State Dismisses Impact of Army Corps Project
That the state of protections for the environment is broken is obvious from a recent notice from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on the proposed Army Corps of Engineers project to bolster the downtown Montauk oceanfront.
The precarious concern for the natural world becomes clear in a single line, in which the D.E.C. declares that the 3,100-foot-long sandbag seawall will not have a significant effect. This came in the form of a “negative declaration” under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, once the gold standard of serious analysis. Comments on a state permit, which is necessary for the work to proceed, will be accepted in writing at the D.E.C.’s Stony Brook office until Dec. 19.
The numbers are staggering. Approximately 14,200 five-and-a-half-foot-long permeable fabric bags are to be used. They are to be filled with 51,000 cubic yards of material from an unspecified inland sand mine and covered with 20,000 yards of actual beach sand stockpiled during the excavation for the seawall itself. You might call it icing on the sandbag cake. In addition, a new beach berm is to be built 50 feet seaward of what is today the water’s edge. What the berm will be constructed of remains unclear. And what happens when the bags inevitably are exposed in a storm and are torn apart, spilling their less-desirable contents, no one will say.
This is a giant project, one that will by definition affect nearby properties, sea life, and birds, as well as beachgoers. To say it is not significant is a dangerous mistake, abetted, one can assume, by the fact that federal, and not local, money will pay for the work. Underscoring our belief that this type of work absolutely does have an environmental cost, a Suffolk Supreme Court justice recently ruled that the Village of East Hampton was wrong when it declared a similar, if much, much smaller, erosion-response project at Georgica Beach to have been without significant impact. This irony is worth keeping in mind when the day comes that the Montauk fix turns into a disaster.
To be sure, doing nothing about the increasingly threatened first row of motels and residences in downtown Montauk would have an environmental effect as a cascade of demolished buildings eventually plunged into the ocean. But the claim by the D.E.C., Army Corps, and others that so massive an attempt to protect them will have no impact is not credible.
What emerges is a disturbing picture of several overlapping bureaucracies seeking to save structures without fully studying the consequences. We are sorry that the East Hampton Town Board has been unable to muster the foresight, and courage, to insist that such study be undertaken, but perhaps that would have been too much to expect under the pressure to do something. We wonder what it will take to get the state back in the environmental protection business when it comes to coastal projects.