In the Philly Voice:
Of course Christie flew back because it would have looked so bad politically if he had stayed in New Hampshire. It’s obviously just theater. We have billions of dollars in state government apparatus in place; I find it hard to believe it made one iota of difference whether the governor was here on Saturday or not.
I thought the mayor did a pretty good job getting information out, just as he did with earlier storms, including Sandy. I have to confess I visited his Facebook page every few hours just to see if anything interesting was going on and I thought the code red announcements were informative without being overdone. Good job there.
I am skeptical that the dunes made any difference. As I said in a comment a few days ago, if they are pushing sand from the east up into the dunes, then they are in effect clearing sand out of the way to make an easier path for the water to reach the dunes.
Notice that the dunes have snow on their east side. For most of the length of the dune, the water didn’t go up the side of the dune at all.
And here at the north end, where the dune ended, the snow on the beach shows that the water didn’t even reach the dune line. Is it because we didn’t push sand out of the ocean’s way?
I didn’t go over there to see for myself but it looks from this still that Avon’s beach has snow on it.
The water did breech the dune at one spot, 12th Ave:
Still it didn’t go very far past the dune line. You know if you look at the scale of the ocean compared to the relatively puny ridge of sand across the beach, it’s hard to believe those dunes can make any difference at all. It just seems to me that the storm surge here this weekend was not even close to what we saw with Sandy, Irene or the 92 nor’easter and that any one of those storms would have knocked that dune down like a child’s sandcastle. Only a much higher dune, reinforced with steel, would have any effect on whether the ocean comes into our neighborhoods or not.
Not that I think we should have a tall, reinforced dune, or any dune.
Because even this dune ruins what I believe to be Belmar’s greatest asset: the excellent view of the ocean from the entire length of Ocean Ave. That is what attracted me to Belmar in the first place.
Now you can’t even see the ocean from the boardwalk.
21 Comments
You are spot on. The dunes made no difference at all with this storm, the surge wasn’t there.
If Christie wins maybe he will take Matt with him?
Whine, whine, whine….Being prepared is important, it could have been very necessary….guess you were not a boy scout.
As I recall our original plan when rebuilding our boardwalk was to include a PERMANENT sea wall to protect our beach and neighborhood. It was in the original contract with Epic. Where oh where did it go???
Living across from Lake Como and having no water come down the street from the Ocean and flooding. Was a good thing for myself and my neighbors. The dunes did help we would rather have all the sand than water to have to clean up.
I’m not saying this is a 100% fix.
We need the pipe work to start on Lake Como and soon.
Dave, You are not an engineer so please don’t pretend to be.
Any mechanical movement of beach sand should be done in consultation with the Army Corps of Engineers …. the ACOE put the sand there …. they are the experts.
Tom Burke shut up you do nothing but complain and think you are part of the solution. You do nothing. You a are filthy mouthed old man that needs to be medicated.
Mark Levis get out of Matt’s pocket and then you can comment.
I don’t care what side of the aisle your on.. shutting down free speech is not what this blog is about. EVER! Making personal attacks is a loser’s argument.
Thank you Teddy, I do not wish to attack anyone here, only to point out that determining the effectives of the temporary dunes (beach scraping)is best left to engineering studies and not personal opinions.
Again I ask, why did this administration nix building the permenenant sea wall which was included in the Epic bid??…….Any one? Perhaps those who have access to the Mayor will ask him and report back to the rest of us. Freedom of speech and open information and all.
Because FEMA wouldn’t commit to paying for it.
Looks like the gov will be signing tge executive order for parade day.
Let me comment from an engineering point of view. Based on the physics of the water movement those dunes would only hold up with the water force and weight at a certain point. Now if the makeup of the dunes were a combination of non-permeable substances they would not wash away immediately. The water would need to crest over the dunes. Now I could go into the horrible fluid dynamics of this but I hated fluids in college. Those dunes would not have stopped Sandy but they were a good effort for a smaller storm. The mayor and DPW did their jobs as they should have, they were trying to protect Belmar as they should. Its like a fireman saying he put out a fire, they did the job period. The mayor wants it to look like he went above and beyond so he can get elected to freeholder. I hope he wins.
#15…You are full of fluid.
Maybe that’s the end of blizzards for this winter?
You should’ve studied air instead of fluid in college, you’d be able to measure the amount of air in Matts head.
South of 9th Avenue the quality of much of the beach sand is challenged by ACOE replenishment …. hopefully, the bulldozer dunes would slow the northward sand drift towards the nice …. natural …. North End Beach.
Isn’t the composition of the dunes (the rocky stuff) going to be plowed back onto the beach to the ocean in the spring?
The dunes were scraped mostly from the seaward side and I guess they’ll push it all back in the spring.
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