“It’s not a glamorous job,” Savannah Van Der Walt observed one day last week as the East Hampton Town Trustee pumpout boat she was piloting glided toward a dense array of houseboats at Snug Harbor Marina on Lake Montauk. “But you see the thousands of gallons that we pump every week. If people dumped it here, we would have a disgusting mess."

Tinder-dry conditions and spiking temperatures were only two of the challenges firefighters faced as they worked to extinguish a brushfire that burned some 20 to 25 acres of grasslands in Hither Hills State Park on Friday night and then rekindled on Saturday. Equally challenging was the fire’s difficult-to-reach location between Goff Point and the Walking Dunes, more than a mile from any paved road.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Suffolk County had documented 16 cases of monkeypox in total, the second-highest case count in the state outside of New York City. Across the United States there have been just shy of 3,500 cases, including about 1,000 in New York, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Dr. Gregson Pigott, Suffolk County’s health commissioner, said that even though Suffolk’s case count is relatively low, those numbers are expected to increase and the department is watching them with concern.

Following her residency, Dr. Gail Schonfeld was hired to work on the East End because there was no pediatric practice in the community. Then: “The community grew, so the practice grew itself," she said. That was 40 years ago, and East End Pediatrics is still going strong.