National Parks Traveler

Trust And Science: What Parks Can Learn From Fire Island National Seashore

By Michael Sparks

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

A punishing storm ran up the Eastern seaboard in late-October 2012, pounding coastal areas with drenching rains, gusting winds that downed trees, and floodwaters that inundated many National Park System structures. At Fire Island National Seashore in New York, Hurricane Sandy tore a gaping hole through the seashore’s eastern side, a breach that in hindsight carried much-needed ecological benefits and some important lessons on how park units can recover from major damage.

Designated a national seashore by Congress in September 1964, Fire Island is a 26-mile long chain of barrier dunes and islands across the Great South Bay from Long Island that takes many storms head-on. Breaches are common on the seashore’s barrier islands. In fact, the area Sandy opened was breached before, in the 1880s, and remained open for about 60 years before naturally repairing itself, according to the National Park Service. 

Immediately after the 2012 breach occurred in the Otis Pike Fire Island High Dune Wilderness, a contentious fight broke out. On one hand were people, like New York State Senator Phil Boyle, whose district includes the seashore, who worried the breach would cause additional flooding on Long Island’s South Shore and wanted the Park Service to fill the breach 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. 

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. 

The breach, looking north, with Long Island in the background/Dr. Charles Flagg, Stony Brook University

“We made a lot of our decisions on the best science we had,” Michael Bilecki, chief of resources management at Fire Island, told the Traveler recently.

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 them 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, the chief 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 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. 

In the months and years after the breach, research has shown that the opening has led to increased species diversity and a “more complex food web,” says the Park Service. The improved water circulation helped reduce high nitrogen levels (from pollution and fertilizer runoff) that were thought to play some role, in eastern portions of Great South Bay, to formation of “brown tides” caused by atypically heavy, light-blocking phytoplankton blooms.

The improved water quality near the breach also has led to population increases in a variety of fish (alewives, sticklebacks, killifish, and summer flounder), as well as in hard clams and lady crabs, the Park Service has noticed.

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, 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,” she said. 

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 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 that 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. 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. 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 more than 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.

In hindsight, it’s clear leaving the breach open was the right decision.

“I’m glad they didn’t close it,” N.Y. Senator Boyle told the Traveler.

But making that decision wasn’t easy and Fire Island’s experience has a lot to teach other park units. “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.

Michael Sparks is a journalist and software engineer in New York. His work focuses on the intersection of climate change and public lands.