Harvey Cedars Beach erosion aerials. Friday Mar. 26, 2010.

By MICHAEL MILLER and ERIC SCOTT CAMPBELL | Saturday, March 27, 2010

OCEAN CITY – Craig Phillips watched this month as a sand-dredging crew crept slowly past his new Boardwalk pet-supply shop, Ocean City Dog & Kitty.

Phillips moved into the store in between winter blizzards and coastal storms that devastated many of southern New Jersey’s beaches. For days snow prevented suppliers from delivering the chew toys, doggie treats and novelties that are his shop’s specialty.

But after a rocky winter, he opened March 20 to a glorious spring. And with a dredge pumping $17 million in sand on nearly two miles of beach in front of his Moorlyn Terrace business, the summer looks even better.

“Looking at Ninth Street, it’s coming up on high tide and there’s no beach. The water is pretty much up to the dunes – almost to the Boardwalk,” he said.

After harsh winter that saw record snowfall and howling coastal storms, resort towns are scrambling to make sure their beaches are presentable to tourists this summer.

With dredging projects planned or under way in at least five towns, tourists should have ample blanket room by Memorial Day.

“It’s a constant question: How good is the beach?” Ocean City Realtor Gary Jessel said. Would-be renters usually insist on strolling down to the beach from their prospective rental homes to check conditions, he said.

Ocean City’s eight miles of beaches have to be big enough to support surfers, skim-boarders, surf-fishermen, kayakers, sunbathers, picnickers and people who love to fly kites in the ocean breeze.

“In some places it’s springtime when robins come to town,” Jessel said. “In Ocean City, when the kites are up, you know.”

A Press of Atlantic City aerial survey at high tide on Thursday found wide beaches in most towns and only a few beaches where the waves engulfed whole beaches and lapped near structures. One of them was the Garden Pier section of Atlantic City, where waves rolled virtually up to the Boardwalk.

“I don’t think anyone is satisfied with the size of the beaches,” Public Works Superintendent Paul Jerkins said.

The most vulnerable beaches are those near New Jersey Avenue, he said.

“We’re keeping a close watch on the Garden Pier area. That was the area hit hardest from the storm. But we’re continuing to brace for anything,” he said.

Ocean currents typically remove sand from northern communities and deposit it in southern ones. Wildwood’s vast beaches in particular benefited over the years from this phenomenon.

“Next time we should dye the sand so we’ll know who to go to to get it back,” Jerkins quipped.

Preparations delayed

In nearby Brigantine, Public Works Superintendent Ernie Purdy dreamed of summer every time his crews had to plow and shovel snow, sometimes for days at a time, over the winter.

It was hardly an escapist fantasy.

As a 30-year veteran of the department, Purdy knew these time-consuming winter tasks inevitably delayed preparations for the tourist season. They began getting the beaches ready for the deluge of visitors on March 18.

“We usually start in late February,” Purdy said. He drove up and down the oceanfront with department supervisor John Doring, coordinating the cleanup and reconstruction of the battered beach. Ramps and a sea wall also took heavy hits at the island’s north end.

“We pick up all the heavy (debris) from tide to dune, then start raking, then opening up paths,” Purdy said. “The weather is killing us. Every time it rains, we lose two days of work.”

Purdy and his beach crew of five work eight hours a day, determined to get the sand in mid-summer form by May 15. This is especially important when unusually balmy weekends draw a preseason beach crowd. But he is working under a budget made tighter by all the hours put into snow removal. There are tradeoffs. Overtime is no longer an option.

“Right now, we’re robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Purdy said. “For the potholes, normally we have hot-patching this time of year. That’s something we’re putting on hold. Painting curbs, we’re putting on hold.”

A contractor asked the department whether he could come in to demonstrate his new power washer. Purdy and Doring know the department can’t afford it.

“We’re butting our heads together, trying to figure where we can save money,” the superintendent said. “We’re going to be asking organizations to be doing things we normally pick up the slack for.”

Racing to dredge

“We should be in great shape for the summer,” Sea Isle City Mayor Leonard Desiderio said.

Desiderio is an optimist by reputation but he has reason to be upbeat. Sea Isle City and Avalon are collaborating on a $10 million beach project in May. Having an attraction like a broad beach is one less concern for local businesses that are grappling with a recession and a stagnant second-home market.

“Besides the economy being bad, it’s been a very bad winter – all the rainfall and the record amount of snowfall,” Desiderio said.

Broad beaches are important to a shore town’s economy even in the early spring when few people are on them, the mayor said.

“Right now potential renters are coming down to look not only at our homes but are taking a look at the beaches,” Desiderio said. “If they feel there isn’t going to be a beach there, they’re going to move on to another location or even another community.”

Sea Isle City suffered serious erosion during a March 12 coastal storm.

But Sea Isle was lucky. In Ocean County, storms eroded dunes in Surf City, consumed 4 feet of beach in Ship Bottom and undermined several oceanfront homes in the North Beach section of Long Beach Township.

“In all the years I’ve been here, I can’t recall a winter where we’ve had this many northeast storms,” Surf City Mayor Leonard T. Connors said.

Connors said the good news was these storms did not linger, unlike the northeaster of 1962 that devastated southern New Jersey. He and his family weathered that storm in Surf City, where he rescued a neighbor’s cat, broke into a home to get someone’s forgotten medication and brought chicken, canned ham, eggs and bread to a marooned crew aboard a dredge.

“If the storms move quickly we don’t have much damage. But when they stall and linger, that’s when they do a lot of damage,” he said. “We had some erosion in the north end of town. I’d say 7/8 of our beach is in very good shape.”

Meanwhile, a $25 million dredging project is still under way in Harvey Cedars, which lost 3 feet of sand to its completed portion. The pace of construction was hampered by coastal storms, borough engineer Frank Little Jr. said.

“Every time a storm comes, they have to move the dredge and take it up to Sandy Hook to protect it,” he said.

Long Beach Township this month trucked in sand to save homes on the brink of collapsing into the ocean. Erosion carved 20-foot cliffs nears some homes off Flamingo Avenue. Now those homes are more or less back to normal with utilities reconnected, he said.

Beaches in Atlantic City also are smaller as well. Some protective sandbags called geotubes on the Delaware Avenue beaches were exposed in the latest storm.

Beach towns hardest hit by November storms stand to benefit from Federal Emergency Management Agency funding to repair damaged strands. Assessments are taking place now in Ocean County, Emergency Management Department spokesman Lt. James Manley said.

“We sustained severe beach erosion. Long Beach Island was hit quite severely,” Manley said.

Just how the winter storm damage will affect summer business is hard to gauge because towns are doing what they can to make the coastline presentable.

“The towns are going to do their utmost to get the beaches in shape before the tourism season,” he said. “We were hit back to back – four storms in a row. That’s a lot on these towns. They’re doing all they can to bring sand in and make repairs quickly so it doesn’t impact summer business.”