The Town of East Hampton was awarded a $350,000 federal grant earlier this month to explore “living shoreline” projects on Fort Pond and Lake Montauk.
The grant is part of a $136 million program sponsored via a partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the United States Department of Defense, and the National Coastal Resilience Fund.
A Dec. 6 statement from town noted that “ongoing coastal erosion has impacted the Town of East Hampton’s 131 miles of coastline, changing the shape and size of beaches, bluffs, and coastal wetlands,” as it highlights that the oceanfront shoreline in downtown Montauk eroded more than 44 feet inland between 2000 and 2012.
“The shorelines of both Lake Montauk and Fort Pond are in areas of high risk” and “subject to flooding and a breach that could flood the downtown Montauk business district” as well as residential communities near the ocean.
Samantha Klein, an environmental analyst with the town’s Natural Resources Department, said during Tuesday’s town board meeting that the South Lake Montauk beach area — now closed to swimming due to persistent water quality issues — would be the focus of efforts there to utilize the grant, and that the work would sync up with remediation efforts now underway.
In September, the East Hampton Town Board adopted a long-range Coastal Assessment and Resiliency Plan (CARP) that was funded with the help of a state grant “to assess impacts of climate change such as sea level rise, shoreline erosion, and flooding, and adapt to a changing environment in a sustainable way.”
The $350,000 grant will allow the town to help leverage CARP’s long-range goals into tangible action.
Living shoreline projects emphasize utilizing plants, sand, and shellfish reefs over hard infrastructure such as bulkheading to protect and stabilize coastlines.
The benefits are twofold, said the town: “protect community infrastructure and natural resources from rising coastal waters and floods, while improving and providing habitat for shellfish and other species.”
The federal coastal resiliency grant application was put together by Ms. Klein, and town board members on Tuesday commended her for jumping on the opportunity. The first-of-its-kind CARP project in East Hampton will now set out to identify appropriate plant species, explore the use of mussel or oyster reefs, examine “other natural feature that could be incorporated into the living shoreline designs for the two targeted areas,” according to the town.
Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said Tuesday that living-shoreline efforts undertaken on Northwest Creek involving spartina grass and mussel beds had “helped restore the shoreline there.”
If successful, other living shoreline projects may soon be in the offing in other parts of town.
Ms. Klein told the board Tuesday that the town would be getting the $350,000 check in late January and would have 18 months to complete site assessments under the rules of the grant. The first step, she said, would be to issue requests for proposals from engineers and environmental consultants to perform the site assessments.
