Not So Temporary

GeoCubes have long overstayed their welcome in East Hampton Town.

At waterfront properties in Amagansett and other communities, seawalls made up of the 1-ton sandbags were installed as so-called temporary measures to protect homes threatened by encroaching seas. But it turned out that “temporary,” while it sounded good on paper, would not be the reality. In one case, a GeoCube seawall stretching in front of two private properties was approved for a nine-month period on an emergency basis — but it remains in place more than a decade later.

Though seawalls are designed to stop erosion, they actually cause more problems than they fix — which is precisely why they are banned in East Hampton Town. On a natural shoreline, wave action goes through a cycle of removing and then redepositing sand. On a hardened shoreline, waves repeatedly lap against the seawall, take sand away and never give it back. The result is a beach that gets lower and lower, until it is eventually underwater at high tide, if not all the time. A once-continuous shoreline where pedestrians or even vehicles could travel becomes impassible, destroying recreational opportunities and posing a public safety risk.

A seawall also exacerbates erosion to adjacent properties, as the force of the sea is dispersed to the left and the right. While GeoCubes provide protection to some property owners’ houses, that protection comes at the expense of their neighbors.

In many cases, homeowners who enlisted “temporary” GeoCubes have had more than enough time to find a permanent solution to erosion and flood risks, such as relocating their houses upland or putting them up on pilings. Instead of wrangling for more extensions, they should be doing the neighborly and responsible thing: removing the GeoCubes and employing permanent solutions.

The East Hampton Town Board is now considering measures to ensure “temporary” GeoCube walls are just that. The plans include large security deposits and requiring property owners to grant the town an easement so that town crews can come in and remove GeoCubes themselves. Perhaps most important is limiting the width of sandbag walls to the width of the house, rather than the entire width of the property. That way, the neighbors would be largely spared the exacerbated erosion that seawalls bring.

Town officials also would like to hear from coastal experts who are not being paid by the homeowners when the board considers applications for an emergency sandbag wall, and to give neighbors the chance to weigh in before an application is approved.

East Hampton is one of the most vulnerable towns on Long Island when it comes to climate change and rising waters, and coastal retreat is something that must be a part of the town’s future, starting sooner rather than later. Homeowners with houses that are already under serious threat should be getting ahead of the curve, but instead they have only sought to delay.

The Town Board is limited in what it can do about existing GeoCube walls, but it is headed in the right direction toward ensuring that the same mistakes are not repeated.