The nor’easter that struck East Hampton Town last month caused significant shoaling at the entrance to Three Mile Harbor and damaged the rock jetty on its eastern side, the town trustees were told on Monday.
“We need to remove that shoal,” Peter Mendelman, president of Seacoast Enterprises Associates, which owns and operates marinas in Three Mile Harbor, told the trustees. “The bay side of the town got pummeled” over four days of severe northeast winds, he said. “The rock jetty at Sag Harbor was completely underwater. Devon got pummeled. Lion Head/Clearwater, Hog Creek has major shoaling across the inlet.”
On Sunday, a boat approached a Seacoast marina after running through shallow water and “almost sank due to damage to its outdrives,” Mr. Mendelman said. One week after the storm, a sailboat with a draft of around five and a half feet “went out and ran hard aground, because that shoal extends all the way into the channel.”
Displaying aerial photography, he illustrated the degree of shoaling on the eastern side of the channel. After the storm, he said, Tim Treadwell, the chief harbormaster, and Marine Patrol officials took soundings and soon after moved a navigation buoy to the west. A few days after the nor’easter, Mr. Mendelman said, he was able to walk almost 20 percent of the width across the channel, where the water “used to be over your head along there.”
“The issue is, that really narrows the channel quite a bit,” he said, and “we don’t have enough buoys to protect that shoal. The answer is, we need to remove that shoal. And on the northern side we need to remove the shoaling that’s taking place there . . . the sand is just coming around that jumble of rocks on the north side of the jetty.”
He noted that The Star reported in 1931 that “the town paid $500,000 to build a 600-foot rock jetty. That rock jetty had no maintenance until 2018, because a few years before 2018, I started getting concerned about shoaling and I said, ‘Look, we have to build up the jetty . . . put smaller rocks to fill the gaps.’ I encouraged the town to do some maintenance, and [then-Supervisor] Peter Van Scoyoc worked to get some maintenance done in 2018.”
Significant gaps have emerged in the jetty since then, Mr. Mendelman said, “but even more so, the water’s just washing around that northern front end and actually over the jetty” during the nor’easter, pushing windblown and waterborne sand through the gaps “and creating what’s effectively significant shoaling over 35 to almost 40 percent of the normal width of the channel. Everybody who’s coming in and out knows you’ve got to go to the west.”
Noting that East Hampton Middle School students had just detailed for the trustees their experiences seeding Three Mile Harbor with oysters and clams, Mr. Mendelman said the harbor is an important resource used by commercial and recreational boaters alike. “The rock jetty, as a town, we have to rebuild. The problem with the shoaling is, very quickly that’s going to go into the deeper part of the channel if we don’t get a long-reach excavator to pull it back on an emergency basis.”
He estimated that 80 percent of the shoal could be reached by an excavator, and “if you can get it back on the other side of the rock jetty with an emergency permit, you will have much, much less issues in the next two years, because it’s going to take some time to mobilize the Suffolk County dredge to come out here and properly dredge the channel.”
“We have to get the county involved with this,” said Bill Taylor of the trustees.
Mark Abramson, an assistant environmental protection director in the town’s Natural Resources Department who participated in the meeting remotely, said that, “we’ve been speaking to the county, so they’re aware.”
The west jetty also needs repair, Mr. Mendelman said. “I’ve been advocating for over a decade that it be raised 18 inches,” he said, adding that it was “completely underwater” during the nor’easter. “When the wind blows, turns around to the northwest, you have two to three-foot seas coming straight down the channel, banging against the commercial dock, banging all the boats.”
The west jetty is the subject of a town capital project, John Aldred of the trustees said.
Mr. Mendelman told the trustees that he is on the board of the New York Marine Trades Association, which held an annual meeting shortly after the nor’easter. “There was disappointment that there wasn’t an emergency declaration yet,” he said, “but there was some thought . . . that there might be state funds available if the towns collectively get together and start talking to the state.”
On Tuesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul requested a Major Disaster Declaration from the federal government to support recovery efforts of impacted communities. The declaration, if granted, would provide recovery money for Suffolk and Nassau Counties.
“This is going to probably wind up being an emergency project,” Mr. Taylor said.
“We’ve gotten an emergency dredging permit in the past for Fresh Pond,” said a colleague, John Aldred, “and it really wasn’t very difficult to get at all.”
Mr. Abramson told the trustees and Mr. Mendelman that he is working to organize a meeting of trustees and town board and planning board representatives, and Mr. Treadwell.
