Six years ago, in 2015, I went to the East Point Lighthouse in Heislerville on the Delaware Bay coastline at the southern end of New Jersey. It is a small but working lighthouse which somehow survived Hurricane Sandy but was in danger of the next major storm as the sea continually eroded a sandy beach less than 100 ft (30 m) away.
Here are a couple of pictures taken in 2015.
Yesterday, I went back to see the lighthouse. Over the past several years, the Maurice River Historical Society which has managed the lighthouse since 1972, has done its best to restore the lighthouse. It definitely looks much improved from the outside.
To try and deal with the real danger of beach erosion and flooding, in 2019 the state of New Jersey spent $460,000 installing giant sandbags called geotubes on the beach near the lighthouse.
Critics say that the geotubes are not high enough to prevent waves at high tide from spilling over and flooding the lighthouse. In a major storm, all bets are off, and anything could happen.
In the meantime, New Jersey authorities and the Maurice River Historical Society are in a contract dispute, and the inside of the lighthouse is closed to all. Visitors could still come and walk around the beach to look at horseshoe crabs in their annual mating rituals.
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