The Mast-Head: Primer on Beaches

Perhaps the dumbest thing I heard back when I was covering the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals came to mind this week as I watched a heavy northeast storm roll in. I cannot recall now what the application was for or where the property was or even who the lawyer was, but I remember blanching when a representative of the owner said the sand on the beach comes and goes and that the sea wall he was advocating would be soon covered and out of sight.

It was the late 1990s, during a relative lull in terms of hurricanes and bad cold-season storms, so maybe the guy could be forgiven. Maybe he believed what he said. What is clear is that he was mostly wrong. If not allowed to migrate naturally beaches tend to go away, and at just about the same rate at which people forget that fact.

There is an abandoned house at the end of a road at Lazy Point that stands dramatically on tall pilings a good 75 feet out into Gardiner’s Bay. To observers today, it looks like a poster image for climate change and sea level rise. The thing is, not so long ago it was inland of a first threatened house, one that the East Hampton Town Board ordered demolished, with the mess hauled away at its owner’s expense.

Years ago, Tony Minardi, teaching science at East Hampton High School, managed an ongoing project to measure the ocean beaches’ movement in relation to records of the height and direction of waves. I was among those providing the labor, walking off readings from which Mr. Minardi developed profiles, portraits of the width and angle of the sand from dune to water’s edge.

If Mr. Minardi had one point to impart to us kids it was that the sand mostly goes. Anything that holds a dune in place, like a building stuck on top of it, will almost always result in the narrowing of the beach. On balance, the majority of the movement of sand is from east to west on Long Island, and when the eastern sources are blocked, as by ill-thought-out seawalls, the western beaches suffer.

It was obvious then, and it is obvious now, that the places for which seawalls are sought will be the places where the beach will disappear. It’s that simple, whether the vested interests want to believe it or not.