Brookhaven completes Riviera Drive flood mitigation project in Mastic Beach

Brookhaven finished a $1.9 million stormwater and flood mitigation project on Riviera Drive in Mastic Beach on June 26, raising the road by an average of 9 inches and by as much as 12 inches in some spots beside the Mastic Beach Marina. The work also added five new drainage structures, retrofitted marina outfalls with back-flow preventers and restored the roadway plus stretches of Elm Road, Lakeview Drive, Orchid Drive, Dogwood Road and Woodland Drive.

Town Highway Superintendent Daniel P. Losquadro announced the completion, and Brookhaven said the project included the acquisition of three wetland parcels to create a natural retention area. The town placed the work inside its Highway, Traffic Safety and Ecology portfolio, framing Riviera Drive as a road repair and a drainage fix at the edge of a neighborhood that has spent years dealing with tidal water and storm damage.

The Riviera Drive job sits inside a much larger coastal resilience effort in southern Mastic Beach. In 2018, Brookhaven won a National Coastal Resilience Grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to develop 30% design plans for restoring coastal saltmarsh and scrub-shrub habitat there. The town says the broader effort covers 147 acres and has been assembled over time through land acquisition and ecological restoration.

That wider plan has also intersected with the state’s Blue Buffers Voluntary Buyout Program, which mailed 144 notices this year to vulnerable Mastic Beach property owners. Town and state officials have described the buyout effort as voluntary and aimed at reducing repeated flood exposure in one of Suffolk County’s most flood-prone hamlets.

Assemblyman Joe DeStefano, who has pushed community meetings on the flooding problem, has said residents have dealt with storm damage for too long and called the Riviera Drive work a smart investment in homes and public safety. Brookhaven Councilwoman Karen Dunne Kesnig, Losquadro and DeStefano were shown on Riviera Drive as the town marked the finish, underscoring how the project was presented as one piece of a long-running response to flooding on Long Island’s South Shore.