BY ROSE ADAMS
A decades-long scheme to
shore up the southern Brooklyn
coast has resulted in a
massive wall of sand that’s
built up along the tip of the Coney
Island peninsula — causing
property damage, health
problems, drainage issues,
and eye sores, according to locals.
“It’s like Lawrence of Arabia
out there,” said Anthony
Ceretti, whose mother-in-law
has lived for decades in Sea
Gate, a gated community on
the western tip of the peninsula.
“We get hundreds of
pounds of sand on our deck
each year.”
The fi rst major fortifi cation
project came in the mid-1900s
when the US Army Corps of Engineers
extended a rock-based
substance called a terminal
groin and added 35,000 cubic
yards of sand to the ocean side
of the peninsula in an effort to
prevent future erosion.
Over time, however, tidal
patterns shifted much of the
sand to the side of the peninsula
opposite the boardwalk
— which led to the creation
of a beach surrounding the
northern shore of Coney Island
COURIER L 18 IFE, FEBRUARY 7-13, 2020
and Sea Gate, according
to one longtime civic leader.
“There was never a beach
on the bayside of the peninsula,”
said environmentalist
Ida Sanoff, who formerly lived
in Sea Gate by Gravesend Bay.
“At low tide, we used to get
maybe six feet of wet sand.”
Locals eventually adapted
to the new reality, enjoying
their man-made beach — even
if it caused the occasional
drain backup and sand accumulation.
But the dunes started to grow
as the US Army Corps and the
Parks Department continued to
dump thousands of pounds of
sand onto the beach’s southern
shore — which would migrate
up to Gravesend Bay. The Corps
and the Parks Department
have conducted several sand
removal projects on the northern
shore and constructed new
terminal groins in 2016 to help
prevent the buildup, but residents
say that conditions only
worsened — and have reached
a breaking point.
“This year is the worst year
I’ve seen,” said Ceretti.
These days, the sand dune
is fortifi ed above the walls
that surround Sea Gate, often
spilling over the fences and
covering residents’ yards like
snow.
Homeowners who live in
the dozen-or-so houses along
Ocean View Avenue complain
that the giant dune blocks
their view of Gravesend Bay
and causes a plethora of consequences.
“It takes over our backyard
and causes all kinds
of damage,” said Patrick Fioriglio,
who lives on the maritime
roadway next to the bay.
“There’s health problems.
There’s breathing problems.”
Sea Gate residents can navigate
a number of bureaucratic
hurdles each year to obtain a
permit and hire a bulldozer
to plow the sand back into the
ocean — but even then, their
relief is only temporary.
“Every year we have to
push back the sand, it blows
back, we push back the sand,
Anthony Ceretti points to the nearly 20-foot sand dune behind his mother
in-law’s Sea Gate house. Photo by Derrick Waterson
it blows back,” said Fioriglio.
Ceretti added that residents
fork over around $15,000
every year for the unsustainable
plow job.
Much of the blame lies at
the feet of the Parks Department,
according to locals, who
accuse the city’s greenspace
gurus of failing to do their
part to clear the sand from the
public side of the fence that
borders the private Sea Gate
community — which allowed
the wall to build up in the fi rst
place.
“If the city kept their side
of the fence clear, Sea Gate
would have a much smaller issue
to contend with,” said Ceretti.
A representative from the
US Army Corps of Engineers
did not say whether the additional
sand on the southern
shore may have caused the gigantic
sand dune to grow, but
claimed that the t-groins have
prevented conditions from
worsening.
‘It’s like Lawrence of Arabia’
Massive sand wall threatens coastal Coney Island homes
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