Four Years After Hurricane Sandy

This week marks the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, an event that lives on in the minds and hearts of many of us who call the East Coast home.

In the wake of Sandy’s destruction, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received $167 million in federal funding to strengthen natural defenses and protect communities and wildlife along the Atlantic Coast from future storms.

Four years later, here’s a by-the-numbers look at what we’ve done to build a stronger coast as of October 2016:

• 3,500 tons of hurricane debris removed from refuges;
• 5 badly eroded beaches restored on Delaware Bay;
• 7 refuges installed with solar and back-up power;
• 20 refuges repaired for visitor and staff safety;
• 6 dams removed to improve river flow and reduce flood risk;
• 4,000 acres of invasive species treated;
• 30,000 feet of living shoreline developed;
• 1000s of native plants planted to restore wetlands, rivers and marshes;
• 4 breaches fixed, 9,000 feet of shoreline restored, 500,000 plugs of beach grass planted, 1,000 acres of marsh seeded, and 25 miles of channels dredged at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge – one of the largest coastal restoration projects on the East Coast.

Some highlights of our 2016 work:

Removal of the 150-foot-long Hughesville Dam on the Musconetcong River in New Jersey to restore fish passage and reduce flooding risks for the local community – a project that caught the eye of Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, who toured the site in September.

Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell visits Hughesville Dam removal in New Jersey. Pictured with Beth Styler Barry (left) and Eric Schrading (right). Credit: USFWS

 

Completion of a 21,000-foot living shoreline  at Glenn L. Martin National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland’s Eastern Shore to protect tidal wetlands that support a crab fishery essential to Smith Islanders – and that help buffer this island community from storms and sea-level rise.

At work creating the living shoreline at Fog Point in Glenn L. Martin NWR on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Credit: USFWS

 

Removal of the Pond Lily Dam in New Haven, CT, where local community members and politicians mobilized to bring attention to the flood risks of this dam. In April 2016, volunteers planted native vegetation at the dam site to help stabilize the riverbanks and create an urban nature park for the community.

Volunteers planting native vegetation along the river banks following removal of Pond Lily dam in New Haven, CT. Credit: USFWS

 

Completion of a $38 million marsh and beach restoration and resilience project at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware. The work is already showing signs of success — including helping to absorb impacts of storms and heavy rains to attracting record numbers of wildlife such as horseshoe crabs and migratory birds.

Recently planted beach grass at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge. Credit: Citizen Racecar

 

Engagement of dozens of student volunteers to help build oyster reefs – along Delaware Bay in southern New Jersey and Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia – that will filter water and buffer the shore from wave energy.

East Windsor Middle School students and families helped build oyster reefs at Gandy’s Beach, NJ. Credit: Project PORTS

 

The staff, community and partners collaborating with us across the region from Virginia to Maine, people who are dedicated to making their communities #StrongAfterSandy – people like FWS staff Matt Whitbeck and Miles Simmons who are working at the front lines of climate change in the Chesapeake Bay.

“We spent a lot of time thinking about what management actions we can employ that will increase the resiliency of the salt-marsh community to sea-level rise, to storm impacts and how can we do that in a way that really maximizes the benefit to the wildlife that depend on it,” says Whitbeck. Credit: Steve Droter

 

Science tells us that the future will include more intense hurricanes and storms like Sandy, causing more damage to coastal ecosystems and communities. In fact, a recent study predicts disastrous floods like those seen during Hurricane Sandy may hit New York City 17 times more often in the next century.

With anticipated rising sea levels, more frequent and intense storms, shifting seasons and higher temperatures, we need to continue to work together to better understand and adapt to changing conditions. Strong natural defenses will help all of us better weather future storms.

Three Years After Sandy: Building a Stronger Atlantic Coast

Three years ago this week, Hurricane Sandy devastated communities along the Atlantic Coast with record storm surge, fierce winds and torrential rain. Earlier this month Hurricane Joaquin again reminded us of nature’s power, inundating much of the Atlantic Seaboard with heavy rains and chest-deep floodwaters and setting historic records in the Carolinas. And only days ago, Hurricane Patricia — the most powerful tropical cyclone ever measured in the Western Hemisphere with maximum sustained winds of 200 m.p.h. — threatened the coast of Mexico before weakening significantly after landfall.

Visit doi.gov/hurricanesandy to learn more about how Department of the Interior investments are helping to build a stronger Atlantic Coast three years after Hurricane Sandy.

In this age of uncertainty we have come to expect the unexpected. The science tells us that climate change will cause hurricanes and tropical storms to become more intense — lasting longer, unleashing stronger winds, and causing more damage to coastal ecosystems and communities. The question is, what can we do to help coastal areas stand stronger against the storm?

An aerial view of coastal damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in Mantoloking, NJ. Credit: Greg Thompson/USFWS

Federal funding for Hurricane Sandy recovery has spurred an unprecedented effort to strengthen natural defenses along the Atlantic Coast to protect communities and wildlife against future storms. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other Department of the Interior agencies are investing $787 million in hundreds of projects to clean up and repair damaged refuges and parks; restore coastal marshes, wetlands and shoreline; connect and open waterways to improve flood control; and increase our scientific understanding of how these natural areas are changing.

The Service is investing $167 million in more than 70 projects to clean up refuges, restore and strengthen coastal areas (marshes and beaches), connect and open waterways for better fish passage and flood protection and support other efforts to protect wildlife and communities from future storms. These investments support the goal of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan to make communities more resilient to increasingly intense storms predicted with a changing climate. They also create jobs and provide opportunities for fishing, hiking, wildlife watching and other recreational opportunities. Here are a few projects that have been completed or are under way:

Post-Hurricane Sandy debris removal from the coastal marshes of Edwin B Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in southern New Jersey, made possible through Department of the Interior funding. Credit: (before) Ryan Hagerty/USFWS, (after) Virginia Rettig/USFWS

• In New Jersey, we’ve completed a $13 million debris removal project at E.B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge to clean up more than 32,000 acres of saltmarsh and coastal habitat. The project removed 1,900 tons of debris from 22 miles of coastline and employed more than 100 workers. Removing the debris allows coastal areas to recover, providing healthier habitat for native wildlife while acting as a buffer against future storms.

• In Maryland, we’re constructing 20,950 feet of living shoreline to protect marshes at Fog Point, a coastal section of Maryland’s Glenn Martin National Wildlife Refuge in Smith Island. The $9 million project will help protect more than 1,000 acres of interior tidal high marsh, sheltered water, submerged aquatic vegetation and clam beds against the effects of future storms. It also will enhance the natural defenses of saltwater habitats important to the island’s soft crab fishery, a natural resource local Smith Island residents depend on for their livelihoods.  

Learn more about the Fog Point living shoreline project in this video.

Dredge work drains a flooded marsh in Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge, part of an ongoing $38 million marsh restoration effort in Delaware. Credit: David Eisenhauer/USFWS

• In Delaware, we’ve invested $38 million in a marsh restoration effort under way to build storm and sea-level rise resilience into the natural landscape at Delaware’s Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge. The project is repairing breached marshes and reconstructing severely damaged shoreline, including critical dune restoration. Restored marshes at the refuge will provide a more resilient coast against future storms and create additional habitat for birds, including American oystercatchers and federally listed species such as rufa red knots and piping plovers. Along with the restoration of coastal wildlife habitat, the project provides the added benefit of enhanced storm protection for nearby residents.

Removal of the White Rock dam in Westerly, R.I. and Stonington, Conn. opens up close to 25 miles of the Pawcatuck River and associated wetlands for migrating American shad, alewife, blueback herring, American eel, and sea-run trout. Credit: USFWS

• In Connecticut and Rhode Island, we worked with The Nature Conservancy to remove White Rock dam. The $794,000 project will reduce flood risk to local communities, restore habitat for fish and wildlife and open up several dozen miles of  fish passage in the Pawcatuck River for the first time in nearly 250 years. It is among 13 Hurricane Sandy-funded  projects to remove dams or  evaluate them for removal in four states.

Three years after Hurricane Sandy, communities, government and nonprofit organizations are working together like never before to better understand and adapt to changing conditions. Clearly it will take time and careful planning before we see a return on many of these investments. But the Service is confident the long-term benefits of building a stronger coast will far outweigh initial costs when it comes to protecting communities, sustaining wildlife and lessening the financial impact of damages resulting from future intense storms. To that end, we are establishing systems to carefully monitor and evaluate our progress to ensure this work is effective and lasting. The nature we care about and the public we serve deserve no less.

You can track the status of our projects and investments by visiting the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Hurricane Sandy website at www.fws.gov/hurricane/sandy/

Birdseye View: Avian Science meets Hurricane Recovery

Tagging red knots on Cape Cod. The yellow tag is a geo-locator; the lime green alphanumeric flag means it was banded in the U.S. Credit: USFWS

While the  U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service continues to respond to damage from 2012’s Hurricane Sandy—clearing out wind-felled timber or hauling hundreds of tons of debris out of coastal salt marsh—the agency is also using science to assess the full scope of the storm’s ecological impact and establish a baseline for future conservation efforts. Some Service research that’s been integral to Hurricane Sandy recovery and resilience efforts is already visible in projects like the recently completed beach restorations along New Jersey’s Delaware Bay. This region has long been seen as indispensable to migrating shorebirds like the red knot, whose eastern population has plummeted 80 percent in the past decade.

While many of the most impacted bird species are shorebirds, studies by the Saltmarsh Habitat & Avian Research Program (SHARP), a collaborative effort between the Fish and Wildlife Service and several other academic, governmental, and privately funded partners, are focused more on marsh birds such as the seaside sparrow, the willet and the clapper rail. According to Randy Dettmers, a senior biologist with the Service, one project funded under the Hurricane Sandy umbrella (and preceded by supporting SHARP research) has targeted more than 1,700 observation points across tidal marshes from Maine to Virginia for post-Sandy monitoring of migratory bird populations.

Survey regions for USFWS/SHARP Tidal Marsh Bird monitoring.

Partners in the SHARP collaboration include the Universities of Maine, Delaware, New Hampshire, Connecticut and State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry, as well as the Audubon Society, the National Park Service, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife and many other state- and regionally based organizations. The program also employs dozens of graduate and undergraduate students who collect abundance, breeding and survival data by monitoring these sites and banding birds.

Student participants in the SHARP program, Left to Right: Chris Field, Univerity of Connecticut; Alison R. Kocek, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry; Mo Correll and Meaghan Conway, University of Maine. Credit: Margie Brenner/USFWS

Another Sandy-funded project launched by Dettmers and Service colleagues Chris Dwyer and Scott Johnston examines the prevalence and distribution of submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV)—coastal plants that grow beneath the waterline and are primary food sources for wintering waterfowl, including the priority species Atlantic brant and American black duck. Studies of SAV in the wake of an intense storm like Sandy, Dettmers says, will provide an excellent picture of “how much of [the vegetation] is vulnerable to climate change impacts from sea-level rise and future major storm events and what the resulting impacts on wintering waterfowl populations are likely to be.”

American black ducklings nesting in coastal marsh. Credit: Peter McGowan/USFWS

Dettmers says the effects of predicted climate change will be increasingly challenging for coastal habitat and the species that depend on it. He expects that future storms and sea level rise will likely impact beach and tidal marsh habitats, affecting birds’ ability to find food and suitable nesting places, and that ultimately this may result in reduced bird populations.

“Species like the saltmarsh sparrow and seaside sparrow are endemic to the Atlantic coast marshes of North America,” he says.  “They don’t occur anywhere else in the world, and they’re highly vulnerable to sea-level rise and major storm impacts such as are expected from climate change. If tidal marshes in this part of the world are lost, we’ll lose those species as well.”

He adds that beach-dependent species like the red knot—already a candidate for threatened status under the Endangered Species Act because of other threats to its population—“will only be pushed further toward the endangered end of the conservation concern spectrum” if the loss of coastal habitat can’t be somehow stabilized.

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A clapper rail chick. Credit: Don Freiday/USFWS

To read more about the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Migratory Birds program, click here. To read more about the SHARP program and its constituent collaborating agencies and institutions, click here.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been working to repair and restore public lands on the Atlantic coast since Hurricane Sandy impacted them in October of 2012. To learn more about the Service’s ongoing efforts to facilitate habitat recovery and build coastal resilience that helps protect communities, please visit www.fws.gov/hurricane/sandy.