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Urban wetlands serve as some of the best protection against flooding from storms, but face threats from development and sea level rise.

(S.P. Sullivan/NJ.com)

THE MEADOWLANDS — In a sense, Hurricane Sandy gave this fabled swamp a needed power washing.

"Even though this was a major disaster for the people — with their homes and our infrastructure — for the natural part of the Meadowlands, I think at the end of the day it might actually be considered helpful," said Bill Sheehan, head of the environmental group Hackensack Riverkeeper.

A tidal surge sent ocean water far up into the Hackensack, and sustained winds kept it pouring into neighboring communities for hours, overtopping the district's patchwork of earthen berms and tide gates, putting towns like Little Ferry, Moonachie and Carlstadt almost completely underwater.

It also swept away accumulations of dead marsh grasses and the kind of human debris that has made the Meadowlands notorious: tires, old oil drums and soda cans tossed from passing cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. In the months after the storm, Sheehan, who captains boat trips out on the Hackensack and its environs, noticed new growth of native cordgrass in places like Saw Mill Creek, where it had never been before.

"Thousands of square feet of former barren mudflats are showing signs of life," he said. Sheehan says even major storms are nothing new for a tidal marsh, and can have a "purging effect" on the landscape.

"They've been happening for hundreds and hundred of years, but they were never considered a 'disaster' until people got involved," he said.

Tidal waters from the swollen Hackensack caused untold devastation for the district's low-lying communities, many of which sit two feet below the high water mark. But it would have been much, much worse were it not for the miles of salt marsh and meadows that absorbed millions of gallons of water. It's estimated that every three miles of wetland sponges up a full foot of storm surge.

New Jersey's beleaguered urban wetlands, long misunderstood as good-for-nothing "unimproved land," are perhaps our best line of defense against storms because they bear their brunt so well. But rising sea levels and overdevelopment are hampering their ability to protect us, scientists and environmental groups warn.

Computer models created by the Meadowlands Environmental Research Institute from LIDAR data and field recordings of flood levels simulate the flooding levels in the Meadowlands region at the height of Hurricane Sandy.

NATURE'S KIDNEYS

Even if Sandy did perform some housekeeping in the Meadowlands, the result was kind of a mixed bag. Karina Schafer is an ecosystem ecologist at Rutgers University whose research has shown that even urban wetlands like the Meadowlands still play a significant role in removing greenhouse gases from the air. That's just one of several crucial functions they perform.

Wetlands, after all, are our ecological kidneys, filtering out the toxins we feed into our waterways. And after more than a century of degradation, the Meadowlands has slowly been getting itself off dialysis, as better planning and regulation has seen the return of native plants and wildlife.

Schafer said that in recent years, the chunks of the Meadowlands she studies have actually been growing, as the natural flow of local waterways deposits soil and organic material on the banks and mudflats.

"We were actually keeping up with the sea level rise," she said.

The marshes were growing at a clip of about three to six millimeters a year, she said, outpacing the estimated two to four millimeter annual increase in sea levels. But the power washing from Sandy that may have benefited migratory birds and cordgrass also peeled back as much as three feet of marshland in some spots.

"It takes forever to grow that back again," Schafer said.

Major storms can sometimes have the effect of shoring up wetlands by depositing sediment, increasing their elevation. Recent research from Drexel University shows that while that was the case with Hurricane Irene, which was more a rainfall event than a tidal event, Sandy did not appear to drop sediment in places like Barnegat and Delaware bays.

Sandy's impact on wetlands around the state depends on where they sit relative to where the storm made landfall, according to Lenore Tedesco, the executive director of the Stone Harbor-based Wetlands Institute. In some coastal wetland areas, beach sand picked up by crashing waves was deposited further inland. On its face, this isn't a bad thing; wetlands naturally migrate back and forth with changes in the shoreline.

The trouble starts when there's a highway, or a boardwalk, in their way, leaving them nowhere to go.

"We need a place for the wetlands to migrate to, and protect adjacent uplands the same way we protect the wetlands," Tedesco said. "The storm was so huge in terms of the human impact, and that was the immediate concern. But natural environmental resiliency is really critical for protecting our infrastructure from storms, and that's typically not a political focus, because it's too long-term."

REBUILD OR RETREAT?

As the state moves past the one-year mark in the recovery, environmental groups are increasingly calling for the inclusion of so-called "soft" infrastructure projects like wetlands restoration in rebuilding plans.

"We're a heavily developed coast," said Debbie Mans, director of the NY/NJ Baykeeper. "I'm not going to go out and say you can protect it better by replacing all the hard infrastructure with soft systems. But we've lost so many of our wetlands in urban areas. We need to focus not just on hard infrastructure, but on utilizing more wetlands."

But there's a tension between the need to create new open space and the desire for New Jersey to rebuild as quickly as possible. The slogan is "Restore the Shore," after all. We look to recreate what was before, exactly as it was, in order to reclaim what the storm took from us.

"We are aware of the need to care for those [wetland] areas along the shore to provide resiliency for the future," said Larry Ragonese, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection. "You also have to live in the real world, and one of the things the Governor is trying to do is rebuild a state that has developed in some coastal areas. People live there. His goal is to get them back in business and back to their lives."

In an op-ed published in The Times of Trenton this summer, New Jersey Sierra Club director Jeff Tittel slammed Gov. Chris Christie's administration for having "no program in place to restore natural systems, such as wetlands and coastal areas, or to pull back from rebuilding in environmentally sensitive areas."

The Governor has been criticized for not committing to taking climate change into consideration as the state rebuilds. Critics say his position on climate change is hampering the state's ability to incorporate greener solutions for flood prevention.

The Asbury Park Press also reported recently that the federal Environmental Protection Agency wrote a letter to the DEP claiming the state hadn't acted quickly enough to undertake $2 million in freshwater wetlands mitigation projects. (The DEP told the paper that the holdup was due to a lack of volunteers for the council that administers such funds.)

One state program that does result in more wetlands is known as Blue Acres, which purchases flood-prone properties from homeowners and converts them into open space. The federal government has given New Jersey $300 million to put into Blue Acres for the purchase of Sandy-damaged houses in low-lying areas.

But Ragonese told NJ.com that the main priority of the program is "to get as many people out of harm's way as we can." The increase in wetland habitats is a "silver lining in a very bad situation."

The miles of wetlands at Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge protected inland communities from a deluge of floodwaters during Hurricane Sandy. Federal officials recently announced a $15 million project that would improve coastal wetlands in New Jersey.

"When the floods come next time it will be fields and wetlands covered with water — not homes," Ragonese said.

Blue Acres is also strictly an opt-in policy, meaning it can only buy up large swaths of land in towns where there's significant interest in moving inland. Last week, the DEP closed buyouts of the first two Sandy-damaged homes in Sayreville, in a neighborhood sandwiched between Raritan Bay and the South River.

So the focus is mainly on improving what's left of the state's existing wetlands, and the federal government has gotten into the game. Last week, U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced the approval of $162 million in research and restoration projects along the Atlantic coast. That includes $15 million improving wetlands on a 60-mile stretch of the Jersey Shore, including Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, a sprawling salt marsh that absorbed much of Sandy's impact.

"By stabilizing marshes and beaches, restoring wetlands, and improving the resiliency of coastal areas, we not only create opportunities for people to connect with nature and support jobs through increased outdoor recreation, but we can also provide an effective buffer that protects local communities from powerful storm surges and devastating floods when a storm like Sandy hits," Jewell said during a press conference at the refuge, which spans from just north of Atlantic City into Ocean County.

Advocates of wetland habitats say beefing up the marshy buffer between us and the ocean and tidal rivers isn't just a matter of conservation; it's a matter of public safety.

"If the water has somewhere to go, besides someone's house, it will go there," Sheehan said.