SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Climate Change Coastal Geology And Smithtown

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Climate change is happening. As a result of sea level rise caused by global warming, lowland coastal portions of Long Island will be impacted. This area has an extremely mixed, indeed a contradictory record—that continues—when it comes to its shoreline. There has been both folly on the coast and also people pressing for understanding of coastal dynamics.

The most recent folly has occurred in Montauk: the placement by the Army Corps of Engineers of 14,200 1.7- ton sandbags along Montauk’s shore in 2015 at a cost of $8.9 million. Storms have since hit the 3,100-foot-long stretch of sandbags hard and many had to be re-buried. A year before, in 2014, the Suffolk Legislature passed and County Executive Steve Bellone signed a “cost-sharing” measure providing that the Town of East Hampton pay half the cost of “maintenance” of the sandbags and Suffolk County pay the other half.

The vote was 17-to-1 with only Legislator Al Krupski of Cutchogue voting no.

Mr. Krupski predicted the cost of “maintenance” of the Montauk sandbags would run $1 million a year. He was prescient. On this July 16, the Suffolk Legislature passed a bill providing $502,000 in payment for its share of “maintenance” over the past year and Mr. Bellone signed it.

This means that you, as a Suffolk County taxpayer, are shelling out your money for “maintenance” of the Montauk sandbags—and there’ll be years of “maintenance.”

“I am very familiar with the processes of coastal erosion and the dynamics of the shoreline,” said Mr. Krupski in a 2014 letter to fellow legislators. For 20 years he was a member—14 years president—of the Southold Town Board of Trustees which oversees the shores and adjoining waters of Southold Town. “I believe Suffolk County should not endorse a project that hardens the shoreline. This is a project that, one, is sure to fail and cause accelerated erosion to adjacent properties, and two, puts the maintenance on the shoulders of the entire county.” 

It was not just Mr. Krupski seeking to stop the folly. There were demonstrations and civil disobedience on the beach with protesters arrested trying to stop bulldozers installing sandbags. There was a lawsuit with the Sag Harbor-based organization Defend H20 as key plaintiff.

In recent times, an East Hampton Town-commissioned Montauk Hamlet Report was done and urged relocation of the first line of structures along the Montauk oceanfront, mostly vulnerable motels—but some Montauk business people are objecting. 

Another example of this area’s mixed, contradictory shoreline record is happening in Smithtown. The town is now considering changes in its coastal management plan including restrictions on development in areas likely to be affected by sea level rise. The changes would require that sea level change be considered when siting, designing or approving waterfront projects. They would also require property owners to when “practical” move houses threatened by coastal erosion. The construction of “hard structures”—such as sea walls and rock groins—would be allowed only as a last resort.

But at the same time, the Village of Nissequogue, which is within the Town of Smithtown, is seeking what Kevin McAllister, H20 founding president, describes as “an easing of restrictions for people seeking to build sea walls. The village trustees are no longer requiring environmental review and have eliminated any reference to the structures having an adverse impact on beaches. The village’s plan is in contradiction to the town’s efforts.” He testified against the proposed revisions at a recent public hearing in Nissequoque.

I think back to the 1960s and Smithtown’s supervisor, John V.N. Klein, when he was also chairman of the then Suffolk County Board of Supervisors challenging the Army Corps of Engineers’ scheme to place groins—jetties of rocks extending out into the sea—along the Dune Road Westhampton oceanfront. Mr. Klein understood that with groins it was a case of “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” They would catch sand moving in the ocean’s westward “littoral drift” along Long Island’s south shore and broaden the beaches where they were placed, but at the same time deprive the shoreline to the west of sand. His understanding has been fully confirmed since then by experts in the relatively new science of coastal geology. Mr. Klein faced intense opposition from beach house owners. As a reporter for the daily Long Island Press, I covered the scene as beach house owners paraded before the board demanding groins be built. 

The groins, indeed, caused devastation. Owners of beach houses on the west, many battered, some lost, brought a lawsuit against the Army Corps, the state and Suffolk County. There was a settlement under which $80 million—of our tax dollars—is being spent to dump sand over a 30-year period along a coastline caused to erode by the placement of the 15 groins. 

Now especially with climate change and sea level rise, we must get real about the coast—and how to deal with climate change.

More next week.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.   

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Climate Change Is Happening Right Here

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

It’s happening. Climate change is hitting this area. 

In Greenport on the North Fork, the dock for Shelter Island’s North Ferry terminal is to be raised in response to higher tides—a result of sea level rise caused by global warming and consequent climate change.

In western Suffolk County, in Smithtown, changes are being proposed in the town’s coastal management plan including restrictions on development in areas likely to be affected by sea level rise. The changes would require that sea level change be considered when siting, designing or approving waterfront projects. They would also require property owners to when “practical” move houses threatened by coastal erosion. Constructing “hard structures” on the shore—such as sea walls and rock groins—would only be allowed as a last resort. 

In Sag Harbor, the second annual “Living on the Edge in the Face of Climate Change” event pairing Kevin McAllister, founding president of the organization Defend H20, and actor and environmental activist Alec Baldwin of Amagansett, has just been held.

“We are making progress. The level of enlightenment has improved. If we keep the wave going, we’ll get there,” said Mr. McAllister at the event attended by 150 people. “If you read the …news, you see we’re in serious doo.” Over the past 40 years, waters surrounding Long Island, said Mr. McAllister, have risen by four inches. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is projecting that because of climate change, in the next 40 years “we can expect they’ll rise by 11 to 30 inches.” That seriously threatens this area.

“We know what we are facing. We know what we need to do,” said Mr. Baldwin. And a need is to “convince a critical mass of people as to what they have to do as well.” There’s been “a cascade of unsettling information about the environment,” said Mr. Baldwin, especially about last month’s record heat in the United States.

Indeed, as the Associated Press has just reported: “July was the hottest month measured on Earth since records began in 1880, the latest in a long line of peaks that scientists say back up predictions for man-made climate change.”

This is a world-wide climate change crisis. The headline of a just-out National Geographic article: “A heat wave is turning Greenland’s ice to slush. That’s bad news.” The headline of a June piece in The New York Times: “India Heat Wave, Soaring Up to 123 Degrees.” Also in June, the headline of a Washington Post article: “Potentially historic and deadly summer heat wave to roast Europe.” In February, summer in the Southern Hemisphere, the USA Today headline was: “Record-shattering ‘unprecedented’ heat scorches Australia, Chile and Argentina.”

Back to this July: “Dangerous Temperatures Grip New York City,” headlined a story in New York Times. The headline of an Associated Press dispatch last month: “Alaska records its warmest month ever; future records likely.” And in The New York Times two weeks ago: “An Ice-Free Iceland Is Not A Joke.”

Indeed, what’s happening is no joke!

Long Island is not among the places that will disappear because of climate change. Reader’s Digest has just put together a list of places that because of climate change are “likely to be submerged within the next 80 years.” These include these nations: 1,000-island Solomon Islands, Palau, Fiji, 600-island Micronesia, the Cook Islands and the Marshall Islands, all in the Pacific; the Maldives and also Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. And French Polynesia would be inundated. Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay off Maryland would be under water. And so on.

Yes, Long Island won’t vanish but sitting in a rising sea with its millions in population, it will be heavily impacted. “Sections will be submerged,” says Mr. McAllister, “including Napeague, Mastic Beach, the Dune Road area of Westhampton.”

A main point Mr. McAllister made at the “Living on the Edge in the Face of Climate Change” event was the importance of dealing with the cause of climate change in addition to its effects. He questioned the opposition to the South Fork Wind Project and its placement of 15 offshore wind turbines 30 miles out to sea by some people in the Town of East Hampton. This is preferable, said Mr. McAllister, to the U.S. government’s push for drilling in waters off Long Island for a substance that is among the fossil fuels central to why we have climate change: oil. Mr. McAllister said: “Let’s move to the sustainable frontier, and that’s critical.”

More next week.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.   

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - The Letter That Changed The World

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

“If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in constructing an atom bomb, I never would have moved a finger,” wrote Albert Einstein in his 1950 book Out of My Later Years. 

He was speaking about a letter from his vacation home on Nassau Point on Suffolk’s North Fork that warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt of a breakthrough in Nazi Germany in nuclear fission which could “lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable…extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Atom bombs. 

That letter from Einstein triggered the Manhattan Project crash program of the United States to build atomic weaponry—to construct atom bombs before Nazi Germany did. And it led to a widening of nuclear technology and what has been called the “Atomic Age.”

On this August 2^nd, on the anniversary of the August 2, 1939 date on that letter, the current owners of Rothman’s Department Store in Southold unveiled Einstein Square in front of the store, centered around a bust of Einstein. The scientist was good friends in the 1930s with David Rothman, the store’s owner when he rented a house on Nassau Point.

I first saw the Einstein letter as a youngster in a display case in the FDR Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park.  I had the feeling then of its great importance. Now I think it might be the most important letter ever. I reprinted part of the letter as a facsimile in my 1980 book, Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, and discuss it in other writings and in TV programs I’ve hosted.

(According to a December 20, 1986 Washington Post article, now online, the letter “was sold to publisher Malcom Forbes today at Christies for $220,000. The price was a record for a 20^th century letter.”) https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1986/12/20/einstein-letter-sold-to-forbes/1f5d23ff-47e3-43ba-a7c0-0199643f1933/

In fact, Einstein didn’t write the letter—although he signed and reviewed it. It was written by physicist Leo Szilard. Fission—the splitting of atoms—had just been done in December 1938 in Germany. Szilard realized the process could be used to create an atomic chain reaction. He made visits to Einstein at his vacation home on Nassau Point with fellow physicists Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller. 

The one-and-a-half page letter—with Albert Einstein, Old Grove Road, Nassau Point, Peconic, Long Island typed on top—cited the fission experiment in Germany and said “it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated.” 

“A single bomb of this type,” it goes on, “carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air. The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is Belgian Congo.”

The letter continued, “I understand Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over”—an indication that Nazi Germany could be pursuing atomic weaponry.  It urged “government action” by the United States.

After receiving the letter, President Roosevelt acted and the Manhattan Project was formed with major secret laboratories at several locations in the United States, notably Los Alamos, New Mexico and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. 

By the time the Manhattan Project produced atom bombs, Germany was defeated. Two of 

the bombs were then dropped on its ally Japan. Szilard was opposed to this maintaining that dropping atom bombs on Japan “could not be justified, at least not until the terms which will be imposed after the war on Japan were made public in detail and Japan were given an opportunity to surrender.” Szilard put together a petition signed by hundreds of Manhattan Project scientists asking that atom bombs not be used on Japan. He and other scientists had earlier collaborated on a 1945 report in which Szilard and some of them called for the U.S. to conduct an atom bomb demonstration to make it clear to Japan the consequences of refusing to surrender. Other scientists involved in the report disagreed. As Manhattan Project physicist Arthur Compton wrote: “We see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”

Einstein regretted signing the August 2^nd letter and was critical, too, of how atom bombs had led to civilian atomic energy. He also wrote in Out of My Later Years: “Since I do not foresee that atomic energy is to be a great boon for a long time, I have to say that for the present time it is a menace.”

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.   

Suffolk Closeup - Dowling College And Southampton College

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Unflattering light has been cast in recent times on the shutdown of what had been a major private college in Suffolk County: Dowling College. Meanwhile, there have been developments involving a main figure at another private college in Suffolk that closed: Southampton College.

Dowling was the first four-year college in Suffolk County when it began operations in 1959 as Adelphi-Suffolk College in a former public school building, “Old 88,” in Sayville. In 1968, after a donation of more than $3 million by real estate investor Robert W. Dowling, it was spun off from Nassau County-based Adelphi and renamed Dowling College. 

I know it well having been a student at Adelphi-Suffolk in 1961 and 1962 during which I launched and was editor of the first newspaper at a four-year college in Suffolk which I named The New Voice. Decades later I would teach journalism at Dowling as an adjunct professor.

Dowling had much going for it. In 1963, as Adelphi-Suffolk, it moved to Oakdale with the former mansion of William K. Vanderbilt the centerpiece of its campus along the Connetquot River. Its faculty was terrific—and included my all-time favorite professor, the late Dr. Charles Raebeck, a brilliant teacher. With small classes, it billed itself as “The Personal College.” Nevertheless, in 2016 Dowling went bankrupt and shut down.  

A 92-page lawsuit charging “negligence” was recently filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court on behalf of Dowling creditors. The lawsuit alleges years of “waste, mismanagement and breach of fiduciary duty.” It seeks $50 million in damages to pay creditors. 

Dowling, it states, launched a second campus at Calabro Airport in Shirley as an aviation school “although it was obvious that Dowling could not sustain two campuses.” Dowling’s trustees “never streamlined Dowling’s operations, never underwent any significant self-examination to improve Dowling’s academic or support services, and never directed Dowling’s available resources toward selected programs intended to enhance Dowling’s success.” It charges the trustees “accepted the cockeyed optimism of their presidential hires and continued to operate Dowling as if its problems would simply disappear.”

As for presidents, Dowling had quite a number, at one point four in four years. They included Robert Gaffney, a former FBI agent, Suffolk County executive and state assemblyman. And there was Scott Rudolph, a trustee switched to being the college’s president although, says the lawsuit, he was “potentially the only college president in the United States who had not graduated from college.”

There’s been a “tentative settlement” of the lawsuit, Newsday has just reported, “that would nix a public airing of the institution’s 2016 bankruptcy and closure.”

I knew Southampton College well, too, serving as an adjunct journalism professor at it for 25 years, until it was closed by Long Island University in 2005. Opened in 1963, it was a fine teaching institution.

A key figure in Southampton’s last two decades was Robert F.X. Sillerman who became its chancellor in 1993. Mr. Sillerman “had amassed a huge fortune in the radio business by buying poorly performing stations, improving their management, and then selling them at a considerable profit,” notes Dr. John A. Strong, long-time Southampton history professor, in his excellent book, “Running on Empty, The Rise and Fall of Southampton College, 1963-2005.” 

Mr. Sillerman had no background in education. He contributed millions of dollars to keep the college going. Still, his push to establish “a new curriculum with an emphasis on innovative interdisciplinary courses” did not help. As a professor, I believe strongly in interdisciplinary education—not compartmentalizing academic areas but integrating them.

But most Southampton students preferred specific disciplines: English or art or business and so forth. The Strong book relates Professor Robert Pattison, long chair of its Humanities Department, dismissing Mr. Sillerman “as someone who may have read an article on interdisciplinary education in a Brandeis alumni magazine or had perhaps seen a program on PBS.” Still, Mr. Sillerman kept pushing this “core” concept declaring it would “revolutionize and redefine a liberal arts and sciences education in the 21^st Century.” Southampton College didn’t make it far into the 2lst Century. And Mr. Sillerman’s personal fall in recent times was as extreme—from being a billionaire to corporate bankruptcy. 

As Newsday reported last month, “A onetime billionaire from Southampton has agreed never again to serve as an officer or director of a public company.” This was in settlement of a securities-fraud case brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Sillerman’s SFX Entertainment went into bankruptcy in 2016. He has sold his waterfront estate and other properties in Southampton and moved to New Hampshire. As an article in Forbes magazine put it, his “blueprint to take over the electronic dance music world is in shambles, the result of poor management, suspect financial planning and a certain hubris…” 

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.   

People In The News - Harold Stein Inducted Into International Filk Hall Of Fame

Harold Stein Inducted into the International Filk Hall of Fame

At the 2019 FilKONtario’s 31^st Convention held in Toronto (Canada) on the April 12-14 weekend, Harold Stein was honored (posthumously) with the presentation of his induction into the International Filk Hall of Fame.  Filk is the folk singing genre of the Science Fiction community and members gather at various locations both nationally and internationally.  The Filk Hall of Fame inducts up to three people annually, who have made a difference in one way or another – by their singing or their “backstage” efforts – over a minimum period of five to ten years, and who had been nominated by their peers. This ensures that the contribution is truly of enduring value.

The Jury, which includes the one member of the FilKONtario convention committee plus Harold Stein at the Sat. night Filk at I-Con 27 in 2008 (Photo by Lenny Provenzano) one representative from each of the other filk convention committee members since the last FilKONtario, critically reviews the nominations. The jury makes selections based on the quality and detail of the information in the nominations and not on personal information they may have. Contributions to filk music and the filk community, of a lasting value, are important. Each honoree’s nomination is made into a Citation, and the new members of the Filk Hall of Fame are inducted at the FilKONtario banquet. There, members of the committee read the Citations (which are based on the nominations) and presented to the Inductees with their individual plaques. Their names are added to the Filk Hall of Fame cumulative plaque. A Hall of Fame Plaque is also handed out. They are also honored in song, at the Hall of Fame Concert the next afternoon.

Harold Stein was the closest to an official filk archivist, amassing and cataloging a collection of filk convention material, recorded performances (from national and international concerts to local “house filk” gatherings).  He make sure that performers had an opportunity to obtain copies of their performances and in his archivist role he worked to identify and preserve many recordings (from a variety of sources).  He was respectful of people’s wishes and intellectual property as noted on his website FloatingFilk.com — “Do Not Record requests are always honored.” He would not include any music or songs on CD’s (that were made available to other filkers) unless he had written permission to do so. Harold assisted in running sound at innumerable conferences and ran filk programming at I-Con 2008 and I-Con 2009, and was the Techno-Guest at ConCertino in 2009.  From as early as the mid-1990’s he was a volunteer at every convention he attended for the sound crew and for the art shows.

His mother, Phyllis Stein of Hauppauge, Long Island, (on being informed that Harold was being inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame) explained, “Harold had often said that there were so many others that he felt were so deserving of this honor and that he felt he had several years (and others to go first) to be recognized at the Filking Hall of Fame.  He also said repeatedly that he was making sure to withhold his cancer fighting time from everyone (those who knew were sworn to secrecy, so to speak) so that it would not affect his eligibility status — he was truly “the listener” and all of us (his parents and his cousin/”big brother” Larry Levy of Rockville Centre, Long Island) had planned to be in Ohio in October 2018 to see him receive his recognition at the Ohio Valley Filk Fest event as the “Listener Guest of Honor”.  He did not make it there in person but was certainly there in spirit and he made sure to hold on until his longtime friends — Merav, Lisa, Spencer, Josh, Mark, Sue, Batya and Alex, coming from Brooklyn to Boston to the Chicago areas— were able to visit him, so that he could see them during his last few weeks as well on the night before he died and to hear some of the music from that Ohio weekend.”