Floodwaters Inundate Low-Lying Parts of Sea Isle City

Sea Isle City homeowner Fred Cantagallo went wading in the water about knee deep on Monday.

But he wasn’t in the ocean or bay. He sloshed through the flooding that had turned Sounds Avenue in front of his bayside home into a virtual river for the fifth day in a row.

Cantagallo, whose full-time residence is in Media, Pa., has vacationed in Sea Isle for more than 30 years and has had a summer home on Sounds Avenue at 57th Street since 2017.

“Even now, it’s still a great place to live,” Cantagallo, a retired engineer, said of having to tolerate the occasional flooding at the shore.

The locals call this “nuisance flooding” – the type not caused by a major coastal storm. The water-logged streets in Cantagallo’s Sounds Avenue neighborhood and other low-lying sections of Sea Isle in the past week can be blamed on the combination of a low-pressure system parked offshore, a full moon and a series of unusually high tides.

Cantagallo said he has been trapped inside his home at times by the persistent flooding.

“This happens all the time,” he said in exasperation.

Sounds Avenue was underwater Monday from 58th Street to about 55th Street. Flooding also swamped a one-block section of Sounds Avenue at 59th Street, on the bay side of Sea Isle’s Dealy Field recreation complex.

    Sounds Avenue homeowner Fred Cantagallo wades through floodwater on the street in front of his bayside house.
  

Cantagallo wants the city to install a stormwater pumping station in his neighborhood to protect Sounds Avenue from flooding. Pumping stations clear the streets of flooding faster than it takes for the water to recede naturally after a storm.

Sea Isle installed its first pumping station at the bay end of flood-prone 38th Street and Sounds Avenue in 2019. The city plans to spend $20 million over the next five years for a series of pumping stations to protect the low-lying barrier island from chronic flooding from the bay.

While Cantagallo and his neighbors have been dealing with the flooding on Sea Isle’s bayfront for the past week, vacationers Carrie and Richard Aloi were lamenting the unusually high tides on the ocean side.

They were sitting on a sliver of beach at John F. Kennedy Boulevard shortly after 1 p.m. Monday. The ocean had inundated most of the beach at high tide, turning the normally powdery stretches of pretty white sand into a brown, mud-like soup.

“I’m not really pleased with all of this flooding. We’ve been coming to Sea Isle for decades and we’ve never seen anything like this,” Carrie Aloi said of the strong high tides covering the beaches.

Carrie and Richard Aloi live in Hammonton and are in the midst of a two-week Sea Isle vacation ending on Sept. 28. Carrie recently retired from a nearly 30-year career as an English teacher in the Berlin Township school district. The couple’s seashore vacation was supposed to be in celebration of her retirement.

“We’re hoping it will get better, but it’s not looking too promising,” Carrie said of the prospect of better weather and no flooding.

    Vacationers Carrie and Richard Aloi sit on a narrow stretch of beach during the unusually high tide.
  

Sitting on beach chairs just a few yards from the water, the couple was bundled up in sweatshirts to protect themselves from the ocean winds and temperatures barely crawling out of the 60s Monday afternoon.

The unusually high tides this past week have put Sea Isle’s recently replenished beaches to the test. The beaches are much wider thanks to more than 900,000 cubic yards of fresh sand placed in the south end of the island from 73rd Street to 94th Street and the central part of town from 29th Street to 53rd Street.

The replenishment project was completed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in early June, just in time for the start of the peak summer tourism season.

Sea Isle spokeswoman Katherine Custer said a city official drove the entire length of the beaches to check for possible erosion, but saw nothing serious.

“While we have experienced some high tides over the past few days, we’re not anticipating any serious beach erosion,” Custer said Monday.

She noted that some vegetation and debris had been washed up by the high tides, but that was not unusual.

“Otherwise, we think we’re going to be fine,” she said of the overall condition of the beaches.