State: Orient Beach State Park to reopen after road collapse

The North Fork’s Orient Beach State Park, shut since a late October nor’easter caused part of the entrance road to collapse, will reopen on Friday, officials said.

Enough repair work has been done to reopen the road, which is the sole access to the park. The work, expected to cost about $300,000, will continue into the spring, as the final layers of asphalt cannot be applied until temperatures rise, the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation said in a statement Wednesday.

The Oct. 27 storm damaged a 300-foot-long, 15-foot-wide section of one of the two lanes of the 2-mile entrance.

“Approximately 12,000 cubic yards of fill, generously donated by the Cross Sound Ferry from a previous dredging project, was placed along the roadway shoulders that had washed away in certain areas of the causeway,” the parks department said.

The park’s location on the eastern tip of the peninsula, with a 45,000-foot stretch along Gardiners Bay, heightens the potential hazards from storms.

After superstorm Sandy in 2012, state workers rebuilt parts of the entrance road, restored the shoreline along Gardiners Bay, and created an 880-foot buffer around the park's building complex using 4,500 cubic feet of sand and gravel.