A nor’easter that as late as Sept. 23 was expected to largely miss Long Island instead spun up the coast, veered west, and impacted the East End last weekend with inches of rain and wind gusts that reached over 80 mile per hour, downing trees, pushing boats aground, flooding low-lying areas, and leaving 450 residents without power by Monday.
Joe Gaviola, the keeper of the Montauk Lighthouse, described the storm as “wicked” and said wind gusts peaked at 81 miles per hour on both Friday and Saturday nights. For seven hours on Saturday he recorded gusts of over 70 miles per hour.
“This storm was absolutely unique,” he wrote in a text. “We had five days of nor’east winds before the nor’easter even arrived. By then, beaches and dunes were already exposed. I don’t remember having 30 to 50-mile-per-hour winds for five days before a nor’easter.”
Nor’easters generally are common from November through March, so last weekend’s was also early.
“The storm was another harbinger of climate change,” said East Hampton Town Councilman David Lys. “A September nor’easter that went through nearly three and a half high-tide cycles, I don’t know if we can ever say that’s happened before.”
Flooding on the bay side of the town was heavy. Napeague Meadow Road was closed during high tides, as was part of Louse Point Road, and houses close to the shore along Gardiner’s Bay saw stairs, dunes, revetments, and sandbags battered.
“Gerard Drive took a beating,” Mr. Lys said.
Indeed, police reported a water main leak from a pipe exposed by the storm just south of the culvert there, which was blocked with sand long before the storm.
“I call it Paradise Peninsula or Horror Point,” said Michael Hastalis, who moved to Gerard Drive in 1975 when he was a caretaker for a house owned at the time by Long Island Oyster Farms. He bought the house in 1984 and still lives there with his wife, Sheryl.
“This storm wasn’t as bad as Sandy,” he said in a phone call yesterday. “Besides Sandy, the worst storm was a midwinter storm in the 1980s. Ice formed all the way from Gerard to Gardiner’s Bay. A high tide picked it up, pushed it over the dunes, and the ice blew the walls out in my shop. It was outrageous.”
“The duration of this storm was a problem though,” he said. “It was all howling winds and the wetlands filled up so the road couldn’t drain. We had to park down the road where it doesn’t flood and walk back to the house through the preserve and beach. The Highway Department refuses to level off the road in front of our house. It’s a low spot. Sometime in the future someone will be stuck out here and they’ll be sued. It’s going to happen.”
“I looked over Gerard Drive as far as I could get,” said Francis Bock, clerk of the East Hampton Town Trustees, “but I couldn’t get all the way to the end because I’m not driving through salt water. And Louse Point. It’s been a while since I’ve seen these beaches that bad. I checked out the oceanside, that was better than I expected. Definitely the bayside got the worst of it.”
“The beach that they did all that incredible work on, like we’ve never had in my life, is two-thirds gone, which is not a surprise,” said John Gosman of Gosman’s Dock. “An extended nor’easter like this during that much storm surge and pushing, I’m surprised as much is left as there is, but at least two-thirds is gone.”
The only time he has ever seen the water higher at Gosman’s Dock was during Superstorm Sandy, he said. “Water was coming in the sluiceway in the lobster house, like in the building.”
Police, harbormasters, and the Highway Department in Sag Harbor were in overdrive when the storm hit, with calls flooding in to dispatch about downed wires, large branches, and rogue boats.
Northeast winds coursed over Cedar Point and treated huge boats as playthings.
Midmorning Saturday, the harbormaster received a spate of calls reporting sunken boats and vessels adrift after being ripped away from their moorings and dock spaces.
The cleats pulled out of the boat Que Pasa and it drifted east of Havens Beach. Zip, a moored sailboat, broke free and slammed into two boats docked in the Waterfront Marina. The 90-foot sailboat Falcon was beached in front of a house on Terry Drive. One boater surmised that its mast sail had been improperly secured to the boom.
Despite tugboat attempts to dislodge Falcon on Sunday afternoon, it remained stuck as of Tuesday morning.
Meanwhile, across the bay, just west of the North Haven mooring field, the boat Aisling Marie washed up on the shore.
Sag Harbor police launched a storm response detail on Saturday just after midnight. Calls starting coming in as early as 3:30 a.m. with trees and wires down on Suffolk Street.
Things in the village seemed to hit a fever pitch just before 7 a.m. when police responded to a handful of calls about downed trees on Franklin Avenue and Bay Street and then wires arcing in the Redwood neighborhood.
A fire truck hit a police car on Redwood Road. The car had been parked outside the scene of another emergency call when a fire truck dinged the front driver’s side bumper. No one was injured.
Sag Harbor police logged 17 calls about fallen tree limbs and multiple calls to report flooding on Bay Street, where the road looked like a river. More arcing wires created smoke and fire.
A falling tree limb broke the window glass at the Variety Store on Main Street.
Michael Cohen, the supervisor of the Sag Harbor Village Department of Public Works, spent the day coordinating his team’s response to blocked roadways and dangerous trees.
In East Hampton Town, police said they has 228 calls for service during the storm, 78 of those for downed wires, downed poles, trees or tree limbs, and another 11 for transformers, smoke or fire, or other electrical issues, with one water main leak, East Hampton Town Police Chief Michael Sarlo said on Monday.
Police were fully prepared for the storm, the chief said, but in a few cases brought in additional officers for a few hours at a time.
“Traffic control officers and Marine Patrol handled quite a bit of the load,” he said.
“We had significant flooding and tidal surge in areas such as Gerard Drive, Maidstone Park, and Navy Road, while ocean beaches sustained a battering,” he said. “Water was breaching the parking lots, however Marine Patrol officers reported dunes holding up fairly well, considering the duration of this storm and the number of high tide cycles it encompassed. Docks were for the most part submerged, with high tides cresting an inch or more above them, breaching parking lots and completely washing out launching ramps. There was ample time to prepare for this event, so most boats were either pulled out of the water or safely secured.”
One boat in Hand’s Creek was reported to have broken free of its mooring on Friday and was found on the shore near the launching ramp. Another was found on Saturday, having landed on the beach at Boys and Girls Harbor.
In Montauk, the Culloden Shores Beach Association reported on social media that “the damage to our beach was significant.” A recently rebuilt dune was “greatly impacted, and “our stairs and boardwalk were severely compromised.” The community access to the beach there had to be closed, the group said.
East Hampton Village police officers reported dragging downed tree limbs out of roadways at 4 a.m. and the village Department of Public Works was out working just as early to keep streets clear.
Things were better along the south shore of the town.
“There wasn’t a lot of removal of sand from our beaches, they’re looking pretty good right now,” said Councilman Lys. “There was a lot of healing of the beaches this summer because there were not a lot of storms.”
For example, the dune at Ditch Plain held up pretty well. “The far east and west sides slumped off a bit,” said Mr. Lys, “but the middle didn’t get touched.”
He also noted that recent drainage projects, including at the intersection of Stephen Hand’s Path and Route 114, “worked really well.” Indeed, on Monday morning there was no standing water at that intersection, but the roadside reservoirs were full.
“We did shoreline assessments with drones ahead of the storm and we’ll do the same now post-storm to see how the shoreline morphed,” he said. “That will also help us know that if people did lose any property, staircases, for example, they’ll be replaced in kind.”
“We had a lot of trees down,” he continued, including one that fell on the Dodge-Parsons homestead. Payloaders were out clearing roads Monday, focusing on priority areas. “Over all, we had relatively minor emergency situations. We’ll continue to work on cleaning up in the coming days and weeks.”
