Tidal Flooding Causes Beach Erosion in North Wildwood

The North Wildwood beaches have not been having a good 2023 so far.

The beach has suffered some damage over the weekend due to a combination of factors.

Firstly, an unfortunate occurrence of high tidal flooding took place, aggravated by a missed round of beach replenishment resulting from adverse weather conditions. Compounding the situation, alternative solutions proposed to address the issue were rejected by the state.

In Mid-May, New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) granted permission for emergency repairs to address the severe erosion along North Wildwood’s beachfront. These repairs only allowed North Wildwood to reshape a few blocks of dunes.

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At that time, erosion had eaten away at the existing sand dunes leaving a massive 17-foot-tall drop. Just prior to Memorial Day Weekend, North Wildwood’s crews were able to spread down these dunes so that folks could walk over them to get onto the beach.

While this helped people to get onto the beach, it didn’t solve the lack of beach replenishment.

Usually, North Wildwood replenishes its beaches by importing sand from Wildwood. This is done by scraping a few feet of sand off the front of the Wildwood beach and trucking them up to North Wildwood. Once there, tractors would smooth them down to elevate the beach and build dunes.

This system is called back-passing, and for this year that process was not feasible due to sections of the beach being inaccessible by vehicles. These sections are in front of Morey’s Surfside Pier and Sportland Pier.

Without proper replenishment, this left some beach blocks in North Wildwood to have virtually no beach during high tide.

This past weekend, we had the opportunity to witness the enchanting Strawberry full moon. While it was beautiful to watch, the island had to deal with exceptionally high tide levels, measuring a height of 7.1 feet.

This height is almost unheard of and is only the second time in a century that we have over 7 feet in the month of June. What was the icing on the cake was the strong northeasterly winds that pushed the water up higher onto the beach.

While the after-effects of the moon’s tides are still going on, we are starting to see some of the damage.

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From videos and photos posted in the North Wildwood Coastal Processes Facebook group, it looks like the waters were hitting the dunes and started to rip apart some of the beach entries.

In some areas, the beach lost three feet to erosion.

Most likely, the city of North Wildwood will quickly get these ramps back open for the weekend.

A special thank you to Joe Kamenar, Joe Stathius, PJ Hondros, Pasquale Varrone for the photos and videos in this article.

At the end of the day, the city of Wildwood could be approved for another beach replenishment but since we are now in the summer season, they wouldn’t be able to start until the fall.