Billions of federal dollars will be spent putting New Jersy, New York, and parts of North Carolina, Alabama and Florida back together again in the wake of hurricane Sandy. WHETHER Washington should continue to pay to pump sand back into the beaches of New Jersey and other coastal cities is another question. The Associated Press reports that the average New Jersey beach is 30 to 40 feet narrower after Superstorm Sandy. Some of the state’s famous beaches lost half of their sand to the surging waters. The shore town of Montoloking lost 150 feet of beach, said Stewart Farrell, director of Stockton College’s Coastal Research Center.
Of course the money should be spent; the work should be done; the people should be given their homes and businesses back.
But should this aid come with the proviso that next time will be the last time?
Dauphin Island in the Gulf of Mexico off Alabama has a year round population of about 1,300. At least $80 million, adjusted for inflation, has gone into patching up this one island since 1979. That’s more than $60,000 for every resident. And that doesn’t include payments of $72 million to homeowners from highly subsidized federal flood insurance.
People should live on places like Dauphin Island at their own risk. They know it will flood again. That’s why they build their houses on stilts. They also know that hurricanes will hit them, rip off their roofs, push over their houses, carry their beaches out to sea.
Because they know all of these things, they should build elsewhere. Or if they must be able to sit on their front porches and watch dolphins swim by, then the storm repair bills should be theirs to pay.
To make this new policy palatable, relocation grants should be provided. Rather than shell out billions after every devastating storm, the federal budget would be hit only once for every householder paid to move to higher, safer ground.
Melting glaciers and rising seas make the need to find a permanent solution more pressing.
In the past, federal dollars were spent sucking up the sand the storms carried offshore and putting it back on the shoreline. Such restored beaches act as a buffer from the next surge and, it is argued, are worth the cost. Places with recently beefed-up beaches saw comparatively little damage from Sandy, the Center reported.
But at a time when Congress and the administration are battling to find ways to reduce the deficit, pouring billions into beach restoration in order to save New Jersey’s $35.5 billion tourism industry will be a hard sell.
U.S. Sen. Tom Colburn of Oklahoma wants none of it. In 2009 Sen. Colburn used a picture of a pig on the cover of a report he wrote titled, “Washed out to sea.”
The topic was beach replenishment. Spending those billions, he wrote, was wasteful pork which the nation could not afford.
One might expect an Okie to have a different view on rebuilding New Jersey’s beaches from that of Gov. Chris Christie. On the other hand, the dollars come from all Americans. How much the nation should spend, storm after storm, to put things back the way they used to be is a conversation we should have.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
