After Hurricane Sandy ravaged the Eastern Seaboard in 2012, Jared Della Valle took action. The storm had destroyed one of his homes on Fire Island, a narrow strip of land off Long Island, and damaged another. So he decided it was time to move.
“I picked up my house and moved it down the block,” said Mr. Della Valle, the chief executive and a co-founder of Alloy Development, an architecture firm in Brooklyn.
The motivation behind Mr. Della Valle’s decision to move his damaged five-room house 150 feet — no easy task — was a $170 million effort by the federal government to fortify the Fire Island shoreline. As part of the project, 41 houses on Fire Island were slated for demolition or relocation, including Mr. Della Valle’s home in Ocean Bay Park, a community heavily affected by the storm.
Ten years and several storms later, Fire Island’s beaches are holding up well, said Suzy Goldhirsch, the president of the Fire Island Association, a community group.
“We’ve had some flooding, but no major damage to homes since Sandy,” she said.
Hurricane Sandy caused catastrophic flooding along the coasts of New Jersey and New York before making landfall near Atlantic City on Oct. 29.
On Fire Island, a 32-mile-long barrier island that protects the southern coast of Long Island, the storm surge carved breaches in the island, allowing water to flow between the ocean and the bay. Along the beach, the sand dunes that served as a line of defense for many oceanfront homes were flattened. Those same dunes had been replenished a few years earlier and were credited for saving Fire Island from far worse damage.
To safeguard the barrier island again, the Army Corps of Engineers spent two years creating a line of dunes as high as 15 feet and stretching more than 12 miles.
Other precautions included the use of sand fences, which can help trap sand and prevent dune erosion, and the planting of vegetation like “Cape” American beach grass, which helps keep the sand in place, Ms. Goldhirsch said.
Some homeowners made their own improvements to guard against extreme weather.
Mr. Della Valle said moving his house cost him half a million dollars. Since then, he has taken further steps to fortify his home, including raising it four feet off the ground, adding a sprinkler system, installing impact-resistant windows and wrapping the outside of the house in corrugated zinc, which he said would help prevent water intrusion.
Other homeowners have taken similar precautions, including bolstering the support for their elevated houses and strengthening their roofs, Ms. Goldhirsch said. And last October, lawmakers in Suffolk County, which includes Fire Island, proposed a plan to replace the island’s outdated septic and cesspool systems, which can leak during a hurricane, contaminating soil and water.
With the 2022 hurricane season starting on June 1, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is offering hurricane preparedness tips for homeowners, including an insurance checkup and guidelines for ensuring a house is in compliance with building codes.
Despite the weather-related risks, the nation’s coasts are continuing to draw people. About 94.7 million Americans, or nearly 30 percent of the U.S. population, lived in coastline counties in 2017, a jump of more than 15 percent from 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And more than 60 million people lived near the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, the regions that are the most vulnerable to hurricanes.
As the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy approaches, some Fire Island residents say there is only so much they can do to prepare for bad weather.
“In my opinion, a home on a barrier island is not permanent,” said Ms. Goldhirsch, who added that her family has had a home on the island for more than 100 years. “I tell people, ‘Don’t build a home here if you don’t have a high tolerance for risk.’”
Mr. Della Valle agreed: “There is a degree to which you accept the reality of living on the ocean.”
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