After Sandy, NJ Rebuilding Plan Doesn't Even Mention Sea Level, Warming, More Violent Storms

[hatrack]

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Instead of planning for future climate threats, New Jersey focused on rebuilding quickly to get people back into their homes and to get the tourist industry up and running for the lucrative summer season. As a result, the state spent billions of federal aid dollars to rebuild boardwalks, businesses and houses almost exactly as they stood pre-storm.

The coastal protection measures New Jersey has proposed, such as dune systems or flood gates, will defend communities only at current sea levels—not the 3.5 feet of sea level rise that New Jersey is expected to see by 2100. The state has partnered with six New Jersey universities to study how communities were flooded by Sandy, but that research will not consider how those communities, or others, may be affected under future climate scenarios.

"Our research doesn't really look at climate change. That is not an objective New Jersey has right now," said Tom Herrington, a physical oceanographer at the Stevens Institute of Technology who has been mapping Sandy's effects on the Hudson River shoreline for the NJDEP.

Nowhere on the Governor's Office of Recovery and Rebuilding webpage do the words climate change, global warming, or sea level rise appear, not even under the site's "resiliency" section. New Jersey's rebuilding strategy is leaving its residents vulnerable to future climate change-related threats, several environmentalists, policy experts and scientists told InsideClimate News.

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http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20131219/christie-administration-ignores-climate-change-new-jerseys-post-sandy-rebuild?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+solveclimate%2Fblog+%28InsideClimate+News%29

[JustAnotherGen]

1. The only piece

That this article leaves out - and I'm not sure why . . . In order to get insurance I know three people who had to raise their shore houses considerably. That doesn't address the root cause (some call it climate change - I call it global warming) or rising sea levels, super storms, etc. etc. But it's a band aid . . . for now.

Having gone through the home purchase process this past summer/fall in NJ - some of the houses sitting on the market aren't just sitting on the shore - within state we know damn well the Raritan River and other rivers flooded during Sandy. Three houses we passed over because the owners didn't raise their houses with the FEMA funds ($25K) - we are talking route 28 in Bridgewater . . . nowhere near the shore.

And at the end of the day - raising one's house doesn't mean anything when we aren't willing to look at energy, pollution, etc. etc. and how we change our behavior there to avoid disaster tomorrow.