The crest of the Atlantic Ocean kilos Montauk’s coastline, exposing buried sandbags intended to guard the downtown against rising sea ranges. Due west, a narrow portion of Gilgo Beach washes away over the bad wintry weather, bringing the water dangerously near Ocean Parkway. And years of erosion threaten to wipe Southold Town Beach absolutely off the map.
Across Long Island, coastal communities are in a war towards nature, looking to duck another superstorm like Sandy and cope with weather change’s inevitability at the same time.
Now, with the typhoon season’s coronary heart ready to overcome down again, experts are divided over whether or not enough is being achieved to protect the area.
“From a worldwide angle, we are higher prepared than earlier than Sandy,” stated Aram Terchunian, a coastal geologist with First Coastal, an environmental consulting company in Westhampton Beach.
Terchunian points to new coastal boundaries, hundreds of extended or demolished shore-lying houses, and tens of millions of cubic yards of sand, which have renourished neighborhood seashores in the seven years because Sandy broke nearly one hundred,000 apartments and companies on Long Island.
But environmental activist Kevin McAllister is not satisfied. He argues that coastline-hardening projects are temporary fixes that do not cope with the eventuality of growing sea stages.
What federal officers need to remember, McAllister stated, is the politically unpopular coverage of “strategic retreat” — buying prone waterfront properties and returning the land to nature.
“There goes to be a point of no return while we are most effective going to get the seashore lower back with the aid of pumping it,” stated McAllister, a former Peconic Baykeeper. “In time, the flooding will most effective get worse.”
Here’s a better examine what Long Island is doing to stem the tide:
Montauk
Living near a number of the maximum beautiful seashores inside us comes at a rate.
At the farthest give up of the South Fork, the hamlet of Montauk is aware of all too properly.
Downtown floods. And those white-sand seashores are eroding — rapid. The shoreline has moved forty-four feet inland in decades, a little extra than 2 feet 12 months.
But the Town of East Hampton isn’t geared up to relent.
The beyond two years, city crews have stepped up to rebury an artificial dune that the Army Corps of Engineers constructed most productive three years ago out of geotextile sandbags.
Without the dune, though, metropolis Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc contends erosion could have uncovered cesspools along the string of hotels near Montauk’s downtown.
The sand value just about $1 million for each of the beyond years. The metropolis is splitting the tab with Suffolk County.
Right now, the city’s percentage comes from the overall fund. However, Montauk considers an individual erosion manage taxing district that might shift the burden to local belongings proprietors.
Southampton Town has four similar taxing districts.
Montauk could rebuild the seashore entirely for about $17 million — in all likelihood alongside an Army Corps thought called the Fire Island to Montauk Point project. The federal paintings would position down 450,000 cubic yards of sand on the downtown seashore.
Thinking of the future, the city is weighing a proposal to move downtown companies inland to preserve Montauk’s man or woman.
The strategy might take higher than a decade, but McAllister, the activist, considers the most effective realistic long-time period choice.
“Kicking the can down the road will most effective make the difficulty more intricate,” said McAllister, who based the Sag Harbor-based nonprofit Defend H20.
But a few Montauk citizens do not like the plan, bringing up the millions of bucks in sales that visitor motels pump into the neighborhood financial system. Hearing the worries, the city is revising the program and expects to launch the information in some months.
Terchunian, the coastal geologist, describes any relocation of downtown as a “wholesale retreat” that might price up to twenty times more than seashore healing. Homeowners and corporations, he predicted, could convey the brunt of the weight.
For seashore erosion professional Henry Bokuniewicz, shoreline hardening isn’t a permanent answer — however, it could be the neatest and most good value approach.
“I evaluate it to medical science,” said Bokuniewicz, a geological sciences professor at Stony Brook University. “It may not be the treatment, but it’s going to assist you from feeling ill.”
FIMP for brief
If seaside nourishment is the 2-aspirin remedy to coastal erosion and flooding, then the Army Corps’ Fire Island to Montauk Point project is an open-heart surgical treatment.
The $1.2 billion thought, referred to as FIMP, might use fortresslike barriers, including dunes and marshes, to guard Suffolk’s South Shore for the eighty-three miles from Fire Island Montauk Point, where Sandy hit hard.
Tens of miles of flood-inclined coastal roads might be expanded as well, correctly turning them into defensive levees.
And roughly four,000 houses in flood-susceptible mainland communities off bays and inlets — the cities of Babylon, Islip, Brookhaven, and Southhampton — would be elevated or floodproofed.
In Babylon Town, FIMP could target masses of flood-prone homes that weren’t extended or storm-hardened after Sandy, stated Brian Zitani, the city’s waterways management supervisor.
“This will make these omitted regions whole again,” Zidane said. “They were rolling the cube dwelling inside the flood zones.”
For a long time, attempts to get help for a sweeping, regionwide flood-manipulate plan failed. Then, Sandy drove through. Today, the National Park Service, New York State, and Suffolk County are all backing the publish-Sandy incarnation of FIMP.
The Army Corps desires to approve the paintings, that may exit to bid subsequent year, officials stated.
The FIMP undertaking also calls for dredging the Fire Island, Moriches, and Shinnecock inlets. East Quogue, downtown Montauk, Smith Point, and Westhampton all could advantage seaside fill, and groins that get worse erosion would be shortened in Ocean Beach and Westhampton.
Montauk Chamber of Commerce president Paul Monte underscored the want to do a massive beach rebuild and FIMP.
“Montauk’s economic system is a vacationer-based financial system,” he stated. “Without a pleasing, huge, sandy, lovely beach in our downtown place, not only will our tourism economic system be impacted, but all of the owners of the belongings along that reach might be impacted.”
Monte blames years of forget about using local and county officials for the hamlet’s shores’ sad country.
