The Village of Great Neck has grandiose plans to beautify its seedy run-down traffic-congested industrial area on East Shore Road by enticing more residential and commercial development, by eliminating the two STPs (sewage treatment plants) there, and by tearing down the large fuel oil storage tanks located on Manhasset Bay's shoreline near the STPs.

The village also wants to replace the bay's dirty, smelly, unsightly low-tide coastal mudflats existing near the STPs and north of the storage tanks across the entire width of the bay from one shoreline to the other. The village wishes to create attractive salt marshes along the bay there that could be admired by residents and visitors (and tourists maybe?) who would stroll on a boardwalk through a proposed new park that might be built there. Transforming an unsightly East Shore Road mudflat into a permanent attractive salt marsh may be easier than changing an ugly frog into a handsome prince - but then again, one muses grimly, it all might just be another fairy tale.

A salt marsh can be created on Manhasset Bay mudflats, but it will revert back to a mudflat if the bay's dynamic conditions favor mudflats over salt marshes. Salt marshes flourish along Manhasset Bay's coastal margins from near the large fuel storage tanks close by East Shore Road, northward toward Long Island Sound where the bay ends. The bay's outgoing tides north of the storage tanks flow fast enough to remove as much mud from the bay as the incoming tide carries in, so no excessive mud quantities build up in the shallow coastal areas that would bury and kill off salt marsh vegetation there.

The rapid tidal velocities are enhanced by a deep wide channel in the bay stretching 3 1/2 miles from the Sound to the oil storage tanks near East Shore Road. Deep moving water in the channel reduces tidal friction and enables fast tidal flows to keep the bay free of excessive sediment buildup in adjacent shallow areas that would otherwise bury marsh vegetation and create mudflats there.

The channel was dug and is dredged when necessary by the Corps of Engineers which is compelled by federal law to maintain access by vessels transporting commercial material to or from land areas (in this case, oil to the storage tanks near East Shore Road for tanker truck distribution to homes, businesses, and industries throughout western Long Island). Since no oil-receiving facility exists south of the storage tanks, no dredging is done there, and the bay has entirely filled in with mudflat sediments from one bank across to the other.

If the storage tanks are removed as Great Neck Village desires, the commercial need for an oil terminal is ended, and the Corps loses its perpetual mandate to dredge the channel. It will then fill in naturally and increased tidal friction will slow the outward flow velocities enough for much more sediment to be deposited north of the old storage tank site for renovated salt marshes to be transformed back into objectionable mudflats.

And where does Great Neck propose to shift the fuel oil terminal and the oil storage tanks if the village's East Shore Road ones are shut down? Will those facilities also be exiled, sent off to Wantagh-Seaford on the South Shore along with the raw fecal sewage waste goodies the village proposes to ship via sewer pipes to our South Shore friends and neighbors who can't contain themselves because they are so excited that they are jumping up and down at the idea of getting these gifts from their thoughtful, considerate North Shore cousins in the generous Village of Great Neck?

(Editor's Note: Julian Kane co-authored an article with eight high school students on micro-organism pollution indicators in Manhasset Bay that was published in the November 1972 issue of the Journal of Geological Education. It was reprinted in Russian without the Journal's permission, for use in early detection of pollution in Soviet bays.)