But it is the eternal return of old concerns that really concerns. Barrier beaches were made to move: Follow the littoral drift and also move toward mainlands.
David Sammis used to sit and hold court at his old Surf Hotel. "If you were here 100 years ago, you would be in water," he used to say. And he would point out to guests that at that time "Fire Island is not an island."
Within memory since European settlement, Fire Island has been a peninsula; has been multiple islands, and has had at various times five or more inlets or "guts" (Dutch for "cuts" on the old maps).
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| Aerial view of the breach at Old Inlet, 1½ miles west of the Wilderness Visitor Center, as seen from the Atlantic Ocean to the bay on November 2, 2012. NPS Photo/Dunphy Thanx to Justin |
Sand carried west from Saltaire will someday end up on Breezy Point. (Ever notice how wide the beach at Breezy is?)
And the island also wants to move toward the mainland, as barrier beaches do. In Sandy, nature was plowing sand north from the old beach and dunes to strengthen the island by building up new dunes farther north. Been going on for thousands of years. Moving it back to where the old beach used to be http://www.saltaire.org/stormpics.htm is fighting nature.
Damage on Fire Island Renews Old Worries
![[image]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NY-BZ723_EROSIO_G_20121106173228.jpg)
Jennifer Smith/The Wall Street Journal
The storm destroyed seven oceanside homes in Davis Park in Fire Island.
On Fire Island, Sandy caused as much erosion in the course of a single storm as the island has seen over the past 30 years.
Fierce wind and water carved two new inlets through the narrow barrier beach, the lone bulwark between the open ocean and Suffolk County on Long Island's densely populated South Shore. Dunes moved on average 70 feet landward, and lost as much as 10 feet in height. Up to 80% of the oceanfront homes on Fire Island sustained damage. Some were reduced to matchsticks.
"I have never seen anything like this in my entire time on Fire Island," said Steve Jaffe, 43 years old, president of the Ocean Bay Park property owners' association and a lifelong summer resident. "All the dunes are absolutely flattened, and there is three feet of sand in everyone's backyard."
As a nor'easter has been heading toward the tri-state region this week, homeowners on Fire Island have had few options to protect their property. Access to to the island is sharply restricted, and even residents who can get there to pile up the sandbags must bring their own sand.
Officials are concerned that ocean water rushing through the Fire Island breaches will worsen flooding in the low-lying communities across the bay. They hope to plug one, though that operation is expected to take 10 to 20 days.
Restoring the beaches is expected to take months and cost millions of dollars—money that could wash out to sea the next time a big one hits.
"At some point we're going to have to assess whether it's economically viable to maintain our coasts in the places where they are," said Cheryl Hapke, a coastal geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Coastlines naturally shift in response to weather. Barrier islands are particularly prone to movement, rolling over toward land as they have for thousands of years in response to storms. Scientists say erosion is a survival strategy for those areas—one at odds with development that inevitably exposes buildings and roads to the force of storms as beaches narrow over time and dunes blow inland.
Since the 1920s, more than $1.7 billion in public money has been spent to rebuild eroding mid-Atlantic and New England beaches, according to a database compiled by researchers at Western Carolina University. The money—split between federal, state and local governments—pays to pump sand onto narrowing beaches and build artificial dunes.
Sandy undid much of that work as it pounded more than 500 miles of coastline.
On Fire Island, homeowners have banded together to form a local erosion taxing district to help pay for projects. In 2009, "we put $21 million worth of sand on our beaches," said Suzy Goldhirsch, a Manhattan resident who has a home in Seaview and is president of the Fire Island Association, another property-owners' group. "We lost some of the sand, but it did the job."
Ms. Goldhirsch said homeowners only sought assistance from FEMA at times when there is a disaster declaration for the entire county, and other communities on Long Island are being reimbursed.
Some scientists and coastal administrators say beach replenishment is a costly short-term solution that can't stop coastal processes affecting barrier islands for thousands of years.
"This is how the system works—it [the sand] comes, and it goes," said Margaret Davidson, acting director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coastal Services Center in Charleston, S.C. "It's only when we plop expensive property on it and it can't come and go as it wants that it becomes a problem."
But coastal communities from Long Island to Florida that depend on summer tourists have embraced the projects. On Fire Island, residents hope to use sand dredged from Fire Island Inlet to help rebuild their beaches and dunes.
"Looking back, maybe they all should have been summer recreational areas where we take barges in for the day and leave at night," said John Lund, who has been coming to Fire Island since 1949 and owns a home in Davis Park, where several homes washed out to sea. "But unfortunately people invested money, the state has built roads and bridges."
Mr. Lund visited Fire Island last week to assess the damage, which he called "shocking." Some residents and officials say this is the worst hit since the 1938 hurricane known as the Long Island Express.
"This is the first time I have ever seen whole sections of dune from east to west disappear," Mr. Lund said. "It's devastating."
The latest storm isn't expected to cause as much damage, but local officials are particularly worried about how the breaches could affect flooding in communities on shore, such as the Mastic peninsula.
Closing the breach on Fire Island at Smith Point County Park in Shirley will take about 50,000 cubic yards of sand—enough to fill 5,000 dump trucks, according to Bill Hillman, chief engineer for the Suffolk County Public Works Department.
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