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New Jersey: Risks & Trends

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Same standard as every other page on this site: every figure below is independently sourced, and figures that vary across sources, or measure genuinely different things, are flagged as such rather than collapsed into one number that looks more precise than the underlying data actually supports.

Hurricane Sandy (2012): where the storm actually came ashore

MetricFigure
Landfall location and time Near Brigantine, Atlantic County, ~6:30 PM EDT, October 29, 2012
Landfall winds 80 mph sustained
Total New Jersey deaths 38
Direct deaths 12
Indirect deaths from power-outage-related causes (hypothermia, CO poisoning, fires, oxygen deprivation) 13+
Storm surge, Raritan Bay 4-9 ft
Storm surge, Sandy Hook 8.9 ft, a record
Homes damaged or destroyed statewide 346,000
Homes/businesses destroyed or significantly damaged ~30,000
Households that lost power 2.7 million
Economic damage estimate $30 billion (initial); $36.8 billion (Governor Christie's later repair-cost estimate)

Why the death toll doesn't cleanly split into two round numbers

The 12 direct and 13-plus indirect figures don’t sum to the full 38-death total; the remainder reflects other storm-related causes beyond the specific power-outage categories tracked separately (hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, and fire deaths among them). This is presented as reported rather than forced into a tidier breakdown that the underlying data doesn’t actually support.

Unlike New York, where Sandy’s damage came from storm surge pushed into a harbor, New Jersey took the storm’s actual landfall directly on its coastline, which is part of why the Jersey Shore specifically saw some of the most concentrated physical destruction of the entire storm.

Superfund sites: a standing, statewide legacy risk

MetricFigure
Active National Priorities List sites 115
Sites cleaned up and removed from the list 37
National ranking Most of any state

This risk doesn’t work like a storm: there’s no single date or event, just a large number of specific, mapped locations, mostly tied to the state’s dense industrial history along its highway corridors, still in some stage of investigation or cleanup. It’s a genuinely different category from every weather-driven risk covered elsewhere on this site: chronic, geographically specific, and something a household can actually check for a given address rather than just plan a general response to.

What these two have in common

Sandy and the Superfund legacy operate on opposite timescales, one a single catastrophic week, the other a decades-long standing condition, but both illustrate the same thing about New Jersey specifically: its extreme population density and industrial development mean that when something goes wrong here, whether a hurricane or a contaminated site, it tends to affect more people, more directly, than the same event would in a less densely built state.

Sources