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Southampton, N.Y. - Even more village residents will be able to enjoy Southampton’s sandy Coopers Beach this summer as the Southampton Village Board has agreed to purchase a Mobimat Recpath, (pictured) certified to help wheelchair-bound beach-goers take pleasure in gaining access to the beach that they might otherwise be unable to navigate.
“I think it’s a good investment,” asserted Southampton Mayor Mark Epley, who was approached with the idea by a local resident whose husband uses a wheelchair. “It really opens up the beach to a large group of individuals who haven’t been able to enjoy it.”
According to the mayor, the purchase of the mat is approximately $23,000. This purchase will help not only wheelchair-bound beachgoers, he said, but mothers with strollers, and those with rolling coolers or any other beach amenity that needs to be carted. The mat is approximately five feet in width and easily portable, as well.
Shooting down brief assertions that the mat may impede vehicular traffic on the beach, Mayor Epley noted that Deschamps, makers of Mobimat, supplies much of its production to the military efforts in Iraq for the use of vehicular traffic and helicopter landings on the desert sands.
The company also makes a Mobi-chair, a wheelchair seat that can float in the water. Currently, a blue sample Mobimat sits at the end of the handicap ramp at Coopers Beach, though Epley expects the village’s actual purchase to be a more toned-down tan version of the mat, which will continue from the handicap ramp to the lifeguard stand, ending in a “T” formation.
“I took a friend in a wheelchair, and he gave it a thumbs-up,” Epley added.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From Hamptons.com:
