It took several months after Superstorm Sandy's devastating blow for the hardest-hit New York and New Jersey shorelines to become usable by the public again as tons of debris were removed and emergency repairs were made. The October 2012 storm robbed significant amounts of sand from beaches, destroyed or severely compromised berms and dunes and increased flood risks to local communities. But a new phase of post-Sandy work to make the shores more resilient to storms will begin as early as this fall and focus on roughly $2.77 billion worth of projects in the region that were federally authorized before the storm but not yet begun.
Led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, that work is in addition to the sand replacement as well as dune and berm rebuilding that the Corps and its contractors began last summer and will continue through much of this year (see story, p. 14). All told, the agency's Sandy program in the heavily battered Northeast consists of about 155 projects at a combined cost of roughly $5.3 billion, says Joseph Forcina, Corps chief of the Hurricane Sandy coastal management division, which is in charge of the largest part of the post-hurricane shoreline restoration effort. By comparison, the agency has spent about that much, on average, for its entire national civil works program annually.