Scarred and  scoured by one of the toughest winters in recent memory, East Beach welcomed its latest yearly migration of summer residents Friday, when the town began allowing lot owners to move their trailers back to the beach for another sun-bleached summer.

For years, move-in day was marked on calendars and eagerly anticipated by the 100 or so lot owners who own small trailer sites along the low-lying oceanfront road. That excitement is still there, but this year it has been tempered a bit by the knowledge that this winter’s storms brought — East Beach may be a paradise, but it is a fragile one.

“It’s changed,” said one man, who was helping a cousin move his trailer in over the weekend. “One hurricane ...”

It wasn’t hurricanes that did in East Beach this year, but a fierce cycle of strong winter storms that from December through February scoured the barrier beach clean, displacing untold tons of cobbles and sand and severely re-shaping the beach’s topography.

The storms seemed to come one after another from late December through the end of January, destroying shacks and utility poles and concrete pads, and leaving many properties without the massive amounts of cobble and sand their owners count on to protect them.

When they returned Friday, owners were greeted with an area far less resilient to another strong storm than it was when they moved out last fall, and to a beach estimated to have lost 40 to 50 feet of frontage since the 1990s. The situation is much worse on the ocean side than on the north (The Let) side, where some properties now have just feet of space above the high tide line.

So as they arrived, some brought fill with them. Others started moving what extra they had, if any, to adjoining properties that needed it.

“One guy brought in $15,000 of material and it didn’t even compensate” for what was removed by Mother Nature and those town workers this winter, Kevin Curt, president of the East Beach Improvement Association, said.

"We're trying to give back what we can, but there's so little material left."

“Give me my rocks back”

For much of the winter and Spring, Curt has been wrestling with town officials over what he believes is no less than an existential threat to the summer colony.

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 much of the storms' spoils off-site, Curt said, left property owners without a precious resource. Frankly, he said, it amounts to theft.

He said that if Westport wanted equity, officials would compensate the dozens of beach owners for the replacement of that material, much of which was trucked up and taken away by town crews who used it as fill in other areas across town over the winter.

Though a small amount — seven truckloads, Curt said — has since been returned at the direction of the select board and town manager, he said that is a drop in the bucket and estimates it would cost $1 million to replace all the fill removed by the town.

"These property owners are screwed," Curt said. "Instead of putting it back on private property (along the road) as a green effort to save the beach, they've taken so much of that material for their own use. We want it back."

Added Deborah Attardo, who owns three lots on the ocean side and has been at East Beach every summer for 53 years, following the first storm:

“I need rock. I had rock, and now the rock’s gone. Give me my rocks back.”

Town response

Town manager James Hartnett said Monday afternoon that while the winter was difficult, the town is taking steps to improve the situation both now, and long term.

"We are working on it," he said — “We are doing what we can."

Westport has held several meetings on the issue, appointed Fire Chief Daniel Baldwin, the town's emergency management director, to head a study group to look at the future of East Beach and East Beach Road, and is working on multiple other fronts to address the beach's problems.

Westport is currently pricing out repair work for sections of the road that were destroyed in the storms, a job Hartnett estimated will cost $45,000 to $70,000. Meanwhile, he said, there have been discussions about what to do the next time a strong coastal storm hits, and how Westport will clean up.

There has been no shortage of studies over the years on how to make the area less vulnerable to storms. One 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, including coastal resiliency measures that include planting vegetation to capture sand so it is not washed out in a strong storm, and other ways to buttress the beach’s natural defenses.

Hartnett said the town is also looking into beach nourishment grants, and at the request of the improvement association, is working to come up with an interim policy that addresses what to do with cobble displaced in future storms.

To that end, he said, highway workers are "looking to push the majority (of the cobbles and fill) to the south side of the road. They still have to maintain the integrity of the road, that's the first priority. But beyond that," town workers will endeavor to leave a majority of that fill where it is."

Curt said the owners deserve a solution that acknowledges their right to exist and doesn’t burden them with endless bureaucratic hoops when they need to do work on their properties. He said he'll continue to work with the town to come up with solutions fair to everyone.

Still, he wonders about the future, aware that not everyone supports the summer colony:

"They're just waiting for a nice big fat hurricane to come and officially wipe it out."