Alliance for a Living Ocean

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Marsh Lagoons
by Donald Launer

Don Launer is a member of Bay Watch, holds a USCG captain's license, and is a frequent contributor to boating magazines. He is author of the book, "A Cruising Guide to New Jersey Waters". E-mail address is: [email protected].

Man-made navigable waterways through the sedge islands and wetlands of this shallow bay began to take shape over l500 years ago. No, we're not talking about Barnegat Bay, but rather the Gulf of Venice, at the mouths of the Po and Piave rivers at the north extremity of the Adriatic Sea. In about 452 A.D. Italians took refuge on the islands of this shallow bay, escaping from the barbarians who had invaded Italy. The city of Venice was created on 120 of these islands, and the practice of dredging waterways in shallow wetlands and between the sedge islands and using the fill to create and raise habitable land has persisted till today.

Along the New Jersey coast, in the last half of the 20th century, the practice of creating lagoons and buildable lots continued, till environmental awareness finally put a virtual end to this type of development.

For the most part New Jersey's "lagoons" were made as straight cuts through the wetlands - as opposed to the meandering waterways between the Venetian islands (a practice made possible by today's mechanized earth-moving equipment). And, as opposed to the waterways in Venice, many of these man-made waterways in New Jersey, and elsewhere along the coast, came to dead-ends at one end of the lagoon. From a development standpoint, this made it much easier to build connecting roads, as contrasted to the 400 bridges used in Venice.

The dead-ends in these lagoons created a potential problem of "dead water". Although some water exchange was created by tides, it was usually not sufficient to keep the water exchange viable. Also, road and lawn run-off water during rainstorms (which went from the road's storm drains directly into the lagoons) created additional problems when oils and nitrates were washed into the water. One solution was to connect lagoons together by running large pipes under the roads to assist in creating a tidal flow.

Another problem was the accumulation of floating debris and eel-grass at the dead-end of these lagoons. A few developers in New Jersey solved this problem when dredging these waterways by making the open mouth of the lagoons on the northeast side, recognizing that the prevailing southwest winds in our area would push floating debris out of the lagoon.

Lagoon building has now nearly ceased to exist and, after nearly 2000 years, the practice of pillaging the wetlands has been recognized as an assault on us all.