The year 2017 will forever be remembered in Coral Bay as the year of the hurricanes. The devastation wrought by Hurricane Irma on September 6, 2017, followed just two weeks later by Hurricane Maria on September 20th was unspeakable. Read the timeline below for a better understanding of what Coral Bay lived through, and the added burden of a Summers End Group exploiting our vulnerabilities at our most weakened time.
If you are interested in just one event on the timeline you can click on the item below to jump to that section. Alternatively you can simply read through the entire story, which is still unfolding …
- Background: Army Corps Permits
- 2014: The Year it All Started
- 2015: The Public and Federal Agencies Weigh In
- 2016: No Response from SEG …
- 2017: The Year of the Hurricanes … And Summers End Responds to Army Corps
- February 1, 2017: Public Letter to Army Corps Requesting Permit Denial
- August 15, 2017: Summers End Submits Responses to Army Corps
- September 2017: Two Category 5+ Hurricanes Devastate Coral Bay
- October 2017: Army Corps Issues Second Request for Additional Information
- December 18, 2017: Summers End Responds With Additional Studies
- 2018: Army Corps Initiates Consultation With Federal Agencies
- 2019: Agencies Request Additional Information to Initiate their Reviews
- 2020: Federal Agencies and Army Corps Still Waiting for Adequate Responses
- 2021: Major Developments – Historic Shipwreck and Extensive Deficiency List
February 1, 2017: Public Letter to Army Corps Requesting Permit Denial
Sixteen months had passed since the Army Corps requested that SEG respond to a long list of issues (October 2015 Request for Information). The Corps had stated that if there was no response within one year the application might be denied and need to be resubmitted.
Save Coral Bay circulated a letter requesting that the Corps do just that – deny the permit requested by the Summers End Group for failure to respond in over a year. We collected around 2,000 signatures for the letter. Although we weren’t optimistic that the Corps would act on our request, we felt it was necessary that everyone know we are watching very closely to everything that is happening.
August 2017: Summers End Submits Responses to Army Corps
Late in August 2017, while most people in Coral Bay were anxiously watching the tropics and making final preparations for a possible hurricane, the Summers End Group was busy preparing a large submission of documents for the Army Corps.
We, in Coral Bay, did not have any inkling what Hurricanes Irma and Maria would do to us. Nor did we have any idea what Summers End was working on in their submission to the Corps. In retrospect we would be stunned by “Irmaria” and ill-prepared in the aftermath of that unprecedented event to deal with hundreds of pages of new documentation submitted by SEG. But we knew none of this at the time.
Although the documents were sent to the Corps in the last week of August, we did not find out about them until mid-October when we were able to make contact with the Army Corps. and it took until mid-December for copies to be delivered to Coral Bay. So, while dealing with no power, no internet, hurricane debris everywhere, I slowly began to unravel the document submission of Summers End.
Rather than attempt to summarize the documents, they are all uploaded and available for review. This page has links to the entire August 2017 document submission by Summers End to USACE. As you can see, there is now a “hole” in the middle of the marina site plan – the location of 13-A and 13-B Carolina.
September 2017: Two Category 5+ Hurricanes Devastate Coral Bay
If you weren’t there, words cannot possibly describe the experience of Hurricane Irma in Coral Bay on September 6, 2017, a day that will live on in infamy. With winds speeds beyond the capability of measuring devices – certainly in excess of 200 mph – and tornadoes coming from all directions, our sole saving grace was that it was a fast moving storm. After three hours of nightmare there wasn’t much left to destroy, and what was left standing probably would have been gone had the storm lasted much longer.
And pouring salt into a gaping wound, just two weeks later Hurricane Maria dumped torrential rain and Category 5 winds on an already reeling Coral Bay. We were numb from Irma. We were zombies after Maria. But we came together as a community and helped one another and cared for the wounded and sheltered the homeless and we did survive.
It should have been obvious to any intelligent being that Coral Bay was NOT a place suitable for a mega yacht marina. Far from the nearest essential services, with direct ocean exposure, fragile infrastructure, Coral Bay is not where you want to build your 30 acre marina. The ONLY access to Coral Bay after Irma was by water – all roads were blocked by landslides, power lines, and debris. If that harbor had been littered with the debris from 1,333 pilings and 2 acres of dock structures, the people of Coral Bay would have been cut off from the outside world for days.
But apparently Chaliese Summers and Rick Barksdale, and their gang of well paid advisors, didn’t see it that way. They persevered, with renewed energy, presenting their case for an Army Corps permit while the people of Coral Bay were hard at work performing triage on our own lives.
I don’t think that anything about the Summers End Group was more poignant to me than knowing that while Coral Bay was struggling through a protracted period of isolation, literal powerlessness, Summers End was taking advantage of our diminished power by eagerly pushing forward with their Army Corps permit. They THOUGHT we could not respond. But we did.
October 26, 2017: Army Corps Issues Second Request for Additional Information
Although we were unaware of Summer End’s August submission to the Army Corps, and were unable to obtain copies of their documents until mid-December, the Puerto Rico office of the Corps of Engineers was still at work. On October 26, 2017 the Corps sent a “Second Comments for Rebuttal” letter to Chaliese Summers, identifying deficiencies in the August 2017 documents.
In prior submissions we had been able to provide input to the Corps prior to their formal review. But being literally cut off from communication, this review was done solely by the Antilles Office in Puerto Rico. We were very thankful that their review was thorough and completed while we were still busy recovering our lives.
December 18, 2017: Summers End Responds With Additional Studies
While much of Coral Bay was still without power, and there was virtually no Internet service anywhere on the East End, the Summers End Group was busy responding to the October information request from the Army Corps. In fact, even before we had received the August 2017 submissions, SEG had submitted a new batch of documents on December 15, 2017.
We obtained copies of the December document drop through a Freedom of Information Act request (“FOIA”) but those documents were not delivered to Coral Bay until March 2, 2018. Nevertheless, while still deep in hurricane recovery mode, we began to sift through around 200 pages of highly technical (and often internally conflicting) documents and reports.
This document set included (a) a revised (but still inadequate) Alternatives Analysis, (b) a Wind and Wave Analysis (which concluded that the site did not meet the standards for a calm water marina), (c) a new Compensatory Mitigation Plan (which essentially provided no mitigation for impacts, but substituted hurricane debris cleanup), (d) some minor additional plans related to power, fuel, moorings, and navigational aids.
The complete document set may be found here on this page. The cover letter accompanying the December 2017 document set is shown below:
Next Page: SEG USACE History – 2018