Dredging To Begin In Three Mile Harbor And Montauk Inlets

Dredging crews will begin setting up equipment in the inlets to Three Mile Harbor and Montauk Harbor this week, ahead of maintenance dredging projects due to start next week.

Both inlets are scheduled to be cleared of more than 60 tons of sand, which will be pumped through pipes across their respective jetties and onto adjacent beaches.

The same company, the Bay Shore-based firm H&L Contracting, is performing the dredging for both inlets, under separate contracts with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Suffolk County. The Montauk project will be done first, starting on Monday and moving to Three Mile Harbor in mid-October. Both projects are expected to take about two weeks.

Both projects are meant to address chronic shoaling in the channels between the jetties leading into the two busy harbors.

Three Mile Harbor was last dredged in 2011, when more than 100,000 tons of sand was removed from the inlet and placed along the beachhead of Sammy’s Beach.

The material removed from Three Mile Harbor inlet will be pumped onto the shoreline of Sammy’s Beach, west of the inlet. The sand will be stockpiled along the waterfront and then bulldozed into place to form a “wider, flatter beach” according to East Hampton Town Natural Resources Director Kim Shaw—unlike the “dike and weir” system that relies on large excavation and was used in 1999—leading to outcry over the destruction of natural dunes.

The material removed from Montauk Inlet will be deposited on the beach immediately west of the inlet, in front of the municipal parking lot and along West Lake Drive. In June, Army Corps contractors buried 1,000 tons of boulders across the front of the parking lot and roadway, which had been damaged during Superstorm Sandy.

But the 45,000 cubic yards—about 67,000 tons worth—will be a drop in the bucket of what the Army Corps has said is needed to repair the whole of the north-facing shoreline west of the inlet. The town rejected an Army Corps plan to reconstruct the entire shoreline, because it called for the construction of three new groins, and said a sand-only plan was too costly. But in July a jury found the town liable for erosion along the shoreline, potentially putting the town on the hook for the cost of rebuilding the beach anyway.

Both dredging projects have to wait until October 1 to begin, because of prohibitions on dredging when young threatened or endangered shorebirds may still be in the area. Both projects are expected to take about two weeks to complete, and both inlets will remain passable to boat traffic throughout.