Confront fast-ferry onslaught now Block Island is clearly facing a crisis. Our streets, our sidewalks, our beaches, our stores, our restaurants are frequently thronged with visitors on sunny summer days, to the point that residents agree: We can't take any more.

Yet more are coming. Fast ferries — some already running, some permitted, some proposed — will soon unload far more visitors on our shores than we now experience. Thousands more.

The catamarans and trimarans are the culprits. Running at up to 35 knots (40 mph), they can make several times the number of trips each day that the slow-moving boats make.

First came Hi-Speed Ferry's Athena, in 2001. It can carry 250 passengers and makes six trips a day to the island in the summer.

Then the 500-passenger Jessica W, put into service two summers ago, making four or five trips a day from New London.

Next comes the new Viking Superstar, which the company says will run twice a day from Montauk starting in July if it can overcome legal barriers at home; if not, it may sail from New Bedford.

Soon to come, probably in 2007, will be Interstate Navigation's new 350-passenger boat, with three trips a day from Galilee and three from Newport.

And in the offing is the probability of new high-speed ferry service from Greenport, on the North Fork of Long Island.

Count them up and multiply. It's mind-boggling.

We appreciate the interests others have in our little island, and we love to have visitors. But we really must ask if there's a limit, and if so, how to establish and enforce it.

The reader will note that this issue of the Times carries a story directly relevant. The Town of East Hampton has indeed found a way to throw sand in the gears of ferry company ambition, for the very same reason that Block Island needs to do likewise.

East Hampton was under pressure to permit fast ferries and car-carrying ferries, none of which it had. But the town, already surfeited with seekers of sun and sand, decided it couldn't handle the road traffic and general overcrowding that such operations would bring; so it passed a local law forbidding those ferry services. Impressively, the law has just withstood its first legal challenge.

Is there a lesson here for Block Island? Of course; close study is certainly warranted.

Perhaps it is simpler to ban something not yet in place than to limit something that exists. Perhaps New York law gives townships some authority that Rhode Island law does not. Perhaps, perhaps.

But let's be proactive. We need to visit the executive and legislative leaders of the state and make clear to them the probability that what we and they too call "the jewel of Rhode Island" can soon be tarnished.

We need to figure out how to forestall that fate. We need to challenge the state to put its most creative legal minds to work on our problem.

Above all, we need to quit drifting along, believing that nothing can be done.