Environmental advocate Aaron Goode, of the New Haven Bioregional Group was grateful the weather had held out Sunday evening for a group of about a dozen hikers to explore Sandy Point, which he called “one of the unique, special places in the bioregion.” It was also, as it turned out, a place where one could see New Haven and West Haven grappling with climate change and environmental stability nearly in real time.
The Sandy Point nature walk was part of the regularly scheduled events of the New Haven Bioregional Group, and that perspective was provided by Kathie Hebert, longtime West Haven resident and board director and vice president of the Sandy Point Neighborhood Association, “founded in 2021 to represent the interests of neighborhood residents in order to maintain and improve quality of life within our Sandy Point neighborhood” in West Haven, as its mission statement reads.
Hebert began by explaining that, in the 19th century, Sandy Point was a tourist attraction, boasting a dock for boats, a trolley from Union Station, and rows of hotels leading to West Haven’s Savin Rock Amusement Park. Savin Rock was closed in 1966 and Sandy Point, the part of West Haven’s shore closer to New Haven, was in some ways hidden from sight. For decades, Hebert said, people parked in the lot at Sandy Point thinking it was the parking for Captain’s Galley, a seafood restaurant on the other side of Beach Street that went out of business in 2010 and was demolished in 2017.
More acutely, Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 “decimated this area” around Old Field Creek, Hebert said. “Many of the houses sustained monumental damage.” In response, the people in the neighborhood formed the West Haven Watershed Restoration Committee, which approached West Haven’s mayor and state representatives to see what could be done to help. “Everybody rebuilt or fixed their cellars after Irene, but when it happened again,” she said, “flood insurance is only so good.”
The committee connected with the National Resources Conservation Service — part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture — which initiated a program to buy those damaged houses, raze them, and return that land to nature. As of 2020, 25 West Haven residents had sold their properties and demolition and natural restoration already begun on several of them, with 39 more slated for a later phase. At the same time, members of the neighborhood association have cleaned out tires, desks, mattresses, and other garbage from Sandy Point.
“In the U.S., we have built along the water where people do not belong, and then you get damage and you rebuild. We want the government to pay for it. But it’s becoming costly with climate change,” Hebert said. With a managed retreat, planting trees and shrubs where houses once were, “when we do have storms, there will be land for the water to be absorbed.” In that sense, West Haven is following in the mode of Silver Sands in Milford, created when Hurricane Diane destroyed 75 homes along the shoreline in 1955, and New London’s Ocean Beach Park, redeveloped as a park after a hurricane destroyed the houses, shops, and businesses there in 1938.
As New Haven promotes dense commercial and residential development along its own waterfront, concerns about flooding in future storms are shaping development in West Haven. Work is slated to begin to elevate Beach Street, which runs along the shore, to 11 feet to mitigate the effects of future floods. Developers along Beach Street are having difficulty finding financial support and insurance for plans for new ground-floor retail. And concerns continue regarding West Haven’s waste water treatment plant, which, Hebert said, was partially submerged during storms.
The theme of learning to accommodate nature persisted throughout the walk. Stopping at a self-regulating tidal gate on Old Field Creek, Hebert explained that in the 1990s the gate was broken, and an Army Corps of Engineers assessment declared it to be a flood hazard. That prediction proved accurate in Irene and Sandy. Since then, the gate has been fixed, and a less impeded tide — allowing salt water to move farther inland at high tide — has begun restoring the marsh behind it to “what Mother Nature wanted,” Hebert said.
As the group reached the waterline and made its way toward New Haven, Hebert informed the walkers that “100 years ago there were no beaches in West Haven.” The sand was all shipped in by the town to build up beaches farther west along the coast. An eastbound current, meanwhile, was slowly moving that sand farther into the harbor, creating a wide expanse of sandy beach and even sandbars offshore. The town would likely continue to import sand; the current would almost certainly continue to transport that sand elsewhere. “Mother Nature is going to do what it wants to do,” Hebert said.
As the dune widened, it was roped off with a small fence to protect the habitat of plovers nesting there. Fishermen dotted this stretch of shore, their lines extending over the walker’s heads and out into the water.
Sandy Point was also a nursery for horseshoe crabs, which, Goode explained, are “living fossils,” remaining largely unchanged for 435 million years. They were a species that survived by laying numerous eggs, enough for the birds to eat their fill of them and still leave enough for the species to propogate. Commercial fishing for them is illegal, Goode said, but fishermen catching them to use as bait remained a problem. In addition, horseshoe crabs are used in medical research, include vaccine development; scientists are working on a synthetic substitute, but have found nothing as suitable.
As the group continued down the beach, the harbor — encompassing West Haven and New Haven — presented itself as an entirely contiguous space. We had the same view, as Goode put it, as “what the Quinnipiac would have seen.” West Rock, East Rock, and Sleeping Giant were all in plain sight. But so, too, were the signs of modern life, from the office buildings in downtown New Haven, to the streetlights coming on along the shore, to the large-scale infrastructure built along the coast in both New Haven and West Haven. It was all too easy to see how the municipalities were tied to one another, especially in the relation of both to the harbor. You could see a waste treatment plant in New Haven from West Haven’s water treatment plant. The large fuel storage tanks of New Haven’s port were an obvious feature of the landscape. The deep channel down the harbor’s middle was clear; 90 percent of goods brought into the harbor, Goode said, was petroleum, mostly for home heating and aviation fuel. That fuel was then transported through the Buckeye Pipeline, which starts in New Haven and heads to several towns north in Connecticut and Massachusetts, as well as Bradley Airport.
New Haven Harbor Station, virtually invisible from most parts of town, loomed large across the harbor water. The power station runs on fuel oil and natural gas and, Goode said, is a major polluter.
But meanwhile, the sand and shells at Sandy Point were soft under our feet, and the dune grasses flickered in the chilly breeze. Boiling gray clouds to the west dropped a curtain of rain inland.Plovers skittered across the tops of the waves. The group came upon the large sandbar Hebert had talked about earlier, where several families were still fishing even as the evening light was fading. The remains of the dock Hebert had mentioned poked just above the waves.
West Haven’s waste water treatment plant was in plain sight. Hebert explained that the lifespan of its outflow pipe “was pretty much done.” It had been damaged and repaired several times. It was going to cost millions to replace it but the town was looking into it.
“It’s a priority,” she said, “because God forbid we get one more storm and it’s gone.”
Visit the New Haven Bioregional Group’s website for more information on its ongoing activities.
An interesting article, mixing history, politics, environmental stories. Very educational.
West Haven--- fix your sewage treatment plant!