Cape May Point Fares Well in Storm

CAPE MAY POINT – “Everything thing is fine, excellent in fact,” said Borough Commissioner Joe Nietubicz after inspecting Cape May Point’s beaches and Lake Lilly.
“Driving around town, there is no obvious property damage – no shingles off roofs, no blown out windows, etc. We had a couple limbs come down that caused no damage,” he said. We did not lose power.”
The only debris in the street was leaf litter and a couple of white trash bags over around the Alexander Avenue beach entrance, said Nietubicz.
“We are the only town in South Jersey who had no flooding what-so-ever,” he said. “Kudos to the then Mayor Fraser for building a storm system that will handle the flooding and to our current Public Works guys who maintain and use it.”
He said storm drains on the southwest of town drain into the lake. Bill Gibson and his crew lowered the level of Lake Lilly as the storm approached. The lake absorbed the two or three days of rain resulting in no flooding.
“The lake looks beautiful, even the rocks around the island are submerged,” said Nietubicz.
Tides were 10+ feet above normal and waves were estimated at some twenty feet, he said. Evidence shows that waves made it to the dunes with no dune erosion – about 4/5 inches of snow fence are showing now where you could not even find them in the summer but the dunes themselves show no lost sand, said Nietubicz.
“We lost 3 or 4 feet of beach sand,” he said. “The worst part was at the end of Leihigh Beach where we lost considerable frontage and the beach is some 3 to 4 feet lower than it was.”.
At 4 a.m. Friday morning (high tide) waves were higher than the bunker at Cape May Point State Park, said Nietubicz.