Friday night in the Lookout
The night before the storm, the bay went white. From the Lookout I watched it come apart in the last of the light, thirty knots and building, the moored boats swinging hard on their lines.
Caleb Stratton walked twenty feet down the hill to talk about what was coming. He is our neighbor, Atlantic Highlands' borough administrator, and New Jersey's first chief resilience officer, a role he took on in Hoboken after Sandy as that city rebuilt itself against the water.
I asked him what everyone on the Bayshore was asking that week. Is this another Sandy?
He said no. Then he gave us the word that would describe the next three days. "The storm's more of like a plateau," he said. "It's going to come in. It's going to stick here."
The plateau
Hurricanes are travelers. Irene and Sandy were born off the coast of Africa and crossed an ocean of warm water to reach us. Their surge arrived the way a wave does: fast, high, and then gone.
A nor'easter is a different animal. It forms over cooler water and lacks what Caleb called fetch, the long open run a storm needs to build its strength. This one wandered the New York Bight without that runway. What it had was patience. "Tropical storms come in, there's like a much higher surge, and then it kind of drops off," he said. This storm would rise and stay.
So we counted tides, four of them: Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday night, Sunday morning. Each one would come in on top of water that had not fully gone out.
The moon was full, too. The storm arrived on a king tide, the same alignment that made Sandy what it was, and that coincidence is why the old name came back into every conversation that week. But Sandy drove roughly nine feet of surge into the harbor. "I don't really see that from the tools that I'm looking at," Caleb said.
Reading the water
Caleb does not watch a storm on television. He watches the water, through the Stevens Flood Advisory System, a line of tide gauges running from the Chesapeake to Cape Cod. Three of them keep watch over us: Sandy Hook, the Shrewsbury at Sea Bright, and Keansburg. We pulled the Keansburg gauge up on the big screen in the Lookout while the real bay went gray in the window behind it.
A pink line showed what Stevens expected, and a red line showed what the water had actually done. For a full day the two had stayed within six inches of each other. Around the pink line ran a gray band, the range between a likely low and a likely high, from about five feet to about seven. Beneath it, a second chart showed the surge alone: the water the wind was stacking on the tide, two to three feet of it over each high tide. Caleb's point was that the gray band is the forecast too. The line in the middle is only the most likely answer.
Then he gave us the most useful arithmetic of the weekend. Most homes in the floodplain have an elevation certificate, which records the height of the lowest floor. "If it's at 4.5 feet and they're projecting a six-foot storm surge, that means that there's maybe a foot and a half of water," he said. That piece of paper is worth finding before the next storm.
The same water can also carry two numbers. Stevens measures from a fixed line on land. NOAA's Sandy Hook gauge, the one most news reports quote, measures from the average low tide, and at Sandy Hook those two lines sit about 2.8 feet apart. Six feet on one chart is nearly nine on the other, and neither is wrong.
What the water did
It came in four times, as he said it would.
At its height, the Sandy Hook gauge read 8.79 feet, just past the line where flooding is called major. Measured from the land line Stevens uses, that is about six feet, almost exactly the number Caleb read us on Friday night. Sandy's mark on the same gauge is 14.4 feet.
The plateau held. On Sunday morning the water at Sandy Hook stood about 3.3 feet above an ordinary high tide, nearly where it had been on Saturday. One climatologist said no storm in more than thirty years had brought this many flooding tides above three feet, a longer siege than the December 1992 nor'easter.
A storm can come in under its worst case and still take a great deal. Across the river, Sea Bright's gauge reached eight feet, the highest in Monmouth and Ocean counties, and its police and firefighters brought 67 people out of the water, 45 of them from their own homes. In Rumson there were electrical fires and trees across the roads, and a fox swam down a flooded street. Red Bank, farther up the Navesink, took on only a little water and canceled its farmers market. Below the bluffs in Atlantic Highlands, the waves tore at the Henry Hudson Trail until the county closed it, the same stretch Sandy closed in 2012.
The middle of the forecast was right. Sea Bright shows what its upper edge looks like when it arrives.
What the sea took
Four tides of waves took sand that will not come back on its own. By Monday the oceanfront beaches sat feet lower than they had the week before. Long Branch lost wide swaths of its beach, and dune fences and access ramps came apart up and down the coast.
In August, $37 million in federal money was announced to rebuild the beaches at Long Branch, Sea Bright and Monmouth Beach. This week the Army Corps is back on the sand with the state, measuring what the storm took.
This is the rhythm of the oceanfront now. The sand is pumped in, the sea takes it back, and the towns ask again. Replenishment buys time, and time is worth buying. What we do with it is the larger question.
Blue sky, black sky
Near the end of our conversation Caleb gave us a phrase I have not been able to put down. Resilience, he said, is "producing blue sky value and then black sky performance." A seawall, a waterfront path or a harbor should be something we love on a clear Saturday in June. It should also hold on a weekend like this one.
His case for it was plain. "A lot of the infrastructure that was built over the last hundred years is not necessarily built for what the next hundred years are going to throw at us." In Hoboken that meant gates and levees, and a habit of planning for the next fifty or hundred years instead of for the last storm.
Here the water arrives differently in every town. Sea Bright faces the ocean and the river at once. Highlands lives between the Shrewsbury and the bay. Atlantic Highlands is bayside, its hills a shelter and its forests a hazard after two days of wind.
The waterfront, Caleb told us, is the reason his family moved here. It is the reason most of us did. This was the first of our conversations with him about how to keep it.
The bay is flat again this week, and the moorings are quiet. Somewhere out past the Hook the next storm is already gathering, and we mean to be ready for it.
Watch, read, prepare
The full interview is on this entry: How a Shore Town Gets Ready for a Storm, with a transcript.
Sandy Hook Bay, live and around the clock: harbor.abovethehook.com.
The gauges Caleb watches: the Stevens Flood Advisory System, and in particular its Sandy Hook, Sea Bright and Keansburg stations. The National Weather Service's flood thresholds for Monmouth County translate each foot at Sandy Hook into which streets go under.
Note on this page
Recorded the night before the storm, in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. Above the Hook, with Caleb Stratton. (The entry dates the session from the film's publication, the morning after.)
Also on this entry: the film · the full transcript.
Sources. Gauge readings and datums from the Stevens Flood Advisory System and NOAA's Sandy Hook station 8531680, with thresholds from the National Weather Service. Storm reporting from Yahoo News on the damage and on beach erosion, ABC7 on the Sea Bright rescues, Patch on Rumson and on the Henry Hudson Trail, Red Bank Green on Red Bank, and 6abc on the Army Corps assessments.
Related: The Sea Takes Back, Chapter 12.