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No town is more vulnerable than Atlantic City, the largest and poorest municipality on the Jersey Shore. According to the Corps study, starting in 2030, the city will begin to suffer more than $300 million a year in damages from flooding over the same half-century; NOAA estimates that by 2050, Atlantic City will experience between 65 and 155 disturbing flooding events per year.
What began in 1854 as a vision of a resort where urbanites could experience the healing powers of the Atlantic’s salty air turned into a carnival by the sea for a century and a half. By the mid-20th century, about 16 million visitors came to Atlantic City during the summer months, bypassing its beach, boardwalk, and amusement piers. City officials hastily filled the surrounding salt marshes with mud and sand to make way for a year-round population, which reached 69,000 in 1947. It was already too much in the 1970s when state and federal laws ended indiscriminate filling of wetlands. Late: Miles of housing – disproportionately occupied by working-class immigrants and African-Americans, as a result of red lines – sat on sinking lands.
When Farrell arrived in South Jersey in 1971 as a 29-year-old doctoral student, Stockton’s main campus was not yet complete, so he taught geology and marine science in suites on the lower floor of a building. A failed hotel near Atlantic City’s boardwalk. The city was at the tail end of a long fall, thanks in part to the development of less populated nearby coastal towns. In the 1980s the city tried to reinvent itself as a gambling mecca; real estate giants like Steve Wynn, Carl C. Icahn and Donald Trump have built vast casinos on the water’s edge. But small businesses in the surrounding neighborhoods dried up and the city went into a second decline. Sandy brought the collapse. The poverty rate rose to nearly 40 percent, the highest in New Jersey, and Atlantic City’s dire flooding problems were effectively ignored. “There was no interest,” Farrell said.
One morning in February 2020, I visited Barbara Woolley-Dillon, Atlantic City’s new director of planning, whose first days on the job were consumed by the urgent need to slow the flooding. Woolley-Dillon’s downtown office occupies a palatial corner of Town Hall, a rigid cube of concrete and black glass. Since 2016, the endangered financial situation of the city has been under government surveillance, during which time the planning and development department was temporarily reduced to two people. The view through the massive windows showed the northeastern wing of the city, with the renamed Hard Rock and Ocean hotel casinos hovering above the row houses and apartment complexes. According to Woolley-Dillon, who is in her 50s, the landscape is “my inspiration for having to do better for the residents.”
In its back bay study, the Corps envisions protecting Absecon Island, which is divided between Atlantic City and three other towns, with a storm surge barrier and a cross-bay barrier along with connections to embankments and flood walls. Projected costs could exceed $6 billion. Woolley-Dillon was the former planner of another barrier island town called Mantoloking, which Sandy razed just before he started there; He is a veteran with experience in disaster recovery. But when I asked him about his corps plan, he sighed. He reiterated a comparison I’ve heard other coastal experts make many times. “Do you know what happened to Katrina?” said. “They didn’t foresee the worst-case scenario. Once the sets are over, you are stuck, your home is in a non-swaying swimming pool. We don’t want to be in the same situation.”
I noticed that the corps also mentioned withdrawal in its work. Woolley-Dillon said that if homeowners wanted to sell their home to a government-run buyout program, it couldn’t stop them. However, he preferred to focus on the city’s official location – determined to adapt in the face of climate change rather than retreat. He described what they had built: a medical center; a flexible microgrid; and the expansion of Stockton’s Atlantic City campus to include an institute focused on coastal resilience. Since we met, the city has positioned itself as the business hub for New Jersey’s thriving offshore wind industry, with a training facility, conferences, and research center. “We do a lot of things towards resilience,” he said. “But when you’re on a barrier island, it’s very difficult. How much more can you do?”
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