Smithtown officials say shallow part of Sound a public safety issue

Smithtown will pay an East End contractor to map the shallow Long Island Sound floor near the mouth of Stony Brook Harbor as town officials make the case for dredging they say is needed to maintain access for thousands of recreational vessels as well as police and bay constables. 

The town proposal focuses on a 100-foot-wide, 3,080-foot stretch of bay bottom off Brookhaven’s West Meadow Beach, where water is now 18 to 30 inches deep at low tide, making it virtually impassible for larger vessels for hours each day. It calls for dredging to 5 feet below mean low water level, removing 64,000 cubic yards of sand and placing it on the town’s Long Beach or West Meadow Beach.

Some county and state officials warn, though, that an attempt to engineer nature could damage the harbor’s ecology and provide only temporary relief, given the vast quantities of shifting sand in the bay. 

Smithtown will pay $5,995 to Riverhead-based Sea Level Mapping for its work, which will likely happen in August. Town officials will hand off the data from that work to Suffolk County, which funds most of the dredging on the county’s North Shore. Any dredging is likely at least a year away and the town’s application will have to clear multiple approvals, county officials said. Legis. Al Krupski (D-Cutchogue) described a process involving multiple county committees, consultation with state and federal officials and a legislature vote to approve a bond for the cost of the project, which has not yet been determined but is likely to range hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, he said. 

“We have to weigh this out against all the other financial needs, all the other projects the county is faced with,” Krupski said. 

Smithtown harbor master Patrick Gilligan said he already faces a public safety crisis. “We have medical emergencies on the Long Island Sound all summer long: heart attack, heatstroke, and we respond with lights and sirens like an ambulance,” he said. “If we don’t have enough water to get back … it could be a problem.”

Constables have already been delayed. In the past, he said, they’ve passed the shallow stretch by trimming their speed, but now their vessels’ hulls scrape bottom at any speed, tearing off struts and propellers. In recent years, a $50,000 marine repair budget intended to last through November has been depleted by midsummer, he said. “Now, if one of my boats gets damaged, we’ll put it up on a trailer and it’ll sit on the trailer because they don’t have money to repair it.” 

Among the vessels that face impeded access are two purchased with a Homeland Security grant and equipped with radiation-detecting equipment that form part of a security net around New York City. “We have an obligation to the federal government to patrol,” Gilligan said. 

Smithtown Deputy Supervisor Thomas McCarthy also made a public safety argument: Harbor access is vital in an emergency, he said, because “it leads to Stony Brook boat ramp, which leads to the best trauma center on Long Island.”

Dredging to establish or maintain a navigation channel requires a state permit. Department of Environmental Conservation spokesman Bill Fonda wrote in an email that the agency would "conduct a thorough review that incorporates public input" if a permit application is submitted. "New dredging projects require considerable scientific analysis focusing on items such as impacts to the benthic environment, the hydraulic impacts of the proposed dredging operation, and other environmental considerations," he wrote.  

Smithtown Department of Environment and Waterways director David Barnes said the stretch of bay bottom to be dredged had filled in from sand after storms and natural “migration” of sand along the shoreline. It was unclear if the area has been dredged before, he said; there may have been sand mining in the area in the 1930s and '40s.

“We want to do it in a way that doesn’t damage any underwater fauna or flora,” he said. 

Mike Kaufman, who sits on the county Dredge Project Screening committee, one of the bodies that will consider the town’s application, said that dredging close to the harbor could alter its hydrology, introducing poorly oxygenated water from deep in the bay and threatening plant and animal life. “There’s a major concern to the entire harbor if those channels become too deep,” he said. Stony Brook University oceanographer Lawrence Swanson made a similar warning in his 2016 book, “Between Stony Brook Harbor Tides”: “Dredging the outer channel would reduce the quality of the water in the harbor.” Dredging would reduce current speeds, reducing the agitation of the water entering and leaving the harbor “and thus the aeration that occurs in the process,” Swanson wrote.   

Assemb. Steve Englebright (D-Setauket), a geologist who has no oversight authority over the project, said that adding large amounts of sand to a beach could create a host of new problems. Excess sand at West Meadow Beach, for example, could blow over Trustees Road and threaten nearby marshland.  

Both men also warned that dredging might not provide a long-term solution. “If you cut a narrow stretch with a dredge,” said Englebright, “mega-ripples” of sand that are on the bay bottom now might easily “migrate and fill it in.”

Then there is the matter of cost, which could be ongoing: “I am astonished that when the county is almost half billion dollars in projected deficit that this particular type of expenditure is even being contemplated,” he said.