I got pretty good this summer at writing my name loopy upside down onto the tables as I introduced myself as my customer’s server at the seafood restaurant I worked at down the Jersey Shore. Since we were little, I and many others from my native state migrated down the Garden State Parkway Friday afternoons like geese heading south for the winter to spend our weekend sun kissed by the Atlantic Ocean. As a kid, I thrived by the shore, spending my weekends boating around the Tom’s River, swimming and crabbing. My nights were spent skipping down the board walk, eating fried anything and begging my parents to let me play skee-ball or finally go on the rollercoaster.

In 2012, I remember the meteorologists saying that Sandy was “just a Superstorm”. New Jersey had seen worse. My dad took me down the shore to tie up our boat. For a boat that weighed over 1,600 pounds under normal buoyancy, a storm surge predicted at three feet, and winds predicted to be around 74 miles per hour, our weapon of choice was nylon boat line. One line could hold 1562 pounds of pressure, so the four we chose equated to the force created from the weight of the Royal Caribbean’s Anchor. It should have been safe. We placed sandbags, that created path of resistance in front of local’s homes, forcing the water to diffuse around. The floor to ceiling glass of our neighborhood’s windows contained atoms packed tightly like the pit at a concert. If existing thermal stress is paired with a physical stress, the atoms would shift, ruining the order, and the glass would explode. We hastily boarded up the windows with sheets of plywood bearing a heartier structure.

I remember sitting in my basement with my family watching the news, trembling as the 80 MPH winds and torrential downpour shuttered my house. The winds heightened in velocity and threatened to create a pressure suction that ripped my roof right off of my house. Eventually, the rain’s ferocity shielded the satellite from its signals and we entered a restless sleep.

We woke to the news showing towns that looked more like ponds with roofs as lily pads. The intense red to purple of the radar induced fear as I began to realize the true size of the storm. The six-foot storm surge pitted our tie up against the buoyancy of the water threating to crush our boat in the middle. The suction of the ocean from the Barnegat Bay created a wave of water that collapsed the houses perched upon stilts like newborn fawns learning to walk. Many houses were sucked into the ocean as two new inlets emerged in Mantoloking, a town in which every one of the 521 homes were damaged. Areal images of the coastline showed fragments of the boardwalk dusted around the sand resembling a leopard’s fur. Even worse, I woke up that I saw my beloved rollercoaster had sunk uneven into the marshy sand.

So, what caused the unexpected? Research suggests that climate change played some role in increasing the ferocity and size of the hurricanes. The extra water vapor in the atmosphere, has increased the amount of precipitation by 30 percent, and the temperatures of the lower portions of the ocean’s water have been steadily rising. On average, hurricanes obtain Category 3 status 9 hours faster now than in the 1980s. Moat of the ferocity, however, they fault to chance. The combination of the high tides due to the moon cycle and a second storm that merged with Sandy pushing it perpendicular from its course, straight to New Jersey, created the monster that destroyed the tri state area for some time.

I could not imagine my life without summers by the Jersey Shore. The experiences I had there gave me a constant to look forward to every summer, which is a main reason why I wanted to work down there and replicate my experience for someone else. So when the bus boy whispered in my ear that we were 86 Clams Casino, I looked at the clock. We couldn’t be out. At 8:30 on a Friday night our wait was still an hour and a half. Panic struck as I thought of the people who came annually for the Clams Casino, and how this joint has shaped their experience for over 30 years. How I didn’t want their experience to change the same way mine did. The entire experience made me fear that if we didn’t take care of our community, someday we may be 86 Jersey Shore.