The remnants of Hurricane Florence passed over East Hampton on Tuesday. Wind from the southwest, warm and heavy on the skin, whipped the flag above the village green. Leaves and tree limbs heaved and waved. Then came the rain, sudden and tropical, rivers running down the street to pool in low spots. 

This is the week, 80 years ago tomorrow, that the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 slammed into Long Island. The Atlantic surged over the dunes, breaking up more than 200 houses along Dune Road in Southampton Town and scattering the pieces across Shinnecock Bay. At Fort Pond Bay, the fishermen’s village built on the sand was cleared as if crumbs on a table. Then the storm moved inland, its relentless rain flooding New England and wreaking havoc.

Hurricane Florence has had much the same effect. Coastal damage from its winds and waves was substantial, but it paled in comparison to a sprawling disaster from flood waters. In the Carolinas, the Pee Dee River was expected to recede after cresting at 46.6 feet, nearly 20 feet above the flood stage. On the Waccamaw in South Carolina, the Charleston Post and Courier reported, the river was two feet higher than the level it hit during 2016’s Hurricane Matthew.

Close to 40 people have died as a direct result of the storm, including two inmates trapped in a prisoner transport van as the waters rose in Horry County, S.C. As happened after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, hundreds, if not thousands, more could lose their lives from the ancillary effects of power outages, loss of access to medical care, exertion, and lack of clean drinking water. A long-lasting threat will come from submerged farm waste and coal-ash containment lagoons, which have already begun to belch their toxic contents. Nearly all of the problems associated with Florence could have been avoided if communities had the foresight not to build in floodplains. But people in the South are no different from us in the North, who allow castles in the sand on dunes that will one day be overtopped in a giant storm once again.

The Hamptons International Film Festival opens today with late-afternoon and evening movies running at the East Hampton Regal Cinema and Guild Hall. Tomorrow, the festival really gets going, with programs beginning at around 10 a.m. in the theaters and a talk at the nearby restaurant Rowdy Hall. Movie lovers who get to East Hampton by car had better keep a sharp eye on the parking rules, however, as the two-hour and one-hour limits will remain in effect throughout the crowded Columbus Day weekend.

In festival materials, the organizers recommend that patrons park in East Hampton Village’s long-term lot off Gingerbread Lane. They have also arranged with the Hampton Jitney to provide free service to and from Montauk and Manorville for anyone with a valid festival ticket. Would that the East Hampton Village Board were as accommodating. 

Each year a number of patrons emerge from festival screenings to find pricey notices of violation on their car windshields. Parking has become something of a running joke in the village during the festival; a popular animated short screened before the movies features voices griping about the problem. With many films running for two or more hours, plus frequent question-and-answer sessions following screenings, plenty of vehicles in the village’s main lots wind up in excess of the permitted time.

That East Hampton could seem to care less is evident in the fact that a former village official, someone who had been in public life for most of the years since the festival’s founding in 1992, had not set foot in any of its talks or screenings until last year — when specifically invited. The official indifference is misplaced, if only because the long weekend brings considerable cultural infusion, which many residents and visitors eagerly look forward to each fall. And though some in the retail trade might differ, the festival brings a valuable boost to local economic activity in the form of rentals and food, while also providing long-term visibility through commercial sponsorships. Plenty of big companies, including Audi, Netflix, and Delta Airlines, know the value of the festival and are among the important underwriters.

A partial solution to the parking problem is simple. East Hampton Village should temporarily change its two-hour lots to allow vehicles to park for up to three hours. Southampton Village allows three-hour parking in some lots, and the heavens haven’t collapsed. Unfortunately, the long-term lot here is far from the action, and for those not familiar with the area, difficult to locate.

If officials are not interested in the movies, at least they should acknowledge all the festival brings to the South Fork, and lighten up about parking.

A powerful sense of community was evident on Sunday when more than 100 people gathered in the hope of saving the Springs Historical Society from dissolution. As with many organizations run by volunteers, maintaining forward motion as the heavy-lifters age, move away, or become interested in other things can be an existential challenge. So it was with the Springs Historical Society, which ran the library but had dwindled to a handful of active members, not even enough for a board of directors, as required by state regulations concerning nonprofits. This put its charter with the State Board of Regents in jeopardy and would shut down its ability to accept tax-deductible contributions.

The Springs Library is in the small, town-owned Parsons House opposite Ashawagh Hall. It opened in 1980 and since then has provided a close-by source of books and videos to borrow as well as a limited schedule of programs for residents of the town’s most-densely populated hamlet. Springs residents have borrowing privileges at the East Hampton Library, too, but the humble library close to home serves its purpose. Among its charms is an ongoing book sale during most of the year, with selections outdoors round the clock under a canopy available on the honor system. It does not have a website and it is open only about 14 hours a week, remaining closed on Thursdays and Sundays for lack of volunteers, we assume.

Coming up with the money to fund the Springs Library and keep the historical society alive has been a challenge over the years. Unlike publicly funded libraries, Springs is run by a private association. This means staff salaries are nearly out of the question, upkeep can be a stretch, and even buying books and DVDs is a challenge. With new and invigorated leadership, more members, and more public attention, in part thanks to the recent crisis, coming up with the necessary cash now appears a possibility.

The outcome of Sunday’s meeting was more than the election of a new board of directors. For every one of the hundred or so people there, you can assume there are several others who use the library from time to time. Libraries today are far more than places to check out books; they are community centers where patrons can find help preparing tax returns, take classes, attend lectures, or sit quietly and read a magazine. Students can get help with homework, work on college essays, or do crafts. Smaller children can hear a story, play with Legos, and learn to socialize with others. 

Springs residents deserve many of these things, and what better place for them than their own library?

Membership, at $15 a year, is a great bargain and helps support the library and society’s work. Checks made out to the Springs Historical Society can be mailed to P.O. Box 1860, East Hampton 11937. We encourage everyone who loves books, history, or a sense of place to sign up. It will be money well spent.

One of the most disheartening aspects of the 2018 election cycle has been a coordinated, deliberate effort to take the vote away from hundreds of thousands of United States citizens. 

Varied schemes have been the work of state and local Republicans bent on victory at all costs. Depending on where, officeholders have eagerly sought to suppress turnout, obfuscate deadlines, and outright disenfranchise fellow Americans along racial divides, mostly because they tend to vote Democratic. 

It is appalling that so many Republicans who believe themselves to be of good conscience are willing to countenance what could create lasting damage to democracy. If there is one issue that should unify the nation, it should be the right to participate in selecting leaders. This failure should be a source of shame.

The effort to suppress votes can be as obvious as limiting the number of polling places or curtailing their hours. The difference between majority white and majority black or Hispanic election districts can make the latter seem like another country. On the South Fork, voters might wait for a few minutes at most to fill out their ballots. However, in 2016, hours-long lines greeted would-be voters in Arizona, North Carolina, and Ohio, among other places, and are expected again this year.

Examples are numerous and horrifying. There have been registered-voter purges, in some cases simply because someone has sat out a couple of elections. Individual registrations in Georgia have been rejected for as little as a missing hyphen in a last name. In one county, officials ordered black senior citizens out of a bus that was to have taken them to an early voting site.

In Alabama, hundreds of thousands of people who remain eligible to vote despite a low felony conviction remain unregistered because of a welter of county-by-county policies and confusing laws. Kansas tried requiring citizenship documents of new registrants, which the American Civil Liberties Union said improperly blocked 35,0000 United States citizens from casting ballots. After a federal judge halted it, the state took another tack: shutting down polling places in minority areas. 

North Carolina has made it all but necessary for hourly workers to skip work in order to take part in early voting. It also eliminated Sunday voting, which traditionally was popular with black voters. North Dakota recently changed its law to require street addresses on the IDs it requires for voting; many Indian reservations in the state do not use street addresses, and under the law post office boxes are not considered adequate. In Tennessee, applications to register have been rejected because an applicant did not check a “Miss,” “Mrs.,” or “Mr.” box. 

No national Republican figure has denounced the strategy to keep black voters in the South or Democratic-leaning college students elsewhere from participating via absentee ballots. At every level, including at the Suffolk Board of Elections, it is shocking that officials and candidates can remain loyal to a party that has so completely collapsed on the most American of American values — the right to vote. The silence of fair-minded Republicans now is the saddest note of all.

At this point there is little to add to the reasons why Perry Gershon is the better choice for the East End in Congress than Lee Zeldin — but Mr. Gershon is better for the country as well. He has proven himself levelheaded and admirably determined. That he has driven almost 40,000 miles during his campaign in his own plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt says a lot about the kind of congressman he would be; Mr. Zeldin’s re-election campaign’s main vehicle is a gas-guzzling Suburban. 

Mr. Gershon is accessible. Mr. Zeldin holds brief public meetings in settings he finds personally comfortable. Mr. Gershon favors improving the nation’s gun laws. Mr. Zeldin wants owners of legal handguns from other states to be able to carry them concealed in New York. Mr. Gershon wants health care for all. Mr. Zeldin would take Medicaid away from millions. Mr. Gershon wants to see the Russia probe play out. Mr. Zeldin sponsored a bill to investigate the investigators. 

Mr. Zeldin has done almost nothing positive for the East End in the past three and a half years in Congress. Mr. Gershon would focus on issues important in the First District, such as Plum Island, environmental protection, and climate change. Mr. Zeldin has wasted his constituents’ time in appearances on Fox News. Mr. Gershon has spent the last two years asking for your vote. 

Mr. Zeldin, through his unconditional embrace of Donald J. Trump’s worst excesses, actively promotes the things that divide us. Mr. Gershon would work to bring us together.

Replacing Mr. Zeldin in the House of Representatives would deprive the president of one of his most eager backers. If only for that, a vote for Perry Gershon is a step toward a better future.

The first chilly days of October might seem an odd time to remind readers about a program offered by the region’s electric utility to reduce demand on the hottest days of summer, but stick with us. PSEG Long Island has been giving away programmable thermostats to residential customers with central air-conditioning through its South Fork Peak Savers incentive. When the web-connected devices are installed, they can be adjusted remotely by a few degrees, saving ratepayers money and helping reduce overall electricity consumption during periods of greatest strain on the grid.

From the utility’s perspective, every watt it does not have to buy — or make in temporary, polluting diesel-fueled “peaker” plants — is money saved. And, every watt not produced limits greenhouse gas emissions, helping all of us. And ratepayers save money, but we said that already.

Easy-to-install Nest-brand thermostats are provided to households under a few conditions. First, there must be central air-conditioning. Second, customers have to enroll in something called Rush Hour Rewards, which actually pays them for remotely changing settings by between one and three barely perceptible degrees — often when no one is home to notice the difference. 

“Smart” thermostats like the Nest can sense when a house is empty or when it is very late at night, and make energy-saving adjustments. They also can be monitored remotely and turned up or down on a smartphone app, allowing participants to override the Peak Savers program or adjust personal settings.

In addition to the free thermostat or rebate, participants get $25 a summer for sticking around.  And that’s not all, as they say on TV; smart thermostats can reduce summer cooling and winter heating bills up to 20 percent. Nest says a change of as little as a degree can cut costs by as much as 8 percent. 

Along the same lines, National Grid offers a $75 rebate to residential gas customers who purchase Nest or another brand of remotely controllable thermostats. The bottom line is that winter and summer savings could add up to a great deal of money — and have a positive effect on the environment.

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This has been updated to clarify the program terms.

A New York State grant of $9.7 million for water mains in Wainscott is good news indeed for more than 500 households. After potentially harmful chemicals were found in drinking water in the area, town and state officials, as well as the Suffolk County Water Authority, acted quickly. About eight and a half miles of underground pipe is almost half completed. 

The grant is good news, too, for East Hampton taxpayers in general. Tax-rate increases were a distinct possibility without state money. The largess from Albany came after chemicals used in firefighting foam, carpets, furniture fabric, and clothes were identified in the southern part of Wainscott.

Where things may get expensive for some property owners is running a supply line from a new water main to their houses. Between the costs of a hook-up vault and laying new pipe, perhaps by precise but expensive horizontal drilling, many homeowners could be looking at anywhere from several thousand dollars to, in one instance we know of, more than $90,000. For someone investing in a multimillion dollar house, that might seem like pocket change. For many, perhaps most, Wainscott residents that kind of money might be a difficult drink to swallow. 

Given the state grant, East Hampton Town will save what would have been more than $10 million, including interest, on the bonds it did not have to issue. Considering this windfall, the town might want to offer low or interest-free loans for hookups for property owners in the affected area. Water should not be a luxury only the rich can afford.

A week after news broke publically about a confrontation that left East Hampton Village’s female lifeguards feeling harassed and subject to a hostile workplace, the village board remains mostly silent. 

An apology would be a good place to start.

The conflict arose in June, amid a few complaints that the women lifeguards’ bathing suits were too revealing. The lifeguards believed the beach managers, to whom they reported directly, were to blame for a series of blunders, including one or more photographs taken of a lifeguard modeling the new suit.

Feeling unfairly blamed for carrying out orders from higher up, three of the four beach managers quit the day after The Star reported on a letter of complaint from several of the female lifeguards and a rebuttal from the village administrator that did not identify who was responsible for the missteps and all but entirely dismissed the lifeguards’ complaints.

Many questions remain, but the lesson for village officials is that the instant women employees say that they feel harassed and threatened, they must be taken seriously, full stop. 

It is unfortunate that the village board has not stood up to make amends, but instead ducked for cover behind bland and carefully worded statements. A simple “We’re sorry,” even now, would go a long way.

Fresh, line-caught tuna, a late-summer delight, has been coming across the Montauk docks lately. Looking through the photos on our Instagram feed lately, we have been thrilled by images from the fish markets of fat yellowfin and bigeyes lined up on ice or cut into sushi-grade slabs on stainless-steel tables. Tuna labeled “local” might be suspiciously ubiquitous on South Fork restaurant menus, but right now we can be assured of the real deal, not something flown in from a probably unsustainable fishery in the distant Pacific.

According to seafood ratings from Oceana and other environmental organizations, bigeye and yellowfin tuna from the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico are a responsible choice from an environmental perspective. These species landed elsewhere and by less-discriminating methods, such as drift longlining in the western and central Pacific, are considered poor choices. Sadly, the delicious and once abundant bluefin is a no-go on most organizations’ seafood charts.

Most seafood markets now announce the country of origin along with the price per pound, and with good reason. In most cases, local is always better. And at this time of year, for the grill or eaten raw, you can’t get more local than a Montauk tuna.

Democratic voters and members of minor parties across New York State will have a chance to make choices next Thursday in primaries for offices from town hall to the governor’s mansion. In East Hampton, the main event — between Councilman David Lys and David Gruber — is for the right to appear on the Democratic Party line in November’s general election.

Mr. Lys joined the East Hampton Town Board in January when he was appointed to fill Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc’s seat. Before that, he spent five years on the town’s zoning board of appeals and helped lead the restoration of the Amagansett Life-Saving Station.

Mr. Gruber ran for East Hampton Town supervisor and lost in 2002. Until recently, his predominant local interest has been lessening East Hampton Airport noise. His candidacy is legitimate even though he has failed to publically rein in his most enthusiastic and occasionally perfidious supporters, who, among other things, falsely claimed that Mr. Lys, a registered Republican, voted for Donald Trump in the last election. (Mr. Lys wrote in his father’s name.) 

The strident opposition to Mr. Lys defies easy understanding, but Mr. Gruber’s willingness to tolerate abject nastiness and falsehoods about him is a big negative. Even if Mr. Lys were to the right of Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House strategist, his single vote on a five-person town board would hardly change its direction. We can think of two possibilities: Either the Reform Democrats fear that Mr. Lys might go on to become town supervisor some day, and then unleash a sleeper cell of Republicans, or they have signed on to Mr. Gruber’s attempt to gain a position of authority, something that has long eluded his grasp. 

By the same calculus, Mr. Gruber would pose little threat should he win the Democratic primary next week and go on to defeat Manny Vilar, the undisputed Republican nominee. Though Mr. Gruber has built his political presence in East Hampton on closing, or strictly curtailing flights at, the town airport, his would likely be a single vote to do so. Given Mr. Vilar’s poor showing when he ran for town supervisor last year, as well as the Democratic registration and turnout edge, it is safe to say that either Mr. Lys or Mr. Gruber would be the winner on Nov. 6.

Because next Thursday’s primary will almost certainly decide who is the November victor, voter participation is critical. Those who prefer Mr. Lys’s role as a community leader to Mr. Gruber’s more behind-the-scenes approach will want to have their say. On the other hand, voters impressed by Mr. Gruber’s many years as a Town Hall observer and airport-noise activist will need to turn out en masse to award him the Democratic ballot line in November. 

It is often not how individuals vote that wins elections but who gets off the couch to go to the polls. Whatever your position on the candidates, a primary is a direct opportunity to influence government in a way that really matters.