If there is one person in Montauk to be thankful for, especially for parents of young children, it’s Maureen Rutkowski. But don’t tell her that, because she’ll only rebuff the statement and make sure everyone else involved gets kudos.

    “I’m just the face of a great group of people,” she said from her lakefront house, which is scattered with kids’ paraphernalia — balls, lacrosse sticks, jackets, and other stuff her two children, Alexandra, 13, and John, 9, collect and throw about.

    On one wall hangs a sign that says “Good Moms have sticky floors, dirty ovens and happy kids.”

    “My family gave me that, and it’s so true,” she said.

    She has been the president of Montauk Youth for the last eight years and sends out weekly e-mail blasts to alert everyone on her list to what’s ahead. She is also the only paid administrator of the Montauk Playhouse Community Center Foundation. “That’s my priority,” she says.

    When she took over as the president of Montauk Youth, an organization that provides fun events for children and their families including the popular Field Day, she “only continued” the programs begun by the previous administrators, she said. “They had Field Day down to a science. Now we have it down to a science. Parents show up and the first thing they do is ask what they can do to help.”

    Among the events since added is a Father’s Day fishing trip aboard the Viking. It was once held a few weeks before the holiday, but it rained so often that they made it a Father’s Day ritual, which has become quite successful.

    On Mother’s Day, Montauk Youth oversees the 5K race around Fort Pond and donates the funds raised through registration fees to a needy family in the hamlet. Before the Montauk Food Pantry opened on Tuesday, Montauk Youth sponsored a 5K race around the pond and raised over $1,000 for the pantry.

    Ms. Rutkowski also organizes the monthly calendar at montaukyouth.org that she has tweaked to enable other groups, such as the Montauk Library and the Town of East Hampton, to link to and add their own events. She updates it constantly, sends out e-mails to warn people of cancellations, and promotes other activities, such as flag football games. “Whatever we know, we want to spread around; there are so many things happening out here that a lot of parents aren’t aware of,” she said.

    The youth group has created a coed flag football game, a spirit squad for children in grades two through five, a roller skating night for the whole family, and a funk squad, choreographed by Joy Hear, that performs routines at various events, including the Sports Night at the Montauk School.

    Those scary scarecrows posted all over the hamlet at Halloween? That was Ms. Rutkowski’s idea; she worked with the Montauk Village Association to get it started. She meets often at the playhouse with town officials to go over programs. “We sit with the town and try to fill in the gaps.”

    Montauk Youth, she said, supports itself through registration fees, usually $25 per event, and with a $5,000 grant from the Town of East Hampton.

    As the administrator for the playhouse, Ms. Rutkowski organizes and updates its calendar as well, at montaukplayhouse.org. It lists all the activities that are offered at the playhouse, especially sporting events in the gym. She reminds people that on Sundays, the batting cage and pitching machine will soon get going with the help of her husband, Dave, and other Little League coaches who will be on hand to help with the budding baseball players.

    She meets monthly with the playhouse foundation to brief them on donations, thank-you notes that have been sent, and bookkeeping matters. She enters the information into a database and suggests when a consultant might be needed. She also handles most of the playhouse’s public relations and helps oversee the planning of the annual Playhouse Gala. The gala has become a huge summer event, raising thousands of dollars for the next step of the playhouse project: to get an aquatic center up and running. “We hope to break ground in 2014,” she said.

    After the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, Ms. Rutkowski joined the East End Cares effort to help people in the Rockaways, Long Beach, and Island Park. The drop-off center was the Montauk Community Church. A Hampton Jitney donated a bus to transport what had been collected and Ms. Rutkowski said the response was unbelievable. “You wouldn’t believe what that bus looked like,” she said. What didn’t fit into the luggage bin was put on the bus, and a team of residents went along to distribute everything.

    East End Cares has created a Facebook page that tells people what’s still needed. Montauk Youth will help with the distribution. “One of the things I like to do is build on the collaboration with all the other Montauk groups,” Ms. Rutkowski said.

    Before moving to Montauk full time, she spent summers in the hamlet with her family, mostly camping at Hither Hills State Park. She started working at John’s Drive-In when she was 12; when she was 13, her future husband bought the Montauk eatery. She then went to college, and spent two years in Russia after graduation. “But my friends always knew we’d get married,” she said. And they did, 14 years ago.

    Mike Martinson and Mike Doall saw the storm coming a week out and knew the potential damage Hurricane Sandy could do to their Montauk Shellfish Company, and the million or so oysters that were growing in cages in Lake Montauk.

    “We . . . started sinking stuff to the bottom,” Mr. Martinson said on Monday. By “stuff” he was referring to the contents of a portion of the 3,000 or so plastic cages that were strung near the surface on longlines on the east side of Lake Montauk just south of the Gone Fishing Marina. 

    “Then, with two days left it started to look real hairy,” Mr. Martinson said. There were a lot of cages left in the water. If they were taken out, and stayed out of the water too long, the oysters would die, so we filled the boat slips with bags of them. The day of the storm we began putting them on land. We were overwhelmed. The storm came in quicker than expected and a southeast wind hurts us the most.”

    Mr. Martinson said he had been out on the water in the middle of the mariculture farm since 3 a.m. in the dark, early-morning hours of Oct. 29. “It was now 9 a.m. I called my wife and said, ‘I hate to be a pessimist but we’re screwed.’ We were in tears. It was obvious it was a real predicament.”

    “She called up her stepdad who has a firewood business. He brought two trucks and four guys. She put it on Facebook. Twenty people showed up,” the oyster farmer said.

    He said a friend learned of the farm’s impending ruin and called three or four others. Susan Vitale saw it on Facebook and showed up in bare feet. Rick Gibbs and Richard Leland helped, and Ryan Persan, who happened to be passing by, stepped up and “worked his tail off.” Other volunteers included Gail Simons, Roxanne Espantman, Tom and Maureen Sennefelder, John Regan and crew, Brian and Bert Leland, Rick Schellinger, and Tom Kaczmarek and crew.

    “People hauled and worked until four in the afternoon in 80-mile-an-hour wind,” Mr. Martinson said.

    The “Montauk Pearls,” as the company’s oysters are known, were saved. Mr. Martinson said that as threatening as a southeast blow normally was for the farm, in this case it probably helped push the extreme high water back out of the lake.

    In the end, many of the 3,000 plastic cages filled with oysters were loaded onto trucks and taken to higher ground. Others were laid out in the parking lot of the Crabby Cowboy Restaurant where they were inundated by sustaining lake water.

    The big unknown is how many of the winter-storage cages that were filled with oysters and sunk to the relative safety of the bottom were buried by sand. On Monday their fate was yet to be determined. In the meantime:

    “We moved roughly 3,000 bags, over a million oysters. We’re sitting pretty. It was a true miracle. The community came together and saved our ass,” Mr. Martinson said on Monday before pondering the fate of his rescued oysters in the face of this week’s predicted northeaster.

    The day before a female goat was scheduled to be slaughtered for her meat, she dropped a big surprise — two babies born on Sept. 27, an unusual time for a goat to give birth, since they often deliver in the spring, rarely in the fall.

    Jeremy Vannoy of Delaware, who raises and sells livestock for their meat, had no idea she was pregnant. So, of course, he canceled the slaughtering.

    “He’s a livestock agent with a heart,” Kelley Foster said.

    Lucky for the goat, now named Sandy because of the storm, and her two kids, Brownie and Cookie, Mr. Vannoy had been in Montauk several weeks prior with Anglin Aircraft Recovery Service, the company he works for, which salvages parts from downed planes, the latest in East Hampton.

    One night he drove out to Montauk and met Ms. Foster at the Coast, a newer restaurant in the hamlet. They got to talking, and he told her what he does. “It’s the total opposite of what we do,” said Ms. Foster, who is the daughter of Rita Foster of Rita’s Stables on West Lake Drive.

    Visiting Rita’s Stables is like viewing a scene from a movie — all the animals just walk around, picking at the ground, and are rarely penned, except for at night when they’re all tucked in to the massive barn. When you get out of your car, goats, lambs, horses, chickens, and a peacock run up to greet you, and you almost expect them to start talking.

    When he returned to Delaware, Mr. Vannoy and Ms. Foster continued a relationship, albeit a long-distance one, via phone and texts. He sent Ms. Foster a picture of the babies and wondered what he would do with them.

    “Now his whole mind-set is changed. Now he has two babies,” said Ms. Foster, who asked her mom if they could take them, and she said, “Of course.”

    But Hurricane Sandy was raging, and Mr. Vannoy was told about the gas shortage up this way. Nonetheless, he filled gas cans to fuel his truck along the way and put the goats and their mother in carriers for the long ride to Montauk. He arrived several days after the hurricane hit.

    The babies are now safely ensconced in a pen with their mama on the grounds of Rita’s and happily prance around their pen, entertaining onlookers with their antics. Brownie has a mostly brown body, and Cookie is mostly white. Sandy watches over them protectively, having no idea that if it weren’t for them, she would have probably already been served for dinner.

    On Sunday, the congregation of the Amagansett Presbyterian Church will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Robert Beecher Stuart’s ordination as minister of word and sacrament. Late last month, Mr. Stuart, pastor of the church from 1981 to 1998, traveled to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he marked the anniversary with his classmates.

    In a wide-ranging discussion at his house in Springs this week, Mr. Stuart looked back on 50 years, noting some profound changes in the church and the larger world over the past half-century.

    At Princeton last month, “I saw several men whom I had known rather well. I say ‘men’ because at the time, our Presbyterian Church was just in the process of having women be ordained to ministry, but it would take a while for them to get into the seminary,” he said.

    Born in Minneapolis, Mr. Stuart grew up in suburban St. Louis. He earned a master’s degree in American history at the University of Wisconsin. Being drafted, he recalled, was the catalyst for an unexpected turn in his life. While his parents were elders in the Presbyterian Church, he said, “no one in my family had been a minister. I hadn’t given it a thought.”

    As a conscientious objector, he was drafted into civilian work in a Kansas City, Kan., hospital, where he served for two years as an attendant in the psychiatric ward. “It was just a great experience,” he said. “That was a turning point. I decided to change direction and go into the ministry. That’s how I went to Princeton Seminary in the fall of 1959.”

    Mr. Stuart led congregations in Wheeling, W.Va., where he married, and Ringwood, N.J., where he spent 15 years. He had one son, divorced in 1979, and then filled a one-year interim position in Bellingham, Wash. At the time, “I didn’t know anything about Amagansett or, for that matter, much about Long Island,” he recalled. “I was flown out for an interview, got the job, and all of my belongings were in storage in New Jersey so it was not hard for the church to move me here. It turned out to be the perfect move, just wonderful.”

    Leading the church in Amagansett, he recalled, was richly rewarding. “I loved calling on people, going to their homes. I would do that when there was a crisis, or somebody was sick, and of course visit them in the hospital if that was the case. Most afternoons, I would be out calling on people in the congregation. I heard all these wonderful stories of older residents in Amagansett that come from the old families. I enjoyed that socially as well as religiously.”

    A proponent of a church that is active in the community, Mr. Stuart became involved in President Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty programs in the 1960s and ’70s, which was met with some criticism. In Amagansett, his professional and personal lives became more deeply entwined with his involvement in H.I.V./AIDS work. He became a pastoral volunteer for the Long Island Association for AIDS Care, and got the church involved as well.

    “As a corollary, I got involved with gay rights issues, and I’m gay myself. I came out to myself in 1985, not because of the AIDS situation so much, but that was a part of the picture as it was developing. That was an important part of my ministry in terms of community organization and involvement here,” he said.

    “With my heavy involvement with H.I.V./AIDS and gay advocacy, there were a few people in the Amagansett church that were a little nervous. But they were never hostile. When I learned that there were a few people talking and upset about that, or wondering where I was going with this, I had them over to the house for coffee one afternoon, and we talked it out. The point is, sometimes there are bumps in the road, and I always felt as a leader, the best way to deal with that is to confront it. I always found people responsive, even when they differed with me in what I was saying or doing.”

    A member of the Ashawagh Hall Writers Workshop for the past 30 years, Mr. Stuart is at present writing a memoir about his religious vocation and sexuality.

    In retirement, Mr. Stuart remains active as an officer at Christ Episcopal Church in Sag Harbor, where he teaches a Bible class and assists at the altar. His involvement in a mission partnership with the Presbyterian Reformed Church of Cuba has taken him to that country several times, and he will attend a conference there next month. “This has become a very rich part of my life in my retirement,” he said.

    With changing weather patterns and violent storms becoming more frequent, Montauk residents are confused and concerned about where the hamlet’s emergency shelters are located. There were no shelters open in the easternmost hamlet during either Hurricane Sandy or the northeaster that followed a week later.

    The issue came up at a meeting of the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee on Nov. 5, but there were no clear answers. Someone thought the Montauk Playhouse was no longer a designated shelter since it does not have its own generator, but a phone call to Bruce Bates, the East Hampton Town emergency preparedness coordinator, determined that indeed it is. A generator is not a prerequisite for a designated shelter, he said.

    In fact, the playhouse also takes in animals in the unfinished area where an aquatic center is expected to be built, said Diane Hausman, a former president of the Montauk Playhouse Community Center Foundation.

    Mr. Bates listed the primary shelters in Montauk as the Playhouse, the Montauk School, and the Montauk Downs. The Montauk Manor will take in the sick and infirm, he said, but only if they are registered with the East Hampton Town Human Resource Department, in which case they will receive a call, and if necessary the shelter will open.

    His department must assess the need for shelters before a storm begins, said Mr. Bates. “We want to complete all our movement before the gale force winds hit,” he said, advising that residents tune in to WLNG or watch LTV for information, or go to the town’s Web site, town.east-hampton.ny.us/.

    As for the lack of a Montauk shelter during the storms, Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson said in a phone interview that the Red Cross did not have enough staff to man two shelters in the township, and chose East Hampton High School, which was near to the most people. The Montauk Playhouse is a designated Red Cross shelter, the supervisor noted, and that organization provides not only care but the necessary supplies, including a portable generator.

    Mr. Wilkinson said he had tried to get the playhouse opened during the hurricane and had asked for assistance from the Montauk Fire Department and its Ladies Auxiliary. He was disappointed, he said, with the response he received from Montauk Fire Chief Rich Schoen, who told him the department was unable to help. Mr. Wilkinson plans to convene a meeting of the Montauk Fire Department and the East Hampton Town Police Department to discuss how to handle the next big storm, he said.

    Chief Schoen said he’d told Mr. Wilkinson earlier that when the playhouse opened during Tropical Storm Irene, the only two qualified fire department volunteers sent to manage the shelter had no generator and about 60 people relying on them for help. “They were living on the edge. If they had to leave they would have been responsible for 60 people,” the chief said.

    He said he’d told the supervisor that in the future the Ladies Auxiliary would be happy to assist the Red Cross but would not take charge, “not on their own.”

    The Montauk Firehouse is also a shelter, but mainly for volunteers and their families.

    Jay Fruin, a member of the advisory committee, said after that meeting that in light of the recent storms and the ocean breach at Hither Hills, it would seem that a fully operational generator and other supplies should be permanently available at the playhouse.

    “In the event of a full breach and no power, our citizens should be able to rely on the playhouse for safety in a storm,” he said.

    Mr. Fruin also expressed concern about the power plant on the northern bank of Fort Pond. If power goes down in Montauk, he said, that would be the plant the hamlet could draw upon, unless, of course, it too was under water from an overflowing pond.

    “We need to be thinking of Montauk as an island,” he said. “The scenario is not too far-fetched. Let’s get some serious planning under way so we can have a shot at being ready.”

    The East Hampton Village Board will attempt to stop John and Suzanne Cartier from building a second house on their property at 105 Main Street, even though the zoning board of appeals determined earlier this month that their plans conform to zoning requirements.

    The village board voted on Friday to hire the law firm Lamb and Barnosky to commence legal actions to “preclude the proposed disturbance of the premises,” which is covered by a scenic easement granted to the village in 1975.

    Village code currently allows second residences for domestic employees or family members to be built on certain properties large enough to be subdivided, as long as both houses conform to zoning in every way should those properties be divided in two.

    After being denied a building permit in 2010 to relocate and reconfigure their main house and build a second one elsewhere on their two-acre property, the Cartiers applied to the Z.B.A. earlier this year for variances. Following four months of review, the zoning board determined that the variances requested were not necessary because both houses as proposed would conform to zoning code requirements for large lots.

    However, the village board believes that a scenic easement granted when the property was subdivided in 1975 “does not permit a second home to be built on it,” said Larry Cantwell, the village administrator. 

    The village is responsible for enforcing the easement, and is hoping a judge will stop the Cartiers from moving ahead with their plans.

    At the same time, the village is seeking to eliminate the section of the code allowing second houses on certain single lots. Generally, in a residential district, only one house is allowed per property. If the change, subject to a hearing on Dec. 21, is approved, property owners would no longer be able to build second houses on their property unless they first subdivide it. “One house, one lot, period,” Mr. Cantwell said.

    Nineteen days after Hurricane Sandy, Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr., at the conclusion of Friday’s village board meeting, estimated the village’s costs as a result of the hurricane at $400,000, citing damage to public property, debris removal, tree work, and emergency measures. Plans were being made to repair damage at Main Beach and Georgica Beach, he said.

    The mayor thanked the East Hampton Fire Department’s emergency personnel for efforts before, during, and after the storm. Of the Department of Public Works, he said, “Their responsiveness during the storm and their effort to clean up the mess in the weeks that follow deserve our highest praise. What is most impressive to me is the teamwork among the village employees and volunteers. They rise to the occasion in the face of a crisis and work together to keep people safe.” The mayor noted that the village was fortunate in comparison to other communities to the west. “It reminds us how fragile we are in our coastal communities.”

    Pat Trunzo III, an attorney representing himself, made a case before the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals for variances necessary to convert the second floor of his building at 11 Lumber Lane into two 800-sqaure-foot “affordable” apartments to be occupied by his two sons, Thomas and Steve. The spaces are currently leased to family construction and other trade companies as storage. Mr. Trunzo owns the property with his brother, Mike Trunzo.

    The Trunzo plan calls for area, coverage, and setback variances, but did not call for a parking variance, and that omission received the most deliberation on Friday.

    Mr. Trunzo initially said he didn’t think he had to apply for variances, but soon admitted he was “afraid of the $10,000 charge per space” levied by the village, which he said would deplete funds for the project. Plus, he said, “the village has never granted a parking variance.”

    “You could make history,” said Andrew Goldstein, the chairman of the zoning board. “We can only say yes or no to the variance. . . . We don’t have the power to waive the fee.”

    He and other board members voiced approval for the plans, although neither the applicant nor the board seemed to know how to legally designate the apartments as affordable, or what such a designation entails.

    John McGuirk, a board member, requested that the applicant “find out the definition of affordable housing.”

    Another board member, Frank Newbold, called the idea of creating affordable housing “terrific,” especially “when weighed against other options, like a commercial use that would increase traffic.”

    Lysbeth Marigold, another board member, said East Hampton “needs affordable housing desperately,” drawing a distinction between a past parking variance application in which apartments attached to the now-defunct Della Femina restaurant on North Main Street were converted to offices.

    “It’s increasingly difficult for young people to stay in East Hampton,” said one of the five or so Trunzo family members present at the hearing. “Whatever it takes, we want to make sure that these units remain affordable housing.”

    Also on Friday, the Joan Segal Trust at 42 Lily Pond Lane came before the zoning board for permission to rebuild a shed that burned to the ground on Aug. 31. The fire also damaged the rear of the house. According to a Star article from Sept. 1, 2012, a generator was a suspected cause of the blaze, which triggered response from East Hampton Village police, who dispatched fire departments from East Hampton, Springs, and Amagansett.

    When Z.B.A. members attempted to discuss the potentially faulty generator, Matthew Pachman, the applicant’s attorney, steered them back to the variance details.

    The application also included a reconfiguration of air-conditioning units four feet closer to the property line than they had been originally — due to manufacturer requirements — and building an eight-foot-high sound barrier to abate noise coming from the units and generator.

    “We could find a conforming space for the generator outside of the shed,” Mr. Pachman said, “but that would impose negative sound and visual impacts.”

    A determination will be issued in favor of the Segal application at the next zoning board meeting.

    The East End was “fortunate to be on the outer edge” of Hurricane Sandy, “which did so much damage to lives and property to our south and New York City,” Richard G. Hendrickson, the United States Cooperative weather observer in Bridgehampton, wrote in his monthly weather report for October.

    “Yes we had high tides, some beach erosion, electric off, and we all expected a much more severe storm here,” Mr. Hendrickson said, but according to his memory and his records, the storm here “was not like severe ones in the past.” He recalled that in the Hurricane of 1938, downed trees blocked dozens of roads, roofs were blown off houses, and crops were washed away.

    This time around, high water along the ocean, harbors, creeks, and bays did the most damage, he said, and “buildings on high ground were spared.”

    Mr. Hendrickson, who has long been concerned about the effects of global warming, wrote that “homes built on low waterfront land always have been the most damaged and will be more so in the future because of warmer temperatures and higher ocean levels caused by the 1 degree temperature increase every 70 to 100 years.”

    As for last month’s temperatures, the warmest days were Oct. 10, 12, and 13, when it got to 75 degrees. Mr. Hendrickson recorded the lowest nighttime temperature — 52 degrees — on Oct. 20.

    There was light rain on nine days, with the heaviest, one-third of an inch, coming on Oct. 26. The total for the month was 1.35 inches.

    October on the East End is usually known for its bright blue days, Mr. Hendrickson said, but that was not so this year. He recorded 7 clear, 2 partly cloudy, and 24 cloudy days.

    He recorded gale-force winds up to 60 miles per hour on Oct. 3, but during Sandy, the high winds here topped out at 50 to 55 miles per hour, he said.

    “Because of climate change,” Mr. Hendrickson wrote, “we will have more severe storms in the future.”

    November promises rough oceans and windier days, he said, adding, “We are due a killing frost, which is late this year, but it will be nice to be drinking cider and eating doughnuts by my fireplace in the evening enjoying it.”

    A crew from the Montauk Coast Guard Station plucked a man from his smoldering boat Tuesday night, minutes before it was engulfed in flames. The 44-foot sportfishing boat, Island Girl, sank.

    Its captain, whose name has not been released, received first aid and was taken to Southampton Hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation.

    Petty Officer Ismael Velasquez, coxswain of one of Montauk’s two 47-foot motor lifeboats, said the station got the call at about 7 p.m. Within 20 minutes, he and his five-person crew were on scene near Cerberus Shoal approximately five miles north of the Montauk Harbor Inlet.

    “It was hard to see, then we saw him on radar. When we got closer all we could see was smoke. We got the man off and three or four minutes later the boat was consumed by flames,” Mr. Velasquez said. He kept his boat at a safe distance until the Island Girl sank