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When Superstorm Sandy slammed into the Jersey Shore in 2012, it damaged houses up and down the coast. But not Amanda Devecka-Rinear's home.
The small wooden house survived untouched. It happened to be lifted on pilings for construction work, so it stayed above the floodwaters.
She says it felt incredibly lucky that the house survived the storm, while homes around it were devastated.
"What are the chances that it was up in the air when Sandy hit?" she says.
At the time, the house on Cedar Bonnet Island in the Barnegat Bay belonged to her grandmother. It had been in Devecka-Rinear's family for generations, ever since her great-grandfather bought it in 1929.
"It just feels like there's a lot of family that's still here in these walls and that they're kind of looking out," she says.
The experience was a lesson Devecka-Rinear wouldn't forget.
"At the end of the day, it was elevation that saved this house," she says.
New Jersey is hoping elevation will save a lot of other homes too.
Since Sandy, property owners have invested heavily in raising homes along the coast.
Climate change is making extreme rain more common and is supercharging storms, raising the risk of dangerous flooding across much of the United States. In places like coastal New Jersey, sea levels are rising and the land is sinking.
The safest option is to move people out of the riskiest flood zones, experts say. But that's not always practical. In many places, raising homes well off the ground can help protect them from flooding, allowing people to stay in the communities they love.
"We have millions of homes at risk in flood plains in the country," says Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers. "Home elevation, I think, is one of those techniques that you're going to see used more and more as our nation faces increasing losses from flooding."
In some parts of coastal New Jersey these days, it's more unusual to see a house that isn't elevated than one that is.
But elevation is expensive, and raising homes alone won't fully protect a community from flooding. Devecka-Rinear's experience holds some lessons for the rest of the country.
Coastal New Jersey transformed after Sandy
While Devecka-Rinear's grandmother's house was spared, other houses on Cedar Bonnet Island weren't so lucky. Her father's house next door was damaged so badly it had to be torn down and rebuilt.
"My whole neighborhood got trashed," she says. "It was like an act of God that this house didn't, and I wasn't going to take that for granted, right?"
So when Devecka-Rinear moved into her grandmother's house the following year, she knew she wanted to elevate it permanently.
"Talk about scared straight — like, I'm going to be trying to lift this house if I can," she says.
Superstorm Sandy was a wake-up call for the whole state, says Lisa Auermuller, director of the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub, a coastal research initiative based at Rutgers University.
The storm damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes across New Jersey, according to the state's Department of Environmental Protection. In the months following the storm, roughly 60,000 homeowners whose primary residences were damaged by the storm were approved for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to the state.
"I really think there was a new recognition of how … entirely vulnerable we are to a storm creating so much impact," Auermuller says.
After the storm, some shore towns doubled down on building and reinforcing sand dunes, which can help buffer communities from storm surge.
In other places, families chose to move away from risky areas. The state used federal disaster recovery money to expand its voluntary home buyout program, purchasing and demolishing hundreds of flood-prone homes.
But Stafford Township, where Devecka-Rinear lives, sits right up against the bay, with no large beaches or dunes to buffer it from storms. And residents like Devecka-Rinear don't want to leave.
So the town has focused on encouraging residents to elevate homes, says Stafford Township Administrator Matthew von der Hayden.
But elevating homes brings its own challenges.
An expensive solution
Raising a house is expensive. Elevating her home nearly 13 feet above sea level ended up costing more than $140,000, Devecka-Rinear says.
In 2017, her town received some funding from FEMA to help property owners elevate. But it covered only a dozen households.
The grant would cover most of Devecka-Rinear's costs, but she had to come up with the money up front, before being reimbursed. Plus, she had to rent another home while hers was under construction. So, she borrowed money from family. She's still paying it back.
Any requirement that families front the money to qualify for assistance can be a huge obstacle.
"It was within reach for us, but that would not have been true for every person in every family," Devecka-Rinear says.
Devecka-Rinear chose to elevate her home. But many New Jersey property owners didn't have a choice. If their homes were heavily damaged by Sandy, they had to raise their homes to meet newer flood zone standards.
After Sandy, New Jersey used federal recovery money to help thousands of households elevate. But in many cases, this assistance took a year or more to reach homeowners. That was too long for some families, Devecka-Rinear says.
"Most people can't hang on," she says.
Devecka-Rinear says some people couldn't afford to rebuild, so they sold their homes to those who could: often developers or wealthier buyers. Over time, she says, she watched her island change.
"Every time there's a storm, or even with COVID — that was a disaster — the folks that are more working class or middle class end up moving out, and then folks with more money end up moving in," she says.
Because of the cost, home elevation doesn't always make sense for homeowners, says Tracy Kijewski-Correa, a professor of engineering and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame who studies disaster risk reduction. In many places, the cost of elevation is similar to the cost of a home, and families cannot expect to recoup the investment when they go to sell their house.
Households that can't afford to elevate are left vulnerable to the next storm, she says.
Stafford Township has been particularly proactive in going after federal money to help residents elevate. The township has applied for several federal grants since receiving the one that helped Devecka-Rinear. But not every town has that capacity.
And the future of federal resources available for this kind of risk-mitigation work is uncertain. The Trump administration has suggested transforming or eliminating FEMA, the agency that funds much of this work.
Devecka-Rinear now leads the New Jersey Organizing Project, a nonprofit that advocates for storm survivors. She says there needs to be more funding available to help families elevate their homes before and after disasters. And, she says, grants need to reach disaster survivors faster.
"I will do everything I can to continue to make sure that regular people and working families like mine don't end up on the losing end of this," she says.
"Future-proofing" homes and communities
Elevating homes alone won't protect communities from rising flood risk. Key roadways, as well as water, sewer and electrical infrastructure, need to be protected, too, for elevated homes to stay functional during and after a flood.
"You can have a bunch of amazing structures that survive, but no water, no power and no ability to come back and actually use them," Kijewski-Correa says.
Stafford Township plans to eventually raise flood-prone roads, after replacing sewers and helping more homeowners elevate. The town has already elevated one road on a different part of Devecka-Rinear's island, which used to flood at high tide.
"Now those people get to their home on a regular basis," says von der Hayden, the township administrator. "They're not driving through floodwaters or parking their car close to [the highway] and then having to wade back to their home."
Homeowners should also try to account for rising flood risk in the future due to climate change — and include a buffer for uncertainty, says Kijewski-Correa. And be sure to consider other risks, she says, like strong winds.
"I would definitely be future-proofing," she says.
This often means going above the minimum requirements when elevating a home.
Building standards in flood zones are based on FEMA flood maps that use historical data and are often out of date. Many towns, like Stafford, already require that buildings be raised above these flood levels, and the state of New Jersey is proposing rules that would go even higher.
And home elevation should not be a community's only strategy for lowering flood risk, says Carol Friedland, an engineer and professor at Louisiana State University who specializes in resilient construction. Communities should also pursue solutions that protect many homes at once, such as living shorelines, stormwater drainage projects and levees, she says.
With her home elevated, Devecka-Rinear plans to stay on Cedar Bonnet Island as long as she can. The place is full of memories of growing up, visiting her grandmother in the house she lives in now.
When Devecka-Rinear's grandmother passed away, she wrote in her will that she wanted the house to belong to her granddaughter "absolutely and forever."
"For me, being here is still being with my grandmother," says Devecka-Rinear.
"I'm not giving that up."
Edited by Rachel Waldholz
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