Hurricane Sandy: Did Beach Nourishment Save New Jersey?

The Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines (PSDS) at Western Carolina University (WCU), in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy, set out to test the hypothesis that New Jersey beaches nourished since 2000 provided a significant degree of storm damage reduction during Sandy. We identified and mapped all nourishment episodes in NJ between 2000 and 2012 and used mean high water (MHW) shoreline data from the NJ Bureau of GIS, county parcel data from the NJ Geographic Information Network, and version 28 of the publicly available FEMA Modeling Task Force (MOTF) data for structure damage estimates. Results of a logistic regression show a significant reduction in damage to structures behind beaches nourished since 2000, structures behind wider beaches, and structures located further from MHW. Additional research, such as an ordinary least squares regression, is recommended to determine the degree to which nourishment alone attenuated damage, which is currently unknown.