In North Sea, An Endless War For The Shore

When Brian Gallagher bought two small beach cottages in North Sea in 1984 he could stroll off their back porches along a broad sandy beach.

More or less since that day, he has been wrestling with the tentacles of Mother Nature and environmental bureaucracy to get that beach back.

A box filled with blue file folders of surveys, newspaper clippings, and envelopes stuffed with photographs traces three decades of fitful satisfaction and ever-looming frustration as the sand in front of his house vanishes beneath the waves, is replaced intermittently, and quickly vanishes again.

At times, Mr. Gallagher’s house on East Beach Road has had more than 100 feet of beach between it and the lapping waves of the bay. Today, at high tide, a couple of determined strides would find you ankle deep. When stiff north winds blow, waves crash against the deck of the house next door.

“It’s a never-ending battle,” he said while standing on his deck recently. “There are things they should never have let be done and … now, when they want to do something that would help, they say no.”

Mr. Gallagher’s neighborhood is a poster child for poor planning of coastal development and private property rights run amok. The narrow peninsula, developed with small beach shacks since the 1950s, is now choked with houses, a few surviving only through Herculean feats of engineering and fortification.

The same year Mr. Gallagher bought his house, a neighbor two doors down was granted permission to expand a bulkhead into a rambling seawall that hardened the entire tip of the peninsula at the inlet’s mouth. A property next door, which was created decades earlier from dredge spoils, also survives only by virtue of a stone revetment.

The bulkhead was certainly a needed fortification to stanch erosion that would have eventually threatened the ill-conceived building lots. But the hardening also accelerated erosion along a several-thousand-foot stretch of shoreline to its southwest. Quickly, the sandy beach in front of Mr. Gallagher’s and several other houses faded away to only a ribbon.

The destruction, however, was easily salved. On the opposite side of the peninsula, the channel to Wooley Pond is steadily filled in by sand carried by natural currents along the Roses Grove shoreline. Suffolk County maintains the inlet for boaters using marinas and docks in the tidal pond and has, for decades, deposited the sand on the shore directly in front of Mr. Gallagher’s and his neighbors’ properties.

After one such dredging effort, in 1993, the beach stretched more than 150 feet. Within three years it was gone.

And the dredging of the channel has become less frequent, partly because changing conditions have not filled in the channel as quickly and partly because county funding shortages have stretched dredging schedules.

Adding insult to injury, the owner of the bulkheaded property, Henry Newton, applied a couple of years ago to modify the seawall, raising a portion of its face by 2 feet and adding a 20-foot extension to the return that runs along the neighboring land. The alterations would have fixed one of the sources of erosion to neighbors’ shoreline, Mr. Gallagher said, but the application was denied by the state and Southampton Town, which have adopted policies against expanding bulkheads.

“The water goes over the top [of the bulkhead] and it comes out the back and rushes … right through here, like a fire hose,” Mr. Gallagher said, pointing to a scoured valley beneath his neighbor’s deck. “It needs to be altered in some way. It’s working for the guy who has it, but it’s destroying our property.”

The situation he faces, he acknowledges, is not dire. The nature of Little Peconic Bay and the west-facing shoreline of North Sea do not threaten his house with destruction in the way the Atlantic and low-lying areas endanger other houses. Even during Hurricane Sandy the water and waves didn’t threaten his home.

Nonetheless, he continues his crusade to someday again have a broad beach in front of his house, and one that will last.

“Next time they dredge and there’s 100 feet of beach, I will have to do a new survey and apply for a rock revetment,” he said, hopeful that such a tactic would survive the regulatory gauntlet. “I’ve learned to the play the game over the years.”