Stormy Winter Shrinks Some New Jersey Beaches, But Shore Towns Ready For Visitors

BRIGANTINE, N.J. (CBSNewYork/AP) -- A stormy winter chewed up New Jersey's beaches more than usual, requiring greater efforts to restore them before the summer crowds hit the sand.

In some places, erosion and beach loss was greater this past winter than it was after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, while other places appeared to come through the winter relatively unscathed.

With Memorial Day crowds a week away from storming the coast, beachgoers will find the Jersey shore ready for visitors, even if some spots are narrower than they were last year.

Jon Miller, a coastal expert with Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, said two major storms did significant damage to the beaches: Hurricane Joaquin in October, which passed offshore but still churned up enough surf to cause erosion; and a winter storm the last week of January that carved 15-foot drop-offs into some beaches.

"The two storms were markedly different in their characteristics, but both caused significant erosion, particularly on the beaches that had yet to be nourished after Sandy,'' Miller said.

"When Joaquin stalled, it spared us a direct hit from a very large storm, which was a good thing, but as it sat offshore it pumped waves at us for the better part of a week,'' he said. ``The cumulative result of all those waves was beach erosion that was actually worse than Sandy in some parts of the state. Since it occurred so early in the season, it also left many communities vulnerable, and some had to do emergency repairs to prepare for the next storm.''

Then a winter storm in late January caused even more erosion; it was shorter-lived, but more intense than Joaquin, Miller said.

In February, there were smaller storms that would not normally have caused concern, but because they came after so much erosion had already taken place, some shore towns had to truck in tons of sand to replace what was lost.

Miller said a lot of the sand that was lost to the storms is now sitting in sand bars offshore, but the bars are larger and further from the beaches than normal, so it might take longer to naturally return to the beach through wave action.

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