Filming Recovery After Hurricane Sandy on Fire Island and in Gateway

Hurricane Sandy struck in October 2012 and broke apart the primary dunes of Fire Island, New York; almost three years later the island was still rebuilding them. That is where the National Park Service (NPS) sent a filmmaker from its Harpers Ferry Center in the summer of 2015, to document early recovery and the research that will guide park managers through the next storm. This account was written by Jamie Remillard and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (SEAcomm URI), and is paraphrased here.

What Sandy did to the coast

Since the storm, more than half a million people have visited Fire Island National Seashore (FIIS), yet many visitors still remember the disaster. Sandy damaged homes, bridges, roads and other infrastructure along the U.S. east coast, and at the time it was the second costliest storm in U.S. history. It also changed natural resources: the island’s primary dunes broke away under the wind, waves and storm tides, and some of the effects are still visible.

The Fire Island breach viewed from a two-seater plane after Hurricane Sandy (Gulick/NPS).

When the filmmaker arrived, the dunes had not regained their former height but were slowly gathering sediment again as beach grasses took root. Scientists had measured higher elevations toward the middle and bay side of the island, which typically happens when storms sweep sediment back from the dunes and shows that the barrier island is still evolving.

What the research is for

In May 2013 the U.S. Department of the Interior released $787 million for disaster relief and storm mitigation projects carried out by its agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and NPS. The NPS Northeast Coastal and Barrier Network used part of its mitigation money to team with university and coastal research center scientists across the east coast on dozens of studies of how coastal resources recover. The findings will help managers make science-based decisions on the changes Sandy caused, and prepare for future storms, sea level rise and other effects of climate change.

The filmmaker described Sandy as devastating to many people, yet scientifically a rare opportunity: the research lets scientists learn from the storm and better understand the dynamic processes in these ecosystems, which should help make parks and nearby communities more resilient.

The authors add that this matters beyond parks. A salt marsh filters water draining into an estuary, and a bay or an island can be a natural resource too. People on Long Island’s south shore rely on Fire Island for storm protection, and communities long depended on the Great South Bay for a large shellfishing industry. The studies can help coastal communities and managers see how ecologically, recreationally and commercially important resources will respond to change.

Making the films

The two short films, each under seven minutes, cover the science of ecosystem resilience. To make them the filmmaker:

• shot from a canoe and in hip waders through the salt marshes around Jamaica Bay in Gateway National Recreation Area, which spans coastal New York and New Jersey;
• flew in a two-seater plane over the barrier breach in the federal wilderness on Fire Island;
• floated beside a research vessel in the Great South Bay, holding a camera just above the water to film scientists on deck;
• on rainy days, drove to Staten Island and the Bronx Zoo to interview a coastal ecologist and a conservation ecologist.

Some sunrise shoots began in the middle of the night. After each day’s last shoot, the two-person crew backed up footage, charged batteries and packed for the next day. The filmmaker gathers hundreds of hours of footage and then selects from it, preferring to let the voices of the people and the sounds of the places shape the story instead of writing it in advance.

The New York City skyline seen from Gateway National Recreation Area (Gulick/NPS).

The same approach shaped an earlier NPS series, America’s Wilderness, made for the fiftieth anniversary of the Wilderness Act, which used the sounds and silences of places and let people speak about what wilderness means to them rather than adding music or narration. For the Sandy films, the filmmaker said, it was important to let people tell their own stories, because life is messier than a simple storyline. The hope is that policymakers, park managers, rangers, visitors and homeowners will reconsider together what resilience means for their coastal communities, and that, as the filmmaker put it, film can bring people together around issues.

Sources

• National Park Service, “Films to Promote Unity and Healing: Filmmaker engages people in the science behind resilience” (https://www.nps.gov/articles/ncbn-films-to-promote-unity-and-healing.htm), written by Jamie Remillard and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (SEAcomm URI); rewritten in hubnx's own words. Photographs credited to NPS.