The Trustees will soon calculate this season’s number of vessels that utilized our pump-out boats that service boats of Montauk and Three Mile harbors at the end of this season. Observing the last few years, including those of the pandemic when there was a noticeable increase of use of our free services for the collection of waste from each vessel, (it is illegal to dump waste into our harbors) this season there were noticeably fewer vessels in our harbors that required the pump-out service.
The East Hampton Star: Christopher Walsh
The East Hampton Town Trustees operate pumpout boats in Lake Montauk and Three Mile Harbor that provide statistical evidence of vessels using their free service. The numbers, and personal observation, demonstrated a surge in traffic in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. The number of vessels in town waters exploded that year, the trustees agreed, a boat providing a relatively safe environment when social distancing was essential to keeping a public health emergency in check.
“People are using their own showers on boats instead of public facilities,” Bill Taylor, a deputy clerk of the trustees, said in the late summer of 2020. “The volume was triple, quadruple, overnight.”
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- NOTE: Lake Montauk boaters: the Montauk self-serve pumpout station will be closed as of Tuesday, September 5th, for the installation of a new, upgraded holding tank. The installation may take two to three days.