The East Hampton Town Trustees voted unanimously on Monday to allocate $89,100 for a 2026 water quality monitoring program as proposed by Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and the New York State Center for Clean Water Technology.
Dr. Gobler, who has been monitoring water quality for the trustees for more than a decade, delivered a largely bleak State of the Bays report at the Stony Brook Southampton campus last month, offering a wealth of data on nitrogen concentrations, harmful algal blooms, and fast-increasing water temperatures due to climate change.
On Monday, John Aldred of the trustees described a range of water quality data to be gathered, including basic parameters such as temperature and salinity, measurements of chlorophyll A, dissolved oxygen, fecal coliform and enterococcus bacteria, and harmful algal blooms, among them Alexandrium, which causes paralytic shellfish poisoning, and other problematic dinoflagellates and single-cell algae.
Nitrogen levels will be measured in marine waters and compared with the Peconic Estuary Program’s goal of 0.4 milligrams per liter for the ecosystem as a whole.
Dr. Gobler proposed spatial water quality mapping to be conducted in Napeague Harbor and Wainscott Pond this year, as the trustees continue to consider remediation measures. Continuous water quality monitoring will be carried out in Three Mile Harbor.
“We’ll be doing some microbial source tracking this year for identification of bacteria related to various sources: human, bird, small mammal, things like that,” Mr. Aldred said, “but this year we’ll be looking at that in Napeague Harbor and Accabonac Harbor.”
Last year, Dr. Gobler presented a look at the 10-year trend in East Hampton waters, Mr. Aldred said, and “this year he’s got a project with the Peconic Estuary Program to do a similar look at the estuary using various data sources that have collected water quality data in the past estuarywide.” The trustees asked if he could “compare what he’s seeing in the estuary trend-wise with what he’s seeing in East Hampton waters trend-wise,” also a first in his work with the trustees.
Much of Dr. Gobler’s report at the symposium last month was overshadowed by social media attention paid to the Vibrio vulnificus bacterium, which he had previously described as deadly to 20 percent of those infected within 48 hours. While it can cause necrotizing fasciitis, a severe infection in which the flesh around an open wound dies rapidly, it is also very rare here, having killed three people who swam in or had exposure to Long Island Sound in 2023 but none since.
Nonetheless, “we’re doing some Vibrio monitoring this year, which we haven’t done before,” Mr. Aldred said at Monday’s meeting.
All nine trustees voted in favor of the $89,100 expenditure for this year’s water quality proposal.
