Three More Arrests in Montauk
Three more people were arrested on the Montauk beach on Friday morning while protesting the Army Corps’s construction of a sandbag revetment there. The arrests were the latest in a series of early morning incursions that began Friday by opponents of the project into the oceanfront work site.
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Workers from H&L Contracting of Bay Shore, which won a bid for the $8.4 million Army Corps project, drove heavy equipment along the shore beside a handful of people who went around safety fencing onto the beach. Large pits have been dug, a dune excavated, and pilings to hold a pedestrian access walk have been driven into the sand.
When police ordered the protestors to leave, H&L's equipment operators at the controls of idling machines dropped their bucket claws onto a pathway, in front of people walking off the beach.
Heidi Rain Oleszczuk, Tom Oleszczuk, and Gayle Hessler remained on the sand and were charged with disorderly conduct, bringing the number of protestors arrested to 11.
Last week and again at a meeting on Tuesday, several hundred people told the East Hampton Town Board that the project, which will create a sandbag wall along 3,100 feet of the downtown ocean shore, should be stopped. They cited its potential to accelerate erosion and eliminate the sandy beach, where thousands of visitors lay blankets on summer beach days and locals walk and fish year round.
About 100 surfers, with twice as many supporters on shore, paddled out from the downtown Montauk beach on Sunday to form a symbolic line of defense against the seawall, and a community protest is planned for this weekend, on Sunday at 2 p.m. at South Edison beach, to write messages in the sand against the sandbag seawall.
In response to the outpouring against the project, which has been in the works and the subject of discussions for several years, East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell has contacted the Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department of Environmental Conservation, a partner in the project, to ask if the work can be suspended or modified.