Despite seemingly tough restrictions, a sobering new study of the East Hampton shoreline has shown significant degradation. According to the Peconic Estuary Project, between 2001 and 2016 the total length of all bulkheads in the town tripled. There is also six times more dock space than there was at the beginning of the period. Figures for what has happened since 2016 were not available, but they surely would indicate that there has been additional growth of these ecologically harmful structures.
Understanding how we got to this point requires a sense of the way projects get built. In the case of expanding bulkheads, the weight of making decisions falls on the town’s zoning board of appeals and the overstretched State Department of Environmental Conservation. There, small extensions are allowed piecemeal, on individual properties, often framed by property owners’ representatives as a necessary part of a restoration. The explanation of the stunning increase in total dock length is less clear, though the East Hampton Town Trustees recently approved a new one in Three Mile Harbor — the first in years. Though the trustees vowed that this was an exception to the rule, it is likely that other requests will follow, claiming a precedent was set.
Tidal shorelines come under pressure from two sides: landowners and the changing climate. In unmolested places, beaches and wetlands naturally adapt to a rising sea level by creeping landward. But where halted by a bulkhead, sea wall, or “temporary” sand bags put in to protect a house, they quickly disappear. Loss of salt marsh habitat has negative effects up and down the food chain, with impacts on recreational and commercial fishing, as well as on threatened and endangered wildlife species.
“Living” shorelines also absorb wave impacts during storms, and rebuild themselves quickly when left alone. Examples of what happens when nature’s ways are blocked are everywhere — from along Sound View Drive and Captain Kidd’s Path in Montauk to Gardiner’s Bay, even some of the freshwater ponds. Where there used to be passable beaches and thriving plant and animal communities, you now find immovable, barren surfaces. Sadly, the loss of the protective marshes and beaches makes erosion worse, threatens nearby properties, and prompts homeowners to beg the state and the zoning board for even more bulkhead length and/or height. And so the vicious cycle continues.
East Hampton Town has had various policies for years regarding so-called shore-hardening structures, but with limited success in regulating them. In the current iteration, the town’s beaches are divided into several “reaches,” most of them where seawalls and the like are banned outright. Another regulation routinely ignored is that sandbags put in place to save a structure in imminent danger must be temporary and removed at the end of, at most, nine months — this has been utterly disregarded, including by the town itself along the downtown Montauk oceanfront.
The Peconic Estuary Study provides ample evidence that current policies are not working. Better and more future-focused solutions must be found.