Tourism dilemma: Irene’s gone but summer’s not

Spec­ta­tors look at the ruined board­walk in Spring lake, N.J. on Sun­day Aug. 28, 2011, hours after Hur­ri­cane Irene dam­aged 1.5 miles of the 2-mile walk­way. Tourist-dependent towns are rush­ing to repair dam­age in time for Labor Day week­end, hop­ing tourists don’t sim­ply give up on sum­mer. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Wayne Parry)

WAYNE PARRY

Asso­ci­ated Press

SPRING LAKE, N.J. — If you fix it, they will come.

That’s the mantra — and the des­per­ate hope — of tourism-dependent towns along the East Coast as they deal with the after­math of Hur­ri­cane Irene, which hit just eight days before Labor Day.

Places that lost board­walks, restau­rants, roads and other fix­tures in the storm are ter­ri­fied the tourists will sim­ply call it a sea­son and stay away until next summer.

“The key is get­ting the word out,” said Celina Moose, the man­ager of a kite store in in Kitty Hawk, on the Outer Banks of North Car­olina. “The beaches are open. The restau­rants are open. We need tourists to come back.”

But that can prove eas­ier said than done. The Jer­sey shore, like North Car­olina, had Irene make land­fall on its sands. And while the land of Snooki and The Sit­u­a­tion fared well as a whole, some places did not.

Spring Lake lost much of its beloved syn­thetic board­walk, a 2-mile mir­a­cle of mod­ern engi­neer­ing that was hailed as a national model of envi­ron­men­tal respon­si­bil­ity because it used recy­cled plas­tic instead of rain for­est wood as many other board­walks do. Jog­gers came from miles around to run along the softer boards, which they swear are much eas­ier on the knees than real wood.

The storm surge from Irene wiped out about 1.5 miles of the board­walk, send­ing planks into the sea, while twist­ing oth­ers into grotesque shapes. Clearly, this is dam­age that can’t be fixed in time for Labor Day.

So the town will have to make do with about half its beach, and very lit­tle of its board­walk dur­ing one of the three biggest week­ends of summer.

“It’s going to be nowhere near what we nor­mally have open,” said Bryan Dempsey, Spring Lake’s bor­ough admin­is­tra­tor. “We’re try­ing every­thing we can, but we’re not going to put any­one in dan­ger just to have a beach day.”

The beach will open on Tues­day, after offi­cials took a heli­copter to fly over the surf to make sure planks of dam­aged board­walk were not float­ing in the waves, ready to injure swimmers.

Ocean City, N.J., is also reopen­ing its beaches on Tues­day. Swim­mers returned to the water on Mon­day, but with­out life­guards, who had moved all their res­cue equip­ment off­shore in antic­i­pa­tion of the hur­ri­cane. The beach resort suf­fered hardly any dam­age at all aside from some beach ero­sion. Now all that remains is con­vinc­ing peo­ple to come for one last sum­mer weekend.

“We’re back in busi­ness, and look­ing to fin­ish out what has been a really good sum­mer,” said Frank Donato, the city’s emer­gency man­age­ment coordinator.

New Jer­sey Gov. Chris Christie had a fit of pique over see­ing peo­ple loung­ing on the beach in Asbury Park as the storm approached, and after he had declared a state of emer­gency that led to many manda­tory evacuations.

“Get the hell off the beach!” he thun­dered at a news conference.

But now, Christie is singing a dif­fer­ent tune: Please get the hell back on the beach.

At a news con­fer­ence Mon­day night, he urged peo­ple to get in their cars and go to the Jer­sey shore for the Labor Day week­end, pre­dict­ing there would be vacan­cies as a result of Irene.

“Be an oppor­tunist,” he said. “You’ll prob­a­bly get a good price.”

Else­where, it was much the same, as com­mu­ni­ties dug out from under the sand and looked ahead to the hol­i­day weekend.

Judy Packer was walk­ing her black Labrador retriever near the beach in Nags Head, N.C., part of a vaca­tion she had planned for months. The beach house she was rent­ing came through the storm with barely a scratch.

“If there had been sub­stan­tial dam­age, we would have can­celled the fam­ily vaca­tion,” said Packer, a 44-year-old accoun­tant and mother of three from New York City.

Now she plans to do the usual: Spend most of her days at the beach and going to her favorite restau­rants at night.

“I just want to spend the next week unwind­ing,” she said. “I’m just glad there wasn’t much storm dam­age. It’s good to be here.”

At the Com­fort Inn on the beach at Nags Head, the hotel’s 105 rooms were booked solid for the week before the storm, said man­ager Kelly Smith. But over the last 24 hours they received 150 can­cel­la­tions for the com­ing week. She esti­mated that the hotel will only be about two-thirds full over the tra­di­tion­ally busy Labor Day week­end, when rooms go for $160 a night.

Many of the can­cel­la­tions are com­ing from north­ern states affected by Irene.

“They’re say­ing they’re can­celling because their power is off and don’t know when it’s com­ing on,” Smith said. “Or they’re say­ing their power is off, they had some dam­age and they don’t know if they can afford the vaca­tion anymore.”

Some resorts away from the ocean actu­ally ben­e­fited from Irene. The Smoky Moun­tain resort city of Gatlin­burg, Tenn., reported an influx of tourists last week­end as the hur­ri­cane fore­casts were issued. Some of them were coastal res­i­dents try­ing to escape the weather, said city spokesman Jim Davis.

Hotels on Block Island, R.I., are slash­ing prices and try­ing as hard as they can to get the word out that their area was not affected by the storm.

“Today is absolutely gor­geous,” said Kathy Szabo, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Block Island Cham­ber of Com­merce. “The fer­ries are run­ning, and I sure hope that peo­ple come out. You wouldn’t even know that a storm went by.”

Posted by AP News on Aug 30 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.