Head of the Harbor to review road flooding with $50G grant

Officials in Head of the Harbor aim to address the village's flood-prone roads using a $50,000 state grant.

The 3-square-mile village, on Suffolk's North Shore overlooking Stony Brook Harbor, received the funding from the New York Sea Grant program. The grant will be used to review stormwater management on Hitherbrook Road and Thompson Lane. Officials say both roads have been prone to flooding.

The issue is acutely felt in the village's boundaries, said Mayor Michael Utevsky. Over time, stormwater runoff has eroded the sides of roads, damaged driveways on private properties, and brought polluted water into Stony Brook Harbor, Utevsky said in an interview. Finding solutions to stormwater-related issues is “critical,” he said. 

“We thought it would be useful to focus on two of the roads that present the greatest problem, and perhaps use the solutions devised for those roads to apply to some of the other roads that have become problematic,” Utevsky said.

Judy Ogden, a village trustee and highway commissioner, said many of the village's roads are on steep slopes that are pitched toward Stony Brook Harbor. An August 2024 storm that dropped 10 inches of rain across several parts of Long Island inundated a number of village roads. Officials identified Hitherbrook Road and Thompson Lane as two areas that were “badly washed out” and needed to be prioritized.

“We have other areas that we’d like to focus on, and we hope to do more, but the first grant we got would focus on these two areas,” Ogden said, noting that the two roads are part of the Harbor Road watershed area. 

A watershed area includes land where channels of water such as rainfall or streams flow into a single source, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Elizabeth Hornstein, Suffolk County's Sustainable and Resilient Communities specialist with New York Sea Grant, said in an interview that the organization began planning a program in 2023 to help communities with their coastal resiliency projects.

New York Sea Grant is described on its website as a university-based statewide program “that connects research, outreach, and education with the needs of New York’s coastal communities, environments, and economies.” It operates as a cooperative program of Cornell University and the State University of New York.

Head of the Harbor is “the exact kind of community” the program seeks to assist, given the "limited resources and limited capacity to address environmental threats," Hornstein said.

The program will help the village find a contractor for the roads and connect them with consultants to help create a design to better address and capture stormwater and implement nature-based solutions, Hornstein said. That can place the village in a better position to apply for funding to shore up the coast.