Removing cottages from Long Beach West

Stratford, Conn. (WTNH) - A restoration project years in the making kicked off Monday morning in Stratford. The project will level abandoned cottages on Long Beach West, which have caught fire in the past.

When it's all done Long Beach West will be left as just a beach.

The only bridge to this thin peninsula burned in 1996. People still took boats out to their beach cottages, but then some of those cottages burned.

The town of Stratford decided it was too dangerous to have people living in a place where fire trucks and ambulances couldn't go so the town made everyone pack up and leave.

"You know the cottages are in really poor condition. They're a safety hazard and it was pretty apparent to all of us that they had to come down," said Sharon Marino, US Fish & Wildlife Service.

Doing anything to Long Beach has always been tricky because it's home to some birds that are protected with 'threatened' status. So you can't build a new road, or build anything else.

"This beach represents 20% of the last, undeveloped barrio beach in Connecticut, so this is really significant. We have a lot of birds that use this area. It's just a really, really important natural place," Marino said.

The only option was to turn it over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. At a ceremony this morning they will break ground on a beach restoration project. They'll spend a million dollars of stimulus money to tear down the cottages and restore the beach to its natural state.

That federal money will create work for two Connecticut-based companies for the next few months. They should be done early next year.