Army Corps Will Rebuild Montauk Dune Again, Then Turn Responsibility Over To The Town

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has agreed to rebuild the artificial dune covering Montauk’s infamous sandbag revetment and release East Hampton Town and Suffolk County from some of the original obligations for maintaining the sand-covered sea wall going forward.

Town officials said on Tuesday that the Army Corps has said it will send contractors to Montauk for a second time later this month to replace thousands of tons of sand eroded from atop the 13,000 sandbags buried in the beachhead along Montauk’s downtown. They will also replace clumps of beachgrass and fencing intended to help hold the sand in place and, eventually, help the sand berm function as an artificial dune.

The work will essentially replicate work done by the Army Corps contractors in the late fall—at a cost of more than $700,000 to the federal agency—and almost entirely washed away within a matter of a couple of weeks.

Once the work is completed, the Army Corps will hand ownership and responsibility for its maintenance over to the town. But as part of the agreement reached between the Army Corps and the State Department of Environmental Conservation last month, the town will not be responsible for maintaining beachgrass or the 50-foot-wide beachhead seaward of the artificial dune section, as the original plans had demanded.

The project had been completed almost a year ago and was ready to be turned over to the town and county, but some scattered issues with access ramps had delayed the transfer—and when Hurricane Hermine swept past the East End on Labor Day weekend, causing severe erosion, the project remained the Army Corps’s responsibility.

Town officials said they hoped the federal agency would just wait until the following spring to make repairs to the project, but the Army Corps sent contractors out to make slapdash repairs just as the winter storm season got started. Within two weeks of the contractors pulling out, a severe nor’easter wiped away most of what they had done.

According to plans the corps sent to the town, the repairs to the project appear to have cost some $730,000.

Town officials said they expect the project to suffer similar erosion on a regular basis, and the sticker price for the repairs is of concern, since the forecast for annual repair costs was just $150,000 when the town approved the $9 million stop-gap project in 2014.

Being freed from the labor-intensive replanting of beachgrass atop the dune covering if it is washed away will help keep costs down, said Alex Walter, assistant to the supervisor.

“They want to turn this over to us in the worst way, so they kind of gave in on whether we’d have to maintain the berm and the beachgrass,” Mr. Walter said. “The [beachhead] replacement will be dropped, so the town won’t be responsible for maintaining that in the future, and there will be no requirement for us to maintain the beachgrass if it disappears, which it seems like it will, eventually.”

Additionally, the town will be allowed to remove the protective sand fencing from on top of the dune in the winter so that storms don’t wash it away and leave it splintered and scattered across the beaches.