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July 24, 1975 - Fire Island Barrier Beachfocus on nature by Paul Stoutenburgh ` Focus on Nature has dealt in the past with the happenings of the North Fork. In the next few weeks I'm going to switch my ramblings to the barrier beach on Fire Island. Think of a beautiful sandy beach stretching for miles, with a Ranger Station just over the dunes. From here I will be interpreting the fragile balance of nature to visitors to the Fire Island National Seashore. It will be fun telling you about the goings on out here. On and off my wife, Barbara, will be here —we'll walk the beach together, watch the ocean change its many moods and wish everyone could experience the wonders of this fascinating world of the barrier beach with us. Those of us who are involved in the ecology and conservation of our area sooner or later come in contact with the words "littoral drift ". It refers to the shifting sand along our beaches. This is a natural phenomenon man has been trying to cope with for hundreds of years. George Washington calculated its effect on the Montauk light when he laid it out 200 feet back from the end of the Island. It was calculated to last 200 years (or one foot a year) and those years are just about up. If you have been out to Montauk lately you have seen its precarious position as it sits less than 40 feet from the edge of the sea. Another example of moving sand can be seen at Fire Island light, which when built was on Fire Island Inlet. Today it is miles from the inlet, attesting to the shifting sands to the west. We all know that Long Island was created by glaciers and that the island, particularly out east, shows the remains of debris from glaciers. The sea worked on the piles of rubble and as the glaciers melted and ran off to the south they formed Long Island, with rocks on the North Shore and sand on the South Shore. This all adds up to that "littoral drift" along the South Shore, for- ming what we now know as Fire Island, which has been taken over by the National Seashore for your benefit and for that of generations to come. This sandy strip is in constant change, no area goes untouched. Whether it be storm, wind -blown sand, flood or salt spray —they all shape and reshape this ever - changing island. Man, in his puny attempts to outwit nature, has done many ingenious things along its shore. All are short- lived.All are expensive. None is permanent. He will build great stone jetties. He will dredge and fill miles of lower beach. He will plant grass, install snow fences and a host of other devices in hopes of stabilizing this barrier beach, but none seems to work. Those that do make a modest showing of success, but finally fail because they ultimately cause problems for someone else. A typical example was a set of rock groins on the South Shore that did a fair job in one spot in holding the beach, but immediately ad- jacent, where the groin stopped, the beach cut away and a motel fell in the ocean. Man simply will not learn that there are some things best left alone. The barrier beach is one. It will give with the punches the sea and storms deal out if left alone. It's a grand and exciting place to be if nature is left to her own shaping, but it's a sorry tale when man builds in an area as unstable as the outer beach. Remember all our hurricanes and the heartbreaks they've caused those who did not heed this simple rule.