New Orleans had levees. New Jersey has dunes.
Modest piles of sand are all that stand between the Atlantic Ocean and the large, growing populations crammed onto the barrier islands that line most of New Jersey's eastern edge.
The dunes do fine from day to day. But in even a tame hurricane, they would be roughly as effective as the ramparts of sand castles at holding back the sea, emergency management experts said.
"Even in a Category 1 storm, all of our coastal islands are gone," said Mike Augustyniak, supervisor of the State Police Office of Emergency Management. "They're underwater."
New Orleans planners had dreaded a direct hit from a hurricane for years before it arrived last week to validate their worst-case scenarios. New Jersey experts fear one as well, and closely track potential hurricanes from the moment they are identified as distant tropical depressions.
Most concern and evacuation planning is directed at our 120 miles or so of delicate barrier islands, human habitats as dense and diverse as the casinos of Atlantic City and the condos lining Long Beach Island. But North Jersey is not immune.
A Category 1 storm aimed squarely at Asbury Park would cover Newark Liberty International Airport with a foot of water, according to the federal New Jersey Hurricane Evacuation Study. Floods from a Category 5 storm would swamp the eastern sections of Newark.
None of this is likely. Climatic and geographical advantages tend to protect New Jersey from the sort of storm surges that inundated the Gulf Coast. We get hurricanes, but by the time they reach us they are usually either tattered and tame or well offshore.
But a direct hit from an ocean- fueled monster from the east -- the true nightmare scenario -- happened at least once before, in 1821. Emergency planning aside, New Jerseyans largely act as if it will never happen again, packing onto the coast as if there were a contest to see how many people could be put in harm's way, some critics say.
"We have a public policy that allows people to put themselves in danger," said Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society on Sandy Hook.
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Ocean County Sheriff William Polhemus was a young boy when a hurricane swept by a few dozen miles offshore in September 1944. He said he and his father were standing on the boardwalk, squinting into the winds and pelting rain, when the structure beneath them was washed inland.
"All of a sudden we found ourselves rafting down the street," he said.
That was a typical New Jersey hurricane -- the kind that moves up the coast from the southeast and strikes only a glancing blow. Prevailing westerly winds that blow across the United States generally prevent them from making a left turn directly into New Jersey. If they stay offshore, as they generally do, the state is spared their worst, because storm surges and the most intense winds of a hurricane occur in the right-front quadrant of a hurricane.
"It's very tough to get a storm surge on the Jersey Shore from a tropical storm," said David Robinson, the state climatologist at Rutgers University.
The other style of hurricane typical of New Jersey approaches from the southwest, perhaps after having made landfall on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Deprived of the warm ocean water that fuels them, they are generally ill-formed and weakened by the time they reach New Jersey -- though as Tropical Storm Floyd's prodigious floods demonstrated in 1999, even weakened hurricanes are capable of inflicting tremendous damage.
What authorities fear most is an atypical hurricane that finds a way to make landfall directly on New Jersey. It could either plow through the Delaware Bay, devastating Cape May and the vicinity, or make a left turn onto the Jersey Shore, aiming its right-front quadrant at the barrier islands.
"That's just pretty much washing over most of the barrier islands," said Steven Hafner, a coastal geologist at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
In the case of a Category 4 or 5 storm -- which is less likely here than in the South, due to the colder temperatures in this part of the Atlantic -- the winds alone would devastate the coast, Hafner said.
"It's going to pretty much splinter most of these buildings into rubble," he said.
Prevailing weather patterns notwithstanding, there is no doubt that it can happen. Experts are "quite certain" a hurricane made landfall in New Jersey in 1821, most likely at Category 3 strength, Robinson said. And some experts believe it happened again in 1904, though others contend that was at tropical storm strength by the time it hit land.
"It would be absolutely negligent not to plan for such an event," Robinson said.
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Augustyniak said that he does, constantly.
"With any storm that has any possibility" of reaching New Jersey, the State Police "plan as if it's coming," he said.
Their primary resource is a computer program called Hurrevac, available only to the emergency planning community, he said. It captures weather service advisories and plots the projected path of a storm on a computer map.
On the same map, Augustyniak and his office have circles around coastal regions, signifying the length of time it would take to evacuate them. When the hurricane's "cone of error" intersects with the evacuation buffer, it's time to tell people to get off the Jersey Shore, he said.
To be sure, even a direct hit would not mean a replay of New Orleans. That city is below sea level -- rather than draining after the hurricane, the opposite happened as the levees that held back Lake Pontchartrain failed.
But much of New Jersey is low- lying as well. The state is laced with rivers; its entire eastern seaboard is coastal plain, and much of the Meadowlands -- an area known by those who study prehistoric times as Lake Passaic -- is geographically depressed.
Augustyniak said he is prepared to enhance coastal evacuation routes at a moment's notice, devoting all lanes to westbound traffic.
Reams of plans are devoted to Atlantic City casinos, he said. There is a process by which the state can tell them to halt incoming bus traffic long before a storm hits. Casinos have in-place sheltering plans that involve moving guests to the interior of the buildings on upper floors, protecting them from both the wind and the floods.
There is some question, though, about whether that would really be safe, Augustyniak said. "Our hurricane planner is involved right now with meetings with the casinos," he said.
He said he did not know offhand how many people, or what percentage of the coastal population, is "transit dependent," meaning they do not have vehicles and would need help evacuating. This segment of the population was largely left to its own devices in New Orleans, and tens of thousands of the city's poorest, oldest and sickest people were stranded after the storm.
Plans call for local governments in New Jersey to lead the way when it comes to evacuating the transit dependent, Augustyniak said, but the state "has a relationship with NJ Transit and local bus companies" that would enable it to help.
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But why are so many people there in the first place?
Between 1995 and late 2003, more than 40,000 residential units were approved in 79 coastal New Jersey towns. Modest summer cottages gave way to plush condos and mini-mansions.
"New Jersey has really failed to control intensive development right on the beach in high-hazard areas, and in fact in recent years has really begun to consciously allow more intensive development along the barrier islands," said Dillingham of the littoral society.
A building boom has been under way on the Shore since the mid-1990s, he said. Now, several island towns are considering new ordinances that would allow high-rise development.
Flood-code standards are in effect, in many cases requiring homes to be designed with breakaway walls on the first floor, but there's some dispute about how adequate the standards are, Dillingham said.
The federal government essentially encourages coastal development by providing flood insurance and spending billions of dollars replenishing beaches that naturally erode.
Federal agencies insist in some cases on building taller dunes when they replenish beaches, so as to protect shore properties. But that has proved controversial in some places; the towns of Margate and Longport have actually refused to allow beach replenishment for fear that the dunes would obstruct their view, Hafner said.
Even the healthiest dunes in front of homes on the barrier islands are a pale imitation of what dunes should be, he added. Nature designed them as multiple ridges that can migrate forward and backward over time, like the ones that exist in the preserved environment of Island Beach State Park.
"That's what Mother Nature builds to protects itself from the storms," Hafner said. "Everyone wants to be right on the water, so they knock that down and build right up to the water."
It is all too possible, experts agree, that those people will come to regret that decision profoundly.
Alexander Lane covers the environment for The Star-Ledger.
© 2005 The Star-Ledger.