Bureaucracy And Lack of Foresight
As officials in the Town of East Hampton and the owners of private property along the ocean in Montauk puzzle over their relationship with the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the fate of a proposed beach protection project there, it is well worth reflecting on two unfortunate chapters in that federal agency’s relatively recent history.
As recounted in a recent edition of Smithsonian magazine, the story involves a 9,000-year-old human skeleton found in a Washington State riverbed and an expensive, nine-year legal battle that the corps ultimately lost. Shortly after the so-called Kennewick Man was found, the Army Corps stepped in and claimed his remains based on its interpretation of a law concerning Native American graves. This put an immediate halt to any hope of scientific study.
Skeletons of this age are rare, and the Kennewick Man’s bones held a tantalizing promise of providing new details about the peopling of North America. It was only after a group of physical anthropologists and archaeologists sued, with lawyers working at no cost, that any access was allowed.
While the suit worked its way through the system, Kennewick Man’s bones lay in insecure and substandard conditions. Meanwhile, just as Congress was about to order the preservation of his burial site, the Army Corps dumped about a million pounds of rock fill there for erosion control, dashing all hopes of research.
About 10 years ago, a federal court ruled that the corps had acted in bad faith. It ordered that the remains be made available to the scientists for a limited period and awarded them and their lawyers more than $2.3 million in legal fees.
Over a 16-day period in 2005 and ’06, researchers studied the remains. They learned, among many other things, that he was likely to have been a seal hunter from a population of seafarers whose contemporary relatives can be found in remote parts of Japan and among the Moriori of the distant South Pacific. Today’s Native Americans, including a tribe that claimed him, are descended from migrants who came later, scientists say. A book describing the scientists’ observations has just been published.
Since the brief study period, the corps has denied further requests for access and refused to allow scientists to take small D.N.A. samples, which could provide clues about where Kennewick Man had lived as a child.
Why the corps fought so fiercely to keep scientists away from the remains and why it continues to make things difficult is not clear. However, observers have speculated that the corps has been in ongoing negotiations with Native American nations in the West, and may be loath to anger their leadership over the Kennewick remains.
One thing is clear though: In this instance and for nine years, the agency took a position that was wholly in opposition to science — something that does not bode well for Montauk or the now-50-year-old Fire Island to Montauk Point study that was at one time supposed to present a future vision for Long Island’s south shore.
Some 2,000 miles away from Washington State and 10 years later, the Army Corps’s poor engineering decisions, in the view of another federal judge, were responsible for some of the levee and flood-wall failures that flooded parts of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. In his decision, District Judge Stanwood Duval wrote, “I feel obligated to note that the bureaucratic behemoth that is the Army Corps of Engineers is virtually unaccountable to the citizens it protects. . . .”
Central to any critique of the Army Corps as it relates to the Long Island ocean shoreline is an observation that its approach, admittedly as mandated by Congress, is doomed over the long term. A new exhaustive analysis by the National Research Council found that the “vast majority of the funding for coastal risk-related issues is provided only after a disaster occurs, through emergency supplemental appropriations.” The most cost-sensitive and effective strategies to reduce the consequence of coastal storms, the study’s authors wrote, are given the least attention. These include more aggressive zoning, land buyouts, and paying to elevate buildings. Some baby steps have been taken in East Hampton and around New York City in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, but they are hardly enough.
One can find an example right here, where the approach is to pile sand in front of a row of threatened Montauk motels now, then worry about coming up with the money later on. And, near Louse Point in Springs, the town zoning board is to decide soon on a request from several property owners for a stone seawall that might well mean the end of an easily walked beach as sea level rises; the town trustees have already rejected the project. Better choices in both instances could well be found, though one will have to look beyond the Army Corps and the old way of thinking it represents to find the way.