Storm Season: How the Coast Braces for a Nor'easter

Ask a coastal engineer what keeps them up at night on the Delaware shore, and the answer is often not the hurricane but the nor'easter. These sprawling winter storms can park off the coast for days, pounding the beaches through multiple high tides and doing damage that a faster-moving hurricane sometimes spares.

The threat is flooding as much as wind. Nor'easters push water into the bays and back streets, and the towns most exposed are the low-lying ones where a storm surge has nowhere to drain. Residents know the vulnerable intersections by heart and move their cars to high ground before the water arrives.

The dunes are the first line of defense, and a strong storm can carve away years of built-up sand in a single tide. That is why beach-replenishment crews and dune-grass planters work in the off-season, restocking the buffer before the next system spins up.

For the coast, storm season is a recurring stress test. Most years the beaches take the hit and recover. The worry, always, is the year they do not.