Soggy shore town weighs renewed court fight against dunes

AP Photo/Wayne Parry

MARGATE, N.J. (AP) — A soggy New Jersey shore town will decide Wednesday morning whether to resume its costly and thus far futile court battle against protective sand dunes.

Officials in Margate, a coastal town just south of Atlantic City, will decide whether to seek a court injunction to halt half-finished dune work that has caused huge ponds of standing water on the beach.

In years of opposition and lawsuits trying to block the project before it started, Margate officials and individual homeowners argued that the dunes would trap water up against a wooden bulkhead at the sand’s edge.

When weekend storms dumped a half-foot of water on Margate, that’s exactly what happened.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Tuesday started pumping the water over the dunes as a short-term fix.