I don’t want to start pointing fingers — we need to save East Beach.”

Select board member Manny Soares

The storm wiped us out big time. I need rock. I had rock, and now the rock’s gone. Give me my rocks back.”

Deborah Attardo, who owns three lots on oceanside of East Beach Road

We’ll work with you, but we want you to work with us. We want to have some cooperation. You (the town) have a vested interest in that area and we have a vested interest.”

Kevin Curt, East Beach Improvement Association

The powerful storm that pummeled East Beach a week before Christmas did more than wash out part of the road, damage scores of beach lots and re-shape the topography of the beach itself — it also eroded the already frayed relationship between the town and the East Beach Improvement Association. But if Westport is ever to take lasting steps to minimize storm-related erosion in the area and save East Beach Road, both sides need to come together for the common good.

That was one of the main takeaways from Monday’s select board meeting, where lot owners, board members and the head of the town’s beach committee dissected the unnamed storm’s impact and brain-stormed ways to lessen the damage from future storms.

“We need to work together,” board member Manny Soares said. “I don’t want to start pointing fingers — we need to save East Beach.”

Nothing new

For as long as anyone can remember, the low-lying barrier beach along East Beach Road has been susceptible to erosion.

The Monday, Dec. 18 storm, like previous ones, moved millions and millions of pounds of sand and cobbles, the essential building blocks that beach lot owners use to shore up their lots and prevent erosion. It pushed massive piles of them up and over the road, washing out a 100-foot section at the east end of the road and flattening or severely damaging several beach shacks, and left an untold number of lots, particularly on the ocean side, with little protection from future storms. The storm was so powerful that it tossed five-ton boulders across the top of the Gooseberry Island causeway.

Though the storm left the road impassible, highway department workers arrived in trucks and front end loaders soon after it passed. Working nearly around the clock, they trucked away load after load of debris — flotsam and jetsam, sand and many of those cobbles — offsite, depositing them at other locations in lower Westport that also suffered in the storm. Workers had the road back open to traffic within two days — a Herculean effort, several said.

But East Beach property owners were not happy with the response, claiming the town had no right to remove and relocate the stones. Those cobbles are the main building block that many of them use to shore up their trailer foundations against erosion, and several said Monday that with them now gone, they are particularly vulnerable to future storms.

The law dictates that when beach areas are replenished following storms, the material that goes in must be in “like kind” to what was there before. But cobbles are expensive, and the town’s decision to move many of those that were there, improvement association head Kevin Curt said, leaves property owners with little means to repair the damage and shore up their lots. Frankly, it amounts to theft, he said a few days before the meeting.

Deborah Attardo, who owns three oceanside lots, was more blunt:

“The storm wiped us out big time,” she said. “I need rock. I had rock, and now the rock’s gone. Give me my rocks back.”

What to do?

There has been no shortage of studies on East Beach and its road written over the years, and beach committee chairman Sean Leach, a civil engineer, knows many of them by heart.

At Monday’s meeting, he said the recent storm should be a wake-up call — it’s time for the town to look at some of those old studies, get together with property owners, and find a lasting solution. While it will be a huge effort, he said, improving the area is possible if both sides work together.

“There are grants and things available to shore up and protect lots,” he said. “But it’s only going to work if everybody from Gooseberry to Dartmouth gets on board. Otherwise we’re forever going to be cleaning off this road.”

Since the early 1990s, he said, the area has lost 30 or 40 feet of beach frontage and that worsened in the past storm. Now, some oceanside lots only have 10 or 15 feet for a trailer.

One study recommended moving East Beach Road slightly to the north, a move that would provide a barrier to the water and would create more beach space. There are other possibilities, as well — coastal resiliency measures that include planting vegetation to capture sand so it’s not washed out in a strong storm, and other ways to buttress the beach’s natural defenses.

Later this year, the United States Army Corps of Engineers is expected to start dredging the federal channel into the Westport River. While the plan is to dump the dredge spoils offshore, Soares suggested bringing that material to East Beach. Others said Monday that part of the solution may be found in a study, due to be released by the Buzzards Bay Coalition later this year, on the impact of the Gooseberry Island causeway, which some suspect is contributing to the problem.

Whatever the solution, “you need to do something fairly quickly,” Leach said. “I don’t want to see East Beach disappear.”

While they acknowledged that forming a plan that addresses the diverse needs of the town and residents won’t be easy, select board members will call on members of the planning board and fire chief Daniel Baldwin, who serves as the head of Emergency Management in Westport, to lead the effort. With the board and Baldwin coordinating a plan of attack, perhaps a unified front will have traction and result in a real, lasting plan.

Curt said he’s ready, and property owners are too:

“We’ll work with you, but we want you to work with us,” he said. “We want to have some cooperation. You (the town) have a vested interest in that area and we have a vested interest.”

“We don’t want to lose it.”