NJ's Post-Sandy Planning Questioned on Video

As Warner Wolf used to say, “let’s go to the video tape!”

NJ.com video of Post-Sandy infrastructure planning process.

While it may be understandable why New Jersey political leaders are not rushing to New York for answers to the problem, it would be in our best interests if they did look towards the Kingdom of the Netherlands (and its centuries of experience living below sea-level).  One novel approach adopted by the Dutch was recounted in a New York Times article (here), which is to allow the sea water to flow instead of trying to build barriers that are bound to fail.

As noted in the article:  “Water management [in the Netherlands] depends on hard science and meticulous study. Americans throw around phrases like once-in-a-century storm. The Dutch, with knowledge of water, tides and floods honed by painful experience, can calculate to the centimeter — and the Dutch government legislates accordingly — exactly how high or low to position hundreds of dikes along rivers and other waterways to anticipate storms they estimate will occur once every 25 years, or every 1,000 years, or every 10,000.”

Why continuously learn lessons the hard way?  No need to be bull-headed, New Jersey should welcome input from our neighboring States and international friends with great knowledge and experience dealing with flood-waters of oceanic proportions.  While they may represent a quick fix, and our near-term options are limited, building sand dunes that will wash away may not be the best long-range solution to the problem.

We’ll keep you posted.