Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc with NJ Transit. 10 years later, resiliency is a priority

The damage Hurricane Sandy wrought on NJ Transit’s infrastructure 10 years ago was part natural disaster, part management disaster.

The flooding left a barge on the Raritan River Bridge in Middlesex County. Electric substations flooded, cutting off power that trains needed to run. Hundreds of trees were blown down, some directly onto tracks. The catenary suffered serious damage as well.

But there was another problem, one that delayed a return to train service for hundreds of thousands of New Jersey commuters for weeks after the storm hit the region on Oct. 29, 2012. NJ Transit officials parked 343 train cars and engines in a floodplain — which flooded.

The expensive mistake revealed a transit agency that was not prepared for climate change, reporting by WNYC in 2013 found. Those decisions could be traced to top leadership, and were defended by the governor at the time, Republican Chris Christie, who was in office from 2010 to 2018.

But Sandy made storm resiliency a new priority for Christie’s administration. It’s remained a priority under Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy — funding work state officials celebrate and transit exports applaud, even as they say much more needs to be done to truly protect New Jersey’s infrastructure from climate change in the long term.

“It's certainly true that during the Christie administration, having conversations about climate change were a challenge,” said Jon Carnegie, executive director of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University. The term climate change itself became taboo when working with state agencies; instead, people talked about planning for “extreme weather,” he said.

Christie refused to acknowledge that climate change caused Sandy. But even so, there was a new willingness to spend money to prepare for it, Carnegie said.

“Even during the Christie administration, the impacts of the storm on the state were so extensive that it could not be ignored,” he said. The state began resiliency work like dune replacement along the Jersey Shore, in some cases fighting legal battles with municipalities that worried about damaging ocean views. It stepped up its Blue Acres program, to purchase homes at risk of flooding, letting the properties become wetlands.

And the state began resiliency work and planning for NJ Transit’s infrastructure itself, though some of those projects would take years to make progress.

Murphy was elected in 2017, and he immediately boosted those Christie administration efforts. Murphy rejoined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — an agreement among several northeast states to cap and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector — which Christie had left. He increased spending on wind and solar power projects, and began to expand electric vehicle charging stations. Just this month, the state started rolling out an electrified bus fleet.

And Murphy appointed a new president and CEO for NJ Transit, Kevin Corbett, who says the decision to store trains in the floodplain was “a black eye” on the agency.

“Hindsight is always 2020,” Corbett said. “I think you've seen a real change.”

NJ Transit is building a rail yard in North Brunswick that is higher and dryer, and the first phase of its construction project is expected to be completed next summer. The transit agency is also raising electric substations that were flooded, and expects those to be completed by next summer as well.

Another major project underway is Long Slip Fill, which is filling in a canal that runs parallel to the rail tracks at the Hoboken train terminal. It is one of NJ Transit’s grandest and most beautiful stations, built in 1907. The night Sandy hit, the station’s Beaux Arts-style waiting room took on 5 feet of water, and the PATH train platform on the lower level was under 8 feet of water.

Long Slip, an old barge canal, provided an easy conduit for the storm surge, transferring the water from the Hudson River right into the station. Now that canal is gone, and NJ Transit is finishing the project with improvements to the light rail station along its side.

“We were a creation of a batch of bankrupt private railroads and private bus companies,” Corbett said about NJ Transit. “We're a 40-year-old transit agency and what we inherited was a mess.”

The storm surge caused tens of billions of dollars' worth of damage to New Jersey, including heavy harm to the transit system. “And then you get a surge of investment,” Corbett said.

But transit has to compete for dollars against funding health care and education, Corbett said. And while some projects are ongoing, once Sandy was in the rearview mirror, the commitment for funding resiliency waned, he said.

“We really need to come to terms with the fact that we're going to need to invest for the future before something bad happens,” said Zoe Baldwin, New Jersey director of the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit that advocates planning policy in the tristate region.

Baldwin has worked in transportation and infrastructure development for almost 20 years, and was working for then-Sen. Frank Lautenberg at the time Sandy hit.

“The only word I can use is ‘triage,’” Baldwin said. “I'll never forget one person called, crying, saying that NJDOT [New Jersey Department of Transportation] was getting rid of their home. And I had to explain that if NJDOT was the one moving their home, their home was in the road and it wasn't safe to go back in.”

Baldwin is pleased with much of the resiliency work that NJ Transit is funding. But she says the agency still isn’t getting the resources it needs to prepare for climate change. New Jersey is, after all, a coastal state with infrastructure built across low-lying areas.

“So I think the state has done a pretty good job, in some areas like the substations, but could be doing a better job in terms of protecting our assets and making sure that we're ready — not even for the future, that we're ready for the existing climate that we're in,” Baldwin said.

Preparing for climate change, though, should encompass a much broader view, she said.

“Because just hoping that resiliency specific programs are going to fix the state is not the right way to look at it,” Baldwin said. “We need to really look at NJ Transit and transit broadly has to be part of decarbonizing for us.”

That means, ultimately, getting people in New Jersey out of their cars, she said. Her group proposes funding NJ Transit plans to make bus travel easier, and access to it more equitable, including by establishing dedicated bus lanes and road design that prioritizes bus travel. It wants to avoid seeing decreased ridership lead to service cuts or fare hikes for mass transit riders. It says NJ Transit needs a dedicated revenue stream — to end its reliance on capital funds and legislative priorities that shift year to year.

“Transit is going to be a necessary part of the decarbonization of our transportation sector and it always will be, right?” Baldwin said. “And so we need to make sure we're investing in that appropriately.”