Sea Bright

Sea Bright — Armored by Seawalls, Narrowed by Storms

Sea Bright is one of the narrowest barrier strips on the Atlantic coast — in the 1920 aerial you can see the Shrewsbury River on one side and the ocean on the other, with the entire town barely four blocks wide. The engineered seawall along the oceanfront was already in place by 1920, evidence of decades of erosion pressure. The 1933 hurricane drove water over these defenses, and the damage to the beach face shows clearly in that year's aerial. By 1962, the Ash Wednesday Storm again overtopped the seawall and flooded the few blocks behind it — Sea Bright's perennial vulnerability captured three times across four decades.