“The management of Long Island’s dynamic Atlantic coastline has been a challenge for decades.”  
That was the lead to Paula Valentine’s article “Coastal Resilience and Climate Change” in the Fire Island News’ July issue. She was writing about presentations given by federal and state agency representatives, consultants and interest groups at FINS’ Science Conference held in April. Paula is Public Affairs Director of the Fire Island National Seashore.  

Also, driving on the beach keeps grass from spreading, if vehicles get too close to the dune. And houses already there, and walkways and stairs that provide access to the beach, tend to affect it in a negative way, as do groins.  Not mentioned is the fact that neither houses (in the federal or state dune area), nor groins, are any longer built on Fire Island.

Professor Psuty’s second paper was on how dunes have “migrated northward.” Since 1976, he notes, dunes in developed and undeveloped areas have moved almost 43 feet landward over all, while in the community beaches the migration is more like 70 feet. What strikes this non-scientific observer, however, is the fact that beach management, “challenging” or not, has been non-existent on Fire Island during that time.

Beach nourishment on Fire Island has been done exclusively by the communities. True, since the mid-1990s, the Seashore and other state and federal agencies have issued permits to allow communities to place sand on adjacent public beaches, but there has been no other nourishment since the 1960s, a period in which numerous hurricanes and nor’easters have pummeled the shoreline.

Cheryl Hapke of the U.S. Geological Survey gave papers on beach scraping and offshore sand supplies. She thinks scraping may cause more problems than it solves. “Because natural park lands are immediately adjacent to modified [i.e., scraped] areas,” she reasons, “even small human-induced changes can impact park resources and beach/dune response to storms.”

Beach scraping is a stop-gap measure, designed to protect communities against one or two high tides in a nor’easter. We do it because the Department of the Interior and the Department of the Army have been unable to agree on a mutually acceptable plan to “conserve and preserve” Fire Island, as called for in the park’s enabling act. Had they done so, we would enjoy the rational beach management programs practiced almost everywhere else on the east coast.

Dr. Hapke’s second paper discussed why borrow sites used in the 2009 community fill project should not be used again for that purpose. She believes material from sand ridges helps supply the beaches along western Fire Island. Hers is one of a dozen or more recent papers on this subject. The main point for Fire Islanders, though, is that USGS has estimated the amount of recoverable beach quality sand in New York and northern New Jersey is in excess of a billion cubic yards.

The News article next discusses the bay side of the island. Sediment needed there, we learn, “is delivered through inlets, overwashes and dunes.” The resulting sand deposits “evolve into new bay beaches, marshes and tidal flats, thereby allowing barrier islands to maintain their general characteristics as they migrate landward under the influence of sea level rise.” Migrate landward? In his definitive primer on Long Island coastal processes, New York Sea Grant’s Jay Tanski notes that parts of Fire Island have not moved appreciably northward in some 1300 years, despite storms of all varieties, and no help from coastal engineers.

As for overwashes, they have been few and far between since the Hurricane of 1938. And what sand makes its way through inlets into the bay system tends to wind up in nearby tidal shoals. Fire Island Inlet, for example, is said to have accumulated some 40 million cubic yards of sand (the same amount Robert Moses pulled out of the bay to build Jones Island in the 1920s). And Moriches Inlet is fully 20 miles to the east. If Great South Bay needs sand, it will be some time before it arrives through the inlets. Anyway, if sand is needed on the bay side, the Corps of Engineers can move it there, just as Mr. Moses did. Call it an “environmental feature” of the beach nourishment project.

Sea level rise is the latest all-purpose rationale for anything the environmental community wants to do with other people’s coastal property. Sarah Newkirk of the Nature Conservancy presented a paper on “Coastal Resilience Long Island.”  By going to coastalresilience.org you can find “a future scenarios tool, with layers of ecological, socio-economic, and boundary data.” This will “provide tools to communities for their planning, zoning, acquisition and permitting decisions so they can meet multiple management objectives while minimizing adverse impacts to human and natural communities.” Um, thanks anyway.

Paula’s lead about coastal management being “a challenge” has another side. A region as rich in beach quality sand as ours should be the national leader in beach preservation. Don’t tell me we can’t afford it. New Jersey raises millions each year, all earmarked for Corps of Engineers studies of what that coastline needs. They do it through a real property transfer tax of 1 percent or so added to the selling price of real estate.  If we did something similar, New York’s coastal assets could be the envy of the nation for centuries to come.

Coastline management doesn’t have to be as “challenging” as we’ve made it.

Mr. Stoddard is president of the Fire Island Association.