Chapter 14

The Sea Takes Back

1944–2012 · Storms, floods, and the price of living at sea level

The town pays tribute on the water's schedule.

Bay Avenue under Sandy's storm surge just after landfall, October 29, 2012 — water above the storefront-sign line, streetlights out, transformer flashes on the ridge, a single boat drifted onto the pavement — Placeholder illustration for Phase 0 — replace with cellphone footage still frame before publishing.

The town at the water's edge pays tribute on the water's schedule. The list, since the Second World War, is short: the Great Atlantic Hurricane of nineteen forty-four, the Ash Wednesday storm of March sixth nineteen sixty-two, the December eleventh nineteen ninety-two nor'easter — and then, on October twenty-ninth, twenty twelve, Sandy. The Sandy line is separate. Sandy is the storm that reshaped every ground floor on Bay Avenue, every family's understanding of what living at ten feet of elevation means, and — for most residents under sixty — the natural terminus of what "flood" refers to at all.

This chapter treats the storms not as interruptions of the town's history but as the recurring author of the townscape. The reason the ground floor on the block you can walk today sits six feet above the sidewalk is Sandy. The reason the block is here at all is the four hundred years of doing this over and over.

Placeholder narrative for the Phase 0 prototype. Real copy will draw from the USGS Scientific Investigations Report 2014–5150, the Highlands borough Storms archive, the NOAA / NHC post-storm survey reports, the ATH oral-history recordings with Sandy first responders, and — where families are willing — private storm-day diaries and cellphone footage.

The mornings after a storm are what nobody warns you about. Sandy hit around nine on the night of the twenty-ninth. By eight in the morning of the thirtieth the water was starting to draw back off Bay Avenue and you could walk along the sidewalk in six inches of mud and see what had happened. Every ceiling had a line on it. Every kitchen wall had a line at chest height. Every couch had water still in the cushions. Every doorframe had the same faint horizontal stain the mud had drawn as it withdrew, and it was the same height on every doorframe on every block. It was almost peaceful, the way a level is peaceful.

The first responders were still working. The National Guard came in from Sea Girt on the thirtieth. FEMA was on the ground the morning of the thirty-first. The volunteer fire department, the one whose 1900 roster we treated as an artifact in Chapter Eleven, was on the beach for the whole night. The captain who ran the station that night — his name is on the roster of the Highlands Fire Company No. 1 — is one of the voices on this site.

Bay Avenue on the morning after Sandy, October 30, 2012 — floodwater receding, debris in the street, a small boat marooned on the sidewalk, a National Guard truck at the end of the block

The line was the same height on every wall in every kitchen.

Placeholder — stand-in for borough archive photograph.

Placeholder — stand-in for USGS SIR 2014–5150 (public domain).

Ten and forty-two hundredths feet above street grade.

The high-water marks are the single most technically useful record of what happened here. USGS teams — dispatched on the third of November and working for the next two weeks — mapped roughly twelve hundred sites across New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut, attaching stainless-steel benchmark plates at each and photographing the debris, mud, and seed lines the receding water left behind. Site HG-05 is the block of Bay Avenue you have been reading about. The elevation reported at that plate is ten and forty-two hundredths feet NAVD88 above street grade. The plate is still bolted to the side of the tavern.

The vertical comparisons the report makes are the ones you feel. Ash Wednesday sixty-two, two and a half feet lower. Great Atlantic forty-four, four feet lower. Every flood before nineteen forty- four is estimated from photograph analysis and is treated as uncertain; the range on the eighteen ninety-four October storm, for example, is plus-or-minus a foot and a half. Sandy is the first flood in Highlands' history documented to within an inch. It is also the highest.

The map above holds still — you are looking at the same block from the same angle at five different moments of the same century. What changes from waypoint to waypoint is the color of the polygon: the extent of surge water at each storm's peak, drawn from the USGS compilation and — for the pre-instrumental storms — from insurance-adjuster records held at the Monmouth County Historical Association. Each waypoint's zoom and pitch tilt slightly further, so the last frame is closest to the ground, hardest to miss. The final frame is the resilience program: elevated foundations, buyouts, the raised bulkhead, the emergency-power upgrade to the firehouse.

The last frame is where the map settles. It is where the town is now.

The slider carries the storm night on the left and the same block today on the right. If you have not been here since twenty thirteen, the change on the right is the change to look for. Most ground floors are lifted six or seven feet on new foundations. A few storefronts declined the elevation grant and put their money into concrete flood barriers instead. The Sandy high-water marks are painted at chest height on the side walls in rust-red paint, and the borough passed an ordinance in twenty seventeen requiring them to stay there until the next major flood or until the building is demolished, whichever comes first.

The tavern in the middle of the block is still the tavern. The pharmacy building is a barber and a board-game cafe. The block looks like Bay Avenue.

Then

Placeholder — stand-in for borough archive.

Now

Placeholder — stand-in for ATH matched shoot.

The decade after Sandy remade Highlands physically. The federally- funded elevation program — administered through New Jersey's Rebuild by Design initiative and the FEMA Increased Cost of Compliance grants — lifted approximately three hundred residential structures in the borough between twenty thirteen and twenty twenty-one. Another fifty-odd properties were bought out by the state under the Blue Acres program and returned to open space. The property-tax base of the borough dropped ten percent between twenty twelve and twenty fifteen and did not recover for another seven years.

The elevation decade also remade the town psychologically. The first significant nor'easter after Sandy — Jonas, in January twenty sixteen — put four feet of water into Bay Avenue and every adult in the borough had the same three-hour interior conversation about whether this was the beginning of another Sandy. It was not. But the fact that the conversation was possible tells you where the town is now. Every subsequent storm since twenty sixteen has been read against Sandy. The state's tide-gauge records at the Sandy Hook station are followed in Highlands by the same percentage of residents that follow the harbor cam. The two are not, in a real sense, separate.

The harbor cam that anchors the /now page on this site is, among other things, the town watching its own water. It is a rooftop camera in Highlands looking out at the same shoreline every family here has watched during every storm since nineteen forty-four. On a calm morning it is a picture of the harbor. On a bad night it is the town's collective early-warning system.

The particular relationship between a town and the sea it lives at sea level with is not simple, and this project does not pretend it is. The USGS tide-gauge trend for Sandy Hook shows a mean sea-level rise of approximately four inches over the last thirty years and projects roughly the same increment over the next thirty. The resilience decade is not over. The elevation grants have run out. The next storm on the level of Sandy will be treated by a town that has practiced.

Everything else — the archive, the timeline, the map, the voices — sits in the shadow of that fact. That is what this chapter is for.