After Sandy: The fight to stay home

Originally published: December 25th, 2012 By Jennifer Barrios

Barbara Minnieer, of Long Beach, stands with her son Christopher Serrano, 2, at her rental home. The family has been living in the home since superstorm Sandy. They have minimal electricity and are heating mostly with wood. (Dec. 25, 2012) Photo Credit: Chris Ware

One family in Long Beach boils water on the stove for quick baths in a chilly bathroom. An Oceanside man lives in an apartment without heat, hot water or electricity - and plans to stay there through the winter. A third family in Long Beach took showers by flashlight and gathered wood outdoors to keep the house warm before they finally found another home.

More than eight weeks after Sandy, some Long Islanders are still living in homes without power, or heat, or hot water - and sometimes, without all three. For them, daily life is a struggle to stay warm and complete tasks they used to take for granted - washing dishes, bathing and getting to work.

"There were many days when I said, 'I just can't deal with this. I can't take it anymore,'" said Barbara Minnieer, who lived in a home without heat and only limited electricity in Long Beach with her husband, mother-in-law and five children for 47 days - two and a half weeks of that without any electricity at all. "I would just burst out in tears because it was just so awful. "

No organization or arm of government appears to track the number of people still living in storm-damaged homes in Nassau or Suffolk counties. The American Red Cross, which has been active in disaster relief, referred questions about the numbers to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Workers are continuing to go door to door, seeking people living in such situations, FEMA spokesman John Mills said.

"FEMA is concerned about people still living without power, heat or hot water," Mills said, adding that the agency has been canvassing the hardest-hit areas. It is using information gathered from the Long Island Power Authority, local officials and neighbors to give out information about FEMA subsidies for rent, hotel and motel stays and home repairs. After Sandy, thousands of Long Islanders whose homes were damaged by the storm sought such assistance or went to live with family or friends.

The Rev. Msgr. Donald Beckmann of St. Ignatius Martyr Church in hard-hit Long Beach - who weeks after Sandy had no hot water at the rectory - estimated that 600 of his parishioners' households have people living without heat or hot water.

For a variety of reasons - financial, emotional, or practical - some Long Islanders continue to stay in homes that lack utilities, interviews show.

Family's fight to survive

Minnieer, 37, became an expert at tending a fire. Minnieer's home, across the street from the bay, flooded during Sandy and ended up with only two working electrical outlets, no gas and no heat. The wood-burning stove, once reserved for special occasions, became the family's source of heat. Minnieer's three older boys would forage for castoff wood and broken furniture, which they would chop up for firewood to keep the house warm.

Leaving was never an option, Minnieer said - her extended family also was devastated by Sandy, and she couldn't afford a hotel room. They also didn't want to leave their dogs, cats and bird behind. "After a while, it just became, this is what we have to do," she said. "There's no other choice. "

Minnieer cooked for the family on a hot plate operated from an extension cord running from one of the home's only working outlets. They had hot water but no electricity in the bathrooms, forcing the family to bathe by flashlight, which terrified her youngest son, Christopher, 21/2.

The family's few perishables - milk, eggs, butter - were kept in a cooler sitting in front of the nonfunctioning refrigerator. Her mother-in-law, Lupe Serrano, slept on three couch cushions pushed together; Serrano's bed, along with most of her possessions, were ruined in the flood.

"I can't even imagine being in a house now with heat and a refrigerator and an oven," Minnieer said this month. "It seems so normal, this situation that we're in now. "

After 47 days, Minnieer's family moved into a rental home that was unaffected by Sandy in the canals section of Long Beach. She said their move took every dollar of the rental assistance and furniture allowance the family received from FEMA.

'Whole life' is in his home

In Oceanside, one light blinks on nightly in the second-floor window of a shuttered apartment complex.

The lamp is connected to a long, orange extension cord that runs from the apartment's terrace door, across the lawn, to a generator kept there by workers gutting the flood-damaged apartments in the 92-unit complex.

In an apartment without heat, running water or electricity, Steven Cohn stays put.

Cohn, 65, cooks on a propane stove in his kitchen, keeping a window open so he and his Maltese, Jax, don't asphyxiate. He eats on disposable plates, since he has no running water to wash dishes. And at night, he sleeps in a nest of warm blankets on the living-room couch, snapping awake at any noises in the otherwise silent complex.

Cohn has lived there nearly continuously since Sandy, and plans to stay until the utilities are restored to his unit, which he said could be in March - or later.

"I'm gonna be here," he said. "I'll be here until they put the lights and heat back on. "

Cohn's fiancee, Joyce Rosinger, moved out shortly after Sandy, when a few days in the cold, dark apartment left her with a bad case of bronchitis.

"I don't know how he does it," said Rosinger, 66, who added that the mostly abandoned complex now gives her "the willies. " "Many times I tried to talk him out of it. "

But for Cohn - who did a variety of jobs, including construction and security, before retiring - the choice was simple.

"I put my whole life into this apartment," Cohn said. "I decided that I wasn't going to go anywhere. "

A calendar on the wall marks the days he's lived there since Sandy. He usually leaves the apartment during the day, going to the movies or a restaurant, or taking Jax for one of his four daily walks. He chats with the workers who are restoring the apartments during working hours. They call him the "Miracle Man. "

But at night, when he drives through the complex and sees the doors of the buildings gape open into darkness, and the silence is nearly complete, it scares him. He keeps air guns and a machete handy for protection.

"It's a little scary at night," he said. "But then I have a dog that will bark if needed. And I'll make it through. I'll make it through to another day. "

Sticking out winter, for now

Back in Long Beach, Neira Zamora developed a recipe for how to take a shower: take three big pasta pots, fill them with water, and put them on the stove to heat. Empty the water into a big green tub in the bathroom and try to wash up in the chill of the bathroom.

Zamora, 37, and her family - husband Hugo Zamora, 42, son Hugo Paredes, 17, and daughter Alessandra Zamora, 4 - live in a home with electricity, but without heat or hot water.

The family sleeps on the large, U-shaped couch in the living room at night, warmed by a space heater that is left running continuously when the children are home. The family can't use portable heaters in their bedrooms because those will trip the circuit breakers.

"Either you sleep in a comfortable bed and you're cold, or you sleep on the couch but you're warm," Neira Zamora said.

The home's boiler and water heater were destroyed in the flood, along with many of the items in Zamora's parents' downstairs apartment. The family is waiting for another boiler to be delivered by the new year, Hugo Zamora said.

If there's no heat by the time the weather hits the 20s, he said, the family will be forced to leave the house.

"I don't think this," he said, gesturing at the space heater, "will sustain four or five days in a row of 20-degree weather. "

Neira Zamora said both children have already gotten sick, but there aren't many options for the family. Hugo Zamora owns a co-op apartment in Manhattan, to which the family decamped for a few weeks after Sandy, but after Neira Zamora found herself getting up at 4:30 a.m. to commute to work and drive Paredes to school, the family gave up and moved back to Long Beach.

While they wait for heat, the family had a subdued Christmas, nothing like the extravagant lights and decorations and holiday shopping that the Zamoras normally did every year. Their block was mostly dark, with a few Christmas lights twinkling across the street.

"This year, you really realize that we did a lot better that most people, so I feel bad to get more gifts than I really need," said Paredes, a senior at Long Beach High School. "I'm just happy that we're still alive after this."

Flooding fears prompt LIers to raise homes

Originally published: February 16th, 2013 By NEWSDAY STAFF

Grover Cleveland Siems III of Babylon is having his home raised to protect it from future storms similar to superstorm Sandy. (Feb. 5, 2013) Photo credit: Chris Ware

Homeowners are beginning to raise their houses above the floodplain, in what could be the start of a dramatic reshaping of Long Island neighborhoods battered by superstorm Sandy.

For hundreds of homeowners, this action isn't yet possible because they can't figure out how to afford the estimated $80,000 to $150,000 cost. However, residents in Lindenhurst, Massapequa, South Seaford and East Quogue, among other hard-hit pockets, are scraping together the money, or the promise of it, in order to elevate their homes.

Houses must be deemed "substantially damaged" to get money from the federal government specifically for elevation. The benchmark for that designation is damage totaling at least 50 percent of a home's pre-disaster market value.

"When we saw how much water went into the house, we said we don't want to go back in there unless it's raised," said Dawn Vozzo, 39, whose three-bedroom home on Shore Road in Lindenhurst was lowered Thursday onto its new, 7-foot elevation. "We don't want to ever have to deal with this again."

The cost was about $60,000. Vozzo and her husband, Anthony, who have lived in the house 13 years, planned to pay half from savings and hope to get a $30,000 grant under the National Flood Insurance Program.

The choice to raise a home after a determination of substantial damage is driven in large part by the need to keep or obtain affordable flood insurance. The first floor must be at an elevation set on Federal Emergency Management Agency flood maps and by local jurisdictions to comply with federal floodplain standards. The standards are set by municipalities' building codes, and vary according to the flood zone.

Other options for owners of these homes are similarly expensive and life altering: demolish and rebuild; try to sell the house as is; move the house to higher ground; or opt for a publicly assisted buyout, including a program being developed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Nearly four months since Sandy struck, what is clear is that raising a home is complex and arduous, involving high cost, complicated bureaucracy, lengthy delays and tough decisions.

Raising house even higher

Those who already have moved to raise their homes are not looking back.

Grover Cleveland Siems III, 61, a retired Suffolk County police officer, has lived since childhood on the Town of Babylon's Captree Island.

Before Sandy, his house already was on 4-foot pilings; after Sandy, he hired an upstate firm to raise it even higher, at a cost of about $30,000. With the house temporarily sitting on wooden cribbing, he is awaiting work to begin on a new concrete foundation supported by pilings.

Siems said he was the first of the 31 houses on Captree after Sandy to elevate and he expects others to do the same. He plans to pay for it with a combination of money from insurance, government grants and his savings.

"For most in this country, your home is your biggest asset and investment," he said. "How do you say, 'Oh, never mind?' I'm on a pension. The options are limited."

"It was either raise it or put it in a Dumpster," Siems said.

FEMA and the state do not have a precise number of how many Long Island properties suffered enough damage to qualify for federal grants to elevate, but it is estimated to be in the thousands.

Officials in many towns and villages said they still are trying to determine the extent of damage to properties. The municipalities have a stake in alleviating flood danger: Localities must meet requirements of the government's floodplain management program, to allow residents to get insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program.

A total of at least 2,543 structures found to be substantially damaged exist in towns and villages along the South Shore in Nassau and Suffolk counties, Long Beach and on Fire Island, local officials told Newsday.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation this month directed local officials to step up inspections and report estimates of homes declared to be substantially damaged.

In a Feb. 1 email, William Nechamen of the DEC's chief floodplain management section cautioned: "The best way to protect your residents not only from future floods but from the high price of flood insurance is to make sure that they meet elevation standards when rebuilding.

"Flood insurance policies for a properly elevated home can be as little as a few hundred dollars a year," he said. "Homeowners that are substantially damaged and fail to elevate their homes will be paying thousands of dollars per year for flood insurance."

FEMA might chip in

Homes that are substantially damaged — like the Vozzos' -- can seek up to $30,000 from flood insurance to help pay for elevation. Since passage of the $50.7-billion Sandy aid package, money may be available under FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program or through community block grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The state will administer both programs.

Contractors, local government and FEMA officials acknowledge that home elevation is expensive and the process can take years.

The Village of Lindenhurst has had success obtaining funding, with 14 homes raised since 2002, Deputy Mayor Kevin McCaffery said. Two residents who wanted to elevate after Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 still are awaiting approval from Albany, he said.

Post-Sandy, McCaffery said, "It is clear many of our residents want to rebuild and return to their homes."

The total cost of elevating, constructing a new foundation and other renovations ranges from $80,000 to $150,000, with the average about $100,000, said Guy Davis, president and owner of Davis Construction Building Movers in Blue Point.

Davis has had a front-seat view of the hardships facing Long Islanders whose homes have been substantially damaged.

Since Sandy struck on Oct. 29, Davis said he has had about 1,000 calls from people inquiring about having their homes elevated. So far, the firm has about 20 jobs lined up to lift homes.

"How many have actually come to fruition? And the answer to that is, not very many," he said. "The problem people are having is they just don't have the money."

Across the Island, local officials are taking different approaches to assessing Sandy-damaged homes, with delays in places caused by sheer volume.

Here is the current situation in Sandy-damaged areas, based on contacts with local officials:

Town of Hempstead: About 1,750 homes meet the substantially damaged threshold. The town doesn't have a number of people who have applied for permits to raise homes. Building Commissioner John Rottkamp said most don't have insurance money yet.

Long Beach: The city said 200 homes have been declared substantially damaged, and forecasts that another 200 will be. About 300 people have told the city they want to be part of a government grant program that would help fund home elevation. Ten permit applications are pending either to elevate an existing house or for the demolition and construction of new FEMA-compliant homes.

Freeport: Inspectors are canvassing neighborhoods, going block by block to calculate how much damage each house sustained. Joseph Madigan, assistant superintendent of buildings, said he expects at least 40 homes will require elevation to comply with the village flood-zone ordinance.

Town of Oyster Bay: Officials said more than 100 residents have expressed interest in home elevation and are seeking permits.

Town of Babylon: More than 300 homes have 50 percent or more damage, and 31 property owners have applied for permits to elevate, spokesman Kevin Bonner said.

Lindenhurst: More than half of the 200 homes that have been inspected have 50 percent or more damage. So far, nine homeowners are pressing ahead with elevation.

Town of Islip: Officials do not have a number of substantially damaged homes, but said they believe it potentially will be in the thousands. The town created a "Storm Damage Building Permit" specifically because of Sandy; of 37 pending permits, 30 relate to raising of homes.

Town of Brookhaven: Damage assessments are expected to continue for months. Spokesman Jack Kreiger estimated that hundreds of homes may meet the threshold for government-assisted flood mitigation; so far, the town has completed 20 damage assessments.

Town of Southampton: The town is waiting until residents apply for permits to conduct inspections.

Incentives and penalties

Spencer Rogers, a coastal construction and erosion specialist with Sea Grant North Carolina, described the federal flood insurance program's approach to flood mitigation as a "carrot-and-stick" method.

The carrot, he said, is lower flood insurance rates for homeowners that rebuild to tougher building code standards after a storm. The stick is the flood maps that, when approved by local governments, give them the authority to withhold building or occupancy permits unless a property meets updated flood map requirements, Rogers said.

BEFORE YOU HIRE

Preparation for home elevation requires significant advance work. Among the steps:

• Select an architect and contractor.
• Have the house and property surveyed and obtain an elevation certificate.
• Get an engineer's report if your town or village requires it.
• Seek official assessment of whether the home is "substantially damaged" -- that is, if damage is at least 50 percent of the house's pre-disaster market value.
• Determine how high the home must be raised, calculated from FEMA base-elevation requirement plus a state-mandated minimum of at least 2 feet above that.
• Determine what type of foundation the home will have. Options depend mainly on the existing foundation and soil conditions. They include concrete block on top of existing foundation and poured concrete on top of existing foundation with added beams, columns and footings in crawl space.
• Decide whether to replace boiler or furnace and where these will be placed.
• For homes with chimneys, fireplaces and/or decks, decide whether to keep these features or abandon them.
• Determine the design, direction and materials for new, higher steps.
• Get disconnect letters from utility companies.
• Complete building permit application and get insurance and workmen's compensation documents from contractor to be submitted with permit application.

SOURCE: LIFT PROJECT GUIDE; BOULER PFLUGER ARCHITECTS, ISLIP

Location is everything

Originally published: October 29th, 2013 By Carol Polsky

Grover Cleveland Siems III raised up his house and hit a wall.

In the months after Sandy inundated his house on Captree Island in the town of Babylon, the retired Suffolk County police officer decided to raise his home high before repairing it.

Now there isn’t enough insurance money to repair it. For months he lived in the damaged structure, hauling bottled water up narrow scaffolding stairs, using a single electrical circuit, and spraying mold when he saw it.

“I’m shot, I’m emotionally, physically, psychologically shot,” said Siems, 62, recently. “I wish I had nothing to do with it. I’m tired of this, I’m tired of the insurance, I’m tired of everything.”

So this month he went out and bought a condo in Oakdale to live in while he waits to see if New York Rising funds or more insurance money will materialize to allow him to finish repairs on the house.

“I needed a bathroom, I needed a kitchen, I wanted my furniture back” from storage, he said.

In hindsight he thinks he should have razed the house and used insurance money to build something smaller, something new, he said. His decision to try to save the house was emotional.

He’d helped his father build it out of their summer bunglalow when he was only eighteen. He and his ex-wife had lived here with their daughter, now 21, and it was home.

It wasn’t anything special, he said, “just a little gray house but it was where I lived. It had my furniture, it had my pets, it was comfortable with heat, water and electric.”

He rented a neighbor’s house during the winter while he raised his own house, starting the foundation work based on an understanding from his insurer that he would get the full amount of his insurance policy, he said. Seven months later, he said, the actual settlement was far less.

“I’ve gone to all the meetings, applied for everything. I’ve lost track of everyone I dealt with,” he said. “Everyone talked a good game about how they were going to be there, but it’s still just talk.”

He conceded that Catholic Charities had come often to offer assistance but that there had been no safe way to remove sheetrock and mold since the only way in and out until recently was by ladder.

A few weeks ago, he installed scaffolding stairs and fell from them the first day, bruising a leg.

He started doing some of the repairs himself, telling himself he could “do alot of this myself,” he said ruefully. “The part of my brain that said this was 35 years old.”

He’d sell the house if he felt he was getting what the property were worth. He still marvels at it and its magical setting. “I can look out my window and see the Great South Bay and the meadows,” and look over another way and see the bay bridges on the Robert Moses Causeway. “The views are amazing: almost all year I have sunsets, and sunrises half the year.”

“The location is everything,” he said.

Unstable soil plagues South Shore rebuilding

Originally published: April 28th, 2013 By Olivia Winslow

The house is first jacked up and placed on wooden supports called cribbages. Then, the helical piles, which are metal and have a corkscrew-like shape, are driven into the boggy soil beneath the home. (April 11, 2013) Photo Credit: Newsday / Ed Betz

Many homeowners near bays and canals on the Sandy-ravaged South Shore face a challenge that architects, engineers and geologists say is a vital consideration for raising or replacing a home -- bog and fill that can undermine a structure's foundation.

From Atlantic Beach to Montauk, unstable material lurks beneath the surface.

Bog, a spongy type of soil resembling compost and sometimes called peat or muck, is a remnant of the glacial "outwash" thousands of years ago. It's not found in the middle of Long Island or on the North Shore. Summer bungalows built along the South Shore in the 1920s and 1930s, many of which became year-round residences, sometimes were built on bog, architects and local historians said.

Fill is generally of more recent vintage, dredged up during construction of canals and used in housing developments often built on top of filled-in marshland, particularly since the 1950s.

"Always when you're near the water, to me that soil is in question and it needs to be tested," said James A. Prisco, a Garden City-based architect who is secretary of the Long Island chapter of the American Institute of Architects. "Most of the time there is unstable soil under the house."

Architect James Bouler, of the Islip-based firm Bouler Pfluger Architects PC, is working with scores of property owners to elevate Sandy-damaged homes. He worries that foundation-support problems posed by bog and fill may be lost on some homeowners and contractors who are raising houses.

"There's no doubt in my mind that there are people -- contractors and clients -- that are putting up [concrete] block on top of the existing foundation and setting the house back on it," he said.

Bouler said state code requires the bottom of the foundation footing to be 3 feet below grade, as the surface level is called, to prevent frozen water from affecting the foundation.

"Ever see a frost heave on a road, where the road freezes and you see these big bumps?" Bouler said. "It's the same thing [with a foundation], where water can freeze under the foundation and lift it. And then it thaws and goes down. . . . It can lift and thaw, lift and thaw, and eventually that's when you get some settlement," with foundation cracks that mean doors and windows do not open and close properly and flooring has dips.

Installing support system

The typical course of action is to erect a foundation that uses piles driven to precise bearing points below ground for more support, architects said. There are two main types: helical piles, which are metal and have a corkscrew-like configuration; or driven piles, also called timber piles, which are likened to telephone poles.

"The bog has a very low bearing capacity, so you have to have a much larger footing or a helical pile system under the foundation, which is what the house rests upon," Bouler said.

The experts cautioned that the existence of bog and fill is marked by inconsistency. Some locations in South Shore communities have it, and some don't.

A soil boring must first be conducted to establish what kind of material is under a house, soil scientists, engineers and architects said. Costs can range from $1,500 to $1,800, Prisco said.

Loretta Luning, president of Slacke Test Boring in Kings Park, said her firm has done soil borings in many South Shore communities and found unstable bog layers of varying depths -- some going 2 feet down and others extending as far as 12 feet below the surface.

"It's very prominent in the Babylon-through-Lindenhurst area, especially in the proximity of the canals," Luning said. "In some cases, when they built the canals, they dredged out and cut that [fill] out and threw it up on the land, compacted it, covered it with sand and built houses on it. And that's the problem.

"People down there are saying to me, 'My house has been here 40 years. Why all of a sudden do I now have to put in helical piles?' " she said. "The answer is the groundwater has increased so much and has become closer to grade than it was 40 to 50 years ago."

When bog or fill is a factor, the expense of home elevation increases.

Nick Hughes, co-owner of Hughes Brothers General Contracting in Northport, which specializes in installation of helical piles, said, "You wouldn't need piles if there was no bog. You would just need a standard footing on a foundation."

The piles must go through "the bog level, the organic level [and] any kind of fill material -- debris that's not suitable for bearing a new foundation on," he said. "We have to get down to undisturbed sand soil."

Costs of elevation

Elevation costs for a modestly sized home, of 1,200 to 1,500 square feet, probably would be "no less than $80,000," Hughes said. That price includes the lifting of the home, installing helical piles, installing a new foundation and a new floor, and setting the house down on the raised foundation.

On top of that is the cost of connecting electric, plumbing and sewer lines, as well as any renovation work needed inside the home, he and others said.

"I'm having helical piles put in because of the bog," said Bob Platin of Bayport. Hughes Brothers earlier this month installed the piles at his home, which took on 30 inches of water from Sandy's storm surge.

"It would be unwise to build a new foundation, an even heavier foundation," he said, because "bog is unstable." The total cost of lifting his house -- it will be 4 feet, 8 inches higher -- installing the piles, taking out the old foundation and putting in a new one, and other work will be about $110,000.

Timber piles are another option. But a house must be lifted and moved from its "footprint" so the piles can be driven in, and many South Shore lots don't have the space for such maneuvering, Bouler said. Installation of helical piles is done beneath a structure that has been raised and is resting on wooden supports called cribbages, without moving it elsewhere.

While those who live near the water have long been aware of flood-prone areas, Sandy's devastation laid bare the consequence of almost a century of development in the marshlands of Massapequa, Lindenhurst, Patchogue, Babylon, Mastic and other communities where bog and fill are found.

Caitlin Young, a doctoral candidate in geosciences at Stony Brook University, has studied the soil composition of Patchogue, Shirley and Mastic. Sediment core logs of those areas found peat and fill.

"The marshy wetland forms a layer of peat on the bottom, which is spongy. Above is cut and fill, which is a bit solid. Then you put a house on top of that, and therein lies the problem," Young said, noting settling issues that can occur from compromised foundations.

Bouler said the 1920s-era bungalows in Lindenhurst that he's seen didn't have deep foundations. "They simply dug a trench into the dirt and poured a footing," he said. "And what that means is that the bottom of the footing is only 8 inches below grade."

After World War II came housing developments built on former wetlands -- what former longtime Suffolk County planning director Lee Koppelman calls "fill-and-build policies" -- and construction of canals that offered the opportunity of waterfront homes featuring boat docks and piers.

"Dredging projects dumped the dredge spoils on the former swamp areas, land people got cheaply," said Koppelman, executive director of Stony Brook University's Center for Regional Policy Studies, who has chronicled the Island's development for more than five decades.

History of LI's development

He recalled homeowners in one Lindenhurst development calling the planning department in the 1960s to complain of grass sprouting through their foundations.

"The [marsh] grasses would pop their way right through concrete floors if there was any crack whatsoever," Koppelman said.

George Kirchmann, vice president of the Historical Society of the Massapequas, also remembered the area's booming development in the 1950s and 1960s.

"A lot of the area down there, especially six or seven blocks from the water, is fill. Dirt was dug out of the Great South Bay and put in the swampy area and let sit for a year." Kirchmann said houses were built on top of it.

"Nobody thought much about water damage in the future because it never happened before," he said. "Of course there weren't any houses down there [before the dredging], so it was a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Nicole P. Maher, senior coastal scientist with The Nature Conservancy of Long Island, said the Island lost more than one-third of its natural wetland acreage -- and possibly much more -- to development.

Wetlands have valuable functions, she pointed out: providing physical protection for the coastline from storms, protecting the quality of coastal waters by filtering out excess nutrients and contaminants, and helping sustain a "vibrant ecosystem."

"We used to think of wetlands as soggy, disease-ridden places of low value. That's why they were ditched and drained and filled in, so we could develop on top of them," she wrote in an email. "Now we know better."