'Why does it still look like this?' 1 year after storm destroyed dam and bridge, they remain in ruins

Patti VanKesteren, of Miller Place, stood at a wooden beach fence in T. Bayles Minuse Mill Pond Park in Stony Brook one morning earlier this month, stunned by the scene in front of her.

She remembered visiting the mill pond, also known as Duck Pond, more than a year ago to stroll the grounds with her grandson Bennett.

Ducks and geese had paddled in the placid pond under brilliant skies. The occasional car had traversed Harbor Road on a bridge spanning a dam.

But now the pond and the bridge were gone. VanKesteren stared at what remained of the overpass after a 100- to 200-foot section was washed away last Aug. 18-19 when the dam broke during a torrential rainstorm.

Sections of asphalt marked with yellow traffic stripes lay in huge chunks as they clung to the dirt roadbed.

Bennett, 7, was perplexed.

“He just said, 'Why does it still look like this?'” VanKesteren said. Then as if to answer him, she added, “I don’t know why it’s still like this.” 

VanKesteren's mystified reaction to the scene at Harbor Road is shared by residents and officials in Stony Brook and the adjacent village of Head of the Harbor. A year after the storm swept across the North Shore, dumping 6 to 10 inches of rain and leaving a trail of destruction from downtown Smithtown to Sound Beach, repairs to the bridge and dam have yet to even begin.  

Residents and local officials had expected the road and dam would be swiftly repaired last fall, possibly by the combined efforts of Brookhaven Town, Head of the Harbor, Suffolk County and the nonprofit Ward Melville Heritage Organization, which owns the park.

But an ongoing dispute over who owns the bridge and dam — and therefore who must lead reconstruction and seek federal reimbursements — has left them in nearly the exact state they were in shortly after the dam broke. 

Ownership dispute lingers

The town, county and nonprofit have commissioned dueling title searches that failed to settle the ownership dispute. Village officials have threatened a lawsuit to force the nonprofit to accept ownership and apply for Federal Emergency Management Agency aid.

Brookhaven Supervisor Dan Panico said Aug. 7 he had reached "a boiling point" as talks between the parties had failed to resolve the stalemate.

"It's just mind-boggling that this is the point where we are almost one year later," Panico said two weeks ago.

Residents say the washed-out bridge — which had straddled the Smithtown and Brookhaven town borders, providing a lifeline between Head of the Harbor and Stony Brook hamlet — makes trips longer between the two communities. Head of the Harbor residents worry that ambulances and fire trucks from Stony Brook are slowed by the village's twisty roads.

Meanwhile, nature has begun reclaiming the park, gradually carving a meandering stream through the muddy, weed-infested pond bottom.

"I thought that the responsible parties would get to work very quickly," Head of the Harbor resident Beth Zweig said in a phone interview, expressing a common sentiment. “We wanted both the road [repaired], that was the most important thing, but also the restoration of the pond.

“If everybody wanted the same thing, why couldn’t we go ahead and get it done?”

Park visitors such as VanKesteren now are greeted by signs warning about "unstable ground" where the bridge washed away.

“To think what it looked like before this happened, it’s very sad," she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It used to be such a nice place to walk.”

The damage from the August storm included flooded basements, mudslides, overwhelmed storm drains and another washed-out dam at Stump Pond in Blydenburgh County Park in Smithtown. Initial estimates said repairs could cost up to $75 million.

Brookhaven Town officials initially agreed to help repair the Stony Brook road and dam — rejecting calls from some environmentalists to let the pond naturally revert to a river — and began setting aside up to $10 million for the effort.

Since then, Brookhaven officials have said the town can't expend taxpayer funds on the project, pointing to what they said is a mountain of evidence indicating Ward Melville Heritage Organization owns the bridge and dam.

They cite documents including property records dating back decades, and official records from over the past 40 years, including some notarized documents signed by heritage organization president Gloria Rocchio, attesting that the nonprofit and its predecessor, the Stony Brook Community Fund, own all the land within the park, including the bridge and dam.

The nonprofit has said its own title search of property records was inconclusive. Rocchio also has cited concerns over insurance liability and potential litigation if it acknowledges ownership.  

Problems for Stony Brook

The stalemate leaves a host of problems for the Stony Brook community — including economic losses for businesses, and the aesthetic stain of the collapsed bridge, said Charles Tramontana, of Stony Brook.

“I think frustrating is the word that comes to everyone’s mind," said Tramontana, president of the Three Village Civic Association. “It looks like our elected officials were all trying, but I don’t know. Is it really on the heritage organization or the town?

“I hope there’s some resolution that moves things forward," he said. “Are they going to wait this out forever? I’m sure there’s insurance involved. How long are we going to sit in this holding pattern?”

While officials debated who should rebuild the Stony Brook dam, there was no such controversy over Mill Creek Road in Head of the Harbor, which also sustained damage in the August storm.

Ward Melville Heritage Organization acknowledged ownership of the road and launched efforts to rebuild it, and it was reopened in May. Nonprofit officials declined to say how much repairs cost.

“Ward Melville Heritage Organization was right on it,” Head of the Harbor resident Daniel Kinney said. Like his neighbors, Kinney was trapped for weeks after the storm until an emergency road was built to allow mail and package deliveries and emergency response vehicles.

The restored road included installation of a steel wall — called a revetment — that officials said would fortify Mill Creek Road against future storms. 

“[The new road is] very beautiful. It’s a major improvement over what was there before," Kinney said. "One good thing happened.”

But the loss of the Harbor Road bridge has removed the most direct link between the sister communities of Stony Brook and Head of the Harbor, which share a ZIP code and a common history going back centuries.

Before the storm, Head of the Harbor residents zipped across the bridge to use the Stony Brook post office or shop at the Stony Brook Village Center, an open-air shopping mall owned by Eagle Realty Holdings Inc., an affiliate of the Ward Melville Heritage Organization.

Without the bridge, Head of the Harbor residents said they get to Stony Brook via Rhododendron Drive, a winding, narrow, tree-lined road without streetlights.

Village residents said they leave home 10 to 15 minutes earlier for trips to Stony Brook. Ride-share drivers have trouble finding their homes, they said.

“If we have a mutual aid situation where we need an ambulance … they have nowhere to go,” Zweig said. “It’s very dark [at night]. It’s very narrow. There have been a lot of near misses, a lot of fender-benders. … It’s only a matter of time, especially with all the pedestrians there, that two cars are going to collide.”

Head of the Harbor residents, including some who did not want their names used in this story, said they make fewer trips to Stony Brook to shop or use the post office.

“That’s one thing that I miss," Kinney said. "Before I could just go to the village. Now I can’t. It’s a longer trip. It takes awhile.”

Nature adapts to the standstill

Over the last year, a new ecosystem has emerged in the drained pond.

A small stream cuts through the mud, dodging the remains of the bridge before continuing north to Stony Brook Harbor.

Ducks on a recent morning bathed in the stream. Geese strolled past the asphalt chunks of the collapsed roadway.

Pond or no pond, nature adapts to changing circumstances, and restoring the pond "would not be an ecological disaster," said Henry Bokuniewicz, a Stony Brook University professor of oceanography who had studied the pond before the dam collapse. 

If the dam is not rebuilt, he said, trees and other vegetation simply will take over.

“The terrain will continue to grow out. ... It will get a lot of native vegetation but it will be temporary. It will get a lot of different vegetation in terms of weeds," Bokuniewicz said. “Eventually, you would expect it to become more of a forested area like the area south of the pond.

“Next year it will look different if they don’t do anything.”

Bokuniewicz recalled the mill pond tested positive two years ago for cyanobacteria, a toxic form of blue-green algae. He and other Stony Brook University marine researchers visited the pond in early August last year to perform their own survey.

“Two weeks later," he said of the pond, "it was gone.”