Climate Change

Eventually, a major hurricane is coming, and Montauk — whose lifeblood is the ocean — is not ready. If the hamlet is hit by a truly big hurricane, it won’t be able to just get back to its feet and walk on. To make even a dent in the task of full recovery will require an army of dedicated experts, officials, and residents — and a yacht-load of money.

Playing out in the background of the rather apocalyptic and very visible destruction of the East End’s native pitch pines has been an equally devastating disease killing beech trees. With that in mind, East Hampton Town is working on ways to help residents remove dangerous trees, without running afoul of clearing restrictions.

The end-times landscaping job wrought by the southern pine beetle along Montauk Highway in Amagansett could seem pretty compared to how it would look after a fire. “It’s a giant tinderbox out there,” said Chris Beckert, who is in his fourth year as chief of the Amagansett Fire Department.

It’s mating season for the horseshoe crab, and last week, a group monitoring the crab for the Cornell Cooperative Extension dropped in on an all-night orgy repeated along bay beaches for 400 million to 500 million years.

With a sense of urgency, the East Hampton Town Board discussed the hiring of a surveyor to assess current beach profile conditions at Ditch Plain in Montauk and to determine the necessary volume and source of sand, its placement, and the cost to restore it to a healthy level.  

“Now is the hard moment,” East Hampton Town’s planning director told the town board during an assessment of a ravaged coastline after three storms in the past month, as mobilization for the downtown Montauk portion of the long-awaited Fire Island to Montauk Point beach renourishment project was getting underway.

Mobilization for the Montauk portion of the 83-mile-long Fire Island to Montauk Point beach renourishment project is to begin Thursday, with temporary road closures to allow mobilization of very large equipment including bulldozers and 35-foot lengths of piping. Beach infill is to begin next month, when an offshore dredge will pump 80,000 cubic yards of sand a day onto the downtown beach.

Near-hurricane-level winds, tides, and rain blasted the East End on Monday, leaving downtown Montauk with far more damage than any other place in Suffolk County.

The spotted lanternfly, a "planthopper" pest now common in New York City, has made its way to the East End, where it is a threat to wineries and native trees like the black walnut, silver maple, willow, and oak.

Our coastal zones have hit an all-time low in water quality, with impairments that violate New York State and federal guidelines ubiquitous, according to a report released last week. East Hampton Town waterways, while benefiting from ocean tidal flushing, are not immune from such impairments.

Abandoned cars, flooded basements, muddy pools, sodden festivals, panicked antiques dealers — those were the scenes on Sunday as the flooding that has overwhelmed parts of New York State’s Hudson Valley, Vermont, and many other parts of the world was visited on a South Fork packed with summer visitors. The East Hampton Town Highway Department estimated that nearly seven inches of rain fell over a sustained period of perhaps unprecedented intensity, while the Suffolk County Water Authority cited a rain gauge in Sag Harbor that put the rain total at 2.67 inches.

Harvested for bait and their blood, horseshoe crabs, which have endured on earth for over nearly 500 million years, are in a state of decline in the New York area.