I live just a few miles from Asbury Park, N.J., a seaside community once famed as a top spot of the Jersey Shore. After WWII the city fell on hard times and stayed there, and it only became a nice place to visit again thanks to a large urban renewal project that has been under way for the last few years to bulldoze derelict buildings, refurbish historic landmarks and encourage new businesses to set up shop.
Then Superstorm Sandy came along, and many of us who live "down the shore" were deeply concerned about Asbury Park. The city had just gotten back on its feet; what would happen if it was all washed away? Thankfully, the damage to Asbury Park was minimal, especially when compared to places like Long Branch, Asbury's neighbor to the north, where the storm surge hit the shoreline like a sledgehammer. The ocean took back whatever it wanted, leaving behind only shattered buildings, twisted wreckage and a monumental cleanup job that even now has barely just begun.
The thing is, Long Branch's damage pales before that of, say, Staten Island, where the devastation was total in some neighborhoods, and where substantial cleanup has already taken place. Meanwhile, the shoreline of Long Branch looks much the same as it did the day after Sandy blew into town. There has never been a full explanation for this. One might be tempted to think that Long Branch is doing the smart thing; after all, another storm will hit the shore. And the next time, it might be a bona fide hurricane. Maybe even a Cat 2 or Cat 3, which would inflict an order of magnitude more damage than Sandy did.
Imagine the storm surge being a few feet higher. Imagine substantial windstorm losses to every roof in the landfall area. Imagine power outages for a month. With a future like that, one might be forgiven for wanting simply to walk away from the wreckage and not rebuild on the promise of false hope. But that's not risk management. That's risk abdication, and somehow, one gets the feeling that the leaders of Long Branch are hoping that people won't recognize the difference.
Coastal risk is one of the risk management discipline's most severe tests, and it is one that will require every stakeholder, from the insurance company to the private property owner to the municipalities living in the red zone to do all they can, not just to rebound from the last storm but to prepare for the next one—and to do so in a way that empowers as much prosperity for as many people as possible along the way. Long Branch's failure to do that has already held back the local economy and the city's prospects for the future. Maybe when it spends the next few decades wondering why it has become such a festering sinkhole, and looks enviously upon the burgeoning prosperity of Asbury Park and other shorefront communities rebuilt swiftly and surely after Sandy, those responsible for preventing its rebound will have a much-needed revelation.
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