Dec 12 – Written By Michael Sparks

Trust and Science: What Parks Can Learn from Fire Island National Seashore

When Hurricane Sandy opened a breach in Fire Island, some residents wanted it closed. Thanks to long-standing community relationships and smart science, it stayed open.

Earlier this year, a study published in Nature estimated that climate change increased Hurricane Sandy’s damage by $8 billion. National Park units all the way from North Carolina to Massachusettus suffered tremendous damage and faced hard choices about how to move forward after Sandy rolled through. Fire Island National Seashore, though, made what was considered a controversial decision: let nature take its course. As climate change causes more and more damage across park units, Fire Island offers a valuable lesson in how parks can address the recreational, economic, and ecological fallout.

After Hurricane Sandy tore a breach through the eastern side of the island in 2012, a contentious fight broke out. On one hand were people, like New York State Senator Phil Boyle, whose district includes the seashore, who were worried the breach would cause additional flooding on Long Island’s South Shore and wanted the Park Service to fill the breach in immediately. “I don’t want it to cost tens of millions of dollars later, when we could do it now for tens of thousands,” he said just weeks after the storm. On the other hand, scientists, activists, and fishermen argued the breach was natural and would improve the Great South Bay’s water quality, without posing any additional flood risk (breaches allow polluted water to be flushed from the bay more quickly, restoring nutrients and allowing marine life to flourish). Dr. Charles Flagg, an oceanographer at Stony Brook University on Long Island, had been monitoring the bay for years. When the breach occurred “we were able to look at water levels right after, and historically, and there was nothing unusual,” he said.

“We made a lot of our decisions on the best science we had,” Michael Bilecki, Chief of Resources Management at Fire Island, said in a recent interview. In the early days after Sandy, when the damage made it impossible to do more sophisticated research, “we were literally throwing oranges upstream and then timing it to estimate the flow rate to gauge how the channel would form,” Bilecki explained, laughing. Knowing the flow rate of the water channel was crucial, Bilecki continued, because the faster the water flowed through the channel, the deeper it would cut the channel, and the deeper the channel became the less likely the breach would close naturally. Soon enough, though, the research became much more sophisticated–using planes, ocean buoys, boats, and advanced LIDAR mapping, which times how long it takes for water-penetrating light-pulses to bounce off the seafloor in order to measure water depth–thanks in large part to strong relationships with local universities and other government agencies. Dr. Erika Lentz, a research geologist at the USGS who has published or contributed to over a dozen studies and reports about Fire Island in the last decade, said that kind of productivity would not be possible without the “time and trust” the seashore has put into working with them.

Science is all well and good, but the people involved in this story are just that: people. Justifiably, local homeowners were concerned about flooding and wanted to be sure leaving the breach open wouldn’t put their homes at greater risk of being flooded. “We had public meetings and brought in research from local universities and folks could hear them say the breach wouldn’t impact flooding, and would even be good for the bay,” Bilecki said. “And I think that worked.”

The “yelling and screaming died off rather quickly,” after showing the public the data, Dr. Flagg said. Jayne Robinson, president of the Davis Park Association, a homeowners group on Fire Island, agrees: “We have a great relationship with the park and have for many years.” The association has a former park ranger on its board and many of the seashore’s administrators live in the surrounding communities, which creates a sense of trust, Robinson said. “People believed the science that the breach would be good for the bay and would not impact flooding.”

As much as science and community trust matter, they need a third pillar: the law. The breach occurred within the federally designated Otis Pike Fire Island High Dune Wilderness, which is part of the larger national seashore. The seashore’s enabling legislation and the existence of the federal wilderness within the its boundaries meant that Fire Island was required to complete an Environmental Impact Statement (which ran to hundreds of pages and included hundreds of comments from community members) and had to consult with the Department of the Interior and the Army Corps of Engineers “before we could do anything,” Bilecki said. “We like to think we had an influence, but at the end of day” the wilderness’ legal protections prevented it from being closed immediately, said Robyn Silvestri, executive director of Save The Great South Bay, a non-profit focused on revitalizing the bay, which lobbied for the breach to stay open.

The legislation and legal frameworks surrounding Fire Island created a situation in which park managers and scientists could buy time, do the research, and win over the community before making any rash decisions. “I’m glad they didn’t close it,” State Senator Boyle said recently. Perhaps the best evidence that things worked out well is the fact that the breach is not on the top of residents’ minds anymore. “We’re much more concerned about trash left by tourists,” Robinson, of the Davis Park Association, said.

But it isn’t as if leaving the breach open suddenly turned the Great South Bay and Fire Island into an ecological Eden overnight. For decades, the bay has been contaminated by polluted runoff from the mainland, mostly nitrogen leaking from septic tanks. More needs to be done. Robinson said her group is lobbying Suffolk County to help homeowners upgrade their septic systems to more “ecologically friendly disposal mechanisms, if you will.” Suffolk County’s Septic Improvement Program offers grants to homeowners to upgrade their septic systems. A spokesperson for the Suffolk County Department of Health Services said they have given out over 1,500 grants since the program started on July 1, 2017, with plans to ramp up the program and upgrade 250,000 systems within 45 years.

The reality of climate change is such that the Park Service will face increasingly difficult, increasingly common questions about what to fix and what to let be. There may not always be an easy answer, but Fire Island provides a guide on how to make the best of a bad situation. “It’s nothing that parks don’t already know, but it’s proving you have to have the science, you have to have relationships with communities, it’s just proving that over and over,” Bilecki said.

This article was originally published on National Parks Traveler