Irene Spares East End Her Greatest Fury

Thousands of South Fork residents, including some 6,000 households in Southampton Town, remained without power midway through this week as electrical and cleanup crews worked around the clock in the wake of Hurricane Irene, which passed though the Long Island region on Sunday.

The massive storm, 450 miles across and once a Category 3 hurricane, was downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm strength just before its center of circulation made landfall near New York City at 9 a.m. on Sunday. Irene buffeted the South Fork with extended periods of sustained winds of 30 to 40 mph and gusts in excess of 60 mph, bringing down trees and power lines and scouring away local beaches and dunes.

No significant injuries or deaths were reported in either East Hampton or Southampton towns, and damage to property appears to have been relatively minimal. Nonetheless, the costs of cleanup and repairs to infrastructure are likely to run into the millions of dollars, local officials said. Most added they felt the area had gotten off lightly, since the storm weakened significantly in the hours before it hit Long Island, and because the heaviest rains largely missed the East End. They also credited the extensive preparations, and the fact that residents heeded warnings and evacuations, for the lack of injuries.

“I think we were extremely well-prepared, and that manifested itself throughout the storm,” Southampton Town Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst said on Wednesday. “We a owe a great thanks to our emergency coordinators. We had everything in place.”

Ms. Throne-Holst said the two hiccups in the wake of the storm were the understaffing of the town’s only designated Red Cross shelter at Hampton Bays High School, and the response to the widespread power outages. “Had this been a bigger event, we would have been in trouble” because of the lack of staffing assigned by the Red Cross to the Hampton Bays shelter, she said. “Lars Clemensen, Larry Luce and everyone at the school really saved it—they came in with their families and their kids and set it all up.”

The East End received only a faint hint of the fury Hurricane Irene had once packed. Sustained winds on the South Fork likely never exceeded 40 mph, according to National Weather Service observations.

In Bridgehampton, Richard Hendrickson, a National Weather Service weather observer, recorded a 65-mph gust and 1.3 inches of rain. The weather station at Montauk Airport recorded just 1.2 inches of rain—areas to the west of New York City saw between 10 and 12 inches over a 20-hour period, beginning Saturday night—and a peak wind gust of 49 mph.

The strongest gust recorded in Suffolk County, 71 mph, came from a weather station in East Moriches. The highest gust recorded in the New York region was 79 mph at LaGuardia Airport, which also registered the highest sustained winds in the region, 62 mph.

The strongest winds on the South Fork, and much of the damage to power lines, came after the center of the storm had passed to the north and skies had begun to clear.

“You saw the winds actually tick up a notch out there on the backside of the storm,” National Weather Service meteorologist David Stark said on Monday. “It was a large area of circulation, the winds started many hours before the storm, but you never quite got to tropical storm force [on the East End]. It hit land in New Jersey, so that weakened it, and the cold water weakened it. The farther west you went, the stronger the winds were.”

Despite having been spared the brunt of the storm’s fury, the South Fork suffered widespread power outages. Immediately after the storm, LIPA reported more than 18,000 households were without power in Southampton Town and nearly 7,000 in East Hampton Town. By Wednesday evening, the majority of those households had their power restored.

Ms. Throne-Holst said there was some frustration with the speed at which LIPA got repairs under way, spending Sunday afternoon and much of Monday making assessments of the damage to its lines in the region.

“We were frustrated on Monday, when there was seemingly no sign of LIPA, but they assured us that there were here and they were assessing, and they finally set to work Monday,” she said. “They’ve chipped away at the majority of the outages, but there is still a good-sized group to go.”

Dozens of electrical crews contracted by the Long Island Power Authority, some from as far away as Oklahoma, were stationed at the East Hampton Airport on Saturday. Crews have been working around the clock since Monday, though LIPA is still estimating that it could be until Friday or later before all local customers have their power restored. On Tuesday, New York Senator Charles Schumer called on the Federal Emergency Management Agency to muster more crews to aid in the restoration of power to Long Islanders.

Islandwide, more than 450,000 homes lost power, the most outages experienced since Hurricane Gloria hit the island in 1985. The last time sustained hurricane-force winds were felt on the South Fork was when Hurricane Bob, a Category 2 storm, passed to the east of Montauk in August 1991.

Residents were not the only one affected by the power outages: The Southampton Town Justice Court remained closed on Monday and part of Tuesday because of a lack of power. Southampton Hospital lost electricity at approximately 11:30 a.m. on Sunday and switched to generator power. The hospital borrowed a second generator from Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead as a backup to its own power source until LIPA restored power at about midnight on Sunday.

The supervisor said that throughout the system, preparations and dedication meant smooth responses and a healthy safety blanket, but that with bigger hits sure to come—another tropical system, Katia, is already moving along a similar track as Irene and is expected to become a hurricane on Thursday—there are lessons to be learned.

“Truth be told, we were spared the worst of it,” Ms. Throne-Holst said. “We are satisfied with our response effort this time, but we’re well aware of the fact that it could have been far worse, and we need to continue to improve our systems as we move forward.”

Residents throughout town were cleaning up their properties early this week and voicing thanks that the storm was not worse.

“It looks like we lucked out, it looks like everybody else got it a lot worse,” said Susan Jurkowich in Hampton Bays on Monday. “We’re on the water but we didn’t evacuate. Our dock was under, our neighbor’s dock floated by us.”

“This one was much better than Gloria or Bob,” said Elizabeth Shane of Remsenburg. “A tree went down across the street. Our house is fine.”

In East Quogue, Reginald Kennedy said he refused to evacuate even though the fire department urged him to do so on Saturday. Mr. Kennedy said a 100-year-old oak tree went down in his yard, and he lost power and telephone about 2 a.m. on Sunday morning. “I’ve been living here for 39 years—I’ve been through a lot of storms,” he said. “This one was the worst.”

Joyce and Henry Flohr had a near-miss when the largest tree on their property in East Hampton came down at the height of the storm. The giant oak fell away from their house. “If it had fallen the other way it would have crushed us,” Mr. Flohr said on Sunday evening. “We’re lucky.”

Oceanfront homeowners, generally free from the hazards of falling trees, were also lucky in that Irene’s nearly 6-foot storm surge, even though it coincided almost exactly with high tide along the ocean shore, did not push the storm’s towering waves far enough ashore to do significant damage. U.S. Representative Tim Bishop surveyed the damage on the beachfront on Monday by air with officials from the Federal Emergency Management Area and said the shoreline appeared to largely absorb the storm’s punches.

“It seemed that there was more flooding of the inner shore, along the north side of Shinnecock Bay, near Little Neck Road and Far Pond,” Mr. Bishop said in a phone interview Monday. “There’s no question that there’s damage to the beach, but it wasn’t particularly significant. I think it speaks to the wisdom of the beach nourishment projects we’ve done.”

Mr. Bishop said in an official statement that he was going to be pushing for federal dollars to help with the cleanup and recovery efforts from the storm. “As we move into the assessment and recovery phase, I want to make sure that we are aggressively cataloging storm damage and that all possible aid is brought back to Suffolk County,” he said.

President Barack Obama declared New York a disaster area, making potentially tens of millions of dollars available to the state to help with costs incurred as a result of the storm.

Southampton Town highway crews—all 52 employees—were on the road to start with cleanup by lunchtime on Sunday afternoon and have been working largely around the clock ever since.

Ms. Throne-Holst said the town has not had a chance to begin tallying the costs of the cleanup but said she was hopeful that the federal disaster area designation would make funding available to ease the financial crunch of the cleanup. “To what extent that reimbursement comes, we’ll have to see,” she said. “This is a whammy to our budget that we can ill afford right now.”

Town Highway Superintendent Alex Gregor said that the town will be picking up debris from residents’ homes for free if it is piled on roadsides, similar to the way leaves have traditionally been picked up in the fall. Residents should separate their debris into two piles—one with branches no more than 3 inches in diameter, and one with large branches—to ease the collection work for town crews.

Ms. Throne-Holst said the Highway Department will be helping elderly and infirm residents with the cleanups of their own yards next week also.

Mr. Gregor said that even after a relatively minor storm event, compared to hurricanes past, there is an enormous amount of debris left strewn around the town.

“It’s frustrating,” he said. “It’s how it used to be in the old days. Mother Nature wins. We just tend to pick up the pieces. It’s nice to know in this technological age, Mother Nature still calls the shots.”

Various staff members contributed reporting to this story.