Late last summer, Long Islanders generally ignored news of the latest dire threat from climate change. According to scientists, the oceans are already locked in to roughly 10.8 inches of sea level rise caused by the increased rate at which Greenland’s ice sheet is melting. When the seas go up, the beaches and bluffs go back, and this should have added new urgency to the region’s coastal planning. Instead, it was business as usual, with just a glimmer of hope for an effective response.
By an accident of timing, the Greenland study arrived just as the East Hampton Town Board approved a long-awaited update to its shoreline strategy. Unlike previous plans, this one addressed the thorny issue of retreat, meaning getting owners to abandon their at-risk properties, or at least move their houses or hotels away from the brink. Before now, the town’s policy had been to divide its shoreline into sections, known as reaches, where erosion-control structures were or were not allowed. This proved entirely impractical, and the law was routinely not enforced, mostly for lack of options if, for example, the town ordered a homeowner to remove a sandbag seawall that was supposed to be temporary. The town was complicit, too, in allowing sandbags to remain in Montauk, years beyond their nine-month maximum limit; each year now, taxpayers have had to shoulder the cost of trucking sand onto what locals dubbed Dirt Bag Beach.
Along the ocean, the new document, called the Coastal Assessment and Resiliency Plan, or CARP, focused on downtown Montauk, Ditch Plain, Wainscott, and East Hampton Village. On the bay side, it identified Montauk’s harbor and its Culloden neighborhood, Lazy Point, Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett and Louse Point and Gerard Drive in Springs as priorities. What needed to be done, the study’s authors said, was to revisit the town’s existing building regulations and shoreline setback limits and also to look at dune restoration and “erosion control districts.” These latter aspects were the resiliency part, but could have had the unfortunate result that residents would continue to not understand the urgency of more radical measures.
‘Resilience’ brings to mind a kind of bounce-back effect, in which areas are rebuilt after a storm. However, unlike the very occasional serious hurricane, eastern Long Island, and East Hampton Town, especially, are faced with an ongoing storm. Words matter, and it may be time to understand the R in CARP to mean retreat instead.