Editing Barnegat Light, New Jersey (section)

===Barnegat Light===
{{Main|Barnegat Lighthouse State Park}}
[[Image:LBI NJ Beach 01b.JPG|thumb|700px|right|Looking southward from Barnegat Lighthouse]]
In 1948, Barnegat City was renamed as Barnegat Light after a referendum.<ref name=Story/> The motivations for this renaming were both to honor the legacy of the lighthouse (which was decommissioned four years earlier) and to distinguish itself from nearby [[Barnegat Township, New Jersey|Barnegat Township]].<ref>[http://lbi.net/communities/Barnegat_Light/history.asp Barnegat Light History] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160320010340/http://lbi.net/communities/Barnegat_Light/history.asp |date=March 20, 2016 }}, LBI.net. Accessed July 26, 2016.</ref> In 1950, the post office moved from the Applegate's general store, which was falling into disrepair, to another general store on 18th Street. The building it replaced had itself been a general store and a gas station, both owned by Jens Jensen in 1920 who had given it to John Englesen in 1940 as a trade for a house on 19th Street. The post office remained at 18th Street until its current location on 10th Street was opened in the early 1960s when a borough hall and municipal complex was constructed. Town meetings had previously been held at the closed Barnegat City schoolhouse since 1951 and also the Barnegat Light Volunteer Firehouse hall. The site of the first post office, the general store on 4th Street, was saved and updated in the ensuing decades, operating today as the Inlet Deli.

The continued threat of storms such as the [[Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944]] and the [[Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962]] reinforced concerns about Barnegat Light's survival in the long term and the survival of the lighthouse and beachfront homes in the near term. The first attempt at stabilizing the shoreline came in 1939-40 when a combination of rock jetties and earthen dams were used to reroute the inlet current away from the shoreline. The massive effort succeeded and stopped the erosion that had doomed the eastern beach blocks, threatened the lighthouse, and erased the former port at 6th street. A diagonal jetty extending hundreds of yards NNE from East 8th Street forced the current far away from land before it entered the channel between the lighthouse and southern tip of Island Beach, while the damming of the existing current's channel along the backside of the Island between West 20th Street and High Bar, plus the damming of a channel between High Bar and an island WNW of the inlet, rerouted the current a mile north and west of Barnegat Light, sending it farther into the bay away from the town. The construction of the existing [[jetty]] in the early 1990s further stabilized the earlier work, straightening the southern jetty of the inlet and reclaiming virtually all of the eastern shoreline from East 8th Street to the lighthouse that was lost over the last century, much of which was not redeveloped and instead designated as parkland, which in 2020 included the addition of a bird sanctuary. The jetties have provided stabilization to the shoreline and especially the previously unstable and occasionally shallow inlet. To maintain the channel, the inlet requires annual [[dredging]] by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. In addition to the lighthouse, Barnegat Light continues to host a [[United States Coast Guard]] station, now located on the bay at West 6th Street, reflecting the continued presence of the former United States Life-Saving Service and its vital duties on the still treacherous waters of Barnegat Inlet and out on the Barnegat shoals.<ref>[http://www.uscg.mil/d5/stabarnegat/Present.asp Station History - Barnegat Light], [[United States Coast Guard]]. Accessed September 23, 2013.</ref> In line with the borough's history, its most prominent industries continue to be tourism and fishing.