Army Corps of Engineers revises plan for bayside flood protection / NJ Spotlight / December 30, 2024

By Ted Goldberg

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has proposed a revised plan to protect communities from bayside flooding.

The revamped plan, which would involve spending nearly $8 billion on flood mitigation measures like house elevation and nature-based solutions, is about half of the corps’ original budget of about $16 billion. Under the new proposal, around 6,000 residential structures (down from 19,000 in the first proposal) would be elevated in areas prone to bayside flooding, and no longer includes plans for massive floodgates.

Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society, welcomed the scaled-down plan and exclusion of the floodgates. “They hadn’t done an environmental impact assessment. We believe that that environmental impact would have been really unacceptable,” Dillingham said of the floodgates. “Water, fish, nutrients move throughout those systems. And if you start to put walls in between, and it’s interchanged with the ocean and different parts of the bay itself, you start to reduce the oxygen that’s available to marine life. You start to retain pollutants that will come off the land.”

The revised plan drew praise from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which said it agrees with “the Army Corps’ focus on elevation, restoration of marshlands and nature-based approaches as a sensible and cost-effective approach for enhancing resilience within the back bay study area.”

“I do think that it’s a little bit more of a reasonable approach right now in what they are trying to do,” said Amy Williams, a board member of the New Jersey Resource Project. Williams, a science teacher at the Ocean County Vocational Technical School, said, “A lot of people don’t have the financial flexibility to be able to raise a house, go move out of it, go find another house to live in.”