Common sense will prevail at Prime Hook

It’s a good thing the various governmental agencies and litigating organizations involved in the Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge fiasco weren’t holding sway on the day the little Dutch boy noticed water coming through the dike that protected his lowland nation. As soon as he put his finger in to stem the oncoming flood, someone would have arrived on the scene with a pack of papers demanding he abandon all common sense, remove his finger from the minor problem, and allow nature to take its course and flood the entire countryside with all its attendant destruction and mayhem.

Many layers of bureaucracy are involved now in deciding whether a hundred gallons of diesel fuel and a day’s worth of work should be spent to fix the dike keeping Delaware Bay waters out of the refuge. It’s starting to read like an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn novel prophesying the fall of the Soviet empire.

When the government stepped in 50 years ago, the powers that be saw the gem represented by Prime Hook, a place named by the Dutch because there were so many beach plums there. (Prime Hook, in Dutch, means Plum Point.) Its salt marshes provided expansive resting areas for migrating waterfowl. Its freshwater marshes – fed by waters draining out of inland Sussex County through Primehook Creek and managed by a sensible system of dikes and roads – provided one of the East Coast’s most fertile and reliable sources of natural food for those same waterfowl.

Since that time, the record is sketchy. There have been periods of success, particularly when the phragmites problem was managed well and water control structures kept the freshwater marshes in the healthy condition they were in when the feds took over.

There have also been periods of poor management, such as in the years when the phragmites problem was allowed to get out of hand, ruining the marshes and threatening the beachside communities along the refuge with great fire danger.

Now the refuge is in a period of decline. Good sense is not prevailing. The pressure to reverse the trend will continue because the Prime Hook resource is too valuable to ignore.