Emergency Closures Helped Spur County Planning

CREST HAVEN – In August 2011, Hurricane Irene looked like an emergency manager’s worst-case scenario, lined up to roll over Cape May County for Labor Day Weekend, when hundreds of thousands of visitors typically pack the county’s beach towns.
An evacuation order would cost shore businesses severely, killing a capstone summer weekend, which could mean the difference between profit and loss in a short season, not to mention changing the plans of hundreds of thousands of people.
But waiting too long could be far worse. Think of the backups on the Garden State Parkway and Route 47 on a regular summer weekend, then add hurricane winds, flooding, and driving rain.
County officials made the call on Thursday afternoon: everybody out starting Friday morning. The storm reached New Jersey on Sunday.
“We evacuated more than 750,000 people in a period of about 24 hours,” said Gerald Thornton, freeholder director, in a recent interview. “I was shocked, because I never thought we could get that many people out.”
It turned out; Cape May County did better in Irene than many of the areas farther inland, including many places Cape May County residents headed to ride out the storm.
Since then, Hurricane Sandy a year later did far more damage to the county, and throughout the state and region. It looms far larger in local memory.
But one lesson remains from Irene: it’s possible to evacuate summer crowds from Cape May County, before flooding starts.
The total population goes from about 95,000 year-round to around 750,000 on a summer weekend, and close to 900,000 on a peak weekend like July 4, Thornton said.
Most of the packed cars that will flow into the county will be heading to the beaches along the ocean, which in Cape May County means heading over a bridge.
If things go wrong, they’ll need to head back out again. But in flood-prone areas along the shore, keeping those routes clear can be a challenge.
One Way Out
Things have been crowded along Sea Isle City Boulevard for a while, with two lanes of traffic shoved to one narrow side as a massive project continues to build a new road 4.5 feet above the old one.
The original contract award was $12.7 million, according to County Engineer Dale Foster. The project should be completed by June of 2020. Much of that money will be spent keeping the road safe and open through the project.
After all, that causeway is the only direct connection between Ludlam Island, which includes Sea Isle City and Strathmere, and the mainland.
That’s the point of the project, Foster said.
“That’s what drives it. When you look at the different barrier islands along the oceanfront, all the others have at least two causeways leading to the mainland. The island that Sea Isle’s on only has one causeway,” Foster said.
In some instances, the foot of the bridges is among the first areas to flood.
The George Redding Bridge leading to the long causeway of Wildwood Boulevard which leads to Rio Grande in Middle Township is often closed to traffic when heavy rains combine with a high tide. Foster said the county is working on improving that, as well.
For Sea Isle City, the only two other bridges lead to other barrier islands, which makes keeping the causeway passable a priority.
A recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, (NOAA), states that sea levels are rising worldwide, and that impact could be particularly severe in New Jersey, where the level of land is dropping at the same time.
The report estimates sea levels will increase the severity of tidal flooding in coming decades.
Foster expected the traffic heading into and out of Sea Isle City to use the new road at the higher level this summer, but instead the change will come in September or October.
At that point, the contractor will work 24 hours to reroute the bridge, the entrance to the Garden State Parkway and Larsen’s Marina, at the end of Old Sea Isle Boulevard.
Weather in the winter and crowds in the summer limit when work can take place, and in the spring, protections for the osprey that nest along the road that time of year prevent the use of heavy equipment, Foster said. That only leaves the fall. The project takes time, not only for the work but to make sure the road through the marsh stays level later.
“When you put that sort of burden on the soil, it tends to settle,” Foster said. “So we have to overburden the ground to get it to settle as much as possible so that it doesn’t settle in the future and cause problems.”
That included adding another couple of feet of fill to the raised road before the new route was leveled and paved. There remains a small amount of work to do on the bridge railings as well, but according to Foster the bridge leading to Kennedy Boulevard itself is in “satisfactory” shape.
A Lifeline For Island Communities
In a separate interview, Thornton said the Sea Isle Boulevard Causeway could also be an important route for people in the north end of Avalon in an evacuation.
So far in this series, much of the focus has been on four of the five toll bridges along Ocean Drive, connecting the barrier island communities of Cape May County, particularly the bridge over Middle Thorofare, in Lower Township, which is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to replace.
Thornton said there is a reason for concern across the board, adding that the county tries to maintain them as well as possible.
“You saw the difficulty we had with the Stone Harbor (96th Street) bridge recently. And now we’re working on the (Roosevelt Boulevard) bridge between Upper Township and Ocean City,” he said.
The drawbridge over Great Channel on Stone Harbor Boulevard leading into 96th Street, now unrestricted, had to be closed to overnight traffic recently for repairs, a project complicated by the historic status of the drawbridge mechanism, which Foster said is of a very unusual design.
The overnight closures were done by June 16, and the total project cost more than $700,000. County officials say the bridge load limit is restored to 40 tons.
A longer-term project had the Roosevelt Boulevard Bridge leading to 34th Street in Ocean City down to one lane through much of the winter, as crews replaced steel reinforcement bars under the concrete. That deck rehabilitation work is set to continue through the next off-season.
“We’ve been doing repairs to the concrete deck up there for years. It seems like every spring; we were up there fixing the deck,” Foster said.
The county launched a study to look at options, and the recommendation came back to replace some sections of deck entirely, and rehabilitate others.
“The salt is what causes the reinforcing steel to corrode, and therefore the concrete to pop over those bars, creating those potholes on the bridges,” he said.
There are some areas of the bridge support that need repair, Foster said, but nowhere near the situation on the deck. “For the deck, we were getting very concerned about having a total collapse failure of a deck panel.”
According to Thornton, the county has always had a maintenance schedule for the bridges, but it was Freeholder Will Morey who in 2016 began to push for a long-term plan to replace the bridges in Cape May County.
“He’s been on top of this. He’s the one that started talking to me about a long-term plan for the bridges. And the county engineer talked to me. I thought it was a great idea,” Thornton said in an interview at his office in the county Administration Building in Middle Township.
“He said to me we’ve got to look at a long-term plan here for the bridges and infrastructure.”
Contacted later by phone, Morey said the closures this spring of the 96th Street Bridge, and the Townsend’s Inlet Bridge for emergency repairs highlights the need for planning.
“We don’t want to see these bridges close for emergency repairs again if we can help it,” he said.
According to someone who attended one of the meetings, Morey has told local organizations that the county will spend $125 million on bridges and infrastructure.
In an interview, he said that is only a preliminary estimate, and would be what was spent over a period of years.
Over the next few months, he said, Foster, others and he plan to work on a comprehensive plan for the bridges, including pushing for the replacement of the Middle Thorofare Bridge in the Diamond Beach section of Lower Township, which county officials say is in most need of replacement.
Morey said the county has a responsibility to ensure its bridges can be relied upon, but also a responsibility to spend tax money with care.
The county is in excellent financial shape, he said, which makes it easier to commit to such projects.
As have others in county government, Morey said the county must be ready if big infrastructure spending, talked about in Washington, moves beyond the discussion phase.
“We want to be prepared for that. When a project is prepared, they get funded,” he said. Morey did not couch the issue purely as a question of preparation for evacuation. He said bridges are also important for commerce, and for the county’s quality of life.
“Those bridges are there for a reason, and we want to make sure that we can depend on them,” Morey said.
To contact Bill Barlow, email bbarlow@cmcherald.com.