The Choice Is Clear: Do Not Bury Lines Under Long Pond Greenbelt

I just finished reading PSEG Long Island’s draft environmental impact statement for extending underground electric cables from its Bridgehampton substation all the way to East Hampton’s Buell Lane, at the edge of East Hampton Village.

There were five alternatives posed, but the cheapest and most direct one involves tunneling under the Long Pond Greenbelt. The most expensive one is No. 3, going south along the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, then east along Montauk Highway. This alternative would be the most expensive because it adds more than a mile to the distance to tunnel and travel.

Some of you remember when “the new kid on the block,” PSEG, arrived in East Hampton Town in 2014 and proceeded to install a bunch of very tall tainted-with-preservative wooden posts from Buell Lane west of Toilsome Lane, into the village and northeast along both Newtown and Long lanes. Those who lived along Newtown Lane were aghast at the size of the poles and didn’t like the idea that they were saturated with a poison that smelled.

The village and town boards, as well as some of the staff here and there, were like chickens with their heads cut off. Some samples were collected and tests run, but the results turned out to be inconclusive. The mile-high poles along Long Lane are still towering over the landscape and have become part and parcel of it.

This time, the now-seasoned partner of the Long Island Power Authority issued a very comprehensive DEIS creating some of their own data and findings, as well as using lists of plants and animals, as well as habitat and geologic lists from The Nature Conservancy, the State Department of Environmental Conservation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as from other state, federal and quasi-governmental organizations.

The DEIS is very long and comprehensive — no more midnight raids and foul-smelling poles from this utility.

Nonetheless, we are not given sufficient evidence to tell us just why East Hampton Town needs more electricity, as one would gather that the town is maxed out by now. Could it have something to do with the electricity to be provided by the offshore wind corporation, Ørsted? Apparently, some of the electricity generated by a slew of wind turbines will be headed to New York, and these underground cables, which are bidirectional, will carry it westward.

At a meeting in Wainscott’s LTV building two weeks ago, PSEG made a presentation that lasted for more than two hours. Surprisingly, perhaps, no one spoke up on the side of PSEG — almost all of the attendees, including a few on Zoom, were opposed to the cables being undergrounded under the ponds in the Long Pond Greenbelt.

Dissenters included longtime conservationists, including Dai Dayton of the 25-year-old Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt, and Frank Quevido, who heads SOFO, both of which organizations are situated in the greenbelt, as well as our New York State representative, Fred Thiele, and Bridget Fleming, the member of the Suffolk County Legislature representing the South Fork.

Thiele, who was a Sag Harborite throughout his childhood, it turns out, used to take walks in the Long Pond Greenbelt with his father, and those walks had a lot to do with his later turn to politics and helping the South Fork, as well as the rest of eastern Long Island, preserve its natural heritage.

There were no members of the various Southampton and East Hampton boards who spoke, with the exception of Southampton Town Trustee Ann Welker. Ann was dead set against PSEG going under the Long Pond Greenbelt, which includes water and wetlands, two parts of the environment that the Southampton Town Trustees work strenuously to protect.

Some new residents, including two from as far away as Wainscott, also spoke out against the plan to tunnel under the ponds. An old student of mine from Southampton College, Steve Storch, who is a dedicated environmentalist and makes a living by improving the environments of various local residences and businesses, also spoke out against the plan to go under the Long Pond Greenbelt.

Of course, the tiger salamander was mentioned often throughout the DEIS, but, strangely, another local rarity, the alewife, was left out of the DEIS altogether.

Traditionally, the largest annual alewife run on Long Island takes place a few miles to the west from the target site, to and from Big Fresh Pond in the hamlet of North Sea. But every year alewives also enter Sag Harbor Cove, swim into Paynes Creel, then up Ligonee Brook, which runs under Brick Kiln Road, and then under the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike to Long Pond, where they breed.

Because the success or failure of each end-of-March run depends upon the wetness of the spring, many alewives die before making it. The crossing of the creek under the turnpike is the largest obstacle and, though asked, the State Department of Transportation has never done anything to improve it.

Meanwhile, the onus is on PSEG to take all of the hearing’s comments under consideration before coming to a decision. It would seem that a decision is now obvious.

In the early 1990s, when the Long Island Lighting Company was still running things but in big trouble with the Shoreham nuclear power plant, there was also a problem with the power supply to Montauk. A hurricane in 1991 followed by the Halloween nor’easter had badly damaged the above-ground high-tension power lines that ran high over the marshes south of Napeague Harbor in Amagansett.

After almost losing a very expensively borrowed machine from the Midwest that ultimately had to be pulled out of the wetlands onto dry land by a Long Island Rail Road locomotive, LILCO had no other choice but to underground the two high-tension lines to Montauk, rather than spend more money trying to fix the steel towers connection. The towers were pulled out of the marsh by helicopters, and the electrical lines were undergrounded, one atop the other, with a neutral line in between, all the way to Montauk in the north shoulder of Montauk Highway.

It’s been 30 years since that undergrounding and, apparently, it is still working.

It is has now become obvious: The only acceptable route for PSEG to follow is alternative No. 3— going south in the shoulder of the turnpike, then heading east in the shoulder of Montauk Highway.