Army Corps Agrees to More Sand for Montauk, but Beach Rebuild Unlikely Until Spring 2024

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has agreed to a request by East Hampton Town to extend the scope of the massive beach rebuilding project in downtown Montauk that it will undertake next year.

After years of lobbying by town elected officials and consultants, the Army Corps agreed this month to widen the stretch of beach that will be reconstructed by about 1,000 linear feet, to the eastern end of Surfside Avenue.

The additional sand, consultants have argued, will protect more properties from storm damage and extend the “life” of the nourishment project’s protections of Montauk’s downtown business district.

Currently, the beach reconstruction in Montauk is slated to get underway next winter and be completed in early spring 2024.

The beach rebuilding is part of the long-awaited Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation project — commonly known as FIMP — and will be paid for entirely with federal funds from the Superstorm Sandy federal aid package.

The promise of an eventual reconstruction of a broad ocean beach across Montauk’s oceanfront was one of the key selling points by the Army Corps when it proposed building the 3,000-foot-long sandbag revetment on the downtown shoreline in 2014.

The artificial dune the Army Corps initially constructed over the wall of sandbags was washed away the first winter the project was in place, and the revetment has intermittently been exposed by erosion since the project was completed in 2015.

East Hampton Town and Suffolk County have been footing the costs of reburying the revetment in sand each spring — an effort that has cost more than $1 million in some years. This past winter was an especially hard one on local shorelines, and the town expects the reconstruction of the artificial dune to be costly, both because of the amount of sand that is going to be needed and the rising cost of sand.

“When we started out, sand was $25 per cubic yard delivered and placed on the beach — last year I think we paid $45,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said. “Sand has become like gold with all the construction going on.”

The town has budgeted $250,000 for reconstructing the walkways that lead over the artificial dune to the beach at several spots along the downtown.

The costs the town and county have borne in maintaining the federally planned project have been a frequent point of contention by the town when pressing the Army Corps to conduct a robust nourishment in Montauk.

The Montauk project has actually been moved up in the FIMP project schedule because the work in Montauk requires a “hopper dredge” — a vessel that can suck up thousands of tons of sand at a time into a large holding bay and then haul it to shore miles away where it is pumped ashore — as does one of the FIMP projects that has been bumped up in the queue on an emergency basis because of bad erosion experienced during storms last year.

“The project is going out to bid in July and will be awarded in September and construction will start in late fall, probably November,” said Aram Terchunian, the Westhampton Beach consultant who has worked with East Hampton and Southampton towns and the Army Corp on the local FIMP-related projects. “Fire Island will be first, so Montauk will probably be in late winter and early spring.”

Once the beach in Montauk has been rebuilt to a natural “profile,” both above and below the water line to dampen the erosive effects of storm-driven waves, the Army Corps will perform periodic restorations as well as restore the beach following any major hurricanes or tropical storms.

The extension does add some planning complications for the town, because more private property owners will have to sign off on easements allowing the Army Corps to place the sand on the beach in front of their homes.

The town had proposed early in the process having the nourishment extend all the way to the Ditch Plains jetty. The Army Corps said that adding the additional 3,900 linear feet of reach to the project would be cost prohibitive for minimal protective benefit to property — a key formula for federal beach nourishment projects.

But the town could decide to self-fund an extension of the project, which would have to be paid for with bonds and property taxes, but taking advantage of the dredging equipment being on site already would save millions in “mobilization” costs.

Extending the nourishment to Ditch Plains would add 3,900 linear feet to the project — more than half-again the total length planned — and could cost as much as $10 million.

Van Scoyoc said that a town-appointed committee has been discussing potential add-ons to the downtown project, but has not yet settled whether the additional cost would be worthwhile — especially in light of the rising costs of the work.

“We know Ditch has gotten hit hard, but that area is notoriously difficult to keep sand in,” he said. “We did some replenishment there last spring just so we could get the lifeguard stands in, and there was some natural rebuilding over the season, but this winter has been rough, we lost a lot in that whole area.”

Halting the new beach construction at the eastern end of Surfside Avenue will not provide any hope of relief to the bluffs at the edge of Shadmoor State Park, just to the east of where the new beach will end, which experienced large erosion losses again this year, cutting off popular hiking trails, which will once again have to be rerouted away from the cliffs, town staff told the Town Board earlier this month.

The FIMP work plan is slated to tackle at least a dozen large-scale dredging and beach nourishment projects and other projects intended to protect Long Island’s South Shore from the impacts of storms for at least the next 30 years — with a budget of more than $1.7 billion.

After more than 60 years of planning and bureaucratic and political fits and starts, the first actual physical work related to FIMP officially got underway this month when a 300-foot hydraulic dredge vessel began pumping sand from Shinnecock Inlet onto the chronically eroded beach west of the inlet.

Planning for FIMP began in the 1960s as erosion threatened oceanfront homes and crucial coastlines. The project was shelved by budget constraints and bureaucratic red tape for long stretches in the ensuing decades. But after Superstorm Sandy, the plan’s groundwork was seen as a well-developed blueprint for addressing storm and flood protection on eastern Long Island.

With the Shinnecock Inlet dredging completed and “the bowl” west of the inlet once again filled in with sand — about 400,000 tons worth — the dredging barge will move to Moriches Inlet, while a second inlet dredging project is underway at Fire Island.

The Montauk and Fire Island dual projects will be next in the queue, and then even larger nourishments in Quogue-Hampton Bays and in West Hampton Dunes will be on tap, probably in late 2024 and 2025.