The Latest Problem Is Up Above
At 3 a.m. on Saturday, when Kimberly Esperian woke up “by the grace of God” to get a glass of water, she looked out the window and noticed bits of ash falling. She walked onto her porch and was shocked to see sparks raining down against the black sky.
“What the hell is that?” she thought. She grabbed a hose and doused the fire. The source turned out to be a Chinese lantern almost three feet high, one of the rice paper and bamboo balloons beloved of beachgoers.
The candle left a black mark on her shingles.
“I look up and the frickin’ thing is on fire on my roof!” she said. “It was like a spaceship up there!”
Ms. Esperian lives on Second House Road in Montauk, parallel to Fort Pond and a mile north of Kirk Park Beach. On the Fourth of July weekend, she had discovered a red, white, and blue lantern tucked into her privet. The metal rods were still hot, she said, hours after it landed.
She had heard of these lights settling on neighbors’ roofs, but this was the first time she had laid eyes on them, let alonespotted two on her property a few weeks apart.
The lanterns add yet another item to the list of destructive merriment caused by weekend partiers in the easternmost hamlet. The danger they pose has actually been a topic of discussion for several years. In 2012, New York State declared them a “recreational fire.”
“So as soon as you let go of them, they are now an unattended fire, which would make them a violation of the fire code,” said David Browne, chief fire marshal of East Hampton Town. Violators could be presented with a fine of up to $1,000.
Ed Michels, the chief harbormaster, worries about the lanterns “getting into the beach grass or into the house. If it goes out to sea, it’s fine. But they’re not going to set them off at night and look at the wind direction.” Sometimes the lanterns float toward land.
Over the years, they have made contact with several buildings while their candles continued to burn. In 2012, one started a fire atop Montauk’s Albatross motel, and another was found tangled in a power line. That same year, Mr. Browne’s department handed out memos to local businesses selling the lanterns, noting the new state classification. However, selling them is not illegal — only untethering them is.
There have been several attempts at the town level to make the state rules even stricter. Former Supervisor Bill Wilkinson urged the town board to adopt a law forbidding their use altogether, but red tape at the state level killed the proposal.
Now, years later, dozens of lanterns continue to glow on summer nights. Over the weekend of the Fourth, beaches lit up with floating lamps ascending into the sky.
While most instances have occurred in Montauk, the issue is not confined to that hamlet. A letter to the editor in this issue of The Star rehashes a tiff between the writer and her neighbor in Amagansett, who wanted to release a lantern.
“They’re still out there. It’s still happening,” said Mr. Browne this week. He has not seen anyone ticketed, though. Packed beaches make it difficult to spot individual violators, he said. “The question has been catching them when they’re lighting them. By the time you get down to the beach, they’re gone.”
Mr. Michels said the same. “They’re very hard to control. Unless you watch them do it, who did it? Especially in the dark.”
The Marine Patrol hands out summonses and walks the ocean beaches to spot wrongdoers, who, Mr. Michels acknowledged, likely do not know that releasing the lamps breaches the fire code. Patrols have pinpointed only a handful of violators since 2012, with just a single person ticketed so far this season.
Mr. Michels said there have been fewer lanterns this year than in the past, though several residents have recently found crumpled remnants on their property. For several days last week, Joan Palumbo, Ms. Esperian’s neighbor, watched a white plastic bag caught on her roof before a storm on July 15 propelled it to the ground. Ms. Palumbo was enraged to realize it was a Chinese lantern, displaying a burn hole the size of a small apple.
She immediately filed a complaint with ordinance enforcement, stating angrily that “In the name of fun or mystical naval lint picking I do not wish to be burned alive as I try to sleep.”
“It’s like a battle zone,” she said, using an obscenity. “Nobody wants to blame the perpetrators. It is really chaotic and freaky. It’s getting worse.”
Ms. Esperian herself did not call ordinance enforcement or the police, given her exhaustion at 3 a.m. “There’s so many problems in Montauk, I don’t want to add to them,” she said this week.