pumps have been a huge help.

We're very fortunate.

We had anticipated paying for the entire project, which was $3 million roughly, and the county came through at the last minute and said, "We will pick up the cost of the pumps."

I believe we paid 300,000 for engineering and those kind of costs.

But the county picked up about 2.7 of the 3 million.

So we were very fortunate.

- [Narrator] Hard physical barriers like walls and jetties and floodgates have historically been the tools of choice for communities seeking flood protection.

North Wildwood has one of the most prominent sea walls on the Jersey shore.

- You can see it at the top.

It's about 25 feet wide, but as it goes down, it actually widens out almost 60 feet wide at the bottom.

And so this sea wall during, for instance, Sandy and then Jonas, which was in January of 2016, was the difference maker, quite frankly.

The sea wall that I'm standing on is gonna extend about another half a mile south of here, which is about a $20 million project.

That project is being split between the Army Corps, the NJDEP and the City of North Wildwood.

And there is also an island wide dune and beach project on the horizon.

Again, that's not, that's the entire island though.

So that's four communities and that's about a 20 to $30 million project as well.

We've pretty much got most of our shore front now has a hard structure, which is the ultimate resiliency.

The state is not a fan of hard structures along the shoreline, for whatever reasons that they have come up with.

Speaking from 50 years of personal experience, I can tell you it is the most cost effective, most efficient, and the longest lasting solution to resiliency and addressing sea level rise is investing significant resources in hard structures.

- [Narrator] But Sandy's devastation has caused many state policymakers and local leaders to look for new strategies for building resilience with a lower price tag.

Nature has sparked new inspiration.

- When they looked at the damage patterns, where houses had been destroyed, where they hadn't been.

They found that often when the houses were behind marshes and reefs and natural beaches, they suffered much less damage.

And of course we took advantage of that sort of awakening on the part of decision makers to really advocate for the use of nature-based approaches to adding resiliency against the next storm.

We're in Forked River Beach in Ocean County on shoreline, on the shores of the Barnegat Bay.

We're sort of central midpoint in Barnegat Bay.

And this is a community which has been suffering for years, the impacts of storms, wave action, and more recently sea level rise.

They're literally have been losing their community to the bay through erosion and through storm damage.

And we offered to partner with them to try a nature-based solution to at least mitigating some of the impacts of sea level rise and storms on the community.

And we proposed to do that and they very enthusiastically joined in to by building a series of oyster reefs.

We've come in and put these barriers in place in an attempt to break up all that wave energy, settle out the turbulence in the water behind it, and then also to hopefully provide a place for oysters to grow on them.

- The oyster shells where this is for building living shorelines.

So our wetlands are sinking a little and the water is getting a little higher.

So we're putting these living shorelines along the edge and then when they dredge the channel, the dredge spoils are gonna go in onto the Sedge Islands, raise them six inches to a foot, and they should be good for another 20, 25 years.

- The threats and hazards came from the bayside, but that's where the solutions are, right?

This is all post-consumer oyster and clam shell from the restaurants on Long Beach Island.

We have been the only town in the state of New Jersey that collects post-consumer shell from the restaurants since 2017 when we started collecting the shell.

That's 2023 shell, we're bagging that up for a shoreline project at Clam Cove Reserve.

You can see that marsh area right over there.

That's a 22 acre salt marsh that the town purchased with our open space trust in cost share with the Ocean County Natural Land Trust.

- [Narrator] A much larger, much more expensive regional project has encompassed the entire shore for decades.

More than $3 billion has been spent nourishing New Jersey's beaches for the better part of a century, keeping sand in place for people's enjoyment despite the natural forces of erosion.

That work ramped up after Sandy, as the US Army Corps of Engineers set out to build a massive dunes along New Jersey's entire ocean front.

- Sandy, we found out how important the engineer dunes were.

We had about a mile section of Brant Beach that was completed and that entire section was basically untouched.

- This project right behind us cost $75 million, right?

$75 million to renourish the beaches of Northern Ocean County.

We have to recognize that, that those resources continue to increase in their cost, right?

In Northern Ocean in particular, there had to be an additional contribution from the county in order to get projects like this done, for example.

And so we see the federal government showing up with anywhere between 65 and 75% of the funding for these types of projects, right?

The state government has to put up the rest and include funding from the counties.

- [Joe] They spend 50 million every couple years, but you know, the tourism revenue and taxes and all that generates billions of dollars.

So the cost return is fabulous.

Yeah, it works.

- So put that in perspective.

And our Shore Protection Fund in the state of New Jersey, which helps to fund these projects, is between 25 and $50 million every single year.

And again, this one project is $75 million.

So let's keep all of that in perspective and recognize that we have to do a little bit of all of the things of nature-based solutions, of civil engineering projects, of adaptations and elevations, all throughout the state, in every community.

- [Narrator] As flood protection projects become more necessary, paying for the work takes more creative solutions.

There's no single source of resilience funding.

Instead, local and state officials use a variety of sources.

- [Patrick] They are dynamic islands.

They have been developed well over 100 years.

There's hundreds of billions of dollars worth of development up and down the shore.

And there is a cost associated with protecting and preserving that.

- We don't have any funding, very little funding to do it.

The infrastructure acts that were passed by Congress in the last couple years have provided a fair amount of money, but that money's very vulnerable, you know, to being rescinded by a new administration, New Jersey does not have a stable source of funding for resiliency or for nature-based approaches like this.

- Over a number of years, we've built in a self-funded Shore Protection Fund for North Wildwood, which generates about $3 million a year.

So sometimes we use that as cash for a project.

Other times we'll take pieces of that and borrow against it, right?

So you can maximize it.

So that's one way.

- It's important to recognize that the majority of our resilient project funding is sourced from the federal government.

And there is oftentimes, but not always, a state match or state share that is required.

How do we build a resilience funding mechanism at the state level that isn't only dependent upon the federal government coming in to help build protective, more proactive projects like this, but more often than not coming in to bail us out after a disaster?

In order to sustain the communities that we love, we've gotta get real about creating investment vehicles and funding sources today that are not just reliant on the federal government.

We can invest, right, in making sure that we're in helping our communities and our natural environment to become more resilient, right?

At the same time, we have to recognize that there's not enough funding in our government to construct all the resilience projects that are needed all across our state.

And so we have to think about in a forward looking way how we are adapting our behaviors on the landscape as well.

- [Narrator] A sweeping new standard of proposed rules, called the REAL rules, would put new requirements on construction projects in New Jersey's vulnerable coastal communities, including new building height requirements.

- We utilize scientific information that is outdated even for today in determining how and where we build new features across the built environment.

And so we've gotta use current information and we've also gotta look forward because we have the ability to do so.

Bringing sound science into the regulatory world to help promote resilient development is an economic benefit for everything we build, every community that we love, reduces the risks that we have seen affect our communities over and over and over by building things higher, backing up a little bit from where we know the water is gonna be, that is critical to the long-term economic success of our communities and our economy writ large.

- [Narrator] The REAL rules are not yet final and state officials will have a tough time convincing shore leaders who worry about restricting development that the regulations are the best way forward.

- I think it's absolutely ridiculous what Governor Murphy is trying to do to us on his way out.

Putting a five foot increase in our base flood elevation is ludicrous.

After Sandy, Governor Christie threw a one foot addition to the base flood elevation, which I thought, "Yeah, that's good."

Murphy should do the same if he feels he wants to do something to add one foot.

- It doesn't mean we're gonna tell people all the things they can't do and all the places they can't build.

No.

Right?

Absolutely we have to power our economies and grow our communities.

We just have to make sure that what we are building today will stand the test of time in a changing climate.

(calm music) (waves crashing) - I wish I had a crystal ball to let you know what the future holds.

We know that sea level's rising.

I don't know how much higher, you know, the houses can go up.

Pretty soon they'll be way up in the air.

This REAL New Jersey could have a massive effect on building if it's another five feet.

And I know a lot of the towns, including Beach Haven, are concerned about that.

I don't know exactly what the answer is for the long term because I think in the interim, we have done everything we can and short of the Atlantic Ocean receding, which I don't see happening, I think we've taken all the appropriate measures for now.

(calm music continues) - The ocean's rising, and it doesn't really care what our perspective on that is.

It's going to rise, and we can either stand in place and ignore it or we can learn to live with the changes that are coming.

(calm music continues) - We love it here.

I mean, we just love living here at the shore, so we're gonna stay here until we can't afford it and then we'll have to go somewhere else, if that ever happens.

And it might, it might.

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