It’s astonishing that when the development boom began on the South Fork in the 1980s, and thousands of acres of farmland were beginning to be carved into housing lots, and houses seemed to be popping up on virtually every vacant parcel in every village, that no one said “whoa!”
“Whoa!” not because landowners should have been prevented from obtaining the fullest financial benefit of their lands — and not because the houses being built everywhere seemed heedlessly big and inefficient, which many of them were — but because this area simply wasn’t prepared to properly handle all that additional human poop and pee. Around about the late 1980s, the signs were already quite clear that municipalities on the South Fork needed to devise a regional wastewater treatment strategy. That never happened.
“Take a second here to visualize this, because although it is a basic fact of life in ‘the Hamptons,’ it is truly astounding — every toilet and shower and bath from the Shinnecock Canal to Montauk basically flushes into carefully crafted holes in the ground.”
So, now — and take a second here to visualize this, because although it is a basic fact of life in “the Hamptons,” it is truly astounding— every toilet and shower and bath from the Shinnecock Canal to Montauk, from tiny cottages on Lazy Point to megamansions on Lily Pond Lane, basically flushes into carefully crafted holes in the ground. It is, as East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc told End recently, “very 19th century.” (There is one exception: Sag Harbor Village, which did, in fact, build a sewage treatment plant in 1970s for its downtown district.)
The result has been predictable. South Fork ponds, bays, and harbors are plagued by serious pollution problems from bacteria, phosphorus, and particularly nitrogen, which has led to harmful algae blooms and bacterial contamination and the closure of huge swaths of shellfish grounds and some bathing beaches. Just this May, the Department of Environmental Conservation closed Alewife Pond in Northwest Woods and Fresh Pond and the Devon Yacht Club boat basin to shellfishing, because fecal coliform bacteria levels had become dangerous. And, in the case of Georgica Pond and a few other smaller bodies of water, the pollution has prompted occasional bans on all human or animal contact altogether.
“Take a second here to visualize this, because although it is a basic fact of life in ‘the Hamptons,’ it is truly astounding — every toilet and shower and bath from the Shinnecock Canal to Montauk basically flushes into carefully crafted holes in the ground.”
No wonder, then, that wastewater treatment has of late become a primary objective of South Fork officials. The nearly 600-page East Hampton town water-quality report, completed two years ago by Lombardo Associates, a Massachusetts firm, not surprisingly recommends neighborhood and community sewage-treatment systems in areas around Montauk, in the Village of East Hampton, and around Three Mile Harbor. A second study of the town’s hamlets conducted by four engineering and planning firms hinged its recommendations on “effective centralized wastewater treatment systems.”
Sag Harbor Village’s is the only municipal water-treatment facility eastof the Shinnecock Canal. Photo by Tara Israel
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