DAN'S PAPERS, September 3, 2010 Page 37 www.danshamptons.com
Stealing the Beaches Hamptons Beaches are for All; Selfish Folks Try to Block Access By Dan Rattiner Three weeks ago, a woman named Leslie A. Wanek Sgaglione drowned in the Beach Hampton development of Amagansett because help could not get out to where she was in the ocean in time to save her. It was a terrible tragedy, and the residents who live along the ocean there have been lobbying the town to provide lifeguard service on that beach and on other unprotected beaches in the area. The beach in the Hamptons, however, is 60 miles long and you’d need hundreds of lifeguards to adequately protect the bathers everywhere along that whole distance—which is why bathers are warned again and again
that they need to do their swimming in protected areas or, quite literally, they take their lives in their hands. There is, however, a more insidious thing going on making the work of saving lives even more difficult. More and more, residents with private homes on the ocean are finding ways to block beach access for everyone else but them. They’ve even arranged this year, for the first time, to begin harassing others who might want to go fish or sunbathe in one particular spot from doing so. This occurred at the sand access roads heading off Marine Boulevard, for example, where guards were posted at beach access roads to the ocean by nearby residents
to check I. D.s of those who might want to swim there. It would be okay for the general public to walk a half mile down the beach from somewhere else to get to this enclave, but they sure wouldn’t be allowed to go to this beach by using the access roads from these “private” although publicly accessible roads. It’s just common sense that everyone be allowed access to the beaches that we all share. The beaches belong to everybody. Everybody is free to walk them. But now getting to them by biking or walking through the dunes is considered cause for alarm by certain local residents. (continued on next page)
WHY HURRICANE EARL WON’T HIT THE HAMPTONS By Dan Rattiner Hurricane Earl is coming up through the Atlantic Ocean as I write this. It is Tuesday. All is calm and quiet here in the Hamptons. And fear not, in spite of all predictions to the contrary, this hurricane season on eastern Long Island is going to be absolute zero. No hurricane is going to hit here. Not this one. Not any other one. The reason this is going to be what happens is because of meteorological shifts I have observed during the last 20 years. I’ve been here writing this paper 50 years. In the first 30 years, hurricanes slammed into this place with considerable frequency. We had Hurricane Belle, Hurricane Diana,
Hurricane Gloria. All were big monster hurricanes that crashed into us to tear up the pea patch. They’d come out of this odd weather pattern in central Africa one day and begin to hurl themselves out into the central Atlantic westward toward a spot just below Key West, then curve to the north, running through the Virgin Islands or the Bahamas or even Bermuda before crashing into the shoreline here where Long Island sticks out like a big baseball bat into the Atlantic. But then, for a meteorological reason that I think is not fully understood but is perhaps related to global warming, the course of hurricanes coming out of Africa commenced to
change. For the last 20 years, hurricanes have more and more either curved up earlier and passed Long Island far out to sea or have failed to turn northward at all and have instead gotten in and around Florida to rattle around in the Gulf of Mexico whacking into places like Tampa or Honduras or the Yucatan or New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama as if they were bumblebees in a jar. It could be that for years and years God has been throwing us curveballs with great accuracy, but for the last 20, he’s been hurling them inside or outside. The weathermen based in Atlanta have taken note of this, but have come to the (continued on page 50)