Law enforcement officials said the goal is to empty medicine cabinets of unwanted painkillers before they’re stolen by substance abusers. Environmentalists said that the event ensures the drugs are incinerated instead of thrown in the garbage or flushed down the drain, eventually leaching into drinking and surface water supplies.

“I urge all New Yorkers to check their medicine cabinets and visit one of the many drug take back sites this Saturday to discard their unused medications and eliminate the potential dangers associated with these drugs,” said Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

More than 2 million pounds of drugs—over 1,000 tons—have been incinerated since the Drug Enforcement Administration launched the national program two years ago. Upward of 6 million Americans abuse prescription drugs, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

The event will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday. Locations can be found on the event website. There are about 250 drop-off locations across New York State. The drugs will then be disposed of at the Covanta Energy-from-Waste facilities.

“Dispersing oxycotin, antibiotics, and valium should be left to doctors, not to the water company,” said Adrienne Esposito, executive director, Citizens Campaign for the Environment. More information about how drug pollute the environment can be found at www.dontflushyourdrugs.net.

Those who miss the event can still anonymously drop off drugs in designated bins installed in Nassau and Suffolk county police precinct station houses.

Those who need help can call OASAS toll-free, 24-hour, 7-day a week HOPEline at 1-877-8-HOPENY, which is staffed by trained clinicians who can answer questions, help refer individuals to treatment services and provide other vital resources to facilitate recovery. All calls are anonymous and confidential.

The breach on Fire Island at Old Inlet opened by Superstorm Sandy is blamed by some for Long Island flooding and credited by others with improving Great South Bay water quality (FINS).

New York State and federal agencies have begun the process of preparing to close the breach on Fire Island caused by Sandy amid renewed debate over whether it’s caused flooding on the South Shore.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) requested Thursday that the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers (ACE) take the preliminary steps to seek out a contractor to fill in the breach—but they haven’t officially OK’d its closure.

“If the breach does not close naturally, the closure process will be much further along,” DEC Commissioner Joe Martens said in a statement. He said the request will allow the state and feds “to act more quickly to close the breach if that is deemed necessary.”

The breach falls within the remote eastern half of the barrier island in part of the Otis Pike High Dune Wilderness Area—the only such federal preserve in the state—known as Old Inlet, which has opened and closed repeatedly throughout history.

The south-facing portion of the breach facing the Atlantic Ocean has widened by more than 1,000 feet since the Oct. 29 superstorm—108 feet on Nov. 3 to 1,171 feet on Feb. 28—and the side facing the Great South Bay more than doubled from 276 feet to 616 feet during the same time period, according to the Fire Island National Seashore (FINS).

“It’s not a final decision to close yet but having everything in place so that when a decision is made we have everything ready to go,” said FINS Superintendent Chris Soller, who believes the breach may still close on its own this spring.

“It will probably be months rather than weeks,” said Chris Gardner, an ACE spokesman, referring to the time it takes to procure and haul in the required heavy machinery. “There’s a variety of different factors at play. Most importantly there’s not dredges working in the area that we can draw upon.”

DEC, ACE and FINS, a unit of the National Park Service, together agreed to begin procuring a contractor under the Breach Contingency Plan, which was used for the first time after Sandy since being inked in 1996 following bungled breach repairs at Westhampton Beach.

The plan was used to close two other breaches—one at Cupsogue County Park in Westhampton Beach and the other at Smith Point County Park on the other side of the Moriches Inlet—shortly after Sandy. The third breach has been closely monitored but left to close on its own because it falls within the federal wilderness area.

A spokeswoman for Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, who called a news conference this week blaming local flooding on the breach and demanding that it be closed immediately, did not respond to a request for comment on the DEC’s announcement.

Adrienne Esposito, executive director of the Farmingdale-based Citizens Campaign for the Environment, contends that there is no proven link that the breach is causing flooding along Suffolk’s bay front. But, it is proven to be flushing the polluted Great South Bay.

“We need to base decisions on fact, not fear,” she said. “I’m very frustrated that science somehow went out the window here … we shouldn’t substitute political science for good marine science.”

Looking southeast, the breach on Fire Island at Old Inlet opened by Superstorm Sandy is blamed by some for Long Island flooding and credited by others with improving Great South Bay water quality (FINS).

Suffolk County officials renewed calls Wednesday for New York State and federal agencies to close a breach on Fire Island formed during Sandy amid debate over whether it’s caused flooding on the South Shore.

The posturing follows a weekend in which extremely high tides flooded coastal Long Island communities closest to the Great South Bay as well as neighborhoods on Fire Island itself—a problem that has been on the rise since the October superstorm. But environmentalists contend that the breach has helped improve water quality in the bay.

“There are people here today who will say this breach isn’t the cause of the flooding; there are others who will say it is—I’m not concerned with that debate,” Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone said at Shorefront Park in Patchogue. “We want that breach to be closed now.”

The breach, in a remote area of the barrier island known as Old Inlet, widened from 108 feet on Nov. 3 to 1,171 feet on Feb. 28 on the southern side facing the Atlantic Ocean, according to Fire Island National Seashore (FINS) data. The north side facing the bay widened to 616 feet from 276 feet during the same time period.

A spokesman for the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers said the agency is waiting for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to send an official request for the breach to be closed before a company can be hired to fill the breach. Even if the OK were given tomorrow, it could take weeks or longer to dispatch the dredging equipment required.

“If the state is in agreement and wants to move forward…we would issue the necessary permits,” said FINS Superintendent Chris Soller, who initially took a wait-and-see approach in case the breach closed naturally. “It’s got to be a three-way agreement.”

Emily DeSantis, a spokeswoman for the DEC, said in a statement that the agency “is consulting with coastal experts about the breach to help to determine the best course of action based on science.”

A Breach Contingency Plan developed in the 1990s was first put to use after Sandy to close two other breaches on either side of Moriches Inlet—one at Cupsogue County Park in Westhampton Beach, the other at Smith Point County Park on Fire Island. But the third breach falls within the Otis Pike High Dune Wilderness Area, the only federal wilderness area in the state, where breaches are given time to close on their own before action is taken under the contingency plan.

Both the DEC and FINS said that there is no definitive link between the four-month-old breach and the increased flooding along Suffolk’s bay front from Brookhaven to Babylon towns.

Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Farmingdale-based Citizens Campaign for the Environment, has credited the breach with cleaning the polluted Great South Bay, which was designated by the state in 2010 as an impaired waterway. The bays shell-fisheries were once nationally renowned before brown tides in the 1980s wiped out most oyster and clam beds.

“While Mother Nature dealt a severe blow to our environment during Superstorm Sandy, she has also provided a precious opportunity to reverse years of declining water quality in the bay,” Esposito said in January. “New York must not squander this opportunity to help restore the bay and rebuild the local economy.”

Sandy destroyed homes across the region, like this one on Fire Island that was knocked off its stilts.

In a week that saw January temperatures on Long Island range from the single digits to an unseasonable 54 degrees, the causes and effects of extreme weather drew the chairman of the state Assembly’s standing committee on environmental conservation, Assemb. Robert Sweeney (D-Lindenhurst), to Babylon Town Hall on Wednesday, where he held a public hearing on what steps the government should take in the wake of the destruction left behind by Superstorm Sandy and the increasing likelihood that the future holds worse storms to come.

In public testimony, Ellen Mecray, regional climate services director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, cited a “statistically significant trend” in extreme weather patterns since the 1970s and said that “what we’re seeing is the atmosphere on steroids.”

After she recommended that our region get better prepared, Sweeney asked her, “Prepare for the worst and hope for the best, basically?” “Yes,” Mecray replied.

As Assemb. Fred Thiele (D-Sag Harbor) pointed out—mentioning that his Assembly district has more coastline than any other in the state—the resources are “finite,” especially at the local level, yet the need for them is only growing.

But the federal government, warned Dorian Dale, Suffolk County’s director of sustainability, may be in retreat on financing the necessary preparation and remediation efforts, so the market place may wind up imposing changes in public behavior that could mitigate the effects of the rising sea levels and the increasing frequency of flooding from bad storms. For example, Dale said, flood insurance rates could rise significantly—assuming the homeowner still qualifies—and coastal property values may sink, making it harder to get a mortgage, let alone refinance one.

So, in the long term, the question of whether to sink more funds into restoring the flood-damaged communities may become moot as residents move away, but in the short term, he sees his neighbors in West Gilgo Beach “in a frantic rush to rebuild in a bad way.” In other words, using sheetrock instead of Durock, which is waterproof and mold resistant, and putting their electrical outlets and fuse boxes in the same vulnerable place they were when Sandy’s surge came into their homes.

Referring to the Netherlands, which has had a history of keeping the ocean at bay, Dale said that in Europe there is a “collective effort” to share resources, whereas in the United States people tend to go it alone. “At this point in time, we are all first responders.” Unless, he said, people “change the mindset.”

Rezoning and upholding building codes were suggested at the hearing by R. Larry Swanson, associate dean of the school of marine and atmospheric sciences at Stony Brook University. “On Long Island variances are a dime a dozen,” he exclaimed.

Swanson disagreed with Jay Tanski, coastal processes and facilities specialist at New York Sea Grant, a state and federal funded agency that researches marine issues, on how fast nature may fill in the Fire Island breach and what effect the inlet created by Sandy may be having on the Great South Bay. Swanson thinks the breach could close in months or a year at most, and should be left alone because the influx of seawater is helping the bay flush out some of the pollution that has accumulated there. Tanski said he believes the inlet will “close by itself” but it could take a decade, and by then the salinity levels of the bay could irrevocably alter the ecosystem.

Both scientists reiterated the need for closer monitoring of Fire Island and the bay itself, given that present government-funded research is “running on fumes,” as Swanson told the Press after he spoke at the hearing.

Of equal concern is the issue of storm debris that may come back ashore in the spring when the wind changes direction, Swanson warned the Assembly committee, and it could contain nails, shingles, home heating oil tanks, and other toxic materials. He compared the situation to the discovery of medical waste, such as used syringes, that washed up on the Island’s beaches two decades ago and kept vacation crowds away for years after the mess was cleaned up. “Be vigilant,” he urged local communities.

Oil slicks in the water from storage tanks uprooted by the storm and ash from open-air incinerators of trees and other waste left from Sandy were among the many concerns raised by Adrienne Esposito, executive director of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment.

Among the recommendations she presented the committee, she proposed that the sewage treatment plants be raised above predicted tidal surge levels, that the state use FEMA money for that purpose, and that the state provide money to the Department of Environmental Conservation to monitor the quality of the water in the western bays where the raw and partially treated sewage was the worst after the storm struck.

On Long Island, she said, “People swim everywhere,” not just the beaches on the Ocean.

Rebuilding without thinking about the future means repeating the mistakes of the past, she said. “It sets us up for another disaster!” she exclaimed.

Sweeney nodded in appreciation. He’d held a previous hearing on this issue on Jan. 16 in Manhattan. No bill is planned at this time but that could change. Sweeney has been a prominent proponent of efforts in the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote clean energy. What will come of his committee’s efforts to stop the weather remains to be seen.