BEACH NOURISHMENT: THE NEW JERSEY RETROSPECTIVE

Beach nourishment came early to NJ, with experiments by the Beach Erosion Board in the 1950's. Over the years, the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) made extensive structural modifications all along the coast: seawalls, inlet jetties, extensive groin fields and revetments. Coming late to beach nourishment, the ACE proposed expensive, complicated inlet structures with massive beachfills. In reaction to this, the State of NJ proposed the NJ Shore Protection Master Plan, the first of its kind in the nation (1982). Based on "reaches," it was a statewide approach based on coastal processes, mainly irrespective of political boundaries, rather than stop-gap, piecemeal projects of the past. One important component was the requirement to monitor for one year post-emplacement, a practice that yielded much valuable data that shaped future beach nourishment projects into the next decade. In the recent past and now, there is much more collaboration with the ACE, and there is reversion to much larger nourishment projects, which is precipitating expected problems, especially within adjacent inlets.