Fire Island Beaches Are Huge
I just spoke with my mother, who in her ultimate wisdom, made her way out to Fire Island for the weekend. She was very excited and her brain was probably half frozen, but she was telling me how large the beaches are on the western end of the island. I don’t know that they are not just as wide everywhere else, but I only know that she said the beaches in Kismet and Saltaire were humongous. This is great news of course, but I think that people need to realize there are reasons that the beaches are very wide at this point. Clearly all of the sand mitigation that has been taking place over the past 5 years has made a differece. As winter comes and wave action picks up, the large surf “pulls” the sand off shore until smaller, more rolling waves, push the sand back in to the beach. But, this is not to say that the sand will stay there forever. There is something called the long shore transport, which is a term to describe the effect of lateral wave action on the sand. The long shore transport moves sand up or down the beach (depending on the area). This is very easy to see most days on the beach as waves do not hit the shore at a perfect 90 degree angle every time.
So, what does all of this mean? Simply that if the people of Fire Island want to have great beaches each year, then we need to continue adding more sand to the supply every year or at the very least, on a consistent basis. More about this later.
Fire+Island, Suffolk+County, New+York, Beaches, Erosion, Oceanography, Long+Shore+Transport
tags: beaches, erosion, fire+island, long+shore+transport, new+york, oceanography, suffolk+county