Bloomberg Green — Unlimited Sand and Money Still Won’t Save the Hamptons
A home seen at sunset along Dune Road in the Hamptons. Photographer: Bryan Anselm/Redux for Bloomberg
Oct 29, 2021
By Polly Mosendz and Eric Roston, Graphics by Jeremy CF Lin — The Big Take
If you happened to be in Montauk, N.Y., when the trucks started rolling in this summer, you’d get a sense of how much sand $171,000 buys. Load after load tumbled onto Ditch Plains Beach, one of the Atlantic Coast’s better surfing spots, carved along one of the richest stretches of the Hamptons. It’s a short walk from an exclusive trailer park where hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb and other wealthy surfers store their beach gear.
The local government funded the sand infusion after winter nor’easters and an early summer tropical storm narrowed the beach and exposed the dense layer of hardpan beneath the sand. For three days before the Fourth of July weekend, dump trucks and tractor trailers dropped roughly 100 loads along a few hundred yards of waterfront. Soon the freshly graded beach was packed with surfers and tourists.
The delivery was one of several this year to beaches in the town of East Hampton, at a cost approaching $1 million, to help restore what’s been carried off by currents and storms in a perpetual ebb and flow intensified by the rising seas. The realities of climate change mean this beach renovation is clearly a temporary fix. It’s also a small preview of things to come, except the federal government will largely be funding any subsequent infusions of sand.
Over the next three decades the U.S. will spend at least $1.5 billion to help shore up about 80 miles of Long Island waterfront as part of the ongoing Fire Island to Montauk Point project, or FIMP. Under the direction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, hundreds of millions of dollars will be invested in dredges that pump offshore sand back onto beaches—much more efficient than the trucks, at hundreds of times the scale. Thousands of residences, many of them beachfront homes, will be lifted off their foundations onto stilts.
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