Storm Takes Bite, but Montauk Beach Work Continues

East Hampton Town’s shores were spared the brunt of a winter storm that grazed the East End last weekend, but the storm did take away a significant amount of sand from the downtown Montauk beach where contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers are building a sandbag wall.

The $8.3 million federal project, which will result in a 3,100-foot sandbag line, has been under way since October and is closely watched by a number of opponents, some of whom were arrested this fall in worksite protests and who have been sharing photos and information about the work.

Overall, “for the severity of the northeaster, the high tide, and the full moon, it held up quite well,” Alex Walter, East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell’s executive assistant, said on Tuesday after a weekend post-storm assessment.

A finished section at the westerly end of the project’s length remained intact, said Mr. Walter, who headed out to Montauk with Mr. Cantwell on Sunday to inspect things firsthand. “The water didn’t get all the way up.” Most, if not all, of the sand cover topping the completed portion of the sandbag wall remained in place, he said.

Once the project is completed East Hampton Town, along with the county, will be responsible for maintaining a three-foot sand topping along the entire wall, and concerns have been raised about the cost of replacing that sand after storms.

On the beach near the Royal Atlantic motel, where work is still ongoing, the sea created “a cut up to the bags,” Mr. Walter said, resulting in “a lot of erosion in front of the bags. But the bags did what they’re supposed to do.”

While the bags are designed to hold the line on wave action sucking away sand along their flank and landward, they do not prevent that from occurring on the ocean side in front of the sandbag wall.

The waves in Montauk last weekend resulted in little to no dry beach area in front of the wall, and a cliff-like drop-off, similar to what has generally occurred over time in other places where sandbag walls have been installed.

Because the beach was so narrow, the Army Corps’s contractors in Montauk had already been forced to deposit extra sand along the water line in order to create an area out of the surf where they could work.

Additional sand will now be needed for that area to replace what the storm washed away, Mr. Walter said. “They’re going to have to build an area they can work in again.” Working at the eastern end of the project area, east of South Edison Street, will be challenging, Mr. Walter said.

A Dumpster at the South Edison beach that had ocean surf swirling around it earlier this week had been buried underground in the sand before the storm, Mr. Walter said, so the contractors could use it as a container for the sand and water slurry used to fill the sandbags.

Its exposure indicates just how much sand was chiseled away by the surf during the storm.

So far, said Mr. Walter, the contractors have had about 40,000 cubic yards of sand delivered from the Bistrian sand mine in East Hampton, the source selected by the Corps.

While town officials had made efforts to ensure that the sand to be used would be compatible in size and color with the natural beach sand, the Bistrian mine sand, which is orange-colored, was selected over another option that appears much closer in color and grain size to the beach sand in photos contained in Army Corps documents.

Mr. Walter, who spoke on the phone with the contractors on Tuesday, said that last weekend’s storm had not caused a significant delay. The work of filling and placing sandbags could be completed by the end of February, he said, and the entire project, it is estimated, could be done by the end of March.

When the Montauk project is finished, the entire area around the sandbags will be fenced off, and walkways will be installed about a foot and a half above the surface in several locations along the shorefront for pedestrians to cross the sandbag wall. If the level of the beach seaward of the wall has eroded, sand will be added so that the walkway remains the same height above ground level, Mr. Walter said.

Those keeping tabs on the project have questioned whether the construction adheres to original specifications, which called for more than 14,000 sandbags — geotextile containers filled with the sand slurry — to be piled along the beach.

The bags themselves differ from the original design, Mr. Walter said. They are bigger than the ones that were anticipated, so the estimated total number of bags that will be used along the shore is now 11,000, he said. So far about 6,000 bags have been filled and placed.

“It’s just a mess out there,” Steve Resler, a retired deputy bureau chief for New York State’s coastal management program, said this week.

Mr. Resler, who remains an occasional consultant to the state, is among those who have been closely watching the Montauk work, and has weighed in on the project and others that he says are counter to federal, state, and local coastal policies.

 Those policies, Mr. Resler has testified, advise retreat from the shore and ban the use of structures along the ocean.

“All they’re doing is exacerbating the problem,” Mr. Resler said about the Army Corps project.

This week’s storm-related wave action “scoured the fronting beach,” Mr. Resler said. “The Corps of Engineers’ own manuals recommend against these things in highly dynamic oceanfront areas,” he said. “They cause scouring and erosion.”

“It should be terminated. Stop and get those bags out of there.”

“Everywhere I’ve seen these things, the bags rip open,” he said. “The beach becomes a mess. They never work, ever.”

“There’s no way you can design these things appropriately,” he said. “You’re not allowed to do them. It’s prohibited.”

The Montauk project moved forward under an “emergency” exemption in coastal law, with the funding authorized by Congress under a post-Hurricane Sandy provision. Officials have said the sandbags are to be removed once the Army Corps begins an alternate beach restoration project under its Fire Island to Montauk Point coastal plan. A draft proposal for that long-term project, more than a half-century in the works, is slated for release next month; it is unclear what will be proposed for Montauk.

“To say that this is an emergency and has to be done now — over a three-year period . . . is outrageous,” Mr. Resler said on Tuesday. The claim that the sandbags are temporary and can be removed is “outrageous,” he said, because to do so “you have to destroy the beach.”