The Geography of Risk by Gilbert M. Gaul

Author:Gilbert M. Gaul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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The Corps of Engineers claims to be agnostic about beach-building. They are simply carrying out the wishes of Congress, the engineers say. Congress orders them to study eroding coasts and appropriates the money to repair damaged beaches. “The Corps can’t do anything on its own,” Keith Watson told me more than a few times.

Even so, repairing beaches is the engineers’ livelihood. They depend on beach-town mayors to invite them to mend their beaches. And they depend on members of Congress from coastal states to arrange the funds for their studies and projects. Without those funds, the engineers would be out of jobs, or doing something different. Unsurprisingly, they spend a large amount of time holding the hands of politicians to make sure they are happy and on board. This creates an awkward kind of codependency in which the engineers often defer to the mayors and politicians, referring to them as their “business partners.”

“If you don’t have a federal project, we want to talk to you,” the head of coastal projects for the Corps’ Jacksonville, Florida, district advised a gathering a few years ago. “We are pulling out all the stops to get funding for you.”

The late Dery Bennett, director of the nonprofit American Littoral Society, once likened the engineers to “Fuller Brush men,” a humorous reference to the door-to-door salesmen who called on American homes in the 1950s with suitcases full of cleaning products. “They’re selling a product, and that product is sand, millions and millions of yards of sand,” he said.

At 141 miles, New Jersey’s coast is far from the largest. It is about one-third the size of the North Carolina and Texas coasts, and one-tenth the size of Florida’s. Yet the state has received significantly more sand than all states except Florida. Since 1962, the Corps of Engineers has pumped over one hundred million cubic yards of sand on New Jersey beaches, with repair jobs extending from Sea Bright in the northern part of the state to Cape May in the south. It is hard to find a beach that hasn’t gotten at least some sand courtesy of federal taxpayers. Some towns, such as Ocean City, have received multiple repairs. If you took all the sand the engineers have placed on New Jersey’s beaches, it would fill MetLife Stadium, home of the New York Giants football team, over fifteen times.

“Any way you cut it, it’s a shitload of sand for practically nothing,” said Stewart Farrell, a well-known coastal geologist based at New Jersey’s Stockton University who monitors New Jersey beaches for the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. “It’s a hell of a deal.”

Farrell recently estimated that various agencies have spent about $1.2 billion widening the state’s eroding beaches over the last sixty years, with the federal government accounting for the largest share. That figure is likely to grow after the engineers finish Sandy repairs on Long Beach Island and other sites, and it could top $2 billion, including future costs associated with maintaining the beaches. Along

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