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Radio Free Montone: Water Woes Everywhere

By John Montone, 1010 WINS

Not enough water here.  Too much water there. Water woes everywhere.

California is parched.  Two years with hardly a drop of rain.  South Texas, too.  Until last week when it rained so hard and so fast cars and houses and people floated away.

Our spring has been so dry that local lawns are already turning brown.  But then the skies opened and we had floods.  In Hoboken near where I drowned the company car during a flash flood two years ago…yes, come hell or high water…when there's news to be covered we try to get there…yes, not more than a half mile away from the 1010 WINS Mobile Unit's watery grave, I chatted with the locals on Tuesday morning about sewers bubbling over during the two day deluge.  Stinking black muck covered sidewalks.  Firefighters had to spray more water on the walks to clean up the sludge.  And in Newark it rained so hard a local lake and some sewers backed up onto the pavement.  Along with the water and sewage came fish.  Fish swimming down city streets.  So many fish the health department had to warn people not to catch and eat them.

And here's another water woe.  During Sandy cyclonic winds pushed  700-miles off ocean water smack into the Mid-Atlantic coast.  The massive sea surge ripped up roads and thousands of homes.  In New Jersey Governor Christie decided he had had it with the selfish beach front homeowners who would not allow the Army Corps of Engineers on their property to build up dunes and widen the shoreline.  So he grabbed much of the property by eminent domain and soon giant dredges were sucking sand from the ocean floor and dumping it on land.

The beach at 18th Street in Ship Bottom where I like to laze with a book, body surf and pluck the occasional striper from the suds is now three, maybe four times as wide as it used to be.  And soon the dunes will be covered in grass.  The idea is that the ocean will have a much longer distance to travel to reach the paved part of the island and if it does get close the towering dunes and plant life will suck up the surging sea.

Radio Free Montone: Water Woes

I don't know.

During Sandy the ocean did breach the dunes, but just barely and only in a few spots on Long Beach Island.  However, the bay exploded.  As the ocean poured through the Barnegat and Beach Haven Inlets water piled up.  The bay did not have the storage capacity to handle the flow and so the water poured out over the eastern and western bulkheads, submerging the island and mainland neighborhoods.

How will pumping sand from the ocean prevent the bay from overflowing? I've heard many an islander ask. Why not dredge the bay?

Water woes. Water woes. Everywhere.

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