Climate Change

With many parts of the Town of East Hampton at moderate, high, or extreme risk of flooding, the planned October start of the project's implementation was prominent in "Montauk's Coastal Resiliency and the Future of Our Beaches," a Dec. 16 webinar hosted by Concerned Citizens of Montauk.

The southern pine beetle, an invasive pest now considered by the D.E.C. to be an established species on the South Fork, has made a comeback in East Hampton Town and regions of the Central Pine Barrens, town and state officials said this week.

The “four horsemen of the ocean climate change apocalypse” have arrived, a scientist told those attending a symposium Friday on the bay scallop die-off of 2019, and they pose a serious threat to the embattled species. 

Native pines will rise once again on town lands where the trees had been devastated by the southern pine beetle, a pest that is having less and less of an impact in East Hampton each year since it first began wreaking havoc on the trees in the fall of 2017.

Baymen and lovers of shellfish can hold on to hope that East Hampton waters will offer an abundant crop of bay scallops when they open to the annual harvest on Sunday, but if the first days’ harvest in state waters is an indication, they will be disappointed.