Georgica Pond has been closed to swimming and the taking of crabs, fish, or other marine life owing to a bloom of toxic cyanobacteria, blue-green algae.
The East Hampton Town Trustees, who have jurisdiction over the pond and many other town waterways and bottomlands as well as beaches, closed the pond on Aug. 18, citing levels of algae exceeding the state threshold. The public has been asked to keep children and pets away from the pond and to rinse off after any exposure to the water.
That action followed the annual report delivered on Aug. 15 by Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences to the Friends of Georgica Pond Foundation, a group of pondfront property owners who organized to mitigate conditions in the pond, which has seen blooms of cyanobacteria each summer for almost a decade now.
On behalf of the trustees and the foundation, officials from Dr. Gobler's lab monitor the pond with a telemetry buoy and hand-sampling, measuring conditions including temperature, salinity, pH, and dissolved oxygen as well as cyanobacteria.
Mitigation measures in place, including the use of an aquatic weed harvester to remove macroalgae from the pond and replacement of aging septic systems at many of the surrounding properties, have been deemed successful, as the algae blooms have steadily decreased year over year.
"The blue-green levels have been very low all summer," Sara Davison, executive director of the foundation, said on Tuesday. "Just in the last two weeks, they started to increase. It's not a pond-wide bloom, it's very localized. But just to be very careful, because a lot of people bring their dogs there, the trustees decided to temporarily close it."
At their meeting on Monday, the trustees spoke of a belief among Marine Patrol officials that people -- "from Queens," one marine officer had told a trustee -- are taking crabs both without a shellfish license from the town and in violation of the pond's closure. "I suspect they're going to restaurants in the city," Francis Bock, the trustees' clerk, said of the harvest.
