Heavy rain last Tuesday caused a washout at Reeves Beach that damaged the structure surrounding the gazebo at the popular town beach. The beach is closed until further notice while repairs are undertaken by the Town of Riverhead.
Riverhead Town Engineer Drew Dillingham said in an interview last week that the engineering department is working on repairing the damage. The repair will involve shoring up the bluff with large rocks and boulders to prevent damage from another washout in the future.
Rain during last week’s storm overwhelmed the drainage system along Park Road — an extensive system of leaching basins and stormwater inlet grates originally installed in the 1990s to prevent the washouts and erosion at the road-end beach that occurred during every major storm, Assistant Town Engineer Ken Testa said. When the system became overwhelmed last week, a large volume of fast-moving water rushed down Park Road to the beach parking lot, he said. The water flowed over the tall concrete curb there and down the front of the bluff, causing major erosion of the bluff seaward of the gazebo and resulting in the collapse of an area under and adjacent to the structure.
The gazebo itself is structurally sound because it’s built on 40-foot pilings, Testa said. “It looks scary because probably eight or 10 feet of the pilings are exposed,” he said, “but there’s still a good portion of them in the ground.”
It will probably require a month or two to complete the work, Dillingham said. The town will hire an outside contractor to put the rocks in place, he said, because special equipment is required. He’s estimating a cost “on the high side” of about $175,000. The town’s buildings and grounds division will rebuild the patio area with the pavers that washed out last week, he said. Doing that work in-house will save the town about $50,000.
The lower bluff and ramp and the cliff on the east side of the parking lot are all reinforced with structures called gabion mats — stone-filled, woven wire baskets that effectively control erosion, Testa said.
“When we built that whole park, all the ramps and portions of the parking lot and all the tiers coming up from the beach towards the parking lot, were all built out of gabion mats,” Testa said. “You can see them along the cliff on the east side of the parking lot. They’re great. Once you hit those, the erosion stops. So I don’t think it’s going to get worse than it is now.”
Testa said yesterday the second rainstorm last week, Friday night into Saturday morning, didn’t cause any additional erosion.
Reeves Beach was the only beach that sustained damage in the storm, the engineers said.
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