The Seawall Is Gone

And there you have it: Scarcely half a year since the downtown Montauk sandbag seawall was installed by the Army Corps of Engineers, a minor late-summer storm called Hermine underscored the recklessness of the effort.

By Tuesday morning, with the post-tropical cyclone in the Atlantic about 100 miles off eastern Long Island, several rows of the plastic-fabric bags had been exposed and hundreds of tons of sand, which had been trucked in at great expense to keep them buried, had been washed away at the Royal Atlantic Motel. 

Just to the east, a concrete-block access built by an Army Corps contractor hung in pieces. Snow fence meant to keep beachgoers away was dangling, and, for a considerable distance, hundreds, if not thousands of sprigs of beach grass that had been planted in the false hope of stabilizing the artificial dune were gone.

Gone soon, too, will be hundreds of thousands of dollars in East Hampton Town and Suffolk County taxpayers’ money. Under an agreement with the Army Corps, it is up to local government to maintain the seawall and keep it from certain destruction. No clear understanding of the folly’s actual cost is yet known.

There will be a chance for East Hampton residents to actually make their opinions known in person at an Army Corps hearing at the Montauk Firehouse on Sept. 28. The hearing, on its $1.1 billion Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation Plan, had been scheduled before Hermine intruded. 

A cynical observer might note that the meeting had been scheduled during the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season when pressure for short-term solutions would likely be high. 

This is not incidental for the Army Corps, a reactive agency that has proven incapable of long-term coastal policy. Its plan for the Montauk seawall, as well as its proposed budget to replenish the beach in front of it with trucked-in sand in the future, demonstrate fundamental incompetence. 

Also deserving criticism are  the East Hampton Town Board and Suffolk Legislature, whose members almost without exception believed the corps’s assurances. Equally guilty are town staffers who knew the project violated several laws but did nothing to stop it, as well as State Department of Environmental Conservation and State Department of State officials, who looked the other way. 

The key failure was to ignore multiple laws regarding the shorefront, which require that most projects, including the Montauk sandbags, are to be allowed only on a temporary basis. There has never been any dispute about that. In fact, Brian Frank, the top East Hampton Town environmental analyst, pointed out in a 2014 letter to the corps that state and town laws might have to be changed to bring the seawall into compliance. Mr. Frank’s observation was never acted upon, and he did not raise the issue again.

Make no mistake: Montauk’s ocean beach is a disaster, and the fault lies in years of ignoring the inevitable forces of nature and, foremost, the Army Corps. Federal leadership is desperately needed, but the corps, compounded by local wishful thinking, has proven it is the wrong agency for the job.