|
SKEPTICS
CONVERTED:
WHY
WE BELIEVE THE BEACH PROJECT HAS MERIT
By
R.F. Barash
A number of us were very put off
the Army Corps of Engineers' "storm abatement" project
after attending the Civic's meeting on that subject last
April. The
presentation by speakers from the Corps and from the State
Department of Environmental Conservation was authoritarian,
one-sided and clownish.
There was no serious discussion of the scientific basis for the
project, or of the effects on the community during and after
construction. We felt as though we were being railroaded into
something that went counter to everything we understood about
how beaches and barrier islands work.
Our understanding of those
processes was not wrong. It is true that in the normal course,
beaches are eroded in the fall and winter, and replenished in
the spring and summer, some years more of one thing, some years
more of the other. However, our barrier island has not been free
to follow its natural bent for many decades.
A wide, gently sloping beach is
the best, and the most beautiful, protector of the land from the
vagaries of the sea. But the naturally replenishing flow of sand
from Montauk Point westward to Point Lookout has been halted by
the extremely long jetty at Jones Beach's West End. Before the
jetty was built, the flow of sand from the east was building up
the western tip of Jones Beach, forcing the Inlet to move west,
towards Point Lookout, where the swift currents were eroding our
own eastern tip. Once constructed, the Jones Beach jetty caught
a great deal of the sand on its eastern side, creating a large
land area west and south of West End Beach #2. (It's become a
prime breeding area for piping plovers along the sandy rim
- and
for mosquitoes in the interior.) Now that the area east of the
jetty is filled in, the sand which might be expected to accrete
at our eastern end is diverted into an "ebb shoal
bar", a sand bar which curves from the southern tip of the
Jones Beach jetty towards the widest point of the beach at
Malibu. If you've looked out to sea at low tide, you've seen the
breakers way out there. Our famine is Malibu's feast.
The dunes along long stretches of
the beach have been destroyed for development, or perhaps just
"the view". The dunes are the ultimate shock absorbers
of the punches thrown by the storms of autumn and winter. When
our family first came to Point Lookout in the late 60's, there
were no dunes south
of Ocean Boulevard. Thanks to Bonnie Mellon and the many
environmentally sensitive people here in town, we now have
dunes, growing taller
and covered with beach grass, as a bastion between ourselves and
an angry sea. But many areas, especially in the city of Long
Beach, have no dunes at all any more.
If the barrier islands
along our coasts were in an uninhabited corner of the world (is
there such thing?) it wouldn't matter how the wind and water and
other land masses impacted on them; it wouldn't matter whether
they merged or breached or grew or disappeared. But here we are,
with Mr. Reynolds' added elevation [see Beach Diary], with our
houses, our navigation, our recreation and our Easter egg hunts.
Leaving things to nature, in other words, makes no sense if
nature has been tampered with already.
In a talk I had with
Professor Stephen Leatherman in early February, this authority
on the south coast of Long Island said we're "overdue for a
'38-style hurricane. We're coming into a new cycle of more
hurricanes." These cycles last for 20 to 30 years. They are
not associated with global warming but with the oscillation of
sea temperatures in the North Atlantic. This opinion was echoed
by three other coastal geologists I spoke with: Professor Nick
Coch of Queens College, Professor Henry Bokuniewicz of SUNY
Stony Brook and Professor Fred Wolff of Hofstra.
Additionally, the sea
around us has been rising for the last 10,000 years, since the
end of the last ice age. At the beginning of that time, the
water rose very rapidly, then it slowed. Now it seems to be
rising faster again, with great chunks of Antarctic glaciers
calving into the oceans and snow and ice melting in both polar
regions due to global warming. Dr. Wolff in 1985 estimated
2-3" rise in sea level every hundred years, leading to an
annual loss of 2-3', depending on the slope of the beach.
Current estimates for this area, says Ron Masters, are a rise of
about 1 foot every hundred years, a chilling prospect.
With tweaking by
Commissioner Masters and others, the Corps' project is now
designed to address our problems with solutions that hew as
closely as possible to what the natural processes would have
been. The two chief elements in the design are restoration of
dunes and sand replenishment that will approximately triple the
current width of our beach. The Mineola jetty is
to be extended by 100’, but no new groins are to be built on
our beaches. Groins #2 (in front of Gardner’s Pavillion) and
#3 (west end of Middle Beach) will be refurbished as
necessary.
In my next article, I'll discuss
the project in more detail, with illustrations of the plan.
Meanwhile, Commissioner Masters' door is open to the community
and he has promised to listen to our concerns and to work with
us on parking, beach access and other matters that will affect
the village once the project is underway.
We are satisfied that the
project is necessary and scientifically sound.
We hope that it, and the
Point, will endure the anticipated 50 years.
|
