Environment

Suffolk County and the Group for the East End have partnered in a new effort to boost participation in the septic replacement incentive programs offered by the county and East End towns.

Builder Pat Trunzo, who grew up in Sag Harbor, will break the long streak of single-property redevelopment in the heart of the village with a proposal for five high-end houses with pools, pool houses and detached garages on properties that straddle Marsden Street, just across Division Street from Pierson High School.

Researchers from the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, or AMSEAS, conducted a necropsy on a dead humpback whale that washed up onto the beach near Halsey Neck Lane in Southampton on Thursday morning, November 14.

After the attorney and architect for the problematic house at 8 Wilson Place in the Ninevah Beach community — built thousands of cubic feet higher than allowed by the village code — bitterly complained about any further delays, Sag Harbor’s Historic Preservation and Architectural Review Board voted 4-1 last Thursday to grant a certificate of appropriateness for the structure and its landscaping plan.

There were no firm answers but plenty of questions on these and other topics when nearly 70 people gathered at The American Hotel for an “Express Session” luncheon discussion on Friday, November 15, on “The Future of Public Space in Sag Harbor Village.” It was the latest in a series of sold-out public discussions sponsored by The Sag Harbor Express and the last one for 2019.

Two years after East Hampton Town found itself confronting a plague in the form of the southern pine beetle, a small insect that had an oversized appetite for the kind of pitch pines found in many of the town’s forests, there is some good news to report.

Tick drags conducted this year for the Village of North Haven show a dramatic decline in the tick population at seven locations between June and October, during which time the village has deployed at least 15 “4-Poster” deer-feeding stations to apply permethrin to kill ticks on the heads and necks of deer as they feed on cracked corn.

On Saturday, November 16, at 7 p.m., the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton will host a lecture about the native species with Samantha Hoff, a Ph.D. student at the State University of New York at Albany, who has been working for the past few years with the animals, researching the deadly white-nose syndrome — a disease that harms hibernating bats, caused by an easily spreadable fungus.

The Peconic Estuary Program (PEP) staff issued a statement last Friday suggesting that this year’s catastrophic die-off of adult scallops in the Peconic Bay system may be linked to global warming causing high temperatures and low levels of dissolved oxygen in bay waters over the summer.

A massive and mysterious die-off of bay scallops over the past summer wiped out as much of 95 percent of the valuable and iconic shellfish in parts of the Peconic Bay system

The Long Island Power Authority this week released the details of its power purchase agreement for the planned South Fork Wind Farm

Conflicting answers from the Suffolk County Water Authority is part of Carol Williams's frustration with her periodic brown-water problem, which she says occurs probably three or four times a year, sometimes lasting a day but usually three or four days and on one occasion even longer.

Michele Passarella, a two-time breast cancer survivor, remembers the help the Coalition for Women’s Cancers at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital offered her when she battled the disease a few short years ago.

The waters of Ligonee Brook saw a once-rare rush of small fish down its shallow, winding reaches last week, as a year-class of alewives dashed out of Long Pond for the tidal waters where they will grow to adulthood.

Marking a milestone in its recent history, the Harbor Committee of Sag Harbor on Monday rejected a long pending application for a wetlands permit that would have allowed a pool to be constructed behind an existing house at 36 Fordham Street, 63-feet from wetlands along Ligonee Brook, 12-feet closer than required by the wetlands code.