By State › New Jersey

New Jersey: Overview

Download all of New Jersey as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in New Jersey exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under New Jersey go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

Hurricane Sandy: the actual landfall, not just the surge

New York’s page on this site covers Sandy’s storm surge into New York Harbor; New Jersey’s story is different, this is where the storm actually came ashore, near Brigantine in Atlantic County, on October 29, 2012, with 80 mph sustained winds. The Jersey Shore took the brunt of it directly: storm surge reached 4-9 feet in Raritan Bay and a record 8.9 feet at Sandy Hook, and 346,000 homes across the state were damaged or destroyed. See the Risks page for the full data.

A chronic, distributed risk: the most Superfund sites of any state

New Jersey’s dense industrial history along its highway corridors left it with more federal Superfund sites, contaminated locations serious enough for direct EPA-led cleanup, than any other state in the country: 115 active sites still in some stage of investigation or remediation, with another 37 already cleaned up and removed from the list. Unlike a hurricane, this isn’t a single event with a clear before-and-after, it’s a standing, geographically distributed legacy risk that shapes where contamination concerns are worth checking before assuming a property or area is clean.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in New Jersey: coastal and shore-area households need real hurricane evacuation and storm surge planning, this state has already absorbed a direct hurricane landfall, and anyone buying property or doing renovation work, especially in older industrial or urban areas, benefits from checking EPA and NJDEP contamination records for the specific site, not just the general neighborhood.

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