The latest water quality report from Concerned Citizens of Montauk stands out for a whopping outlier: A persistent and unresolved problem with elevated enterococcus bacteria levels at East Creek in Montauk hit a new high mark this week.

The Old Whalers Church needs a paint job.

To help raise money for it while offering some solid tunes, there will be a "Let's Paint the Church" benefit concert featuring the HooDoo Loungers on Friday starting at 6 p.m. Tickets are $20 for adults and $10 for 10 to 18-year-olds. The under-10 set can listen for free.

Bruce Beyer, who helped arrange the benefit, has said estimates for painting the church are more than $100,000. For the first stage, they're just looking to "clean the front up" to make it more presentable from the street.

On Long Island, while we are not technically in a drought, unusually dry conditions are prompting the Suffolk County Water Authority to ask residents to cut back on water usage. “It’s not that the aquifer is in danger of drying out,” said Joe Pokorny, deputy C.E.O. for operations at the water authority. “It’s that the demand is outstripping the water authority’s ability to pump fast enough.”

“It’s not a glamorous job,” Savannah Van Der Walt observed one day last week as the East Hampton Town Trustee pumpout boat she was piloting glided toward a dense array of houseboats at Snug Harbor Marina on Lake Montauk. “But you see the thousands of gallons that we pump every week. If people dumped it here, we would have a disgusting mess."

Tinder-dry conditions and spiking temperatures were only two of the challenges firefighters faced as they worked to extinguish a brushfire that burned some 20 to 25 acres of grasslands in Hither Hills State Park on Friday night and then rekindled on Saturday. Equally challenging was the fire’s difficult-to-reach location between Goff Point and the Walking Dunes, more than a mile from any paved road.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Suffolk County had documented 16 cases of monkeypox in total, the second-highest case count in the state outside of New York City. Across the United States there have been just shy of 3,500 cases, including about 1,000 in New York, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Dr. Gregson Pigott, Suffolk County’s health commissioner, said that even though Suffolk’s case count is relatively low, those numbers are expected to increase and the department is watching them with concern.

Following her residency, Dr. Gail Schonfeld was hired to work on the East End because there was no pediatric practice in the community. Then: “The community grew, so the practice grew itself," she said. That was 40 years ago, and East End Pediatrics is still going strong.

Thirty years later, Patty Eames says it was “a day that’s right here at the front of my brain.” She was one of many locals and luminaries who were arrested at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett on July 28, 1992, during a storied protest that found the East Hampton Baymen’s Association in open defiance of a 1990 state ban on haulseining for striped bass off the ocean beaches.

East Hampton Town’s Nature Preserve Committee has recommended to the town board that the 6.9-acre wooded area bordered by Crandall Street, Lincoln Avenue, Norfolk Street, and Fort Pond Boulevard in Springs be made part of the town’s nature preserve. Not everyone agrees.