the Jersey shores erosion problem is getting worse climate change is making storms more intense and sea level rise is eating away at beaches from Cape May to Sandy Hook municipalities are spending Millions to keep up but is it all really worth the cost and investment year after year Melissa Rose Cooper reports from Monmouth [Music] Beach for years the sounds of waves along the Jersey Shore have offered both residents and visitors a sense of Serenity but as sea levels rise and storms intensify due to climate change there's concern that peace could lead to Jersey's beaches being washed away over time you know that sand would disappear it would uh you know beaches would get narrower and narrower and we get back to a point where we were in the uh late 80s early 1990s where a beach like this one here uh you would stand on this sea wall and the water would be lapping right at the base of the seaw wall That's why Tom Harrington associate director of the urban Institute COA Mammoth University says Beach replenishment is so important the process aims to fight erosion by widening the beach with added sand we know we've had beach erosion throughout the history of our Shoreline um and uh that erosion doesn't go away so they need to replace the sand as it disappears so they're they don't do it it's like not Paving your roads right they just become potholes and Decay this spring the Army Corps of Engineers wrapped up a beach replenishment project stretching 21 mies in Mammoth County from sebrite to Manasquan Mammoth beach at the north end of that area is considered a hot spot for erosion the seaw wall will protect the houses behind the beach the ones that if you look right behind you you can see all the houses but the seaw wall itself makes the erosion more intense it exacerbates erosion and so when you put a seaw wall up you have a problem maintaining the beach Kenneth Miller studies how sea level rise is affecting New Jersey this drone which takes hundreds of thousands of overlapping photos from about 100 m in the air will help analyze how the elevation of Mammoth Beach is changing so sea level is rising around here in about more than an inch per decade and it is that makes the erosion worse in the sense CU sea level is rising and the Sea and the ocean comes up further the most hazardous part though is when we have intense storms as we saw at Sandy and Sandy really trashed this area particularly sebrite just to the north here this wall continues up into sebrite and then there's a break in the wall and then it continues from seab brght into the southern part of the national park and it was in where that wall had a break between the two places that the town of sebrite was flooded and so again uh the storm surge is getting worse in general uh as storm intensities are increasing you know there are some places like on the mainland where yes you have beaches the sand would move laterally right down down um the shore uh but the shoreline would not necessarily retreat at the same place but Barrier Islands want to move that's sort of inherent in the nature of the of their structure Bob cop is an expert in sea level rise and Coastal adaptation he says a 2019 assessment shows a two in3 chance of sea level rising by 1 to2 feet along New Jersey's Coast by the year 2050 and even more by the end of the century by our assessment uh in 2019 um under the emissions trajectory the world seemed to be headed for then which was a bit more than three degrees of warming um we thought there was uh less than a 17% chance of sea level rise in New Jersey exceeding 5.1 ft and that again that that's where that number came from since then you know we sort of continued to bend the emissions curve downward so I think that the likelihood of exceeding 5.1 fet has has gone down further but that's a number that's still you know pretty closely tied to a a pretty conservative attempt to to protect the coast but while Beach replenishment is used as a means to protect the shoreline the process can be quite expensive New Jersey has already spent billions of dollars on it I think people think of it you're just protecting the homes or maybe you know the recreational aspect for people that come in the summer but actually the the cost benefit analysis that's used before we can do a project doesn't take uh you know the beachgoers or the homes into consideration it t it's just the infrastructure the roads and the utilities congressman Frank palone has spent much of his career working to secure funding to protect the shore which he admits can be difficult again I want to stress that it's always a cost benefit analysis that shows that if you do this prevention then you don't have to come back and pay for all the damage later and so it's harder but it's more important than ever because of uh the problems with climate change the congressman also says cheaper methods of beach replenishments are sometimes possible like what was recently done at Mammoth Beach the sand here was uh was not actually uh from offshore but was as a result of a dredging project that I have in the in the shrewbury nav R and they use the uh the the extra mud if you will to to to pump this beach the Army Corps is currently spending $3 million to study how beach erosion is acting in the area and how it might change plans for future Beach management that study is not expected to be released until next year so what the core is looking at is some kind of an offshore mechanical or infrastructure device that would deflect the wave action and there's another one like that in Long Branch uh you know my hometown there's others up and down the shore to look at possible infrastructure offshore that would uh deflect the waves so you wouldn't have to do the berp punishment as often I think the way we manage the shoreline will change I think we know more and more about how shorelines naturally evolve and we can start to consider uh different methods of of managing our sand resources maybe uh not letting them go right back to the inlets or maybe not letting them kind of end up at the tip of Sandy Hook into New York Harbor we have ways to to take those materials and bring them back for now even as sea levels rise pumping sand on our beaches Remains the plan to protect the Jersey Shore for NJ Spotlight news I'm Melissa Rose Cooper [Music]