Hurricane Sandy dealt a great deal of damage to Gateway National Recreation Area, and now a new study predicts future storms could do greater damage and arrive more frequently/NPS file

Super storm Sandy back in 2012 left a hole in Fire Island National Seashore, one that actually improved the water quality and fishery in Great South Bay while redesigning the seashore a bit. A January 2022 blizzard chewed away at a bluff near a parking lot at Cape Cod National Seashore, an adverse impact that led to closure of the lot until the extent of erosion could be determined. 

Gateway National Recreation Area in the greater New York-New Jersey metropolitan area, with its natural and cultural sites that scientists say are increasingly at risk from climate change, continues to recover from Sandy.  Further south, in Maryland, much of the setting of Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument in Maryland could eventually be submerged by sea-level rise. 

Those four park units, and other unnamed ones, face even greater risk from the combination of potent hurricanes, storm surge, sea-level rise, and flooding, a just-released study in Nature predicts. By century’s end, the frequency of “joint extreme events,” those exceeding historical 100-year levels, could increase by as much as 195-fold in the Northeast, the authors said. 

“This increase in joint hazard is induced by sea-level rise and [tropical cyclone] climatology change; the relative contribution of TC climatology change is higher than that of sea-level rise for 96 percent of the coast, largely due to rainfall increases,” they added. 

The paper pointed out that tropical cyclones are “one of the largest drivers of coastal flood losses” along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. In the Northeastern United States, the periods between joint extreme events, aka 100-year storms, might shorten to three to 10 years. 

Driving the changes are the frequency of major storms and hurricanes as well as changes in associated rainfall and/or sea level rise driven by the storms, said the report. 

Those predictions could prove costly for the National Park Service, both from a budgetary perspective as well as on the ground. Of the Eastern Seaboard parks hit by Sandy in November 2012, Gateway NRA sustained the greatest amount of damage from a dollar standpoint -- $180 million. 

Protecting the NRA and its resources, cultural and natural, isn’t inexpensive. Gateway has some 600 historic structures that the Park Service has a mandate to preserve, and the NRA didn’t have the financial wherewithal to preserve all its cultural resources before Sandy hit. 

In 2021, the NRA began work to create a "living shoreline" that is expected to better stand up to future storms. The $4 million project was designed to provide a resilient edge along the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge’s West Pond, an area breached during Superstorm Sandy and repaired by NPS in 2017. 

Whether it will stand up to the Nature report’s predictions remains to be seen. 

“... we provide evidence that joint rainfall–surge extreme events could become an increasing threat to coastal communities in the future. We also find that the statistical dependence between extreme rainfall and storm tide increases in the future for portions of the coastline, resulting in a higher probability of multi-hazard extremes during future storm events,” wrote the study’s authors.