Suffolk Closeup: Catastrophic storms? It can happen here

“Ian shows the risks and costs of living on barrier islands,” was the headline of an Associated Press story this month in the wake of Hurricane Ian.

The article was datelined Sanibel Island, Fla., which was decimated by Ian. But it applies to all construction built in the teeth of the sea, with buildings on barrier islands and beaches — such as we have here — especially vulnerable.

“Hurricane Ian underscores the vulnerability of the nation’s barrier islands and the increasing costs of people living on the thin strips of land that parallel the coast,” said the AP article. “As hurricanes become more destructive, experts question whether such exposed communities can keep rebuilding in the face of climate change,” 

The lesson of Hurricane Ian to this area? “I really hope it’s a strong wake-up call,” said Kevin McAllister, founder and president of the Sag Harbor-based organization Defend H20. “I would urge for a pause to rethink areas occupied that are low-lying” — considering climate change causing great intensity of future storms and also sea level rise. “The prospect” for these stretches, he said, is “untenable.”

The AP piece continued: “Barrier islands were never an ideal place for development, experts say. They typically form as waves deposit sediment off the mainland. And they move based on weather patterns and other ocean forces. Some even disappear. Building on the islands and holding them in place with beach replenishment programs just makes them more vulnerable to destruction because they can no longer move, according to experts.”

Indeed, having barrier beaches flexible enough to move when hit by storms is critical for them in protecting the mainland.

This is where I came in as a journalist in Suffolk County back 60 years ago. Robert Moses had just announced a plan to build a four-lane highway on the length of Fire Island. He claimed it would “anchor” the beach.

In 1962, there weren’t the experts in coastal dynamics who would subsequently emerge, such as Orrin Pilkey, founder of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University. He has authored, coauthored and edited 45 books, including “The Rising Sea,” with Robert Young, who succeeded him as the program’s director. Pilkey’s most recent book: “Retreat from a Rising Sea.”

Still, it was clear Moses’ claim was baloney. We found at the Babylon Town Leader — one of the very few newspapers in the New York area that challenged Moses (a Babylon resident) — that along the highway he built on the Jones Beach stretch, bulldozers worked at night so people wouldn’t see them, removing sand from the sides of the highway to try to keep the road in place.

Further, in Suffolk, folks before the 20th Century wouldn’t do major building on barrier beaches. They’d put up, said old-timers, what were called “beach shacks.”

Meanwhile, when I began as a journalist here, the Army Corps of Engineers began pushing for piles of rocks, called groins, to be dumped out into the ocean along Dune Road in Westhampton. “Hand-wrestling with God,” the Suffolk County Executive John V. N. Klein, called it. The rock piles caught sand moving in the westward littoral drift, but robbed it from reaching the coast farther down the beach, causing severe erosion.

Global warming has resulted in the situation becoming dire. Hurricanes are now rapidly escalating, feeding off hotter seas, to Category 3 and Category 4. Ian with 155 mph winds was near a Category 5, the worst, when it hit Florida.

It can happen here.

Consider the hurricane before Ian, Fiona, that struck northeastern Canada with 100 mph winds at Category 2. “I’m seeing homes in the ocean,” said René J. Roy of Newfoundland, chief editor of the newspaper there, Wreckhouse Press. “I’m seeing rubble floating all over the place. It’s complete and utter destruction.”

On his website “Informed Comment,” University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole took issue with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who said Ian was a “once-in-a-500-year flood event.” It is “the new normal,” said Cole. And the “ocean water up north is no longer …cold … so hurricanes can remain strong all the way up to New York, Boston and even Newfoundland.”

An OpEd essay by Robert Young in The New York Times this month was titled: “To Save America’s Coasts, Don’t Always Rebuild Them.” Young wrote: “Hurricane Ian is the latest devastating hurricane to confirm that coastal areas are failing to keep rebuilt or new development out of highly vulnerable areas.” He cited “multiple incentives to rebuild rather than to relocate. The assumption is that taxpayers will always be there to back up private investment …”

The Bible speaks of “a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against the house, and it fell.”