Nor'easter battered shorelines from Jones Beach to Montauk, with millions in damages

The nor'easter that battered Long Island over the weekend caused millions of dollars of damage along the coast from Long Beach to state parks on the North and South forks, along with world-famous beaches in Southampton and Fire Island.

It provided an early taste of the winter nor’easter season, which is almost certain to bring more flooding and erosion to Long Island’s coasts. Long Island’s geography — 23 miles wide at its thickest, reaching 120 miles into the Atlantic — makes it vulnerable to storms blowing in from the ocean.

Such storms, on both the North and South shores, are expected to arrive more frequently as the seas grow warmer with climate change. Rising sea levels will bring higher, stronger waves, experts have said.

On Nassau's South Shore over the weekend, Tobay Beach lost approximately 60% of its sand due to erosion, Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino said. The town has to rebuild the beach every year, he added.

The cost of replenishing 90,000 tons of sand is about $3 million, a town spokesman said.

"It's an enormous amount of sand that was lost, which represents millions of dollars," Saladino said. "Since [Superstorm] Sandy, storms are getting more and more impactful."

The full moon made high tides higher and intensified the height and force of waves, said Southampton Village Mayor William Manger. And that meant significant beach erosion.

“We probably lost about 4 feet of sand on a good portion of our beaches,” Manger told Newsday on Monday. “We're hoping that comes back, slowly, but it's a little concerning because obviously we've got all winter ahead of us and winter storms as well.”

'Really took a battering'

The stairs leading to the beach at Smith Point County Park in Shirley were damaged, and the beach itself "has been narrow all season" from previous erosion, Suffolk spokesman Michael Martino said Monday in a text message. Drones will be used to assess the damage.

Brookhaven Town's Cedar Beach, in Mount Sinai, was all but washed away, according to video shared by Town Supervisor Dan Panico.

“Our beaches and our shorelines really took a battering," he said during a town board meeting Monday morning.

Many state beaches and parks sustained “significant” damage, resulting in temporary closures of fishing piers and campgrounds as officials assess the damage, said George Gorman, Long Island regional state parks director.

Pounding wind and waves created a 6- to 8-foot cliff at Hither Hills State Park overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Montauk, Gorman said. Orient Point State Park on the North Fork was closed while crews assess damage to a road, he added. Jones Beach's Northwell theater also was extensively flooded.

Solutions costly 

Erosion is a natural process that pulls sand from one part of the coast and redeposits it farther along. But a hotter climate has brought more frequent and powerful storms, which have accelerated the scouring on Long Island's beaches and bluffs.

Some beaches have been replenished with sand dredged from the ocean floor, but in most cases the solution is short-lived. Sometimes the new sand washes away in the very next storm.

“While coastal erosion is certainly worsened by climate change, due to factors such as rising sea levels, many of these coastal erosion processes are also naturally occurring,” Jase Bernhardt, associate professor of geology, environment and sustainability at Hofstra University, said in an email. “So trying to completely stop them in a certain area is going to be costly or unrealistic, as you are trying to stop something that ‘should’ be happening without human intervention.”

Hard structures like sea walls and bulkheads can be effective in protecting a particular part of the beach, but coastal scientists say they just displace the erosion to another part of the shore.

In the Town of Babylon, both Overlook and Gilgo beaches lost sand, said Vincent Piccoli, commissioner of the town’s department of public works. At Gilgo, the state-run part took the brunt of the storm, he said.

“There was really significant damage,” Piccoli said.

Some of the erosion at Gilgo Beach State Park, on the east end of Jones Island, that occurred this weekend will be addressed as part of the ongoing Fire Island to Montauk Point beach replenishment project. The $1.5 billion federal project, undertaken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, already had been scheduled to restore sand this fall at the park, Gorman said. 

'Very hard to predict'

Erosion was especially problematic in Long Beach, where city officials planned to send up a drone to assess damage on the eastern end near Maple Boulevard, city spokesman John McNally said.

A lack of jetties on the eastern end has left the area vulnerable, McNally said. The new beach assessments will be compared with ones taken before the storm.

In Baxter Estates, on the Port Washington peninsula in Nassau County, erosion-prone Shore Road had to be closed twice because of flooding, North Hempstead Supervisor Jennifer DeSena said.

The highly trafficked thoroughfare, which connects the Port Washington peninsula to the rest of the town, has long faced coastal erosion and is undergoing a $7.7 million restoration project.

Scientists say shorelines along the East Coast will migrate inland over the next few decades, as sea levels rise and storms carve away coastal bluffs and beaches. But Bernhardt explained  it’s hard to know exactly what those coasts will look like in 20 or 30 years.

“Humans will likely continue to try and protect some beaches, with strategies that could improve over time,” he wrote. “And what we do on all fronts (from local mitigation projects to the global scale emissions) are of course very hard to predict.”

Newsday's Denise M. Bonilla, Deborah S. Morris, Joshua Needelman and Ted Phillips contributed to this story.