Thursday, March 08, 2012
The March '62 Nor'easter
The 50th Anniversary of the March 1962 Nor'easter, occurring over three days 3/6-8 & five high tides, causing devastation from Virginia to Sandy Hook NJ to Long Island. The most destructive Jersey coastal storm of my lifetime to date, & had an enormous impact on me as a young adolescent, a very significant weather event. I still have the special Sunday color supplement magazine on the storm from the old Newark News.
OI course, I didn't see it in person as it occurred. If I had a car & drivers license, nothing except a police blockade could have kept me away at least from the Raritan bayshore. Although all the tidal estuaries that extend far into North Jersey felt & showed the impact.
The storm was a big deal for me for several reasons. First, my impressionable age. Second, the extent of the damage, apparent as it was happening even though TV news didn't have anywhere near the mobile capacities it introduced in the Seventies. Third, the storm was not a hurricane, or even the fiercest of nor'easters. It did what it did by stalling offshore & pounding the coast for three days. Fourth, my dad decided a week later to visit my grandmother in Atlantic City to see how she was doing. We knew she was fine. She had close relatives nearby. Dad actually wanted a look at the destruction.
Nana resided on the third floor of a small building a long block from the boardwalk on Pacific Ave. near California Ave., within sight of the Ritz-Carlton. The doctor offices on the first floor had flooded out, the street still had large amounts of debris, including some appliances Nana had seen floating down the street. She had a view from her window partway up Belmont Ave. & claimed to to have seen waves breaking. I doubted that one, as the boardwalk would have busted the power of the breakers. Atlantic City didn't get the worst of it. Other boardwalks were ripped up end to end, The barrier islands lost thousands of houses, severely damaged, wave & wind wrecked or washed away altogether. Hair-raising stories from narrow Long Beach Island, nearly the entire island underwater, residents trapped, the storm punched a new inlet through to the bay as successive high tides piled up more water on the ocean side, pushing it into the back bays before low tide could drain the previous high tide. But Atlantic City got it bad enough, especially at the northeast inlet end. That part of the boardwalk was splinters & pilings. It was there I saw a tall apartment building with a brightly multi-colored wall; going closer, the multi-colors became wallpapers on inside walls of apartments, toilets & even a few bathtups sticking out into air. It was impressive. There were a number of similarly wrecked buildings. The mid-section of the Steel Pier washed away when a barge crashed into it, destroying the Diving Horse part & leaving the theater part stranded (I don't recall if it had been repaired by that summer, but the front part of the Pier was open),
So it wasn't difficult to take what I did see & apply it to the remainder of Jersey's coast & get a reasonably accurate sense of the storm's massive destruction.
We've had some pretty strong ocean storms since. The worst, I think, was Hurricane Irene last summer, but that was an inland flooding event. My dad predicted another like '62 within 20 years. But he remembered the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 & the storm surge generated by the 1938 New England Hurricane as it passed close offshore. Jersey's beaches are better protected by beach replenishment & dunes. We have built too much - far more than existed in '62, & no storm has sat offshore for five consecutive high tides. If that happens again, we'll see.
There are hundreds of photos & articles online. Here's an Asbury Park Press picture gallery & an Atlantic City picture gallery.
***
A Facebook friend commented that Jersey Shore is "overdue for another 'cleansing'." I'm not certain of that anymore. I have no desire for Jersey's boardwalks to be ripped to pieces, that's not "cleansing." The most detestable developments are on the bays & estuaries - I've seen them built on sand islands I was certain nobody owned much less could get approval from the NJ Dept. of Environmental Protection to develop. I think it would take a fifteen foot storm surge at high tide or three consecutive high tides with no draining to do any significant damage to them.The '62 storm was so unusually slow-moving it caught the old salts by surprise. In time, over the next century, barring a quick switch to global cooling, rising ocean levels will gradually push barrier island inhabitants back to the mainland & cause frequent damaging flooding in bayside developments. Then shore communities will have to do what many Jersey river communities are beginning to do: purchase & rip down flood prone houses & return the land to flood plain.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
OI course, I didn't see it in person as it occurred. If I had a car & drivers license, nothing except a police blockade could have kept me away at least from the Raritan bayshore. Although all the tidal estuaries that extend far into North Jersey felt & showed the impact.
The storm was a big deal for me for several reasons. First, my impressionable age. Second, the extent of the damage, apparent as it was happening even though TV news didn't have anywhere near the mobile capacities it introduced in the Seventies. Third, the storm was not a hurricane, or even the fiercest of nor'easters. It did what it did by stalling offshore & pounding the coast for three days. Fourth, my dad decided a week later to visit my grandmother in Atlantic City to see how she was doing. We knew she was fine. She had close relatives nearby. Dad actually wanted a look at the destruction.
Nana resided on the third floor of a small building a long block from the boardwalk on Pacific Ave. near California Ave., within sight of the Ritz-Carlton. The doctor offices on the first floor had flooded out, the street still had large amounts of debris, including some appliances Nana had seen floating down the street. She had a view from her window partway up Belmont Ave. & claimed to to have seen waves breaking. I doubted that one, as the boardwalk would have busted the power of the breakers. Atlantic City didn't get the worst of it. Other boardwalks were ripped up end to end, The barrier islands lost thousands of houses, severely damaged, wave & wind wrecked or washed away altogether. Hair-raising stories from narrow Long Beach Island, nearly the entire island underwater, residents trapped, the storm punched a new inlet through to the bay as successive high tides piled up more water on the ocean side, pushing it into the back bays before low tide could drain the previous high tide. But Atlantic City got it bad enough, especially at the northeast inlet end. That part of the boardwalk was splinters & pilings. It was there I saw a tall apartment building with a brightly multi-colored wall; going closer, the multi-colors became wallpapers on inside walls of apartments, toilets & even a few bathtups sticking out into air. It was impressive. There were a number of similarly wrecked buildings. The mid-section of the Steel Pier washed away when a barge crashed into it, destroying the Diving Horse part & leaving the theater part stranded (I don't recall if it had been repaired by that summer, but the front part of the Pier was open),
So it wasn't difficult to take what I did see & apply it to the remainder of Jersey's coast & get a reasonably accurate sense of the storm's massive destruction.
We've had some pretty strong ocean storms since. The worst, I think, was Hurricane Irene last summer, but that was an inland flooding event. My dad predicted another like '62 within 20 years. But he remembered the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 & the storm surge generated by the 1938 New England Hurricane as it passed close offshore. Jersey's beaches are better protected by beach replenishment & dunes. We have built too much - far more than existed in '62, & no storm has sat offshore for five consecutive high tides. If that happens again, we'll see.
There are hundreds of photos & articles online. Here's an Asbury Park Press picture gallery & an Atlantic City picture gallery.
***
A Facebook friend commented that Jersey Shore is "overdue for another 'cleansing'." I'm not certain of that anymore. I have no desire for Jersey's boardwalks to be ripped to pieces, that's not "cleansing." The most detestable developments are on the bays & estuaries - I've seen them built on sand islands I was certain nobody owned much less could get approval from the NJ Dept. of Environmental Protection to develop. I think it would take a fifteen foot storm surge at high tide or three consecutive high tides with no draining to do any significant damage to them.The '62 storm was so unusually slow-moving it caught the old salts by surprise. In time, over the next century, barring a quick switch to global cooling, rising ocean levels will gradually push barrier island inhabitants back to the mainland & cause frequent damaging flooding in bayside developments. Then shore communities will have to do what many Jersey river communities are beginning to do: purchase & rip down flood prone houses & return the land to flood plain.
Labels: Atlantic City, boardwalks, growing up, jersey shore, weather
