Route 40 (https://rtforty.com/tag/flooding/)
Looking at an aerial photograph showing off Atlantic City’s near-desolate South Inlet neighborhood and its new $38-million storm-protection structure, the New Yorker had a question.
“Did you have a lot of challenges justifying your cost analysis?”
Clamming has served as a viable source of income in South Jersey since time immemorial, although the work becomes harder and harder with each passing year.
Sometime before 4 p.m. on January 23, 2016, the day the worst nor’easter in recent memory destroyed his house, Sven Peltonen, an Atlantic City fireman and amateur Facebook weatherman, addressed his home audience via video camera with a bandage above his lip. The dog had bitten him. Sven was speaking, at this point, in Australian-accented English, I want to say (he’s since taken down the video), with occasional outburst of pirate speak. At different times during the preceding 20-plus hours, he’d delivered his regular weather reports in a variety of dialects and accents, including, by my count, Standard Pirate, Eastern European Pirate, Southern Bumpkin, Stoked Aussie and a kind of classic Surfer Speak reminiscent of Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s Jeff Spicoli. Meanwhile the dog—a fuzzy little animal named Cha-Cha (I think), which may have been a little high-strung to begin with—had been visibly unimpressed with its owners at their decision to stay put and ride out the storm from the comfort of their bayside bungalow, rather than retreat to the relative safety of the mainland.