Town of East Hampton Section V. Flooding and Erosion Policies #11-17
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SECTION V FLOODING AND EROSION POLICIES #11-17 Town of East Hampton LWRP Flooding and Erosion Policies #11-17 A. INTRODUCTION 1. Flooding and Erosion Issues and their Evolution in East Hampton As an island promontory surrounded by water, East Hampton is singularly exposed to forces of the sea and weather. The Town's 110 miles of shoreline are protected by fragile beaches, dunes and bluffs, and while these are the same scenic and recreational attributes that lure tourists and second homeowners to a resort community, they are also vulnerable to winter nor'easters and catastrophic hurricanes. The awesome natural forces of storm events can quickly transform scenic views and real estate assets into disaster areas and insurance liabilities. Coastal flooding and erosion planning and policy in East Hampton have largely evolved in response to storms and other impacts of natural forces on development. Historically there has been less concern about episodic flooding and erosion in undeveloped areas where private property or public infrastructure were not at risk. This emphasis on protecting developed areas has masked the importance of maintaining unspoiled natural coastal features, both to sustain the Town's resort economy and because of their vital protective role in buffering the coast from flooding and erosion. A consideration of flooding and erosion and the coastal processes that determine them depends, as does any problem, on the point of view from which it is seen. In The Beaches are Moving, a popular classic of coastal management, authors Wallace Kaufman and Orrin Pilkey portray the conceptual dilemma thus: "The nature of sand is to move. That is how it came to the beaches, how it blows from the beaches into the dunes, and how it washes from the dunes into the bays to form new salt marsh and forest. ...Those who live near the shore choose to say that a shoreline moving with the water toward their house is 'eroding.' ... Most geologists speak of beaches retreating. Barrier islands are said to migrate. Beach erosion, geologically speaking, is not usually a permanent loss, but a strategic retreat. ... The barrier islands which protect most of the Gulf and East coasts have existed continuously for thousands of years, but they have retreated many miles. ... Beaches are not stable, but they are in dynamic equilibrium. ...Dynamic equilibrium is not stability ... but a net balance among many changes." (Kaufman and Pilkey, 1979) Anne Simon, author of The Thin Edge, Coast and Man in Crisis, published in 1978, puts it more poetically, "Sand meets water's force with its natural tendency to move; its soft answer turns away the sea's wrath. Waves energized by the sun, moon and wind crash on the wide expanse as they have done every day and night since the island was formed. The use of sand to receive and repel this merciless attack is a triumph of natural engineering. The smallest grain of sand is almost indestructible, especially when wet, keeping a film of water about itself by capillary action. Because of this liquid cushion, there is little further attrition. Even a heavy surf cannot cause one sand grain to rub against another." "... For us, shifting sands is a convenient cliché but an inconvenient reality. We do not accept it. We call it erosion and engage the United States Army Corps of Engineers to fight it." (Simon, 1978) The view of flooding and erosion as part of natural processes of dune, beach and bluff formation, as phenomena which should be adapted to, rather than fought against, arises from a long-term perspective of coastal processes. Again, Pilkey and Kaufman, "There are no catastrophes or disasters in nature. The powerful events that seem so unusual to us are disasters only because our lives are Town of East Hampton LWRP Flooding and Erosion Policies #11-17 short and our bodies fragile. ...Great storms, floods, landslides, and quakes are, in the grand scale of time, normal events recurring again and again, more or less regularly. ...'Disasters' are part of the dynamic equilibrium of the beaches." "Storms, landslides, and tsunamis, despite their destruction, offer a valuable frame for human activity on the beaches. First, they provide a measure of the ultimate forces we will encounter. Second, because they can move the beaches in a matter of hours, they often tell us just how transient that landscape is. Like a painting in a good frame, human activity in the context of natural disasters appears with new clarity." (Kaufman and Pilkey, 1979) In early times, neither the colonial settlers nor the native Montauketts built permanent habitations along the shore. Only within recent decades has land use changed to produce intense development pressure on the immediate coast, from a combination of a booming resort economy, population growth, modern construction techniques, and improved regional transportation and communication. Siting of contemporary development has often failed to take into account coastal storms and the potential for damage from flooding and erosion. Following major storms, homeowners recognizing their precarious predicament have built structures designed to protect their property. However, attempts at erosion protection using groins, bulkheads and other hard structures have had detrimental effects on neighboring beaches or property and have often aggravated the erosion problems they were designed to prevent. Their legacy is seen in the disappearance of the sandy beaches adjoining erosion protection structures, a poignant loss for East Hampton, whose way of life and fishing and resort activities have always depended on unrestricted access to unspoiled beaches. East Hampton has a rich tradition dating back to its origins as a colonial entity of maintaining coastal resources for all its citizens. The beaches in East Hampton are for the most part publicly owned and remain in fee title of the Town Trustees under the colonial Dongan Patent for the "Freeholders and Commonalty" of the Town. East Hampton's north and south shores have greatly differing geography and geology with different weather exposures. Ocean swells breaking on the south ocean shore may travel from West Africa or Iceland, whereas the northern bay shores are primarily exposed to nor'easters with a more limited fetch. The Town's south shore ocean beaches are generally more dynamic because of the higher wave energies and greater quantities of sediment being transported. According to a 1988 study by the Marine Science Research Center of SUNY Stony Brook concluding ten years of ocean beach monitoring in East Hampton Village, beach width there can vary as much as 270 feet in a given year. (MSRC, 1988) The Town's bay beaches, while more protected, are narrower and more fragile and may take longer to recover from storms. They are mostly fed by sediment from bluffs and headlands. In areas where residents have attempted to stabilize bluffs with hard structures, these sand sources have been restricted, and the resulting deficit in the local sediment budget has lead to further narrowing or elimination of the beaches. V-2 Town of East Hampton LWRP Flooding and Erosion Policies #11-17 Flooding and erosion in East Hampton's coastal zone are caused primarily by storms, and secondarily by other meteorological and coastal processes including wind and rain, tidal, littoral, and other hydrographic forces, sea-level rise, and the interactions of coastal geomorphology with development. Other causes of flooding and erosion include effects of development, and other human activities that interfere with coastal processes and sediment transport, such as inlet stabilization, and construction of erosion protection structures, particularly those perpendicular to the shore such as groins and jetties. Flooding and erosion policy issues that have arisen in the LWRP process generally can be reduced to either 1) use conflicts, such as protection of private property versus preservation of public beaches and coastal resources; or 2) policy responses to natural forces, coastal and littoral processes, and effects of storm events and rising sea level. Recognition of the realities of long-term coastal processes has come slowly to communities like East Hampton, along with a gradual conceptual shift toward adapting coastal planning to the inexorable forces of nature rather than, like King Canute, attempting to oppose them. Zoning, a primary tool for regulating land use in the coastal zone, was introduced in East Hampton in 1957, and was followed in the 1960's by local adoption of National Flood Insurance Program standards (as the Flood Hazard Overlay District), and coastal and wetland setback requirements. Some development that occurred before the advent of zoning and setbacks was, in hindsight, poorly conceived and hazardously sited. Pre-zoning setbacks were more often dictated by the excellence of a water view than potential flooding or erosion, and setbacks themselves were only gradually implemented and increased through progressive revisions of the zoning code. Under earlier laissez faire policy, coastal owners were allowed a free hand in protecting upland property, often at the expense of neighbors and of public recreational resources. To protect these resources the Town in 1984 instituted a system of Natural Resource Special Permits for coastal construction. Formulating coastal policy for the Town remains an ongoing process, of which this Local Waterfront Revitalization Program (LWRP) is the most recent addition. On a national level perceptions and policies relating to flooding and erosion have also evolved, as noted in this excerpt from the NYS Coastal Erosion Task Force Report: [Federal] Policy trends "Prior to this century, there were no pertinent federal programs, which meant individuals occupied coastal locations at their own risk. After a series of severe storms in the first half of this century, hard shoreline protections projects by the Corps of Engineers became the general response to erosion. Increasing cost of construction, a poor success rate for hard structures, and a burgeoning shoreline population during the 50's and 60's began shifting the policy from coastal "hardening" to "soft" solutions to coastal hazards such as beach nourishment.