One year after a series of powerful winter storms battered Westport’s coast, town planners have enlisted the services of a prominent environmental engineering group to help come up with plans to manage three of the town’s  most vulnerable barrier beach areas.

The Woods Hole Group recently began working with Westport’s planning department to study and draft beach management plans for East Beach Road and Atlantic and Beach avenues. The work is being paid for by $230,000 in grants secured by town planner Michael Burris.

“It’s really been a long time coming,” Burris said.

A string of storms that began in December 2023 and continued through this time last year caused significant damage to coastal areas, most notably East Beach Road. As Westport cleaned up the mess, the town’s removal of cobbles and sand that had washed onto the road angered seasonal residents who said that debris was theirs, and they needed it to shore up their properties.

As the town and Woods Hole work to develop plans to manage the areas, they’ll work in tandem with a new committee formed by the select board earlier this week. The town’s Barrier Beach Planning Committee will consist of Sean Leach, head of the beach commission, Kevin Curt, of the East Beach Improvement Association, and three coastal property owners. Burrris said that not all three property owners have yet been selected, but he said he has reached out to the Elephant Rock Beach Club and the Westport Land Conservation Trust, which owns properties along Atlantic and Beach avenues and expressed interest in taking part.

While other areas in Westport are also vulnerable to the type of impacts felt last winter, West Beach and Cherry and Webb Beach are not included in the study, Burris said, because they lack the infrastructure of the three areas under study — “it’s a different situation,” he said.

Grant funding that is paying for the management plans’ development also did not specify work in those other two areas, Burris said.