Below excerpts are from an August 13th article in The Southampton Press. The full article is available here.

Suffolk County took quite a blow from Isaias last week. And if the track of the hurricane-turned-tropical-storm was 50 miles farther east when it hit us, it would have been much worse here.

The bad news: It was a sampling of what’s ahead.

On Long Island, a good chunk of Montauk has become a poster child for dune destruction and the folly of then trying to deal with storms by artificial means. The “primary dune” of a major section of the oceanfront of Montauk was eliminated decades ago for the construction of a string of mainly motels.

In recent years, a choice was made. It was either relocating mainly 10 or so motels and also condos and other structures, rebuilding the dune, and allowing “the natural coastal process” — the dynamic process that nature provides — to return. Or — and this is what happened in 2015 — following the prescription of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: placing 14,200 jumbo “geotextile” sandbags, each 1.7 tons, in front of the buildings to try to protect them. The construction cost: $8.9 million.

Suffolk County government went along with this. Continue reading here.