March End Date Seen for Army Corps's Montauk Project

Army Corps contractors who had been expected to complete the construction of a 3,100-foot sandbag seawall on the downtown Montauk beach by the end of January have reported that the project is unlikely to be completed before “sometime in March,” East Hampton Town officials reported this week.

“The beach is not very wide,” said Alex Walter, an assistant to Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell, and the workers are “having a little trouble” setting up a system through which water will be pumped into stockpiled sand to create a slurry used to fill the 14,500 geotextile bags that will make up the wall. They are to be covered with a three-foot veneer of beach sand.

Required approvals from the Army Corps and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation for items such as the timber pilings that have been driven into the beach to support wooden pedestrian overpasses, and the design of a vehicular beach access, have lagged, also contributing to the delay, representatives of H&L Contracting of Bay Shore have told the town.

Weather could cause additional delays. “It’s taken a while for them to get their rhythm; let’s put it that way,” Mr. Walter said on Tuesday.

A series of early morning protests on the beach last month by opponents of the project over a period of several weeks had contributed to the delay, but only slightly, Mr. Walter said. Sixteen people who engaged in acts of civil disobedience were arrested in the protests.

Last week, a judge rejected a request for an injunction to stop the work by Defend H2O, an environmental organization, and nine individual plaintiffs that have an ongoing lawsuit over the project.

Judge Arthur D. Spatt of the United States District Court in Islip said in a written opinion that “construction on the project has gone far enough that for economic reasons, it would be impractical and wasteful to delay it any further.”

Construction had been set to begin after the Columbus Day weekend. The start date was initially pushed back so that the Army Corps could re-examine beach conditions after a storm caused accelerated erosion. Work ultimately began the first week of November.