Third and final in a series on a recent visit to Louisiana’s bayous, a trip sponsored by the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, to start a conversation between people there who are being flooded out and those in the Down East communities of Carteret County who face similar threats.

GRAND BAYOU VILLAGE, La. – Home is where we feel we belong. Its mystic cords connect us to everything we know and cherish – our family, our friends, our culture, our past. Its hold on us is so complete that we must fight to save it, even as the water rises around our ankles.

Maybe, in the end, that’s the simple, but profound, lesson in all this.

 A group of North Carolinians had gone to the battered bayous of southern Louisiana to connect with those at the edge of the climate crisis. We found resilient people who have withstood numerous storms and the constant flooding that comes with living at ground zero for rising seas. We found a natural world that is changing so rapidly and so dramatically that those who live there barely recognize it anymore. We had hoped to return better prepared for what’s coming because our state’s uniformly flat coastal plain will be one of most-threatened landscapes in America.

The scientists, as they did there in Louisiana, will almost certainly advise us to surrender to the impending flood. But it’s never that simple. Like the survivors of the bayous, we will try to adapt, pick up the pieces and soldier on, many to the bitter end. This is home, after all, and retreat isn’t an option.

“Leaving would be almost like death,” said Rosina Philippe, before we boarded the small skiffs for the short trip to her village in the bayou. We can reach it only by boat. “For us, home is more than the building you live in.”

Philippe is an elder in the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha Tribe, one of the several small Native American groups we visited. They fled from Andrew Jackson in the 1830s and sought refuge along the remote, watery fringes of the continent. Her people settled here in south Plaquemines Parish, close to where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Here, they fished; they farmed; they survived.

But, then, the water started rising. Slowly, at first. Then, more rapidly. Now, acres of marsh disappear in what seems like a blink of an eye. (See a previous story for the reasons.)

The small squadron of skiffs glided through Grandpa Bayou to what remains of Grand Bayou Village. Fourteen houses, perched on wooden stilts pounded into small plots of squishy land, dotted the water. No road connects them. “When I was a girl, there were forests as far as you can see,” Philippe said, as she scanned the open waters of the Gulf. “You could walk for miles without boots on your feet.”

Her grandparents told of a time, back in the 1940s, when almost 1,000 tribal members lived in hundreds of houses that lined the high ground of the bayou for more than five miles. Each had a proper yard with enough land to raise goats and plant peach orchards. The surrounding waters provided their bounty of fish, shrimp, crabs and oysters. Now, the 50 or so remaining residents must plant portable gardens in canoes and small boats. They try to protect their burial grounds and other sacred sites with reefs made from oyster shells recycled from New Orleans restaurants, 40 miles away.

Most of the tribe’s 800 members have left, but those who remained, including Philippe and her brother Maurice, intend to stay. She already has a solution for when dry land completely disappears. She’ll live on a houseboat moored to her sunken home.

“Everything you see around us is in our DNA. We’re part of the land, the air, the water.” Philippe explained. “If you leave, you become someone else. You are no longer the same person. No longer the same people.”

A Homecoming

In Ironton, 20 miles to the north on Louisiana Highway 23, the Rev. Haywood Johnson Jr. is trying to bring his flock home after a series of devastating hurricanes scattered it to the wind. Most are descendants of the slaves who founded the settlement soon after emancipation, making Ironton one of the oldest Black communities in the state.

Being Black and poor in the Deep South during the reign of Jim Crow meant nothing was ever easy. Life was particularly onerous in Plaquemines Parish, where Leander Perez ruled with an iron fist for more than 40 years during the mid-20^th century. The Democratic Party boss, district attorney and head of the parish commission was a racist and an avowed segregationist in the old Dixiecrat mold. He cared nothing for the Black residents of the parish and made sure they were last in line for everything – voting rights, equal schooling, sewerage, even running water. The parish didn’t lay water lines to Ironton until 1980 and then only after “60 Minutes” made a big deal of it.

The same was true of flood protection. Ironton was excluded from the massive federal levee that Congress authorized after Hurricane Katrina inundated much of southern Louisiana in 2005. Had the wall been extended 10 miles south, hurricanes Issac in 2012 and Ida nine years later would likely have been less destructive. “Ida was the worst,” Johnson said. “It devastated our community. I had never seen anything like it.”

The eye of the Category 4 storm passed over the Ironton on Aug. 29, 2121, just months after Johnson and his congregation celebrated the 143rd anniversary of their St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church. The hurricane damaged or destroyed every building in the community. Even caskets floated out of their graves.

For the third time in 16 years, Johnson’s church was wrecked. “We weren’t going anywhere,” he said.  “We were going to come back and rebuild because this is our heritage. This is our identity. If you lose that, you cease to exist.”

It took four years, but Johnson was notified just before our visit in June that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had finally approved money to raise and rebuild the church. He hopes the reopening will reunite his congregation. “Many left after Ida,” he said. “Their hearts had been broken.”

He promised to invite us to the first Homecoming.

Staying Home

The bright orange globe of the setting sun was dipping into Terrebonne Bay when we came upon brothers Dominic and Levis Dardar sitting on a dilapidated dock sipping beers and admiring the sunset. They are the last members of their tribe living on their ancestral island.

The Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians have lived on a narrow ridge of high ground in the marsh in Terrebonne Parish for more than 170 years. Until the asphalt road was built in 1953, boats were the only reliable way to get home. Island Road today is often impassable because of high winds and tides. But few people use it now.

The amount of land that has been lost here is staggering, from 22,000 acres in 1955 to about 300 acres today. With the land went the people. Several hundred tribal members once lived in 60 or so homes. By the early 2000s, only 25 families remained on the island.

Chief Albert Naquin then began his tireless efforts to relocate the entire community to save the tribe’s culture and traditions. It took almost two decades, but the federal government In 2016 gave Louisiana $48 million to voluntarily move island residents to higher ground. It was the first federally funded climate migration program in the US.

The country’s relationship with its native peoples has been marked by disappointment and betrayal, and this deal was no different. Naquin had hoped that all his people would be reunited in one place, but only tribal members who left Isle de Jean Charles after 2012 were offered money to move. They could choose to live in a new, planned community, The New Isle, 40 miles to the north, or anywhere else in the state that was safe from flooding. Homes in the new community would eventually be available to anyone. “The plan was to reunite the tribe, and now it’s going to be destroyed,” a heart-broken Naquin told the Los Angeles Times in 2019. “Instead of fixing it, I broke it.”

Chris Brunet took the offer and left the island for the new community. “I can’t smell the water,” he told the BBC last year. “I can’t smell it, I can’t see it, I can’t sense it. And I miss it.”

As it dipped below the horizon that night, the sun cast its orange glow on the water, and the breeze carried a faint scent of the sea. “This is home,” Dominic told us. “I was born here, and this is where I will die.”

Second in a series on a recent visit to Louisiana’s bayous, a trip sponsored by the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, to start a conversation between people there who are being flooded out and those in the Down East communities of Carteret County who face similar threats.

BAYOU LAFOURCHE, La. – Eric Verdin clearly knew where he was going. These waters are like family, after all, but his GPS plotter was frantic. Using the latest marine charts, its line tracing our path on the screen in front of us blinked red, warning us that we were about to plow into dry land. It was a good time, it seemed to suggest, to ABANDON SHIP. But we had open seas ahead of us and 8 feet of water under our keel.

“There used to be an orange grove here,” our captain conceded with a shrug.

Not a hundred years ago. Not 50. Not even 20. “Not that long ago, really,” Verdin said, as he looked out the window of the shrimp boat’s pilot house across the placid water of the bayou to the glimmering Gulf of Mexico on the horizon. “Just about all that water you see in front of us was all marsh.”

His native people, the Biloxi-Chitimacha, have lived on the fringes of this watery world along the southwestern tip of Louisiana for many generations. Verdin, 58, has known these waters since boyhood. He makes his living here, first running big boats to supply the oil rigs out in the Gulf and now chasing brown and white shrimp. He’s witnessed changes he never thought possible. “I’ve seen the absolute devastation of our coast during my lifetime,” he said with a sigh. “Miles and miles of marsh are now open waters.”

Nowhere on Earth does land disappear as quickly as it does here in southern Louisiana. According to one fantastic estimate, the water covers, on average, a chunk of marsh the size of a football field every hour or so. Or is it 15 minutes? No matter. The change is so rapid that not even online navigation charts can keep up. Brought about by a catastrophic combination of human engineering, ignorance and hubris, it’s been going on, though more slowly, for at least a century. During that time, an area of marshland the size of Delaware vanished. Now, add another human-induced insult — rising seas triggered by the warming climate — and a similar-sized piece is expected to disappear in just 25 years.

This is ground zero for sea level rise and wetland loss in the world. We, of course, had to see it ourselves.

A group of North Carolinians, on a 10-day trip sponsored by Duke University, toured coastal Louisiana in June looking for connections, for people at the water’s edge who are facing the perils wrought by a rapidly changing environment. They have weathered the frequent storms, survived the destructive aftermaths, and found ways to accommodate the rising seas as the familiar natural world transforms in the blink of their lifetimes. Some of their communities have been displaced, and their cultures are threatened.

Coastal people back home will soon increasingly confront the same dangers, knows Karen Amspacher, a native of Harkers Island in Carteret County, the director of a cultural museum there and the group’s inspirational leader. “We’re all living on the edge,” she told Verdin after he welcomed us aboard his 55-foot shrimper, Lil’E. “I’ve been trying to find common ties with people who are going through what we will.”

After the bayous of Louisiana and Florida’s Gold Coast, the uniformly flat North Carolina coastal plain is the most-endangered landscape in America. The small fishing and farming villages of low-lying eastern Carteret County, Amspacher’s beloved Down East, face a grim future of increasing storms and flooding. Many of the homes will become uninhabitable by century’s end.

Jerrica Cheramie understands all too well the fears that the people there will have to confront. “I’m just 36 and I’ve seen all this change,” said the local high school teacher who joined us on the boat. “It’s terrifying.”

Taming A River

Since its beginning, the Mississippi River has deposited the silt of a continent to build the Louisiana coastline. Its delta, a water-logged labyrinth of bayous, marsh grasses and ancient cypress trees, fans out like a swampy snout into the Gulf. The first European settlers along the lower Mississippi in the 18^th century started throwing up dirt walls along the river’s banks to protect themselves from the frequent floods. The effort intensified a century later after a series of devastating deluges. Congress got involved after the Great Flood in 1927 killed 500 people and inundated 27,000 square miles. It authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to begin digging. That old river man, Mark Twain, once scoffed at the notion of containing the mighty Mississippi. “Ten thousand River Commissions …,” he wrote, “cannot tame that lawless stream … cannot say to it, ‘Go here,’ or ‘Go there,’ and make it obey.”

By God, they tried, and they came damn close. Close enough, anyway, to make southern Louisiana disappear.

Today, massive levees line the river for about half of its 2,400-mile-long route to the sea. Along the very southern leg of its journey, the Mississippi is little more than a big canal, hemmed in place by huge earthen walls.

We followed it one day for its last 75 miles. Down Louisiana Highway 23 we went, through Bohemia and Port Sulfur, past Home Place and Triumph, to Venice, population 164. It’s as far as you can go by car. The river was on our left the entire way, but it flowed unseen behind its wall. The smokestacks of the ships we passed were the only hints that the river was actually there. At the end of the road, we had hoped to watch the great Mississippi make its last, lumbering lurch to the Gulf. Alas, there was nothing to see but more marsh, the wall and assorted bits of industrial detritus – cranes, barges, pipes, barrels and such. More on that shortly.

As we stood at the end of the road expressing our disappointment, a set of eyes popped up through the murky water of a lagoon that wasn’t 20 feet away. Then, another. Soon, it was a dozen. Then, more. I had never seen so many alligators in one place at a time, and I once lived in Miami and fished the Everglades in a canoe. They all came toward us, gliding silently through the water, leaving gentle wakes behind them. Our presence clearly triggered this conclave. Other gawkers, we surmised, had also come this way and had fed the native wildlife. The approaching gators were expecting a handout. What tidbits do you toss to giant reptiles? I wondered as we quickly headed back to the cars. A bucket of Col. Sanders? A Big Mac? Chick-fil-A nuggets, we agreed. Everything likes them.

After that meander worthy of the old Mississippi, let’s get back on course. The point of all this is that the river now heads straight to the Gulf. No more oxbow cutoffs, no twists, no turns. With it, goes all that muck. Very little now leaks into the surrounding bays. Without sediment to nourish them, the marshes have been sinking for a long time. They are drowning more quickly now as sea level rise accelerates.

Big, Big Oil

Verdin killed the engine and dropped anchor. We bobbed under a scorching sun in languid Lake Raccourci. A lot of open water bodies on the Gulf’s fringes in Louisiana are called lakes because they were surrounded by marsh when the mapmakers named them. To Verdin, these are sacred waters. His son, Eric Jr., died in a car wreck five years ago. He was only 34. His family spread his ashes here, one of his “honey holes.” Verdin named his boat after Eric and put a picture of his smiling son in a frame on the bulkhead behind the ship’s wheel. “He always used to stand behind me and say go this way or that way,” his father explained. Verdin comes back often, especially on the anniversary of his son’s death in December when he places flowers in the water. He couldn’t think of a better place to take visitors. We were honored.

We were also surrounded by an odd array of pipes, pumps and iron platforms that rose out of the water everywhere. Rust was their primary color. Each one marked an oil or natural gas well, Verdin explained, and most are still producing, though some are approaching 100 years old. They are relics, really, of simpler times, when the Gulf was just becoming America’s great oilfield.

Like the deltas of many of the world’s great rivers, the Mississippi’s is full of oil and gas. All that muck that the river deposited for millions of years contained the organic ingredients — ancient plants, algae, bacteria – of oil and gas. They’re called fossil fuels for a reason. Time and heat did the rest.

I sat one night on the beach at Grand Isle, one of the few sandy beaches in the lower bayous, and counted the lights of 22 offshore oil rigs blinking on the horizon. There are more than 600 out there, making the Gulf of Mexico America’s primary source for offshore oil and natural gas.

Big Oil is really big here. Its presence is almost everywhere: Refineries with their fiery tails of methane, mountains of pipeline stacked in neat pyramids, natural gas liquification plants, petrochemical complexes, miles of storage tanks, acres of stacked barrels. All in industrial grimy gray with splashes of white. It ain’t pretty and there’s likely no way to make it so.

From Lake Raccourci, we could see the outline of Port Fourchon, maybe 8 miles away. It is Big Oil’s most important port. More than 400 ships leave it every day to supply the rigs. More than 15,000 people fly out of there every month to work on them. It’s the operational base for almost 300 companies. The port is perched at the tail end of LA1, a vital road so threatened that it’s being raised on a causeway to keep it from slipping under the Gulf.

Before all that, there were these pipes now sticking out of the water. The reservoirs closest to shore were, naturally, the first to be tapped, starting in the 1930s. The companies dug canals through the dense marshland to dig the wells. The channels ended up becoming pathways for water, accelerating the marsh’s demise. Many of the wells are now miles from the nearest dry land.

Everybody understands the role the oil and gas industry played in destroying the marshes, Verdin explained as the shrimp were almost ready for lunch. “In hindsight, it ruined our environment, but you won’t find fishermen around here who are anti-oil.” he said. “We know how much we’ve benefitted. When the fishing was good, we fished. When oil was booming, we worked in oil.”

The Diversion

Verdin spilled the pot of boiled shrimp, corn on the cob and potatoes onto one of the hatch covers, and we dug in. The lunchtime conversation turned to The Diversion, the first step of a grand ecosystem experiment that would have taken 50 years to complete and would have cost more than $50 billion. Officially known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, the controversial project intended to divert some of the Mississippi’s flow to allow sediment to once again nourish portions of the marsh. “We need to do something,” Verdin said. “This can’t go on.”

That was the state’s conclusion after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region 25 years ago last month. Healthy marshes, scientists said, would have lessened the damage. In response, the state legislature in 2007 passed the first coastal master plan, a 50-year initiative to blunt the forces eating away at the coastline: sinking land, rising seas, and the channels dug by the oil and gas industry. Barrier islands would be rebuilt, levees bulked up, and structures raised. The plan also endorsed 11 river-diversion projects. The biggest was in Barataria Bay, about 30 miles east of our lunchtime anchorage. Engineers planned to poke a hole into the levee near Ironton in Plaquemines Parish and release 75,000 cubic feet of sediment every second. They estimated that doing so every day for six months a year would create 21 square miles of new marsh in 50 years. “It gives us a fighting chance to win this battle,” Chip Kline, the chairman of the state authority charged with the task, said in 2021.

Others weren’t so sure. Fishermen worried that the sudden influx of freshwater would push oysters and brown shrimp, mainstays of the local fishing industry, out of their current ranges. Federal scientists feared that the salinity drop could cause skin diseases in the bay’s dolphins, killing maybe a third of them. Opponents noted that even if it completes everything in the plan, the state will still lose more wetlands – 2,300 square miles — than it saves or creates – 1,200 square miles.

The scheme went on life support the day voters sent Jeff Landry to the governor’s mansion in 2023. He had been a staunch opponent of the project as attorney general, questioning its ballooning cost — $3.1 billion — and claiming it would kill fisheries important to Cajun culture. A month after our visit, Landry canceled the project.

Its demise didn’t likely lessen Charamie’s resolve “People ask why do I live here?” she said before we said our goodbyes back at the dock. “Where am I to go? This is home.”

It would be a sentiment we would hear again and again.

Next: Life on the edge.

First in a series on a recent visit to Louisiana’s bayous, a trip sponsored by the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, to start a conversation between people there who are being flooded out and those in the Down East communities of Carteret County who face similar threats.

NEW ORLEANS – Our search for connections and common ground began with a tour of this storm-struck city on the Mississippi River.

We didn’t set out to find the Big Easy. No double-decked tourist buses for us. No frozen daquiris from one of the drive-throughs that seem to be everywhere. The famed French Quarter wasn’t on our itinerary. Neither were any cool jazz clubs on Bourbon Street or warm beignets at the Café Du Monde. No, ours was a melancholy excursion that took us to landmarks of our hubris, monuments to our supreme self-confidence that we can control the uncontrollable.

We visited the places where the levees gave way and the walls collapsed 20 years ago in August when Hurricane Katrina exposed their fragility and futility. Canals designed to drain water away from the city carried a devastating storm surge into it. One built to encourage commerce took the flood into New Orleans’ beating heart and drowned an entire parish that has yet to recover. Pumps failed, and as much as 17 feet of water ended up covering 80% of a city that exists mostly under sea level. Almost 1,500 people died, more than 100,000 families were left homeless, and about $200 billion worth of property was destroyed or damaged. The American Society of Civil Engineers later called it “the worst engineering catastrophe in U.S. history.”

The hurricane wasn’t the killer. We were. We thought we were gods who could contain the tempest. Rosina Philippe knows better. You’ll meet her later in our journey through the bayous of southern Louisiana. She’s an elder with the Atakapa-Ishak Nation in Plaquemines Parish, down in the far southern tip of the state. Her people have existed for centuries surrounded by water.

“Water will always meander,” she told us. “It will always find you. It will go this way and that until it finds your weakness. You can never control the water. You can only try to live with it.”

It seemed like a fitting first lesson for a group of North Carolinians who spent six days in June exploring a state that a dozen hurricanes have battered since Katrina, a place where a football field of marshes disappears on average every day. As Rosina warned and Katrina attested, the calculations of engineers may not offer much protection when the storms come, and the floods threaten.

Sponsored by Duke University and led by Karen Amspacher, a Harkers Island native and the director of a cultural museum there, the group hoped to connect the people of the bayous with those living at the water’s edge in the small fishing and farming villages of low-lying eastern Carteret County, Amspacher’s beloved Down East. They face a grim future of increasing storms and flooding as the climate warms and the seas rise. Many of their homes will become uninhabitable by century’s end. Can connecting with people who have already faced those dangers raise awareness and lead to understanding and ultimately to solutions?

“I don’t know if it can,” she said, “but we have to try.”

The Unexpected Flood

We drove along City Park Avenue, atop the remnants of a sand ridge that the Mississippi created eons ago, took a right on Canal Boulevard, and headed north, downhill, toward Lake Pontchartrain. In a couple of miles, we reached Lakeview, a neighborhood of handsome brick and stucco homes. We were below sea level, kept dry by the city’s extensive system of earthen walls, or levees. Look closely, advised Barry Keim, and the evidence of living below the sea is everywhere. Many of the houses’ foundations are exposed and their driveways cracked as the peat soil of the old marsh beneath them dries and compresses. Side streets are buckled, and the tops of storm drains are above the sinking pavement.

“Every house you see on both sides of the road was flooded after Katrina,” he noted. “The water here was 8 to 10 feet deep, some of the worst flooding in the city.”

A thick black line around the exterior of the neighborhood Starbucks memorializes those dark times. The line is more than 7 feet above the ground with one word printed above it in bold letters: “Katrina.”

“And this is where all that water came from,” Keim said, standing on the seawall that borders the lake. An affable man who was the state climatologist for more than 20 years, he now directs the Environmental Health, Climate, and Sustainability Program at Louisiana State University in New Orleans. He knows the city intimately, having grown up in one of its suburbs.

Down this way, they call the oval-shaped body of water behind him a lake, though it’s technically a lagoon because it has an opening to the Gulf of Mexico at its east end. By any name, it’s big, covering more than twice the area of North Carolina’s largest city, Charlotte. Though a levee was built along the shoreline here after a 1947 hurricane flooded a portion of New Orleans, Pontchartrain was considered far less of a threat than the mighty Mississippi, which snakes along the other side of the city.

Engineers found the lake to be a convenient place to dispose of excess water as New Orleans grew from its original settlement on the high ground of a natural levee created by the river. Over time, they dug three large canals to drain the low-lying land that locals call “the Back of Town.” Katrina came along on just the right path to turn the tables, pushing its deadly surge up the canals. “Everyone expected the big flood to come from the river,” noted Amy Lesen. “No one expected the levee system here to fail as it did during Katrina.”

A professor at Antioch and Tulane universities, Lesen organized much of the trip to come. She has spent most of her career teaching and writing about climate change and its effects on people. A striking resume popped up on Google when I searched: Bachelor of Science in marine fisheries biology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley; a long list of books and publications; an impressive array of research grants; and weighty appointments and awards. Most striking, though, is what Google only hints at. Unlike most professors, Lesen gets out of the classroom and into communities, helping the poor and disadvantaged recover from storms or prepare for them. Over the next six days, I will come to learn that she’s just a big-hearted Jewish girl from the Bronx who came to New Orleans almost 20 years ago and found her life’s work helping the marginalized water people of the bayous adjust to a rapidly changing world.

Residents of 4900 block of Warrington Drive didn’t have much time to react when Katrina arrived that morning of Aug. 29, 2005. All they could do was run for their lives. Water from the lake rushed up the London Avenue Canal, which ran through their backyards along a channel lined by concrete and sheet metal walls that had been reinforced just a decade earlier. The engineers unknowingly anchored their walls in the soft sand of an ancient barrier island, Keim said. At 9:30 a.m., a 30-foot section of the wall collapsed, releasing a geyser of sand and a torrent of water that topped 15 feet. The neighborhood disappeared. “When I drove down here, there were houses on houses, cars on top of cars,” Amy remembered. “It was complete devastation.”

We are peeking through the windows of 4918 Warrington, a solid brick house that withstood the flood. No one lives here now, and you can’t go inside. The Flooded House Museum is a stark re-creation, a haunting reminder of what the people here came back to after the flood waters receded. Dark mold covers the walls. The baby grand piano in the corner is destroyed. Yet, the books on the shelves seem undisturbed. Photo frames hang askew. Toys are tossed around the room, and a thick layer of dirt covers every piece of furniture. The wrinkled, faded front page of the city’s Times-Picayune sits atop a broken table. The newspaper was published the day before the storm. “Katrina Takes Aim,” the headline screams.

We headed back to the van. “I hate I have to take you on this tour of woe,” Lesen says.

Mister Go

In the ponderous language of the bureaucracy, it’s known as the Mississippi-Gulf Outlet Canal. Locals took the acronym, MSGO, and came up with a more memorable moniker, Mister Go. It was the last and maybe most depressing stop on Amy’s tour. Of all the deadly screw-ups that led to a drowned city, Mister Go was the most predictable and most lethal.

Fittingly, then, it started to rain, though the sun was still shining, as we headed south out of town on LA 39, following the Mississippi. A huge levee obscured the river on our right, though we sometimes glimpsed the smokestacks of passing ships. “The devil is beating his wife,” Keim said from the front seat. “That’s what we say down here when it rains while the sun is shining.”

As Lucifer wailed away, St. Bernard Parish rolled by our windows. At almost 2,200 square miles, it is the state’s second-largest parish, or what we In North Carolina would call a county. Eighty-three percent of it is water, however, making it the wettest place in Louisiana, which is saying something. The passing scenery confirmed that: a thousand cuts of water coursing through an endless sea of marsh grasses, dotted by small islands of bald cypress trees. “Out here, you’re in another world,” Keim noted.

We reached our destination, Shell Beach, which has neither a beach nor any readily apparent shells. Shrimp trawlers and rusting oyster dredges were tied up along the Mister Go waterfront, confirming the community’s past prominence as a fishing port. “If you came here before Katrina, you would have seen a lot of activity,” Keim said as we got out of the van. “It was a bustling place.”

About 40 minutes from downtown New Orleans, Shell Beach is about halfway up the 76-mile channel that links the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans’ inner harbor. The city had been clamoring for years for a shortcut for commercial ships. With support from the Army Corps of Engineers, Mister Go finally got congressional approval in 1956. The Corps started digging two years later, dredging up more earth then was moved during the building of the Panama Canal and destroying thousands of acres of wetlands in the process. The channel opened to shipping in 1965 at a cost of $92 million, or almost $900 million today when adjusted for inflation.

“Scientists warned of the environmental effects, and locals worried about the flooding.” Keim explained as we walked along the deserted waterfront. “The people here didn’t want this built. They thought it would be a disaster. It turned out to be worse than they imagined.”

As soon as the channel was dug, saltwater from the Gulf swept in, drastically changing the ecosystem. The dead, sun-bleached stalks of bald cypress and live oak trees, what scientists call ghost forests, mark the salt’s line of advance. Muskrats went next, taking the parish’s thriving fur industry with them. The oysters followed along with another industry. The brackish marshes were important to wintering waterfowl, but the birds went elsewhere after the water’s salt content tripled, killing most of the marshes.

The long-term effects stretched far beyond muskrats, oysters, and ducks, however. An estimated 20,000 acres of marsh that served as a buffer against storms were swept away over the next 40 years. By the time Katrina arrived, the original 500-foot-wide channel had more than quadrupled in size in some places.

Poor people bore the brunt of what came next. Katrina’s storm surge barreled up the channel and into the connecting Industrial Canal in the heart of New Orleans. Containing walls collapsed, and the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly Black neighborhood, was under 12 feet of water. Its residents became the storm’s human face of suffering on TVs around the world. The Lower Ninth was the last place in the city to get power restored, the last to be pumped dry. Empty lots and collapsed houses covered in vines dot it still.

In poverty-stricken St. Bernard Parish, the destruction was complete. Every inch of the parish was underwater, every building flooded. Many who fled never came back. The parish’s population is still two-thirds of what it was before the storm.

The most-maddening thing about it? All that death and all that destruction and all that despair were for nothing. Absolutely nothing. A few people probably made money on Mister Go, but the economic boom it was predicted to trigger along its length never happened. In fact, it was a bust. Before the storm, the channel cost more than $8 million to maintain each year for the two large container ships that used it on any day. In the Corps of Engineers’ long list of misjudgments and disasters, the Mississippi-Gulf Outlet Canal must rank somewhere near the top.

Under extreme local pressure, the Corps shut the whole thing down after Katrina. It built a rock dam in 2009 at Mister Go’s Gulf end to close it to shipping and completed a $1.1 billion storm-surge gate across its connection to the Industrial Canal four years later. In New Orleans, it built floodgates at the mouth of the other canals.

The people of St. Bernard Parish were left to mourn, but they got busy building, too. They erected a monument along the shore in Shell Beach that lists the names of all 164 residents who died during the flooding: Bernhard, De la Fosse, Gallodoro, LaBlanc, Morates, Roark, Vidross …

“Those are the names of St. Bernard Parish,” Amy said.

Next in the series: Ground zero for wetland loss in the world.

This is the first in a series of stories about the effects federal budget and staff cuts and the cancellations of programs and services are having in coastal North Carolina.

POLLOCKSVILLE – Jay Bender is rightfully proud of his town hall. Lovingly restored when it was moved to higher ground a few years ago, the old train depot has come to symbolize the grit of this little river town that a hurricane once tried to drown and its government in far-off Washington now has abandoned.

The mayor for 42 continuous years – a record in North Carolina – Bender fashioned his office to look like one that the stationmaster might have used when the depot was built in 1893. An antique rolltop desk anchors the room, accented by sturdy wooden chairs for visitors and framed railroad maps on the walls.

He led me to the handsome town council chambers with its wide-beamed oak floor and huge, sliding, wooden cargo doors that bear names and other graffiti that people scrawled during the building’s lifetime. “All of this was under water,” explained Bender. “We lost everything. We lost our records. We lost our computers. Everything.”

Related: North Carolina among most successful states for BRIC awards

The depot, which even then served as town hall, was a few blocks away, down on the banks of the Trent River, a pretty, usually placid stream that languidly flows northeast a dozen or so miles to its confluence with the Neuse River in New Bern. In these parts it’s known primarily for its catfish and largemouth bass. It was the little town’s biggest attraction.

Until it became the source of its destruction.

That would have been during those three, grim days in September 2018 when Hurricane Florence dumped more than more 30 inches of rain and unleased a biblical deluge. The river had overflowed its banks before, of course – back in 1999 after Hurricane Floyd, for instance – but never like this. Some experts would later speculate that the Trent hadn’t flooded that badly in maybe 1,000 years. It rose more than 25 feet, covering much of Pollocksville to its rooftops. Most of its 300 or so residents had to be evacuated. More than 80% of its buildings were destroyed or damaged, including every town commissioner’s home.

Bender, living in his grandfather’s old place on high ground, was spared. That’s where they ran the town until the river receded and the power was restored 11 days later.

The slow recovery then began.

Aided by state and federal grants, the town moved and refurbished the waterlogged old depot in 2021 and began getting pieces of its sewer and water systems out of the floodplain. Owners raised some buildings, and the town gussied up U.S. Highway 17, its main road, with a bike path, planters and banners.

The place was starting to look almost normal again, and Bender was feeling optimistic about his town’s revival until the Trump regime in Washington suddenly and without warning pulled the rug out from under him.

Killed without warning

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced about a month ago that it was cancelling its major grant program that provided seed money to communities that wanted to be better prepared for the next flood or weather catastrophe. FEMA didn’t contact Pollocksville or the 67 other communities in the state that were awarded grants but had not yet received any money. Neither did it notify the N.C. Division of Emergency Management, which administers the grants, or the media. The agency made the surprise announcement on one of its websites after 5 p.m. on a Friday, presumably to attract the least amount of attention.

Bender didn’t find out about the cancellation until the following week. It was the first time a federal grant program had been killed in midstream.

It would be another 12 days before FEMA clarified that only grant projects that had been completed would be totally funded. Those that have started might receive partial funding. Everything else was dead. In North Carolina, that meant almost $186 million in projects intended to help communities ward off weather catastrophes and save lives would have to be shelved unless the recipients could come up with the money elsewhere. That total includes about $81 million in the state’s 20 coastal counties, including $1.1 million for Pollocksville to raise six commercial buildings to revive its downtown.

“Losing the grant is very disappointing,” said Bender, whose town operates on an annual $600,000 budget. “It would have funded the next step in our long-range plan. Replacing the grant money will be difficult.”

The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants, known as BRIC, was the federal government’s showcase program to help communities help themselves by funding projects to lessen and prevent storm damage. It committed almost $5 billion to communities across the country since it was approved by Congress with bipartisan support and signed by Donald Trump in 2018 during his first term. Local governments had planned to use the money to help raise buildings and roads, relocate vulnerable sewer pump stations, control flooding, strengthen building codes and on similar projects to reduce the damage of future storms. The program was so popular that last year FEMA had to reject nearly 2,000 applicants because it didn’t have enough money to go around.

About $1 billion was allocated to the program as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021. Under President Biden, the BRIC grants were key parts of the government’s efforts to address climate change, and a special emphasis was placed on helping Black and other historically underserved communities. It was those directives that likely put BRIC on the regime’s hit list.

‘Wasteful,’ ‘political,’ fearful

An unnamed FEMA spokesperson said in the April announcement that the agency now considers BRIC to be “wasteful” and “political.” I called FEMA’s “news desk” at its regional office in Atlanta several times to get some examples. Each call disappeared into the ether because the number listed on the agency’s regional website didn’t even generate a dial tone. I sent an email to the address listed on the site. It remains unanswered. As do the emails and phone message I sent to the state’s two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Ted Budd, asking for their reactions.

Many county and town officials also didn’t return emails and phone calls. They watched the bullying of the country’s biggest universities and law firms and heard the threats about withholding federal funds to public schools and museums. They apparently got the message. They would need FEMA someday, and all depended on federal funding for something. Bender understands his counterparts’ desire to remain under the radar. He’s relying partially on federal money to upgrade his water and sewer plants. “We lose this grant and we’re out maybe $20,000,” he said. “But I can’t build half a sewer plant.”

Anna Weber, however, needed no coaxing. She’s a policy analyst for the National Resources Defense Council and helps communities prepare for the violence of an unstable climate. She has a hard time understanding how spending money to prevent death and damage from future storms can suddenly be considered wasteful.

“In fact, investing in adaptation and resiliency against climate change is one of the least wasteful things we can do,“ she said. “It’s actually one of the best investments in preventing future local damage and loss of life from storms.”

She noted that studies have consistently shown that every dollar invested on projects to prevent storm damage results in at least $6 in savings when the pieces later have to be picked up and put back together.

BRIC also seemed to dovetail with the regime’s desire to require states to pay more for cleanup and reconstruction costs after a disaster, Weber said. The grants pay 75% of project costs. The applicant is responsible for the remainder. “These were communities that were doing this right,” she said. “The federal government wanted communities to step up and take some responsibility. These communities did step up and do what the government asked, and now the rug is being pulled out from under them.”

The charge that the grants were doled out as political favors by the Biden administration makes little sense in North Carolina, which Trump carried handily in all three of his elections. The 22 counties, which include the state’s most populous, that Biden won in 2020 received only about a quarter of the grant money, while the 20 coastal counties, many of which Trump won with 60-70% of the vote, received almost 45%.

Jessica Whitehead was North Carolina’s first chief resilience officer and helped evaluate the state’s first BRIC applications in 2020. She’s now director of the Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience at Old Dominion University.

“Politics?” she said. “It never came up.”

No one asked Bender about his politics when the town applied for its BRIC grant.

“This had nothing to do with politics,” he said, “and I don’t know how you can consider it wasteful. This is all about trying to get our town back to normal.”

BRIC and North Carolina were made for each other.

Since the first applications were accepted for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants in 2020, state and local-government officials had developed a keen sense of what the Federal Emergency Management Agency wanted to fund. A steady flow of successful applicants was the result.

“North Carolina was one of the most successful states to get BRIC funding,” noted Anna Weber, a senior policy analyst with the National Resources Defense Council. “As a result, it will be one of states with the most to lose.”

Related: Coastal towns awarded resilience grants see funding pulled

Sixty-eight cities, towns and counties in the state have been awarded grants since that first cycle of funding, according to the N.C. Division of Emergency Management, which administers the grant program. Thirty-three are in the 20 coastal counties. Those grants range from $120,000 to Bertie and Hertford counties for watershed studies to more than $18 million to Fayetteville for stream-restoration and bridge-relocation projects.

About all of it is now gone. FEMA releases BRIC money as work on a project is completed. The agency has said that only projects that have been completed will be fully funded. Those that have started may be partially funded. A living shoreline in Duck is the only completed BRIC project in the state, according to the division, and is the only one that will be completely funded. The project in Princeville to move municipal buildings out of the floodplain has started and will likely be partially funded.

Both projects in Fayetteville, the largest in the coastal counties, are currently being designed to lessen storm damage and flooding, Loren Bymer, the city’s marketing and communications director, explained in an email. He said the city “anticipates” being reimbursed by FEMA for the design work. The grants, however, won’t pay for construction as anticipated, he wrote. To complete the projects, the city would have to find other sources of income, such as issuing bonds or raising property taxes, or delaying other projects, Bymer said.

BRIC funding for all of the other projects on the list below has been killed. That amounts to about $81 million in coastal projects and more than $186 million statewide.

This is the house in Mexico Beach, Florida, that famously survived Hurricane Michael. It didn’t lose a shingle but everything around it was destroyed. The picture speaks volumes about us, our politics and our woeful unreadiness to face a harrowing future.

Some media accounts described the house’s survival as “miraculous,” as if the owners were just lucky or maybe touched by a smiling Neptune. The truth is that money and brains saved this house; miracles had nothing to do with it.

Neither did government. And that’s the real problem.

The two men who own this house understood the dangers of living at the water’s edge during a time of radical changes in our climate. They purposely set out to build a house to withstand the powerful hurricanes that they knew would become a normal feature of our future. That meant throwing away Florida’s inadequate building-code book. Instead of building a house to withstand 120 mph winds, as the code required, they built one to stand up to 250 mph winds and 25-foot storm surges. They built their house on 40-foot steel pilings, with reinforced concrete walls a foot thick, with steel cables that run through those pilings to tie down the roof.

All that doubled the cost of the “miracle” house. But these were men of means. They could afford it. They survived.

Those living around them relied instead on their government to keep them safe. They built their houses to the state’s code, assuming all those regulations would protect them. Those houses were destroyed.

To think that we will get our carbon emissions under control in the next decade to avoid the worst effects of a runaway climate, as scientists warned in a recent, much-publicized report, is a fool’s bet. Adapting to the changing climate is all that’s realistically left to us at this point.

That will require concerted government action on all levels. So far, government is failing us.

In Florida, for instance, Gov. Rick Scott, now running for the U.S. Senate, ignored for years the warnings that a third of his state will disappear under the waves in next 100 years. His administration at one time even banned the words “climate change” in official reports.

Congressional leadership on the issue has been an unfortunate fatality of the crippling tribalism of our politics in Washington. Recent polling and research suggest that more Republicans in Congress than you might think believe we ought to be doing more to combat climate change and prepare for its consequences. But Republicans view it as a Democratic issue. They aren’t so much skeptical of climate change as they are of Democrats. Because the Democrats are for it, they have to be against it.

Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, spoke of his opposition in his first several years in Congress: “All I knew was that Al Gore was for it, and therefore I was against it,” he recently told researchers.

In the White House, we now have a man who once said climate change was a Chinese hoax to cripple the U.S. economy. His understanding of the issue is laughable and his energy policies that promote burning more coal and oil would only make things worse. Under such a man, the federal bureaucracy will do nothing to help us.

In fact, we can expect it to do more of the same. The Federal Emergency Management Agency will come in and pick up the pieces left by hurricanes Florence and Michael and then make money available to put it all back together again. The federal flood insurance program might require policyholders to rebuild above the current floodplain, but it won’t require them to avoid the flood that will come in 20 years when the seas are 6 inches higher.

Here, in North Carolina, our legislature has done nothing to help coastal communities adapt. It even passed a law a few years ago that bars state agencies from using scientific forecasts for future sea level rise when planning projects.

With the election of a Democratic governor, state agencies are beginning to take the first steps to help communities prepare for a changing world. Swansboro is using some state money to devise a plan that will identify areas in town that are prone to flooding and storm damage now or will be in the future.

We volunteered to take that step and are one of only a handful of coastal communities in the state that have. No one said we had to. Such an approach won’t work. Adaptation planning, like land-use planning is now, must become a required step for all coastal communities.

But that will take money and political will. Both are lacking now.

As the hurricanes get stronger and more frequent, as the heat waves and droughts get longer and more intense, as the wildfires spread over more and more acres, we will find that will and that money. We will have to.

We are already seeing movement in the polls as more and more people, regardless of their politics, recognize the dangers we face. Enlightenment proceeds action. It always has.

But we can’t wait long. The longer we wait, the more limited and expensive the choices

The picture foretells the price of inaction. People with money will find ways to survive. The rest of us, awaiting help from our government that never came, will just get blown away.

Learn More

• New York Times: Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘for the Big One’

The following first appeared in Frank Tursi’s blog, the White Oak Journal.

SWANSBORO — The numbers aren’t pretty. They paint a bleak picture of a drowning people.

In less than 12 years, 6,500 houses along the North Carolina coast worth more than a $1 billion today could be flooded every other week by normal high tides. By 2060, the rising Atlantic will make dozens of coastal communities nearly uninhabitable. At least 120,000 coastal North Carolinians could be climate refugees by the end of the century.

Like I said, grim stuff.

The Union of Concerned Scientists issued a report several weeks ago that could be the script of a dystopian movie. It analyzed for the first time by ZIP code the effects rising seas could have on the country’s coastal communities at five points in time – 2030, 2045, 2060, 2080 and 2100. It looked at the number of existing homes that will be flooded by normal high tides as the climate continues to warm, the values of those houses and the property taxes at risk. It counted the people who could be displaced.

The scientists mean to scare you. They hope their report will then lead you to cry for a life preserver while there’s still time.

Smart people, like those who compiled this report, have been warning us for years about accelerated sea level rise triggered by a warming climate and what it will do to buildings perched at the water’s edge, especially on a uniformly flat landscape like the North Carolina coast. After Gold Coast of South Florida and the bayous of Louisiana, we may be living on the most-threatened coastline in the country.

There are several interactive, online maps that graphically display the rising water in creeping colors of red and purple. But assigning those dangers to a familiar number seems to strike closer to home. 28584, for instance. That’s Swansboro’s ZIP code. That’s me and my neighbors. To think that 60 houses, representing more than $20 million in current value, in the little place I call home could be regularly flooded by 2030 makes this downright scary. About 1,100 people, or almost 10 percent of the current population of our ZIP code, will be flooded out of their homes by 2100. As bad as that sounds, they’ll be in far, far better shape than many of their coastal neighbors.

First, Some Qualifiers

There are some important things to keep in mind before we go any further with this. The authors of the study assume that future flooding will reach a threshold where normal routines become impossible and coastal residents, communities and businesses are forced to make difficult, often costly, choices. They call this level of disruption “chronic inundation,” which they define as flooding that occurs 26 times a year, or about once every other week. It is important to note that this flooding is not caused by storms—it is simply the result of high tides inching higher and reaching farther inland as sea levels rise.

The report also doesn’t attempt to predict future coastal development or population growth. All projections are based on current population and housing stocks. So, if anything, the numbers get more conservative as the predictions progress farther into the future.

Neither did the authors factor in sea walls, moving or raising houses or other measures that may be taken in the future to lessen the damage.

And, finally, they use the most-dire scenario. They assume that global sea level rise will average about 7 feet worldwide by 2100. That’s currently at the far end of predictions and would result if we do little to control emissions. That may sound extreme but keep in mind that sea rise projections are forever edging upwards as the climate continues to warm and glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica continue to melt and we continue to do nothing meaningful. The current scientific consensus of 3 feet by 2100 was considered extreme a decade ago. A decade hence, 7 feet may seem like a fond wish.

Not Just Beach Towns

If they consider the issue of rising seas at all, most people naturally think about the beach. Nags Head and Wrightsville Beach and Ocean Isle and places like that are most endangered. The report’s numbers, though, reveal a far different reality that reflects our coast’s geography and flat topography. Much of the initial flooding occurs inland, away from the oceanfront and along the vast labyrinth of sounds, rivers and creeks. Only later are beach towns affected.

Stumpy Point, for instance, is a good 20 miles from the ocean as that crow flies. The small, unincorporated community off U.S. 264 in Dare County instead backs up to Pamlico Sound. About a third of the houses there could flood twice a month in just 12 years. Stumpy Point has, according to the study, the highest percentage of at-risk houses in the state in 2030.

Other inland communities aren’t far behind: Manns Harbor on Croatan Sound in Dare; Maple and its neighbor Barco along Coinjock Bay in Currituck County; Englehard in Hyde County; and Lowland and Hobucken in Pamlico County.

Chronic flooding becomes more widespread by 2060. It could threaten more than 30,000 existing homes along the North Carolina coast with a current value of about $7 billion. More than 40,000 people currently live in those houses. That’s more than the population of New Bern.

The low-lying lands from eastern Carteret County, up the Albemarle-Pamlico peninsula, to the Great Dismal Swamp on the Virginia border could be particularly hard hit. High tides in 2060 could threaten more than half the homes in Davis and Marshallberg in Down East Carteret. In Hyde and Tyrrell counties, 30 percent of existing homes could be regularly flooded. High tides could now reach more than a quarter of the houses in northern Currituck County bordering the swamp.

The beginning of the disintegration of the Outer Banks clearly shows up in the 2060 numbers. Almost half the houses in Frisco, Waves, Hatteras and Salvo on Hatteras Island could be subject to frequent high-tide flooding. While the effects are more limited on the higher, northern Outer Banks beaches, residential real-estate worth about $11 billion today could frequently be flooded in Nags Head, Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills.

By 2100, the destruction of the southern Outer Banks is complete. High tides could flood more than half the homes in most of the beach towns. Flooding could hit 70 percent of the houses in Rodanthe and Salvo and 85 percent in Waves. Every current resident of Avon, Frisco and Hatteras would be displaced by high tides.

Three-quarters of the current population of Hyde County would also be refugees. The old, quaint fishing villages of Down East – Davis and Marshallberg, Williston and Gloucester, Smyrna and Sea Level – could become drowned ghost towns.

The coast’s major cities could also be devastated. Property currently worth $15 billion could be inundated in Wilmington. About 7,000 people in New Bern, or about a quarter its current population, could be flooded out of their homes. Almost half the current population of Elizabeth City could become refugees.

Are you sufficiently alarmed yet? Good. That’s what the report’s authors intended.

Now What?

Now, they would want you to think about where we go from here.

Certainly, putting a lid on emissions is still at the top of the to-do list, but that requires national and international actions and nothing meaningful has been done so far. We can all agree at this point that the Trump administration won’t do anything in the near term. In fact, its energy policies, if actually carried, out would make things worse.

Also at the top of the list are things we can all do individually to be smarter energy consumers and to reduce our carbon footprints. Frankly, such reductions would be small, incremental and largely meaningless. There’s absolutely nothing you and I can do personally at this point that will prevent our descendants from being flooded out of their homes.

We can, however, prepare for the future they face. The state Division of Coastal Management has begun to take the first steps to help communities plan for the more watery future. Its teamed up with experts at North Carolina State University and the Nature Conservancy to offer willing communities an opportunity to identify flood-prone areas and critical public and private infrastructure that are subject to flooding and storm damage and need to be protected. Communities can then use that information to devise protective local ordinances.

Swansboro is one of about 10 communities on the coast that have volunteered for the adaptation plan. The process just started and will probably take the rest of the year. A public meeting is planned in late August to get residents’ input. Follow this blog for more information.

It’s a good first step that every coastal community should be required to take it. The more prepared they are, the less it will cost all future taxpayers to bail them out – pun intended.

But that will take money and laws. The scope of the problem is too large for the small budgets of small communities, like Swansboro, to tackle. It will overwhelm even the largest cities. This is a problem that the state needs to tackle. That is a problem for the North Carolina General Assembly.

The subject of climate change has in the past received a frosty reception in the halls of the Legislative Building. Beholden to special interest groups, legislators a few years ago even attempted to ban planning for future sea level rise and were ridiculed worldwide for their efforts.

Now, they must step up. If they won’t, voters must replace them with people who will.

Your grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s futures depend on it. As the water rises around their ankles, they will wonder about our obstinacy and blindness. We should give them evidence that we haven’t totally lost our minds.

Learn More

• Interactive maps: U.S. Coastal Property at Risk from Rising Seas

Reprinted from the Tideland News

SWANSBORO — The mighty red drum is the official state fish. Powerful bluefin tunas off the Outer Banks inspire TV dramas. Majestic marlins spawn fishing competitions that can make contestants rich. Popular saltwater fish, like flounder, speckled trout and king mackerel, support the state’s multi-billion-dollar fishing industries.

But the lowly mullet is North Carolina’s first fish.

Striped mullets, more commonly called jumping mullets for their aerial, acrobatic displays, are one of the great schooling fishes of the Atlantic. The babies, the ubiquitous finger mullets, crowd our sounds and coastal rivers and creeks in untold numbers throughout the spring and summer. Come fall, those that have grown to adults gather in huge schools for their annual southern migration.

Where great masses of fish go, masses of men with nets naturally follow.

Highly prized for their flesh and roe, striped mullet fueled the first commercial fishery along the state’s coast. It boomed to prominence after the Civil War and continues more than a century later, though now much diminished.

By the 1870s, more mullets were caught in North Carolina than in any other state. Thirty or more ships carried the fish from Beaufort and Morehead City to far-off northern cities where they fed poor immigrants flooding into the country. The old North Carolina Railroad to Morehead hauled away so many mullets that for generations, locals called it the Old Mullet Road. Barrels of salted mullets became as common in country stores across Eastern North Carolina as jars of pickled eggs.

Most of the men who caught those fish were part-time fishermen. They made their livings as farmers and merchants and tradesmen of one kind or another. Some were mere schoolboys. But they all gathered on the coast in late summer with their skiffs and cotton nets to reap the annual bonanza. Some lived for weeks at a time in makeshift, temporary fishing camps that were scattered along the beaches and sounds from Hatteras Inlet to the South Carolina line.

“Mullet fishing was a really important part of life along a big stretch of the coast from the 18th century to the 1950s,” explained David S. Cecelski, a historian who has written extensively about the North Carolina coast. “From Hatteras to the other side of Wilmington, every bit of the beach would have been carved out by mullet camps.”

Cecelski, who splits his time between Durham and his native Carteret County, will tell the story of one of those camps on Monday, Feb. 19, at a program sponsored by the Swansboro Historical Association. His talk, which will feature 1938 photos of a camp on Brown’s Island in Onslow County, will begin at 6 p.m. in the auditorium of One Harbor Church at 502 S. Church St.

If you’ve spent any time on the water, you’ve seen them. Biologists speculate why mullets jump. Some think they’re trying to escape predators; others suspect that the fish leap out of the water to breathe in needed oxygen. Here’s an alternate, though less scientific, suggestion: They jump for the pure joy of it.

Whatever the reason, striped mullets (Mugil cephalus) do their jumping all over the world. They are found in coastal waters from Nova Scotia to Central America, from southern California to Chile, from the Bay of Biscay in France to South Africa. You’ll see them jumping in the Mediterranean and the Black seas, in the Arabian Sea, in the Bay of Bengal and in the Philippines and Coral seas.

Here, in North Carolina, the mullets congregate in large schools in our inshore waters. In late summer and fall, they begin to move offshore to spawn.

Austin Guthrie knew to watch the weather for the first signs of a “mullet blow.”

“Nature would tell you when the mullet would begin to move,” remembered Guthrie, 87, who as a teenager fished with a mullet crew, led by his father, from old Cedar Point Beach on Bogue Sound. “When the wind would blow strong from the southwest for three or more days in the fall, we knew it would shift to the north and then the mullet would begin to move.”

Men, perched atop wooden towers built at strategic places along the shoreline, would be looking for them. Those assigned the task had an “eye for mullet.” They scanned the water for the telltale signs of schools just below the surface – large areas of ripples, dark spots that moved against the tide and current, silver bodies that leaped into the air. When they spied a school within reach of shore, the lookouts hollered to the fishermen below, waving a branch of wax myrtle or yaupon.

The crews of 12 to 30 men would then spring to life, launching their small, wooden pilot skiffs to splay out the shallow-water nets used to corral the approaching fish and haul them to the beach.

One fisherman remembered how large the schools of fish could get and how they inspired awe and, it seems, a bit of irritation.

“During the fall they move in such immense schools that the noise of their splashing resembles distant thunder and to persons living near the bay this noise kept up day and night becomes very annoying,” the fisherman told R. Edward Earll in the 1880s.

Earll was a young biologist for the United States Fish Commission. He was helping G. Brown Goode of the Smithsonian Institution compile the first comprehensive study of the United States fishing industry. For his research, Earll visited mullet camps throughout the Southeast. He lingered on Core and Bogue banks in Carteret County, which at the time was the center of mullet fishing in North Carolina.

It was a wild, exotic world of sand dunes, thick stands of live oak forests and vast expanses of salt marshes and deserted beaches. Groupings of odd, thatched houses with round walls and conical roofs, which Cecelski speculates traced their architectural roots to Africa, dotted the shoreline of the islands. They were built by the men who had come for generations, from farms and shops from as far away as New Bern and Edenton.

“People would come down to the shore every year and join the same gang every year,” Cecelski explained. “It was a social thing. All these guys – and it was almost exclusively guys – would head off and live out there on their own for two or three months.”

In his report on mullet in “The Fishery and Fishing Industries of the United States, Vol. 1” that Goode published in 1887, Earll describes methods, customs and a language that had developed over many decades and would remain in place for a century longer.

The men, for instance, would begin gathering at the camps around the first of August and would remain until mid-November. They fished in crews led by a captain, who usually owned the boats and nets. They each got “shares” in the catch depending on their labors, talents or the equipment they brought with them. The captain got multiple shares, of course, as did the lookout and man who owned the land where the camp was built. Everyone got at least one share, including those who delivered firewood and freshwater each day. Each share, in Earll’s day, was worth the fetching price of a 100-pound barrel of salted mullet.

The fish were salted at the camps, Earll reported, and packed in those barrels, which were sent by boat to buyers in Beaufort and Morehead City.

Guthrie’s father, Elbert, used the same financial arrangement, or “lay,” with his crews when he fished for mullet 80 years later. Elbert Guthrie had been evicted in 1941 from the family homestead in Bogue in Carteret County when the government bought land for a training field for pilots. He moved a few miles away to Cedar Point, settling along Bogue Sound at the end of what is now Bell Street. There, he had a public popular swimming beach with a hot dog stand and a picnic shelter and such. Business sort of died when the bridge to Emerald Isle was completed in 1972, opening the ocean beaches.

Elbert closed the swimming beach each fall because that was mullet time.

Austin Guthrie was rowing one of the boats that day in 1952 or ’53 – he can’t remember which year exactly – when his daddy’s crew caught 57,000 pounds of mullets, which Guthrie said is the biggest single haul of mullets ever caught in Bogue Sound. His rowing duties earned him an extra half share along with his full share. It amounted to about $300.

“That was real good money back then,” he said. “We could make money, even for the few cents a pound daddy sold the fish. There were that many mullet.”

The late Tucker Littleton, a Swansboro historian, describes numerous mullet fishing crews operating in the Swansboro area around the turn of the 20^th century. Relying on the memories of family members, Littleton, in a 1980 newspaper article, lists more than 20 mullet crews working in such places as Dudley’s Island at Bogue Inlet, at the mouths of Queens and Fosters creeks, at Brown’s Inlet in Onslow County and in Goose Bay and Sander’s Island in Carteret.

Many of the men in these crews arrived at the fishing grounds in the morning and returned home that night. One such crew in Cedar Point, fishing at the mouth of the White Oak River, near the eastern end of the current causeway, would hoist a white flag up a tall pole when the mullets were plentiful, Littleton writes. Many of the crewmembers came from Swansboro, rowing each morning across the river to fish. The flag, which could be seen in town, let their wives back home know that the fishing was good. Littleton reports that the crew once raised the flag on 27 consecutive days.

The custom was followed for many years, Littleton explained, but had to be stopped after some of the fishermen complained that their wives broke out the Sears and Roebuck catalog when seeing the flag, and their shares were spent before they rowed back home that evening.

Photographer Charles Farrell visited the mullet camp on Brown’s Island in 1938 and left behind a valuable photographic record that’s now preserved by the state’s Division of Archives and History. The owner of the first photo shop in Greensboro, Farrell had for years crisscrossed the coast and had developed an affinity for the rough-hewn life of fishermen.

“He had a talent for capturing their common, everyday lives,” Cecelski said.

Two fishing families, the Lawrences and the Gillikins, from far-off Otway along Wards Creek in Down East Carteret County, had started the camp on Brown’s Island. Year after year, the men from these families would make the two-day sail to Brown’s each August to fish for mullet. They would return home before Thanksgiving.

Bedford Lawrence, 70 when Farrell visited, was the head of one the clans. He had been coming to Brown’s since the 1880s. He poses for Farrell in a faded denim jacket and a hat he had waterproofed with linseed oil. The wry smile hints of the fiddle player that Lawrence was back home at the North River Primitive Baptist Church.

Leonard Gillikin, the boss of the fishing crew, gives it his Hollywood best for the camera, tilting his felt fedora at a rakish angle and holding his pipe ramrod straight in his mouth. He’s descended from the legendary Decatur Gillikin, a Paul Bunyan-like character who could row farther and faster than anyone. Not to go too far off track, but there’s a story, relayed by an attendant at the Minnesott Beach Ferry who hailed from Down East. It was likely once told in fish houses from Cedar Island to Straits: Decatur was also an expert wrestler who challenged anyone to a match. A Yankee showed up one day to wrestle but Decatur wasn’t home.

The Yankee said he’d wait and asked Decatur’s daughter if he could have a drink of water, it being a hot day and all. She directed him to the water barrel out back. The Yankee found the big, wooden barrel but no ladle. He returned to the house. Decatur’s daughter followed him back to the barrel. “I thought you’d do like everyone around here does,” she said, lifting the barrel and taking a drink. The Yankee left and was never seen again.

To get us back on track, Farrell’s photos provide a glimpse into the everyday lives of these mullet fishermen. He shot them sleeping on their dried seaweed mattresses, a bible by their side. He shot them cooking meals. And, no, they didn’t eat a lot of mullet, Cecelski explained. It was too valuable. They ate spot, because there was no market for that fish. He shot their pigs rooting around the fish-cleaning tables. No, they didn’t eat them either, Cecelski reports, because the bacon tasted too much like fish. He shot them salting fish and nailing the carcasses and the salted roe sacks, which look like bunches of bananas, on the walls of cabins to dry.

The big roe mullet could fetch several dollars, instead of the usual few cents a pound. Salted and dried, the roe sacks would last almost forever.

“I used to wrap one up in paper and take it to school,” Austin Guthrie remembers. “I’d take it out of my pocket every once in awhile and take a bite like a snack.”

“In the old days, you would see salt fish drying constantly,” Cecelski said. “You would have seen them drying on porches. People would hang them from clothesline. It was something everyone did.

“Once ice becomes more affordable and there are more icehouses, then it all changed. Everything then goes to the fresh market. Salt only made sense when ice wasn’t available.”

Like salted mullet, it’s all mostly gone now, existing only in the fading memories of old men and in a handful of black-and-white photos. A crew fishes for mullets each year from the beach at Salter Path on Bogue Banks, and occasional crews haul boats and nets along the beaches on Core Banks. Even the mullets themselves have taken a turn. Commercial catches have dropped steadily over the last few years, and the state now considers the health of the species to be of a “concern.”

David Guthrie, Austin’s younger brother, will always have his pictures and the stories that go with them.

“They were good times,” he said, holding a picture of his father seated in the lookout tower. “Everyone would come down to the beach when we were hauling the nets and the fishing was good. Word would get around and people would come and look. The beach would be full of people. Fishing for mullet and spot and even scallops when the weather got real cold was all part of life here.”

Frank Tursi of Swansboro is a member of the Swansboro Historical Association.

This story is provided courtesy of the Tideland News, a weekly newspaper in Swansboro. Coastal Review Online is partnering with the Tideland to provide readers with more environmental and lifestyle stories of interest about our coast.

HOLLY RIDGE – Lena Ritter, the indomitable fisherman who fought developers to save an island and a way of life and in the process became the eloquent voice of Stump Sound, died Monday of cancer.

Her family will receive friends from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. today at Jones Funeral Home in Holly Ridge.

Ritter, 80, had deep roots in western Onslow County. She lived with her husband, Graham, on a piece of family land a mile from the sound, land she used to proudly say had never been sold for money.  Ritter, like all her people, was a fisherman. She wasn’t a “fisherwoman” or a “fisher.” Ritter would have none of that PC stuff. She was a “fisherman” and proud of it.

“She loved that water,” Graham Ritter said yesterday. “She always lived for that water and tried to look out for it.”

That water turned her life upside down in 1983 when developers announced that they would build condominiums on Permuda Island, an undeveloped, one-and-a-half-mile long strand of sand and scrub pines in the middle of Stump Sound. Ritter was unschooled in the ways of ecology, but she knew instinctively what would happen to her water if the pines were cut down and the sand paved over.

“The runoff would have ruined it all. A whole way of life was threatened,” she said during an interview three years ago. “I couldn’t just sit by and let that happen.”

One of the first things she did was call Todd Miller, a native of Carteret County, just up the road, and the founder of a new environmental group called the North Carolina Coastal Federation. They would work closely over the next three years. Miller was the guide and interpreter for understanding state rules. “He was leading the blind through the woods,” is the way Ritter explained it.

She was the organizer, rousing the fishermen in language they understood. The bond between the two became close. “Lena was a remarkable person,” Miller said yesterday. “She had a deep love for Stump Sound and the way of life it supported. The people of the sound respected her and listened to what she said because she was one of them.”

Ritter and the other fishermen of the sound, people like the late Bill and Bernice Rice, had clam bakes and fish fries to raise money to hire a lawyer out of Wilmington. They spoke out at public hearings before the Onslow County Board of Commissioners and at meetings of the state Coastal Resources Commission. Leading the way was Ritter, speaking from the heart about her water, her way of life, her home.

“It was all very personal to me,” she said at that interview in 2013. “I never spoke in public before. I remember how scared to death I was at that first meeting in Jacksonville. All I knew to do was to speak what was in my heart.”

As often happens with causes, this one took over her life. This was a woman who rarely ventured outside the county and was rarely seen in a dress outside of church. Before long, Ritter was putting on her Sunday best and attending so many meetings in Raleigh and visiting so many politicians that she had to quit fishing and take a job on the graveyard shift at the local pie factory. “It freed up my days and gave me money to go down the road for meetings,” she said. “But, oh, was I tired.”

Ritter had joined the federation’s board of directors while all this was going on and would serve as its president from 1987-90. She sometimes went to board meetings, laid her head down on the table and fell asleep.

“But she persevered,” Miller remembered. “Through all the meetings and long drives, she persevered. Some county commissioners even threatened to sue her for harassment, but she persevered. Lena always credited the federation for saving Permuda Island, but the truth is that her perseverance and her indomitable will saved the island.”

In the end, the island was set aside as a state coastal preserve.

In 1986, Ritter was chosen among 400 nominees to receive the first Nancy Susan Reynolds Award for exemplary leadership. “My knees is a-knocking and my teeth is chattering, but I’ll talk,” she said at the awards ceremony that night in Raleigh.

“I don’t remember a thing I said,” she mused years later, “but the newspaper wrote the next day that I got three standing ovations.”

After it was over, Ritter worked for a time as an environmental advocate for the federation. She also helped the organization acquire Morris Landing, a public boat landing on Stump Sound that has been preserved and opened to the public. The federation in 2013 gave Ritter its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Aunt Lena was an inspiration to her niece Tina Sanders-Hill. “She was unlike any other woman her age that I’ve ever known,” Sanders-Hill wrote Tuesday on Ritter’s Facebook Page. “She was a strong leader before it was cool for women to be strong. She paved the path for so many us of that followed behind. She was one of my very first role models on how to be a strong woman. But she balanced it with love and care and humor.”

Graham Ritter can go down to Morris Landing now, stand on the shore that his wife helped buy and gaze out over Stump Sound to an island she helped save. “That’s as good as way as any to remember her by,” he said. “She loved that water.”

The federation staff and board plan to install a permanent memorial at Morris Landing so people who visit can learn about what Ritter did to protect our coast, said Miller.  “Unspoiled coastal places like Morris Landing and Permuda Island are her enduring legacy,” he said, “and we want people to know what she did to keep them that way to inspire future generations to be coastal stewards as well.”

There’s a new guy in charge here at Coastal Review Online. Mark Hibbs, a longtime community journalist and CRO’s assistant editor since June 2015, takes the helm today as I prepare for my retirement after almost four decades in journalism.

A native of Carteret County, Mark worked for more than 20 years with the Carteret County News-Times, a tri-weekly newspaper in Morehead City. He wore a lot of hats there — staff writer, photographer, business editor and assistant to the editor – and won numerous journalism awards for his reporting. He’s a solid journalist and a good fella.

I’ll be around for a bit longer, spending the last few months of the year reporting and writing a special series on the state of the coast’s environment that will run in CRO next year. I’ll retire on Dec. 31.

Walking away hasn’t been easy, but I’m comforted knowing that the experiment we started four years ago is a success and that CRO is in good shape and in good hands.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation in 2012 launched the daily news service to cover coastal environmental issues. It was, frankly, an act of desperation. Environmental groups depend on good journalism to educate people about the complicated science and policy issues that they often tackle. But decades of wilting revenue and falling readership had decimated daily newspapers, which reduced staff and cut coverage in response. Environmental journalism was a casualty.

As a longtime environmental reporter, I knew my time was about up in 2002. I voluntarily left the Winston-Salem Journal after more than 30 years in newspaper newsrooms to take the job heading the Coastkeeper program here at the federation. There had once been as many as six reporters in the state whose full-time jobs were to cover environmental issues. There were four when I left. Now, there is one.  Much of the coast — indeed much of the state — is no longer within the beat of the last remaining environmental reporter.

We intended for the news service to fill that gap. I docked my Coastkeeper boat and took over as editor. Though I enjoyed my gig as an environmental watchdog, I’m a newsman. When the time comes, I hope they put that in my obituary. It felt good to be back home, even though my “newsroom” consisted of a single office and a computer, some software and freelancers for reporters.

Something else was different this time around: Our publisher was an advocacy group. Could a news service owned by the most-prominent environmental group on the coast produce credible journalism? No one knew because no one had tried it before. We made the rules as we went along.

The first rule, though, was simple and immutable: We would adhere to the strictest journalistic standards of fairness and balance. I told our writers, many of whom are former newspaper reporters, that we weren’t interested in one-side stories, even if that side was the publisher’s. In a media world dominated by Fox News, MSNBC, “news” websites of suspect origins and ideological screech radio, we still cling to the quaint notion that if you give them the facts most people will come to the right conclusions. Call me a romantic in that regard.

To provide a bit more separation between the federation and CRO, the news service launched this website in February 2015. Until then, it had been a feature of the federation’s site.

We did good journalism and even had some real scoops. Our inaugural story, a profile of Marc Basnight, made headlines across the state by revealing that the former state senator and once one of the most powerful political figures in the state was suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease. Our story about the state legislature’s attempt to ban planning for sea-level rise reverberated around the world. Stephen Colbert had fun with it, and King Canute made a brief resurgence.

Still, the Board of Directors of the N.C. Press Association, the state’s only trade organization for journalists, was rightly suspicious when CRO applied for membership in 2013. The association is made up mostly of newspapers and TV and radio stations, all reliable members of the Fourth Estate. A digital newspaper published by an environmental advocacy group? Heresy.

We had several hundred stories in our archives by then. I asked the board members to judge us not by our publisher but by what we’ve published. They voted unanimously to let us in.

It turned out all right. The association last year recognized our work with 22 journalism awards for reporting and photography. Included in that total were first-place awards for the most extensive examination of offshore drilling published in the state – more than 40 stories run out over two months.

CRO also caught the attention of the North Carolina Wildlife Federation, which last year gave us a prestigious Governor’s Conservation Achievement Award for our environmental journalism.

We had arrived.

And readers began finding us. We started with a handful of visitors to the website, literally a couple of dozen a day. I had always feared that I probably accounted for half that traffic as I went back and forth to the site constantly. Today, more than 20,000 people read CRO every month. They’ve viewed more than a half-million pages. Almost 3,000 people receive our daily email, and a phone and tablet app is in the works.

None of this came cheaply. CRO is a nonprofit news service, one of only two in the state. We don’t sell ads or charge for subscriptions. But every story you see costs about $200. We wouldn’t have survived this long without the good people at the Park, Campbell and Z. Smith Reynolds foundations and without Fred and Alice Stanback of Salisbury. They took a chance on an unproven journalism model. I hope they now think their faith was well placed.

Any news organization is only as good as its reporters. The freelancers who are the core of our reporting staff have been with us from the beginning. Trista Talton, Cate Kozak, Brad Rich, Kirk Ross and Liz Biro stuck with us, even when the pay was meager, because they believed in what we were trying to do. Like all good reporters, each was always willing to do what it took to get the story. They even made their deadlines … most of the time.

The staff here also deserves mention. Though CRO is the odd duck around here, my colleagues have always supported what we were trying to accomplish. Many of them even became good news hounds and passed along ideas that became good stories. Thank you.

A special thanks to the boss. CRO would not have been possible without Todd Miller’s unfailing support and encouragement. He understood the need to allow CRO to establish its journalistic independence if the news service was to succeed. He rarely interfered and put up with my occasional cantankerousness. And like a good publisher he got out of the way and let us do our job.

I started my career many years ago in dingy newsrooms that could have been the sets used in “It Happened One Night,” the classic 1930’s newspaper movie. There, some of the most profound and profane people I would ever know banged out copy on manual Remington typewriters and reached into desk drawers for the occasional shot of 90-proof inspiration. The walls, stained a grimy yellow from decades of tobacco smoke, vibrated when the presses in the basement rumbled to life each night for the first edition. It would be delivered to our desks a short time later still moist and warm to the touch.

I end that career sitting here in front of a computer screen, sending email to reporters a hundred miles away. A mere push of a button will transport this copy out to thousands of readers.

It’s been a helluva story. But every story must end … and another begins.

–30–

The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission unanimously approved an agreement with the service, which currently manages the refuge, that gives the commission a say in such issues as water-quality studies, wildlife habitat restoration and lake levels.

The agreement is merely intended to “enhance management of and communication concerning” the 50,000-acre refuge, according to documents in the  commission’s agenda packet. The condition of the lake and the health of its fish and wildlife are “in question” and “of great interest to both agencies and the public.” Increased collaboration would lead to improved conditions, according to the document that also defines areas of authority in the five-year plan.

Funding for improvements and other expenses is to be covered in a separate agreement.

The deal has raised eyebrows among wildlife conservationists. The refuge was created in 1934 to protect migrating waterfowl. Tens of thousands of snow geese and tundra swans spend their winters around the shallow lake. Audubon North Carolina says the deal is bad for the birds and other wildlife in and around the state’s largest natural lake. The organization says it’s part of a plan to gain state control to promote the lake for fishing and boating rather than managing the refuge for waterfowl and migratory birds.

“While Audubon supports fishing and healthy fisheries, waterfowl managers have clearly pointed out that artificially high water levels would harm ducks, geese, and swans by preventing the growth of aquatic vegetation on the bottom of the shallow lake during the summer and early fall, which would eliminate essential food for the waterfowl during the winter,” according to Audubon N.C.

Learn More

• Lake Mattamuskeet agreement

One of the many pleasant amenities of living on the coast is that suits are rarely required for anything. But somewhere in the back of a closet I have one. A pretty nice suit, too, if I recollect correctly. Gray pinstripes, I think. I don it these days for just weddings and funerals, but I’ll have to break it out tomorrow. No one I know has died or is getting hitched, but the good folks at the N.C. Wildlife Federation insist I wear it anyway.

They’re going to give us here at Coastal Review Online one of their Governor’s Conservation Achievement Awards at a banquet in Cary. The official name of the award is Conservation Communicator of the Year, and it must be a pretty big deal because the letter notifying us of the award had this in bold type: “Dress for this prestigious event is business attire.” I assume that doesn’t mean shorts, flip-flops and a T-shirt proclaiming the Swansboro Yacht Club’s spot fishing tournament – my team came in second two years ago.

So, I’ll have to clean up Saturday to accept a conservation award that the federation has been giving out since 1958 when Gov. Luther Hodges was in charge. He allowed them to be called “Governor’s” awards and they have been ever since. Every year, the federation recognizes sportsmen, scientists, volunteers, elected officials, groups, businesses, wildlife professionals and media representatives who have shown an unwavering commitment to conservation in North Carolina. The awards are considered the highest natural resource honors given in the state.

“Each year we are amazed at the commitment and creativity of North Carolina citizens in protecting wildlife and wild places,” said T. Edward Nickens, the federation’s Awards Committee chair. “Many of our award winners tell us their Governor’s Conservation Achievement Award represents the high point of their career—whether they are full-time scientists or full-time volunteer conservationists.”

We are certainly proud to have been chosen in only our third year of existence. Since launching Coastal Review Online in 2012, we have strived to report factually and unflinchingly on the environmental and conservation issues facing our coast, while also highlighting our region’s culture, history, people and places. Winning this award will only encourage us to redouble our efforts.

We will certainly be in good company Saturday. The other award winners with coastal connections are:

Land Conservationist of the Year: Harriett Hurst Turner and John Henry Hurst. When the brother and sister sold 290 acres of rare maritime forestland to North Carolina last year, it boosted the size of popular Hammocks Beach State Park near Swansboro in a deal that will also bring back to life a historic camp that will be used for nature education.

Legislator of the Year: Sen. Harry Brown. As the senior chair of the state Senate Appropriations Committee, Brown of Jacksonville has led the effort to restore funding for land and water conservation. Under his leadership, funding for the Clean Water Management Trust Fund and other conservation trust funds has risen every year.

Natural Resources Scientist of the Year: Ron Sutherland. A conservation scientist for the Wildlands Network, Sutherland of Durham is actively involved in both research and education. He is a tireless voice for the conservation of public resources and was a leader in efforts to prevent the initial sale of N.C. State University’s Hofmann Forest in Onslow and Jones counties. He was a recipient of the N.C. Coastal Federation’s 2015 Pelican Award for his work to conserve Hofmann Forest.

Marine Fisheries Enforcement Officer of the Year: Justin Lott. Lott patrols the waters of Dare and Currituck counties, whose rich maritime legacy continues with a robust recreational and commercial fishing industry. Lott is known for keeping a keen eye out for fishing violations and has participated in educational and search and rescue operations, as well.

Our Girl in Paris

When world representatives gather in Paris in November for a crucial conference to achieve a new agreement on climate change, our Cate Kozak will be there to report for Coastal Review Online.

Kozak, who lives in Nags Head and writes about the Outer Banks for our news service, was notified this week that her press credentials were approved for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which starts Nov. 19. She’ll write about climate change issues as they relate to the N.C. coast.

They’ll probably force her to gussy up as well.

Opponents of offshore drilling edged out supporters among the North Carolinians who would likely be most affected by drilling for oil and natural gas off the state’s coast, according to the results of the first opinion poll on drilling in the state’s eight oceanfront counties.

Forty-six percent of the respondents in the poll commissioned by Coastal Review Online were opposed to drilling, while 42 percent favored it. The rest were undecided.  With the poll’s four point margin of error, it’s pretty much a toss-up.

The poll does, though, contrast sharply with a statewide industry poll done earlier in the year that found that more than 70 percent of the state’s residents favored offshore drilling.

“I don’t think it’s a slam dunk for a lot of people unless you’re a die-hard environmentalist or in the drill-baby-drill crowd,” noted Jim Williams, who conducted the poll for Public Policy Polling of Raleigh.  “For most people, there’s a lot of gray.”

The poll surveyed 868 residents in Brunswick, Carteret, Currituck, Dare, Hyde, New Hanover, Onlsow and Pender counties. The telephone poll was done Monday and Tuesday.

In keeping with similar polls, the survey found huge differences in opinions based on party affiliation and gender. Almost six in 10 self-identified Republicans favored offshore drilling, while 27 percent of Democrats did. Support for drilling among those who said they weren’t affiliated with either major party fell in between at 38 percent.

A third of the women surveyed supported offshore drilling and more than half opposed it.  The numbers for men were reversed at 51/40.

Most of the poll numbers are in line with national and statewide polls on offshore drilling, noted David McGowan, executive director of the N.C. Petroleum Council. The council is affiliated with the American Petroleum Institute, the largest industry group in the country.  He was, though, a bit surprised by the big gap in support between Republicans and Democrats. The statewide poll that the institute commissioned in January found support by party affiliation was 90 percent among Republicans, 65 percent among independents and 55 among Democrats.

“People on the coast have heard more about this, and due to their proximity, they have more at stake and have more concerns about this,” McGowan said. “So it makes sense that there would be a little more opposition in those eight counties.”

Todd Miller, the executive director of the N.C. Coastal Federation, draws a deeper message from the poll results. The federation has historically opposed drilling off the state’s coast.

“These results confirm that the more people learn about the facts of offshore oil and gas development the less they like it. Earlier polls showed much less public opposition,” he said. “It will be interesting to watch how this issue plays out politically since there appears to be a pretty strong, almost seismic shift, in public attitudes regarding drilling.”

About 60 percent of the respondents thought that drilling would likely lead to positive benefits for the state: more jobs, increased revenues for state and local governments and greater energy independence for the country.

But they also worried about the possible negative effects. More than half thought that the coast’s multi-billion-dollar tourism industry would likely be adversely affected. More than six in 10 thought recreational and commercial fishing would likely suffer and almost that many thought that a major spill or accident was likely. Almost three-quarters of the respondents said drilling would likely lead to an oil refinery, pipelines, gas processing plants or other oil infrastructure being built on the N.C. coast.

“Even people who are inclined to support development offshore are concerned about the possibility of a spill,” McGowan said. “I’m concerned about it, but that’s the reality of the situation.”

The mixed poll results reflect the emotions and opinions that we saw expressed in the last four days of CRO’s series on offshore drilling. Reporters traveled the coast from Calabash to Corolla, talking to dozens of people about offshore drilling. The reactions and opinions were mixed and many who said they supported drilling had misgivings about what its adverse consequences could be.

Large numbers of poll respondents also thought drilling would be both good and bad, Williams noted. “I was a little surprised that people sort of believed everything, the good stuff and the bad stuff,” he said. “I think you have competing emotions. People want the jobs and the added energy independence, but they’re worried about the environment and the tourist economy. At the end the day, though, the bad stuff outweighed the good stuff because opponents outnumbered supporters.”

Support for drilling was highest in Onslow County, where more than half of the respondents were in favor of it, and lowest in New Hanover County, where about a third of those surveyed favored drilling. Hyde was the only other county where supporters outnumbered opponents, 45/31. Some of the individual county results, though, have to be viewed cautiously because of the small sample size, Williams said. Those Hyde numbers, for instance, are based on fewer than 10 respondents.

All the geological ingredients may be there under the roiling waters off Cape Hatteras for the makings of one of the largest natural gas fields in America.

At least, that’s what geologists for Mobil Oil Corp. and seven other oil companies hoped in the 1980s when the companies leased 120,000 acres about 40 miles off the cape. Their scientists thought one in 10 wells drilled there would strike gas. Back then in the oil business, those were pretty good odds, good enough anyway to persuade the companies to commit at least $25 million – about $72 million today — to sink a few test wells. Public and political opposition eventually killed those plans, but the geology hasn’t changed.

But even the best odds have a way of diminishing as the drill bit goes deeper and deeper, especially off the East Coast where no modern seismic surveying has been done that could better identify prospects. Fifty-one offshore wells were dug in the 1970s and ‘80s, mostly along the Northeast coast. Almost all were dry holes.

“But they were going after the Cretaceous,” said Stan Riggs over a plate of Mexican at Chico’s in downtown Greenville. “The Cretaceous is empty.”

Riggs, a researcher and professor emeritus at East Carolina University, is one of the most renowned marine geologists in the state. No one knows more about the complex geology of the N.C. coast.

He’s talking here about sediments laid down in a period of geologic history that started more than 145 million years ago as the super-continent Pangea was breaking apart and the Atlantic Ocean was forming. It ended 66 million years later with the disappearance of the dinosaurs. It was a time of great forests of ferns, cycads and conifers. Giant marine reptiles hunted ammonites, belemnites, other mollusks and fish, and pterosaurs soared in the air above.

But it wasn’t particularly a good time, at least on what is now the western margins of the Atlantic, for the ancient algae and bacteria that have powered an industrial world for more than a century now. For that, said Riggs, you need sediment and rocks from an earlier period.

“The Jurassic is where it’s at,” he said. “And the only place where you might get Jurassic within 50 miles of the North Carolina coast and that’s not in 12,000 feet of water is small area off Cape Hatteras.”

How Oil and Gas Form

They’re called fossil fuels for a reason. Oil and natural gas come from ancient organisms – tiny plants, algae and bacteria mainly – that were powered by the sun during various stages of Earth’s geologic history.

The deltas of big rivers like the Mississippi, the Amazon and the Niger are now the sites of some of the greatest oil and gas fields in the world because of all that sun-drenched organic matter that flowed down the rivers and settled in the deltas millions of year ago.

In that anoxic environment, the algae and plant matter in the sediment changed into a substance scientists call kerogen. And when the temperatures rose to at least 230 degrees the kerogen gradually changed into oil. Natural gas is oil that continues to cook – maturate in oil science lingo – at higher temperatures. The process from algae to crude or gas takes at least a million years.

Crude oil is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons – hydrogen, carbon and traces of other substances. Its texture varies, but it’s generally liquid. Natural gas is mainly made up of the chemical compound methane. It’s gaseous, or lighter than air.

Even after oil has formed in the rock, pressure continues to rise, squeezing the oil out or upwards through rocks that have more pores, or spaces, within them. Some of it eventually reaches the surface and seeps out naturally into land or water, but most of it eventually comes up against a layer of rock that it can’t move through. This impermeable rock forms a seal or trap, and slowly, very slowly, the oil builds up. As it does, it forms a reservoir.

These reservoir rocks are like fossilized sponges that usually hold both oil and natural gas within their pores. Gas, being less dense than oil, rises to the top of the reservoir. Then comes oil and then seawater, the most dense of the three, at the bottom.

The search for petroleum, then, is a search for those reservoirs, which can be massive. Some may be as large as the world’s greatest cities.

Jurassic Muck and Coral Reefs

As Pangea started to break up in the early Jurassic, about 200 million years ago, great chunks of granite separated from what is now North America, leaving behind huge holes along the new continent’s margins. Water — the nascent Atlantic – filled the gap being left by the breakup and sediment from the land started filling the holes.

One of those big holes is the now called the Baltimore Canyon Trough that extends from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay all the way to the tip of Long Island. Another hole, the Carolina Trough, runs south of there, from Cape Hatteras to about the middle of the South Carolina coast.

In those basins, covered by tens of thousands of feet of younger sediment, are salt domes and rocks formations, called shale, that are compressed organic muck from the Jurassic. Both almost certainly contain petroleum, Riggs notes. But they are in very deep water, 12,000 feet and more. Drilling at that depth is considered experimental even using the most modern methods.

Between the two holes off what is now the Outer Banks, there is high ground, a bit of Jurassic bedrock that didn’t make the long journey to Africa. It’s called the Norfolk Arch. It’s in relatively shallow water and 30-40 miles from shore. It’s where Mobil wanted to drill.

“They knew what they were looking for,” Riggs said. “That area is about the only place off our coast where you can drill into the Jurassic without getting into really deep water.”

The Jurassic was a good time for oil creation. Forget the dinosaurs that appear in the series of movies that have made the geologic period the only one most people know. Almost all of those reptiles appeared on the scene later, but “Cretaceous Park” doesn’t have same ring to it. The Jurassic was for plants and bacteria and algae.

The young Atlantic was calm and far from shore. The Appalachians were also young, and rivers brought its organic-rich sediment to the sea. Coral reefs grew abundantly. Think of the Florida Keys or the Bahamas. One such reef extended for 30 miles between two developing basins in the ocean floor, crossing a plateau between them. Mobil had targeted that high spot in the reef.

“In the Jurassic, we had this quiet, very shallow ocean that was full of limestone,” Riggs said. “It was a perfect setup.”

The sea rose by the late Cretaceous and over time the reef between the two basins got buried by sediment that is now 12,000 feet thick in places.

To Drill or Not to Drill

As promising as it looked to Mobil geologists, the old reef is currently untouchable by their successors. The proposed leasing plan for the Atlantic that the federal government released earlier this year includes a 50-mile buffer along the shoreline. That would put the reef off limits. Gov. Pat McCrory has urged that the buffer be moved 20 miles closer to shore to allow companies to drill into the old reef, but Congress would have to amend the leasing plan to make that happen.

If the buffer remains in place, Riggs thinks the oil companies will be reluctant to bid on leases in very deep water while oil and gas prices are depressed.

James Knapp isn’t so sure about that. He’s a former oil company geologist who is now a professor of earth and ocean sciences at the University of South Carolina. It all depends on the results of the seismic testing scheduled for late this year or next year.

“There may still be aspirations to pursue leases if the buffer remains in place,” he said. “They’re certainly interested to get out there and look. If you’re not replacing your reserve base, you’re going to go out of business.”

The federal government estimates the amount of recoverable oil in the Atlantic at about 4.7 billion barrels. Natural gas stands at 37.5 trillion cubic feet.

The truth? Nobody really knows.

The latest estimates by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, has most of the oil and gas coming from its mid-Atlantic planning region, which stretches from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to the South Carolina-Georgia line. More than half of the recoverable oil – 2.4 billion barrels – and almost two-thirds of the gas – 23.4 trillion cubic feet – would be drilled off that section of shoreline.

The estimates, though, aren’t based on seismic surveys or exploratory drilling. Limited seismic work was done in the 1980s with equipment that would be considered primitive today. The 51 offshore wells that have been drilled along the East Coast were sunk in shallow sediments and probably in the wrong places. Most came up dry.

In coming up with these estimates, BOEM makes some assumptions about the underlying geology and then makes a prediction based on oil and gas finds at similar geologic structures around the world. The estimates keep going up as more oil and gas are found and as drilling technology improves.

No one really knows until seismic surveys are done sometime late this year or next year, said James Knapp, a former oil company geologist who is now a professor of earth and ocean sciences at the University of South Carolina.

“The BOEM estimates have some validity,” he said “I continue to submit, though, that if anything they’re conservative. They’re based on 30-year-old data and play concepts that are out of date.”

Modern seismic survey, especially the very sophisticated 3-D studies, will almost certainly increase the estimates, Knapp said.

Critics of drilling like to point out that BOEM’s estimates amount to about a year of oil at current U.S. consumption rates and 18 months of natural gas.

Any find off the East Coast would be close to consumers in some of the America’s largest cities, Knapp pointed out, and far from the despots that make some of the oil-producing countries a high risk.

“People tend to rattle off those kinds of volumes with disdain, but they would constitute 10 percent of the national undiscovered reserves,” he said. “If they’re conservative, it could be considerably more than that. The industry wouldn’t be willing to explore for it if they didn’t consider it valuable.”

Second in a series

MANTEO – Yogi Berra came to mind as I sat among the old activists, who had gathered one night recently to plan for a fight they thought they had won almost three decades ago.

Michael McOwen sat in a chair on the other side of the living room, cradling his granddaughter in his arms.

I had first met McOwen in 1989 at Manteo Elementary School while covering a public meeting on Mobil Oil Corp.’s proposal to drill an exploratory oil well off the Outer Banks. He was holding his daughter, who was then about the same age as her daughter now in her grandpa’s arms.

“It’s frustrating that here we are again more than 25 years later,” McOwen told the others.

He stopped and looked at his granddaughter.

“But there’s a whole new generation now to fight for,” he said.

Yogi, a beloved baseball icon, a Hall of Fame catcher and an unintentional philosopher noted for his malapropisms, famously summed it up once. “It’s like déjà vu all over again,” he said.

McOwen and most of the others in the room had, indeed, been here before. The grassroots group they formed in the late 1980s, LegaSea, had been instrumental in galvanizing public opinion on the Outer Banks against the Mobil proposal. They were successful then after several years of fighting, but their vanquished enemy had arisen.

Grandmothers and grandfathers now, they met to regroup for a new fight, this time against the federal government’s recently announced plan to open much of the East Coast, including offshore North Carolina, to oil and natural gas drilling. It’s the first time since the Mobil days that drilling off the N.C. coast may again be a reality.

Some of the old activists had brought along some reminders of those old days – the cardboard box they used to collect donations; the bumper stickers, buttons and T-shirts with the “Save Our Oceans” and “No Offshore Drilling” messages; the newspaper clips and flyers.

“It brings back a lot of memories,” noted Lucille Lamberto-Egan, who now lives in Salvo on Hatteras Island, “and not all them are good.”

They shared some of those memories: the packed public meetings, wearing out U.S. 64 on drives to Raleigh to cajole legislators, the prickly governor who slowly became an ally, the phalanx of lawyers and public-relations people that Mobil threw at them, trips to Washington to meet with federal officials, senators and representatives; and the wreck of the Exxon Valdez that turned the tide.

“That history is important,” McOwen noted, “so we remember what we had to do and what we’re now up against again.”

Manteo Wildcat Well 467-1

The 1973 Arab oil embargo triggered gasoline shortages and long lines at gas stations across America. In response, President Richard Nixon ordered his Department of Interior to triple the amount of offshore acreage available for oil and natural gas exploration.

For the first time, the East Coast was in play. Oil companies bought leases in 1976 and again three years later for tracts off the Northeast coast. They drilled 10 wells. All were dry or contained non-commercial quantities of oil or natural gas.

Given that track record, the bidding war that erupted when the first tracts in the south Atlantic were sold in August 1981 surprised many. Sale No. 56 became a landmark for East Coast leasing because of the aggressive bidding by a three-company partnership of Mobil, Marathon Oil and Amerada Hess. It bid a record $103.8 million, or about $266 million in current dollars, for one nine-square-mile block, called 467-1 on the map, that was about 35 miles east of Salvo. The partnership along with five other companies also leased 20 other adjacent blocks for $260 million — about $667 million in 2015 equivalent dollars.

The eight companies formed the Manteo Exploration Unit and chose Block 467-1 as the best place for an exploratory well. It was at the edge of the continental shelf in more than 3,000 feet of water. Below it, buried deep beneath the seafloor, was a 100-million-year-old limestone reef that formed when the ocean was much lower than it is today. Porous limestone can make excellent traps, or reservoirs, for oil and natural gas.

The companies estimated that the reef could hold as much as six trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or the energy equivalent of a billion barrels of oil. That would have made it at the time one of the largest gas fields in the world.

As majority owner of the block, Mobil was named operator of the exploration unit.

Federal offshore leases normally give companies five years to explore, but most of the leases owned by the eight companies had 10-year terms. Longer leases were needed, the government reasoned, in so-called “frontier areas” where no infrastructure existed and where deep water, swift currents and other environmental conditions required greater lead times for exploration.

Mobil released the exploration plan for the Manteo unit in early 1989. Drilling was scheduled to start the following year.

Reaction on the Outer Banks was swift.

The Fight Begins

Michael McOwen had an ad agency in Manteo in 1988, the year he first heard of Mobil’s plan. His wife, Beth, had started the community’s first domestic-violence shelter. They had just had their first child.

“We were involved with the community in fundamental ways and cared about the Outer Banks,” he said, “but I don’t think anyone would have called us activists.”

That changed after he attended a meeting where a Mobil lobbyist explained the company’s plans. “It was the first time anyone had heard about this stuff,” McOwen said. “I was shocked.”

And so the organizing began. McOwen and other opponents formed North Carolinians for a Clean Coast. They later changed the name to LegaSea.

“Mobil meanwhile was taking to local politicians and leaders. They came back about how great it would be,” he said. “People told us ‘This is Mobil Oil. You can’t kick them out. They’ve got resources and politicians and lobbyists.’ We heard that a lot, but we just didn’t believe it. We just couldn’t envision this happening here.”

LegaSea’s first task, McOwen explained, was to find out more about offshore drilling and what it might mean to the Outer Banks.

Halfway across the state, then-Gov. Jim Martin had the same idea. Only the second Republican elected governor since Reconstruction, Martin was in the final year of his first term in 1988. A Princeton-educated chemist, he had taught chemistry at Davidson College before being elected. Like any good scientist, Martin wanted answers about what drilling might mean to his state.

Clark Wright was hired to get them. Wright was then a young lawyer in private practice in Raleigh. He had caught the eye of the state attorney general’s office after he successfully defended development permits at North Topsail Beach. An assistant called. Would he be interested in becoming the special counsel to the governor on offshore drilling? Wright told him that he knew next to nothing about the issue. He got the job anyway.

“That was literally my full-time job,” Wright said recently over lunch at a noisy restaurant in New Bern where he is now a partner in his own firm. “Nothing else was initially in my realm than the offshore drilling issue.  That was an amazing time.”

For the next two years, he collected studies and reports on everything from offshore drilling techniques to Gulf Stream eddies. He interviewed the top scientists on the subject and toured offshore platforms in Mobile Bay in Alabama.

“I amassed a four-drawer file cabinet on everything,” he said. “The information I amassed helped us put together a pretty compelling case that we didn’t know enough about what Mobil was trying to do.”

A Game Changer

Federal law didn’t require companies to do full-blown environmental studies for an exploration well. Officials at Mobil and at the old Minerals Management Service, which at the time was the federal agency that managed drilling in U.S. waters, assured Martin that there had never been a major spill or accident at a test well. An environmental-impact statement, or EIS, they said, would be done if Mobil decided to pursue production wells.

Martin wasn’t persuaded and neither was he pleased that he had only 30 days to respond to Mobil’s drilling plan. In a handwritten note at the bottom of his formal letter to the agency objecting to the process, Martin wrote: “Unless you find some basis for a more patient and thorough approach to some of the major environmental fears, it forces us to adopt the most defensive posture at every turn.”

The company and the government ignored Martin’s demand. They learned what many legislators, reporters and staffers already knew. “Jim Martin did a good thing and said, ‘No. We need to know more,’” Wright said. “And the more Mobil got snotty about it, the more that man, who could be very stubborn, got his back up.”

There things stood on March 24, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez sailed into Prince William Sound on the southeast Alaskan coast a little after midnight and struck Bligh Reef. The tanker was carrying about 55 million gallons of crude oil from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay oil field. As many as 25 million gallons ended up in the remote sound, covering 300 miles of shoreline and killing an untold number of wildlife. Oil from the Valdez was still washing up on beaches 470 miles from the sound more than a year after the accident.

The effects in North Carolina were more immediate, noted Derb Carter, who heads the Southern Environmental Law Center’s office in Chapel Hill. At the time he served on a task force that Martin empaneled to study the Mobil proposal.

“The Exxon Valdez happened in the middle of all this,” he said. “It was significant because it was a pretty stark demonstration of what could happen if a similar spill happened on the N.C. coast. Even though it was a tanker spill, it focused pretty dramatically what the effects of a spill could be.”

Martin called a press conference in Raleigh less than a week after the accident. I stood at the back of the packed room in the Administration Building. A Mobil lawyer and public relations guy stood next to me.

The governor approached the podium. He didn’t look happy. Martin wasted little time in announcing that the state would seek an injunction to stop Mobil’s drilling plan.

“And then we’re going to sue you,” Martin said, pointing to the Mobile guys.

He took a few questions and strode purposely out of the room.

The lawyer and PR guy looked stunned.

“What the hell just happened?” the PR guy asked.

“The Exxon Valdez,” I replied.

This Is the End

Martin got his study after Mobil and the government agreed to a voluntary process that mimicked an EIS. Opposition mounted in the seven months that it took to complete the study.

“Some of the bigger communities like Morehead wanted the staging business,” Wright remembered. “Most everybody, even the business folks, were appalled at the idea of seeing the Outer Banks become Louisiana.”

Despite the study, which was completed in 1990, state officials still argued to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that year that they didn’t know enough about drilling’s effects to determine if the Mobil proposal was consistent with North Carolina’s coastal-management program. A positive review was needed before Mobil could get federal permits for their project.

“No one had ever won a consistency appeal dealing with offshore drilling,” Wright said. “There were several that had been tried, but they always lost to the trump card in that process, which is national security. It has a veto factor over any other issue.”

Mobil appealed to the U.S. secretary of the Interior, who agreed with the state.

It was over. U.S. Rep. Walter Jones Sr., a Democrat who represented the Outer Banks, pounded in the final nail when he successfully added the Outer Banks Protection Act to an appropriations bill in 1991. It barred drilling off the N.C. coast until a long list of studies was completed.

Mobil waved the white flag and then went to federal court to get its leasing money back. There, it won.

“We were all committed to seeing this through,” McOwen said as the meeting wound down that night in Manteo. “It turned out that the people of the Outer Banks didn’t need much prodding. Opposition was nearly universal. You know that famous line in the movie Field of Dreams: ‘Build it and they will come’? We built it and they came. Now we have to rebuild it.”

Wednesday: The long, winding federal process.

The history of oil drilling off the East Coast and in North Carolina has been one of dashed hopes and dry holes.

Ten oil and gas lease sales have been held in the Atlantic between 1976 and 1983, according to federal records, and 51 wells have been drilled along the continental shelf. Five were deepwater test wells commissioned by the federal government, and the rest were drilled by oil companies. Almost all were dry holes.

The exceptions were five wells off New Jersey that showed some evidence of natural gas, but they were all abandoned because the companies didn’t think the wells would be commercially viable with the technology then in use.

Currently there are no active oil and natural gas leases in the Atlantic.

The track record on land has been even worse in North Carolina. Since 1925, 129 oil or natural gas wells were drilled in the state. All but 13 were plugged as dry holes, and no commercial quantities of oil or natural gas were found in any of them.

In Eastern North Carolina, Esso dug two tests near Cape Hatteras soon after World War II. Both were dry and abandoned. A well in Camden County in 1952 went down 6,500 feet before some natural gas was detected. It, too, was plugged and abandoned. About 86 wells were drilled in and near Albemarle and Pamlico sounds. All were dry.

1896: Offshore drilling for oil began off the coast of Summerfield, Calif., just south of Santa Barbara. Rows of narrow wooden piers that looked like boardwalks extended up to 1,350 feet from the shoreline, their piles reaching 35 feet to the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Using the same techniques then used on land, steel pipes were pounded 455 feet below the seabed. The field produced a modest yield, peaked in 1902 and was abandoned several years later. The project left behind a beach blackened by oil and marred by rotting piers and derricks. A winter storm in 1903 destroyed many of the derricks.  The remnants of America’s pioneering offshore rigs were wiped out by a strong tidal wave in 1942.

1947: An offshore milestone was reached when Kerr-McGee Oil Industries drilled the first productive well beyond the sight of land, in shallow water about 10.5 miles off the Louisiana coast.

1950: Congress failed to pass a bill authorizing the federal leasing of subsea drilling, bringing offshore drilling to the halt. States had leased areas off their coasts, but President Harry Truman asserted in 1945 exclusive federal jurisdiction over the entire continental shelf. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1947 and 1950 upheld Truman’s claim, but no federal law allowed the U.S. Department of Interior to issue offshore leases.

1953: Two landmarks bills were passed to settle the impasse. The Submerged Lands Act gave most states the right to lease up to three nautical miles from the coast. It allowed two states, Florida and Texas, to claim a nine-mile jurisdiction. The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act then gave the federal government the authority to issue leases beyond state jurisdiction. The federally administrated area became known as the Outer Continental Shelf, or OCS. It’s a legal designation that’s more reflective of legislative negotiations than the actual geology of the seafloor.

1954: Offshore production of oil in federal waters stood at only 133,000 barrels a day, or about 2 percent of total U.S. production.

1968: The Prudhoe Bay State No. 1 exploratory well discovered what would become the largest oil field in North America in state waters off the north coast of Alaska. Regular production began the following year, exceeding a million barrels a day by 1978.

1969: A blowout at a Union Oil Co. well located in the Santa Barbara Channel produced an 800-square-mile slick of oil that blackened an estimated 30 miles of Southern California beaches and soaked a substantial number of sea birds in the gooey mess. The blowout lasted 11 days and ultimately released about 80,000 barrels of oil. It was at the time the greatest offshore drilling accident in American waters. It prompted stronger federal protections and inspired the first Earth Day.

1971: Offshore production in federal waters reached 1.7 million barrels a day, roughly 20 percent of U.S. production.

1975: The first discovery in deep water — depths of 1,000 feet or more, though definitions vary — came at Shell Oil Co.’s Cognac field in the Gulf of Mexico. Technology had yet to evolve from shallow to deep water, just as it took a while to develop from land to sea. Advances in that technology in the 1980s would begin shifting production in the Gulf to deeper water.

1982: Congress started including a provision in appropriations bills that prohibited offshore oil and gas development in the majority of the OCS. President George H.W. Bush in 1990 issued a similar directive that also banned offshore drilling in the majority of the OCS, which was extended by President Clinton in 1998 until 2012. Despite these moratoriums, drilling was allowed to continue in large portions of the Gulf of Mexico and off the Alaskan coastline. President George W. Bush subsequently rescinded the executive branch offshore drilling moratorium and in 2008 introduced an updated schedule for 2010-2015 that contained proposals to lease lands for drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

1990: Offshore production in federal waters stood at only 1.1 million barrels a day – just 5 percent more than a decade earlier. A collapse in world oil prices in the mid-1980s had stalled the expansion of onshore and offshore drilling and had struck a devastating blow to the economies of Louisiana and Texas.

1997: More than half of the exploratory wells in U.S. waters proved successful thanks in large part to improvements in 3-D seismic technology.

Late 1990s: Production in deep water – a minor factor just 10 years earlier – surpassed that in shallow water for the first time. Five years later, deep water produced twice as much as shallow water, and an increasing amount of oil was coming from ultra-deep water — 5,000 feet and deeper.

2002: Offshore oil in federal waters topped two million barrels a day after 13 consecutive years of increased production.

2006: New federal legislation allotted Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama a 37.5 percent share of the revenues derived from leasing activity in the so-called 181 South area off the coast of Alabama.

2008: Lease and royalty payments to the federal government reached a record $18 billion. The payments have become the second-largest source of federal revenue after income taxes.

2010: A blowout at BP’s Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico is the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. The U.S. government estimates that 4.9 million barrels gushed from the leak for 87 days before it was sealed. The Obama administration put a halt to all deepwater lease sales after the spill, including one scheduled off Virginia.

2014: The Obama administration opens the Atlantic to seismic testing. Offshore oil production in federal waters falls to 1.3 million barrels a day – almost all from the Gulf of Mexico – after reaching a high of almost 1.7 million before the BP blowout.

2015: The federal government releases a draft offshore leasing plan for 2017-2022 that for the first time in decades includes portions of the Atlantic OCS, including offshore North Carolina.

First of a series

For the first time in almost three decades, the federal government is considering opening up the Atlantic Ocean off the N.C. coast to oil and natural gas drilling. The first of the many environmental studies has been drafted, the first of the many public hearings has been held. And the first of many questions has been raised.

How much oil or gas is out there? When will they go get it and where will they drill? Will it come ashore somewhere along our coast? Will the price of gasoline drop as a result? Will drilling generate any jobs for local people or much money for the state treasury? Where will that oil go if there is an accident or spill?

Coastal Review Online this week begins to answer those questions and many more. This is the first of more than 40 stories that we will publish over the next two months on offshore drilling and its potential effects on the N.C. coast. In our most ambitious reporting project, seven reporters have spent several months talking to dozens of people trying to determine what drilling might mean to the state’s coastal environment, economy and lifestyle.

The Schedule

Week 1 — Science, Politics & Process

June 8: General overview of series, introduction of authors.

June 9: The history of oil exploration along the N.C. coast, including Mobil Oil Corp.’s proposal for an exploratory well off the Outer Banks in the 1980s.

June 10: The federal process for leasing and permitting wells offshore and why it will likely take more than a decade to play out. The geology of the continental shelf of the East Coast and why oil or natural gas might lie beneath the sea and in what quantities.

June 11: The politics of oil in the N.C. General Assembly and what drives Gov. Pat McCrory’s push for   drilling.

June 12: The geology of the continental shelf of the East Coast and why oil or natural gas might lie beneath the sea and in what quantities.

Week 2 — Pros, Cons & Reality

June 22: The pros of drilling: jobs and gas pump relief. Job creation and lower gasoline prices are among the main benefits of drilling, say its proponents. How realistic are their job forecasts and will gas prices fall if oil is found off North Carolina?

June 23: The pros of drilling: money, money, money. An oil industry study that is often quoted by proponents forecasts that North Carolina could reap more than $9 billion a year by 2035 in oil royalties and increased tax revenue. We take a hard look at the numbers.

June 24: The cons of drilling: oil spills and accidents. How likely is a spill or accident from an offshore rig and where would the oil likely go?

June 25: The cons of drilling. Intense industrialization is required to transport, store and process oil or natural gas. Is that likely to occur in North Carolina and what would the effects be on the coastal environment if it does?

June 26: Tourism and oil. The fear of what an oil spill might do to the coast’s tourism industry is at the center of much of the opposition among local governments. In North Carolina, from the Outer Banks in the north to Sunset Beach in the south, beaches and coastal towns draw more than 11 million visitors each year. In 2013 alone, visitors spent just shy of $3 billion in the eight oceanfront counties, according to the state Department of Commerce.

Week 3 — Pulse of the Coast

July 6-7:  Calabash to Morehead City. We poll coastal residents about their support for offshore drilling and send a reporter to spend a week traveling along the southern coast talking to people about the prospects of drilling off our shores.

July 8-9: Corolla to Morehead City. Another reporter travels the northern coast to gauge the sentiments of residents there.

July 10: Morehead City or Wilmington. We explore whether these port cities along the central coast could become a staging and supply port for the drilling rigs and what that mean for a tourist town.

Week 4 — America’s Oil Coast

Fall: We send a reporter to the heart of the country’s oil region along the Gulf of Mexico where he reports back on life amid the oil rigs and refineries.[/su_shaded_box_right]

We’ll run the results of all that reporting on alternate weeks, starting this week with stories about the history of drilling in North Carolina, the geology of the Atlantic Ocean and why oil or gas might be out there, the federal process that manages offshore drilling and the politics in Raleigh that are promoting it.

Other stories in the series will explore the potential benefits of drilling to the state’s economy and the likely environmental effects on the coast in the event of a spill or accident. We’ll poll coastal residents to gauge their support for drilling, and two reporters traveled the coast, from Calabash to Corolla, talking to people about the subject.

Setting the Stage

First, though, let’s catch up as to where we are.

The Obama Administration did the expected in late January and announced plans to potentially open portions of the Atlantic coast, including offshore North Carolina, to oil and natural gas drilling for the first time since Mobil Oil proposed an exploratory well off the Outer Banks in the mid-1980s.

In keeping with Obama’s all-of-the above approach to energy development, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, released a draft five-year leasing plan that would begin in 2017. The plan includes all federal waters 50 miles off the mid- and south-Atlantic coasts, from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to the Georgia-Florida border. Also included in the plan are areas in the central and western Gulf of Mexico and off the north coast of Alaska.

The proposed leasing plan is the initial step in a long, tortuous federal permitting and review process for offshore leasing, exploration and finally production. That process for the Atlantic, where no wells exist, will take more than a decade to play out if it continues to move forward.

The announcement followed a decision by the Obama administration last year to allow companies to use sound waves to survey the seafloor in the Atlantic in search of oil and natural gas. These so-called seismic tests are controversial because critics charge that they can harm marine mammals, such as whale and dolphins.

BOEM has since received 10 applications from companies to conduct the tests. Four of those applicants want to survey off North Carolina’s coast and more applications are expected, according to state regulators. The state has approved three of the applications so far, and testing could begin later this year.

Battle Lines Form

Offshore drilling has a contentious history along the N.C. coast, and it soon became clear that a fight is brewing this time as well. The first skirmish was in Wrightsville Beach about a month after BOEM announced the leasing plan. The spark was the first of the agency’s two public hearings in North Carolina on the plan.

Drilling proponents gathered that afternoon across the waterway in downtown Wilmington. Over boxed lunches supplied by the country’s largest oil industry trade group, the crowd of mostly businessmen listened to speakers extol the benefits of drilling: good-paying jobs, money for state and local budgets, energy independence and strengthened national security.

The message mirrored the one that Gov. Pat McCrory has been taking all across North Carolina. As the leading drilling cheerleader in the state, McCrory has promoted offshore drilling in testimony before Congress, urged BOEM to allow exploration closer to shore and supported exploring for oil and natural gas within three miles of the state’s coastline. He also heads a group of East Coast governors who have been urging Obama to open up the Atlantic to drilling.

Using an industry-sponsored economic study, McCrory has said offshore drilling will provide thousands of new jobs in the state and contribute more than $9 billion to the state treasury by 2035. In later stories, we’ll explore the accuracy of those predictions and the oil industry’s close ties to the governors’ group that McCrory heads.

There wasn’t much talk about jobs at the press conference that 10 environmental groups held at the hotel where BOEM had its meeting that day in Wrightsville Beach. The BP Deepwater Horizon was the featured attraction. One wall was dominated by a huge photograph of the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 in the worst oil spill in U.S. history. It was engulfed in flames and ringed by fire boats spewing jets of water.

Speaker after speaker raised the specter of oil-encased seabirds, blackened beaches and a dying tourism economy if something like that were to happen here. We’ll examine the likelihood of all that during the second week of the series.

More than 400 people attended the BOEM hearing that day in Wrightsville Beach. Almost 700 showed up a month later at a similar hearing in Nags Head, the largest turnout in BOEM’s five-year history.

“I would say we have heard from a lot of people who are opposed,” an agency spokeswoman said afterwards.

At least a dozen communities along the coast have passed resolutions opposed to offshore drilling, seismic testing or both.

And in Manteo a group of old oil warriors began organizing again for a fight they thought they had won 25 years ago.

Tuesday: Mobil Oil and the history of drilling along the N.C. coast.

Covering the Issue

Seven reporters and editors will be involved in this series on offshore drilling as it unfolds over the next two months.

Here they are:

Frank Tursi: The editor of Coastal Review Online, Tursi conceived of this project, was its lead editor and wrote several of its stories. The author of three books, Tursi was a 30-year newspaper journalist before joining the N.C. Coastal Federation in 2002. He was the senior environmental reporter in North Carolina and was among the lead reporters of Mobil Oil Corp.’s proposal in the mid-1980s to drill an exploratory well of the N.C. coast. His environmental journalism has won numerous awards, including three Public Service Awards from the N.C. Press Association and the Scripps-Howard National Environmental Journalism Award. An avid fishermen and model boat builder, Frank lives with his wife, Doris, in Swansboro.

Catherine Kozak: A longtime reporter on the Outer Banks, Kozak also traveled the coast talking to residents about offshore drilling. Born and raised in the suburbs outside New York City, Kozak worked for 15 years for The Virginian Pilot. During her career, she has written about dozens of environmental issues, including oil and gas exploration, wildlife habitat protection, sea level rise, wind energy production, shoreline erosion and beach nourishment. Kozak has a journalism degree from the State University of New York at New Paltz. She lives in Nags Head and covers the Outer Banks and the northeast coast for Coastal Review Online.

Tess Malijenovsky:  The assistant editor of Coastal Review Online, Malijenovsky helped plan the project and edit its stories. She was also one of two reporters who traveled the coast talking to residents about offshore drilling. Malijenovsky joined the N.C. Coastal Federation in 2013. She grew up in Charlotte and received her bachelor in fine arts degree in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where she was editor-in-chief of the university’s literary arts magazine, Atlantis.

Brad Rich: Rich has written about fishery and environmental issues along the central N.C. coast for 30 years. For this series, he delved into the potential environmental and social effects of offshore drilling. Currently a reporter for the Tideland News in Swansboro, Rich covers the central coast for Coastal Review Online. He lives in Hubert with his wife, Gwen, their 18-year-old daughter and a rambunctious black lab named Satchmo.

Kirk Ross: A longtime N.C. journalist based in Chapel Hill, Ross is the lead legislative reporter for Coastal Review Online. He explored the political support for offshore drilling in the N.C. General Assembly. Ross’ reporting and opinion pieces have appeared in multiple publications, including the Independent Weekly, in Durham. He is also the founder of The Carolina Mercury, an online N.C. politics website.

Kip Tabb: Every reporting project like this needs a guy like Tabb. He’s fascinated by process and how things work. So he was given the job of explaining the byzantine federal permitting and monitoring process that will play out over the next decade or more if offshore drilling is pursued on the East Coast. A freelance writer on the Outer Banks, Tabb has covered transportation, environmental and related topics for a number of publications. He writes regularly for Coastal Review Online. He’s the former editor of the North Beach Sun, a quarterly newspaper on the northern Outer Banks covering community interest issues.

Trista Talton: Talton covers the southeastern N.C. coast for Coastal Review Online. Her assignment for this project was to explore the potential benefits of drilling, including the jobs it could spawn and the money it could provide to state and local governments. Talton is a native North Carolinian who, after graduating from Appalachian State University in 1996, pursued a career in journalism. She has covered everything from education and local governments to law enforcement and military. She embedded with Marines in Kuwait for the start of the Iraqi war in 2003, spent time in New Orleans with N.C. National Guardsmen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and lived on a Coast Guard cutter to write about patrolling the shores of New York and New Jersey following the Sept. 11 attacks. She lives with her husband and two sons in Jacksonville.

Coastal Review Online, starting today, will begin running a new feature at the bottom of our front page called “Coastoons” by Bob Eckstein, an award-winning cartoonist for the New Yorker, The New York Times, Playboy, Reader’s Digest, Mad Magazine…

… And now CRO.

High cotton, I would say.

It’s a coup that I would like to take some credit for, but the fact is that Bob found us. An email from him appeared out of the blue in my inbox one day a few weeks ago. He wanted to know if we’d be interested in running his original cartoons. Bob attached a few as samples.

We were immediately interested, but I was sure we couldn’t afford Bob. Did I note that he is a New Yorker cartoonist? In the email exchange that ensued, Bob assured me that he wasn’t interested in making a lot of money from CRO. Buy a minimum of two cartoons a month, he said, and he’d let us have them for a fraction of his going rate. I’m talking a 90 percent discount.

The deal was too good; I was suspicious. I can’t help it. All those years in the news business will turn even the sweetest guy into a cuss, and I was never the sweetest guy. This was probably some sort of cartoon scam, I thought with a furrowed brow. I first asked Bob for a photo and bio, ostensibly for our Staff and Contributors Page.  He sent them along. He doesn’t know this, but I then spent the next few days checking Bob out on the Internet, comparing the photo and the facts he sent. I became convinced that Bob is who he says he is.

Sorry  about all that, Bob.

During that search I learned that this guy is more than a renowned illustrator and funny cartoonist who has been nominated a couple of times as Gag Cartoonist of the Year by the National Cartoonist Society. He is, for instance, a snowman expert. How does one become such a thing and, more importantly, why? Well, Bob thought Frosty was getting a bum rap. Consumer capitalism had turned the snowman into a pitchman for everything from shampoo to laxatives. Some feminist professors have even publicly denounced him as a fat white guy who lolls on the lawn “while the woman of the house is inside toiling.” In Switzerland, there is even a national holiday dedicated to blowing him up.

So Bob set out to right a wrong, traveling the world for seven years researching and attempting to answer the age-old question, who made the first snowman? The resulting book, The History of the Snowman, was published in 2007.

“The snowman might be different to everyone, but most importantly, he is nobody to everybody,” Bob writes. “We can all relate to him. He’s the last man picked on the team. He is Everyman.”

Born in the Bronx, Bob now lives next to The Cloisters in northern Manhattan, where he wrote his next book, The Sea Below Us, a graphic novel and 1850 diary of a sailor searching for the North Pole. To write the book he reconfigured his office into the inside of a ship’s quarters.

Bob’s currently writing another graphic book about the best bookstores in the world.

We’re happy to welcome Bob to the CRO family. Look for his cartoons, which will all have a coastal theme, at least twice a month at the bottom of the front page.

Offshore Drilling and the N.C. Coast

Also, beginning next month, look for what we think will be the most comprehensive series of stories about offshore drilling and the N.C. coast.

In the most ambitious reporting project we’ve ever attempted, seven reporters will write more than 40 stories that will stretch out over two months. The stories will be contained into weeklong packages with two-week breaks in between. The first package will run June 1 and the last start on July 27.

Stories will detail the history of oil drilling in North Carolina, including the last time the topic dominated public debate in the mid-1980s. I was one of the lead reporters in the state covering that debate. Like Yogi Berra, I have déjà vu all over again.

Other stories will describe the geology of the Atlantic and why it might harbor fields of oil or natural gas. We’ll explain the politics of oil and the tortuous federal process in place to regulate offshore drilling. We’ll examine the possible benefits of drilling and its environmental consequences. Two reporters will travel the coast, from Calabash to Corolla, to record the views of ordinary people, and I’ll spend a week along America’s Oil Coast along the Gulf of Mexico to describe life amid the oil rigs, refineries and processing plants.

RALEIGH – The N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources yesterday levied the largest environmental fine in state history against Duke Energy for groundwater contamination from coal ash ponds at the company’s L.V. Sutton power plant near Wilmington.

The agency fined the utility $25.1 million for several years of leaking coal ash that polluted groundwater around the Sutton plant. The penalty also includes the state’s investigative costs. The state also hinted yesterday that more fines for groundwater violations at other Duke power plants could be coming.

The penalty dwarfed the previous record $5.6 million fine that the state issued in 1986 against Texasgulf Chemicals, now PCS Phosphate, for air emission violations at its phosphate mine and fertilizer plant on the Pamlico River in Beaufort County.

Donald R. van der Vaart, DENR’s secretary, said yesterday that the record fine shows Gov. Pat McCrory’s commitment to cleaning a legacy of coal ash pollution that grabbed headlines last year after an ash pond at an old Duke plant in the Piedmont spilled into the Dan River. DENR last month cited Duke’s Asheville plant for contaminating groundwater. It also ordered Duke to supply bottled water to one home near the plant in 2013 and Duke voluntarily supplies a second residence.

“In addition to holding the utility accountable for past contamination we have found across the state, we are also moving expeditiously to remove the threat to our waterways and groundwater from coal ash ponds statewide,” van der Vaart said.

Duke, which has 30 days to respond, could appeal the fine to an administrative law judge. The company is reviewing the assessment, said Catherine Butler, a Duke spokeswoman.

Environmentalist applauded the fine as a good, but much delayed, first step. The fine does little to ease the fears of people who live near the Sutton plant and get their drinking water from local wells, noted Kemp Burdette, the Cape Fear Riverkeeper.

“Unless the state forces Duke to clean up the groundwater, the $25 million fine is really not doing much,” he said.

Forcing the company to clean up its pollution ultimately has to happen, echoed Cassie Gavin, director of Government Affairs for the state chapter of the Sierra Club. “While we appreciate that this is a significant enforcement penalty, there needs to be an end to the pollution into Lake Sutton and the groundwater,” she said. “Contamination is continuing even as the fine is being issued.”

There is no evidence that anyone’s drinking water is threatened, Butler said. “We have no indication of any off-site groundwater impacts that would pose a health concern for neighbors that have not already been addressed,” she said.

Tests in 2013 showed that nine pollutants found in coal ash had contaminated groundwater near the Sutton plant. Duke agreed later that year to pay to extend a public water line to affected communities.

The company has monitored groundwater at the Sutton ash basins since 1990 and routinely reports the results to the state, Butler explained. The company, she said, is currently following a process mandated by a state law passed last year to enhance groundwater assessments at all its power plants.

DENR determined that Duke allowed a host of coal ash contaminants to leach into the groundwater at the Sutton plant for several years in some cases. State officials calculated the penalty by determining the number of days specific pollutants exceeded a groundwater quality standard, then multiplied that number by a daily penalty amount.

In the case of the thallium, for instance, state officials determined that Duke exceeded the standard for 1,668 days. They then multiplied that number by $5,000, which is the daily civil penalty allowed for substances that are considered to have significant health risks. The fine for thallium alone was more than $8.3 million.

A trace element in coal, thallium enters the environment primarily from coal-burning and smelting. It stays in the air, water and soil for a long time and isn’t broken down. It is highly toxic to humans and animals and was once used to make rat poison.

The Sutton plant opened in 1954. Its three coal-fired burners were replaced by natural gas units in 2013.

Three environmental groups filed a notice the following year to sue Duke under the federal Clean Water Act for groundwater violations. The state preempted that lawsuit with one of its own.

“We filed that lawsuit because there were some pretty major violations, but we couldn’t even get DENR to call us back,” Kemp said. “Now they’re at least fining them $25 million, though they’re not doing anything to force Duke to clean up. But we’re at least now moving in the right direction.”

DENR officials met several times in 2013 with lawyers from the Southern Environmental Law Center, countered Drew Elliot, an agency spokesman. The law center represented environmental groups that had intended to sue Duke.

The founder and executive director of the N.C. Coastal Federation has won a prestigious Peter Benchley Ocean Award for his lifelong work in protecting and restoring the natural resources of the N.C. coast.

Todd Miller will receive the award May 14 at a ceremony at the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington.

The awards are the world’s preeminent ocean awards and the only major awards program dedicated to recognizing excellence in marine conservation across a wide range of expertise including science, policy, media, youth, exploration and advocacy.

Wendy Benchley co-founded the awards eight years ago to honor the legacy of her late husband, Peter, author of Jaws and a lifetime marine conservationist.

Miller is one of eight award recipients, who were nominated by ocean conservationists from around the globe and selected by a committee that included Benchley, marine scientists and ecologists and authors.

A N.C. coastal native, Miller won the committee’s Hero of the Sea Award for the work he and the federation have done since its founding in 1982 to enhance the environment and economy of the state’s coastline. Under his guidance the federation’s staff of 29 carries out advocacy, education and restoration programs that have reduced pollution and protected hundreds of thousands of acres of coastal habitat while restoring oyster reefs, salt marshes and other key components of the N.C. coast.

Solutions to the many problems facing the world’s marine environments come from local activists like Miller, said David Helvarg, the executive director of the Blue Frontier. His organization helped found the awards with Benchley.

“I think that people like Todd commit a good part of their lives to protecting — you protect the places you love,” he said. “He has spent a lifetime ensuring that it’s not only protected but that some of what’s lost is brought back. So we look at things like the oyster restoration projects and the way that things are coming back. We get so much from the coast of the ocean in terms of recreation, transportation, trade, energy, protein, just a sense of awe and wonder, we’re just glad that folks like Todd are willing to give something back.”

Miller tried to deflect such praise. “Good captains know when they’re needed, and when they should get out of the way,” he said. “I’ve been very fortunate to have a great crew of staff and volunteers here at the federation that make my job easy.”

Miller will be sharing the stage at the award ceremony with royalty and other distinguished people. Other award winners this year include: Prince Albert II of Monaco for his support of scientific research on ocean acidification and climate and for advocating the protection of biodiversity on the high seas; U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for supporting the expansion of marine protected areas, advancing global effort to end unregulated commercial fishing and a U.S. senator from Massachusetts working to restore the health of the Boston Harbor; and explorer Charles Nainoa Thompson, president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and master of the traditional Pacific Island art of “wayfinding,” or non-instrument navigation.

Forty-eight previous Peter Benchley Ocean Awards recipients include: Presidents Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica, Anote Tong of Kiribati and Macky Sall of Senegal; U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Ed Markey and Ernest Hollings; former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta; and marine scientists Ransom Myers, Nancy Knowlton and Jeremy Jackson.

Tess Malijenovsky contributed to this story.

WILMINGTON – The first N.C. skirmish in what will certainly be a decades-long battle over offshore drilling played out in this old port city Tuesday.

Proponents of drilling marshaled their forces in an old train station downtown. Over sandwiches stuffed with roast beef or ham, chicken salad or turkey, they struck a martial chord. Drilling, they said, is good for the economy, good for our nation’s security. It is decidedly the right thing to do.

Across the bridge over in Wrightsville Beach, drilling opponents, amid color photos of the BP rig blowing sky high, rallied their troops at a late afternoon press conference. Drilling, they said, will despoil beaches and wreck local economies. It is a decidedly dumb thing to do.

The goal of both events was to encourage people to turn out for a public meeting that day at the Blockade Runner Hotel in Wrightsville Beach. The Bureau of Offshore Energy Management, known to all as BOEM, regulates energy production in federal waters. It held the meeting to get the people’s thoughts on the Obama administration’s recent proposal to open a portion of the Atlantic seaboard to oil and natural gas development. More than 400 people attended, by far the largest turnout at the three meetings the agency has had so far on the East Coast. If nothing else, drilling, it seems, is decidedly good for the meeting business.

The Good About Drilling

About 160 people showed up at the Coastline Conference and Events Center, the former train station, to grab a free sandwich at what was billed as an Offshore Energy Luncheon. The N.C. Energy Forum provided the eats.

If you never heard of it, you’re forgiven. It is one of 27 state groups that are part of a larger effort known as America’s Energy Forum, which notes on its website that it is comprised of “concerned citizens committed to two goals – achieving energy security for our country and holding our elected officials more accountable in shaping energy policies.” Some have disparaged the forum as a fake grassroots group. The Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch calls it an “astroturf” project of the American Petroleum Institute, or API, the largest trade group of oil and gas producers in the country. API admits to it, though you have to search pretty hard to find it. There it is, though, at the bottom of the forum website in tiny type: “Sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute.” David McGowan III, the executive director of the N.C. Petroleum Council – an API group – later confirmed the affiliation in an email.

No one talked about the connection at the luncheon, which was mostly attended by men in suits. Don Loren, a retired rear admiral, was on the agenda as the keynote speaker. He was to talk about the importance of oil and natural gas to the country’s security. Loren, a 31-year Navy veteran, commanded guided-missile frigates and destroyer squadrons, was a deputy assistant Defense secretary and is an expert in counterterrorism. He’s now with Vets4Energy, still another API group.

Unfortunately, while the audience was munching, the admiral was stuck in port, so to speak. Bad weather had left him stranded at the Charlotte airport.

So Algenon Cash was pressed into service. His day job is an investment banker in the Triad, but he’s also chairman of the N.C. Energy Forum, traveling the state with his pro-energy message. Sometimes, it’s not warmly received. He attended a fracking hearing back in August in Raleigh dressed in an orange t-shirt that said “JOBS” in big letters and “Powered by natural gas” in smaller letters beneath it. Many of the 500 people there showered him with boos.

There was nothing but enthusiastic applause Tuesday.

Standing in front of a large poster that proclaimed “Energy Security = National Security,” Cash stressed that we are in the midst of an “energy revolution,” triggered largely by fracking that has made America the world’s top producer of natural gas.

“We have left decades of scarcity behind us,” Cash told his audience. “That would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.”

This revolution, he said, has made America more secure and less reliant on despotic, foreign governments for its energy. It has also provided real economic benefits, which he adroitly ticked off: the 9.8 million jobs that that the oil and gas industry supports, industry wages that are seven times the national average, soaring pension plans and 401ks that invest in oil and gas stocks. The API website has more on all this if you’re interested.

But the revolution is threatened by the “vocal minority,” Cash said. Using emotional arguments and erroneous science, it has stymied such things as the Keystone XL Pipeline, he noted.

“You know what? I’m not very different from my friends in the environmental community,” Cash said. “I want clean water for my kids. I want clean air. It’s important that we do this right. It’s important that we protect the environment.

Bureaucrats in Washington with their overreaching regulations and stifling one-size-fits-all policies are also a threat, Cash said. “We firmly believe that the energy resources throughout this country belong to you,” he said. “It should be the people’s choice in how they’re used.”

He urged his audience to take that message to the BOEM folks at the public hearing.

Afterwards, Cash couldn’t come up with an example of a burdensome regulation or explain how a populist energy policy would work. Should states, for instance, control all drilling off their shores? “We just think that the states should have more say in energy development,” Cash said.

The Bad About Drilling

Almost 300 of Cash’s “vocal minority” crowded into a room at the Blockade Runner for a press conference called by 10 environmental groups. It was a very different crowd than the one at lunch.  There were people with tattoos and pierced noses, kids in t-shirts and torn jeans from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, lots of young families toting small children, middle-aged couples and bearded retirees. Many in the crowd wore blue Oceana t-shirts, handed out by one of the sponsoring groups. Other groups distributed fact sheets to help people submit commits at the BOEM hearing, which was going on just across the lobby.

One wall was dominated by a huge photograph of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig engulfed in flames and ringed by fire boats spewing jets of water. The explosion and massive spill in 2010 fouled 68,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico, an area about the size of Oklahoma. Oil washed up on 125 miles of Louisiana’s coast and along the Mississippi, Florida and Alabama coastlines. Scientists say dolphins are still dying from the aftereffects.

None of that was mentioned at lunch, but the BP spill and its aftermath were very much on the minds of people at the press conference.

“I’m for offshore drilling,” said Jonathan Barfield Jr., “as long as it’s done on another continent.”

Barfield is chairman of the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners and was one of the speakers at the press conference. Before taking up the microphone, he looked at the photo of the burning rig and wondered what would happen to his community if something like that were to occur here. “What would happen to our economy? What would happen to our estuaries?” he asked. “We need to make sure that we never find out.”

James Lewis came from Morehead City to attend the press conference and public hearing. He had a big button pinned to his shirt that had an oil rig encircled with an X.  We’re pursuing the wrong kind of offshore energy, he said.

“Oil and water don’t mix,” Lewis said. “There’s plenty of wind out there that we could have.”

Speakers talked about a spill’s effects on fisheries, on tourist-based economies, on people’s health. The Oceana website and many others have more on all this if you’re interested.

Dave Taylor of Beaufort doesn’t have to consult a website. He’s been there. “I’ve lived in California. I’ve lived on the Gulf Coast. I’ve walked on tar balls on the beach,” he said. “I’ve seen what could happen and I don’t want it to happen here.”

The Ugly Politics of Drilling

Meanwhile, BOEM folks across the hall dutifully explained their environmental review process and welcomed written comments.  The flow chart for how the agency analyzes all the information it obtains and how it permits each step in process is long and complex. One BOEM official told a very earnest questioner that it would be 2030 maybe longer before any oil or natural gas from the Atlantic reaches consumers somewhere in the world.

“And that’s if the politics don’t change,” he said.

The website for Coastal Review Online is organized like a newspaper site.

We here at Coastal Review Online are moving to a new digital home. Come Monday, you’ll find us at a new address: www.coastalreview.org.

Since its inception in 2012 as a journalism experiment, the daily, online news service has shared a web home here with its parent, the N.C. Coastal Federation. Since then, we’ve shown that a nonprofit news service can succeed. So, like a fledgling flying the nest or a youngster leaving home, it’s now time to take the next step. It’s the natural order of things.

With us gone, the federation, like so many empty nesters with more room, will do a complete remodeling. The organization’s website will remain here, but it will be expanded and gussied up. With Coastal Review Online, or what we call around here CRO, no longer occupying the best room in the house on the top of the home page, the federation will expand its coverage of all the great work it does protecting and preserving the N.C. coast. You’ll find lots of pretty pictures that illustrate that work and updated reports about the dizzying array of projects the federation staff is involved in from one end of the coast to the other. You’ll also find some surprises like seafood recipes and profiles of people who go beyond the call of duty to protect our coast. So come back to our old home place often to see what the old folks are up to.

Visit us at our new digs to keep up with the latest news about the coast. CRO will continue to employ a team of professional journalists to produce daily news stories about the issues affecting the coast or features about its people, places, nature, culture, history and food. As Eastern North Carolina’s only online, nonprofit news service, we take pride in producing daily stories that meet the highest journalistic standards of fairness and accuracy. That won’t change.

How we display and package the almost 1,000 stories we’ve written will change pretty dramatically. The new website is organized more like a newspaper site.  You’ll find news stories grouped under the major issues we cover. The “Our Coast” section includes stories about the coast’s culture and history, its people, places and wildlife, along with some sumptuous recipes. Looking for a place to kayak or to see black bears or birds? How about a traditional oyster stew recipe? You’ll likely find it here.

We’ve also added a “Commentary” section that will feature Todd Miller, the federation’s executive director and probably the most knowledgeable guy on the planet about coastal policy in North Carolina. Sam Bland, the federation’s naturalist, will contribute occasional columns about his jaunts through the woods and swamps and the along the beaches of our coast; and I’ll kick in from time to time with some curmudgeonly view from the editor’s desk. We’ll also ask scientists, policymakers, politicians and other experts to comment on topical issues, and we hope readers will feel compelled to add their voices to the mix. So if you have something you’re just dying to get off your chest and it deals with the coastal environment, drop me an email (frankt@nccoast.org) and let me know what it is.

The new N.C. Coastal Federation website will feature stunning photos and updates of the federation’s work.

If pictures are your thing, you may want to contact Tess Malijenovsky, CRO’s assistant editor. She’ll be managing a photo contest that will feature the best photo of the week. Those that are judged to be the best of the year will win cash prizes. You’ll find rules and Tess’ contact information on the website.

You’ll also find lots of ways to support CRO. As a nonprofit news service, we rely on the kindness of friends and strangers. We run more than 250 stories a year, and each one costs us about $150 to produce. While we have gotten some financial support from private foundations, the federation foots most of the bills. We hope you’ll contribute in helping bring high-quality journalism to the coast by sponsoring a day on CRO, donating directly to us or by joining the federation. All contributions are tax deductible.

Along with the new website, we’ve launched a CRO Facebook page, where you’ll find the day’s story along with other coastal items that strike our fancy. We’ll also keep a calendar of environmental meetings, hearings and workshops and other coastal events of interest. We want our readers to be a major part of our Facebook page and hope you’ll go there to comment on stories and join the discussion. Or if you prefer Twitter, we’ll be tweeting from the handle Coastal_Review.

We’ll continue to post the daily stories on the federation’s Facebook page.

Problems come with any move. While the movers haven’t lost the furniture, we have lost the list of some of our old readers. Let’s see if I can explain this without going off on my Google rant about worthless software and getting what you paid for. Many readers receive a daily email that highlights the day’s story. The software that does that is a free Google product. For some reason, known apparently only to the bots at Google, we can no longer get into our account. No combination of passwords and user names works. And good luck trying to get someone at Google to respond to an email or actually pick up a phone to help you – “Thank you for calling Google customer support. Your call may be monitored for quality assurance but by the time it’s answered you will have forgotten what you called about. But your call is important to us.” The music’s pretty cool, though.

Without access to the account, we can’t change the settings to the new website or retrieve the email list. We sadly, after many weeks of trying, had to abandon the effort.

We will still send out the daily emails, but with a program that has nothing at all to do with Google. We’ve added subscribers that we had from an old list, but we fear we have lost many. We’ll apologize for Google because the bots certainly won’t. If you normally get an email from us each morning and one doesn’t arrive on Monday, please go to the new site and re-subscribe.

If you aren’t a  subscriber, you should consider becoming one. It’s a good way to keep up with what’s going on along the coast, and we don’t pester you with a barrage of emails. One a day. We promise.

So, sometime this weekend we’ll turn the lights off here and do all the geeky things – changing server names, switching the DNS record – that need to be done to turn the lights on over there.

And then we’ll cross our fingers.

If all goes well, we’ll see you Monday at our new place.

The Obama Administration did the expected yesterday and announced plans to potentially open portions of the Atlantic coast, including offshore North Carolina, to oil and natural gas drilling for the first time in almost three decades.

In keeping with Obama’s all-of-the above approach to energy development, the federal Bureau of Energy Management, or BOEM, yesterday released a draft five-year leasing plan that would begin in 2017 for offshore drilling. BOEM last week started the process to lease portions of federal waters off the N.C. coast for commercial wind energy.

The drilling plan includes all the federal waters 50 miles off the mid- and south-Atlantic coasts, from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to the Georgia-Florida border. Also included in the plan are areas in the central and western Gulf of Mexico and off the north coast of Alaska.

The announcement is one of the initial steps in a long federal permitting and review process for offshore leasing, exploration and finally production. That process for the Atlantic, where no wells exist, would likely take more than a decade to play out if it continues to move forward.

“The draft proposal prioritizes development in the Gulf of Mexico, which is rich in resources and has well-established infrastructure to support offshore oil and gas programs,” Sally Jewell, the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, said in the press release announcing the plan. BOEM is an agency in her department. “We continue to consider oil and gas exploration in the Arctic and propose for further consideration a new area in the Atlantic Ocean, and we are committed to gathering the necessary science and information to develop resources the right way and in the right places. We look forward to continuing to hear from the public as we work to finalize the proposal.”

She can take that to the bank. Offshore drilling is a contentious issue in North Carolina and along much of the East Coast. The last leasing proposal off North Carolina, by Mobil Oil Corp. back in the mid-1980s, spawned years of debate and triggered permit challenges and lawsuits before Mobil dropped its plans.

Reaction from around the state was swift yesterday.

“We’re disappointed that the administration plans to open up North Carolina’s coast to offshore drilling,” noted Dustin Chicurel-Bayard, communications director for the N.C. Sierra Club. “Drilling for fossil fuels off the North Carolina coast would contribute to the carbon emissions that are driving climate change. We owe it to our communities to invest in clean-energy solutions.”

The Southern Environmental Law Center stressed the risks to the state’s natural resources and coastal tourist-based economy. Sierra Weaver, a senior attorney, noted that Obama cancelled a planned lease sale off Virginia’s coast in May 2010 in the wake of the BP accident in the Gulf Mexico that spilled an estimated 130 million barrels of oil, causing unprecedented environmental damage.

“Risky drilling off our Southern coasts jeopardizes the communities, jobs and beloved beaches that are the very heart of our coastal states,” Weaver said. “As we’ve seen with the Exxon Valdez and BP disasters, a single oil spill can devastate a coast for years, threatening everything about why we choose to live, work and play on our Southern Atlantic coasts.”

But not all the reaction was negative. The state’s biggest oil cheerleader, Gov. Pat McCrory, welcomed the prospect of oil rigs off his state’s coast. He, along with the governors of neighboring South Carolina and Virginia, have been lobbying Obama to open up the Atlantic to drilling.

“I’d like to thank Secretary Jewell for taking a step in the right direction to help North Carolina become a significant energy-producing state,” McCrory said. “Responsible exploration and development of oil and gas reserves off our coast would create thousands of good paying jobs, spur activity in a host of associated industries, generate billions of dollars in tax revenue and move America closer to energy independence.”

Gov. Pat McCrory

Those jobs depend on how much oil or natural gas is out there. At the moment, that’s a matter of speculation. A BOEM study in 2012 estimated that 3.3 billion barrels of oil and 31.3 trillion cubic feet of gas might lie beneath the ocean along the Atlantic Seaboard. Those seem like big numbers, but they represent about 4 percent of the total estimated recoverable oil resources and 8 percent of the total estimated recoverable gas resources in federal waters. They pale beside the estimated oil reserves off the Arctic coast of Alaska.

But those estimates date from the 1970s and ’80s, and industry and other drilling supporters consider them too low. The Obama administration has approved seismic testing to get a better idea of how much oil and gas lie beneath the Atlantic. The testing could begin this spring.

Along with the proposed leasing plan, BOEM also announced its intent to prepare a draft Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, for the leasing. The plan and the intent to do an EIS will be available for public comment for 60 days following the publication of the documents in the Federal Register.

For more information, including maps, visit BOEM’s website.

Reporter Kirk Ross contributed to this story.

The federal government yesterday took the next significant step toward developing commercial wind energy off the N.C. coast by releasing an environmental assessment that supports the potential lease sale for more than 300,000 acres in three areas, one off the northern Outer Banks and two near Wilmington.

“We are really pleased that the administration is continuing down the offshore wind path,” said Nancy Sopko, an ocean advocate with Oceana, a nonprofit group that advocates for world’s oceans and supports offshore wind development. “This is a big step forward, especially for North Carolina because of its abundant wind.”

The assessment, the first issued for a Southeast state, is another step in the long process of developing commercial wind farms off North Carolina, which studies have indicated has the best offshore wind resources on the East Coast.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, prepared the 300-page assessment. The agency, part of the U.S. Department of Interior, regulates energy development in federal waters beyond the states’ three-mile territorial limits.

“No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change, and today’s announcement marks yet another milestone in the President’s strategy to develop renewable energy, create American jobs and strengthen the nation’s energy security future,” Sally Jewell, the Interior secretary, said yesterday in a press release accompanying the study. “In close coordination with our partners in North Carolina, we are moving forward to determine what places make sense to harness the enormous wind energy potential off the Atlantic seaboard.”

The study assesses the environmental effects of commercial wind farms in three areas off the coast:

• Wilmington West includes about 51,600 acres that begin about 10 nautical miles from shore and extend roughly 12.3 nautical miles in an east/west direction.
• Wilmington East includes about 133,600 acres that begin 15 nautical miles from shore and extend 18 nautical miles in a southeasterly direction.
• Kitty Hawk includes about 122,400 acres that begin 24 nautical miles from shore and extend seaward 13.5 nautical miles in a northeasterly direction.

The areas are all that’s left of the millions of offshore acres that BOEM and a task force of federal officials and state and local leaders began studying three years ago for wind development. Most areas were eliminated to protect important viewsheds, sensitive habitats and resources or to minimize conflicts with other activities such as military operations, shipping and fishing.

BOEM looked at the potential environmental effects associated only with issuing leases and approving site assessment activities in the three areas. Anyone leasing blocks for a commercial wind farm must then submit a construction and operations plan for BOEM’s review and approval. BOEM would then prepare a site-specific environmental analysis for the project proposed.

On the same day that that the agency released its environmental assessment of offshore wind leasing, North Carolina’s two Republican U.S. senators, Richard Burr and the newly elected Thom Tillis, introduced an amendment to a bill authorizing the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline that would force BOEM to include North Carolina in the next round of offshore leasing for oil and natural gas. The amendment would also allow East Coast states to share in royalties from any drilling in federal waters off their coasts. Current law doesn’t provide for that type of revenue sharing. The amendment is largely symbolic since President Obama has said he will veto the Keystone bill if it reaches his desk.

Tillis, in his first speech on the Senate floor, said the proposal is about creating opportunities for Americans. He said the proposal would support hundreds of thousands of jobs, reduce the cost of utilities for families and move the nation closer to energy independence.

Oceana, in a report released last week, noted that offshore wind would provide many more permanent jobs than oil and gas drilling and wouldn’t threaten North Carolina’s environment or coastal tourist-based economy.

“When it comes to the Atlantic, it’s really a no-brainer as to which path to go down, especially for North Carolina, which has the best wind resources on the East Coast,” Sopko noted. “We should not be doubling down on these polluting energies of the past.”

The public can read the assessment on offshore wind leasing and submit comments on BOEM’s website during the 30-day comment period that begins today. BOEM will also hold three public meetings next month to provide an overview of the findings and offer additional opportunities for public comments.

The meetings are scheduled for:

• Monday, Feb. 9, at a place to be determined along the northern Outer Banks
• Wednesday, Feb. 11, in Wilmington
• Thursday, Feb. 12 in Carolina Shores or Sunset Beach

After reviewing the public comments, BOEM will either move forward and begin leasing blocks in the area or revise the assessment. Based on the comments, the agency could determine that leasing poses severe environmental consequences. It would then do a more comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement.

More information about the assessment and BOEM’s wind energy leasing program for North Carolina can be found here.

BEAUFORT – The state’s Coastal Resources Commission gathered on an island near here Wednesday to talk about the latest report from its science advisers on sea-level rise along the N.C. coast.

There were no fireworks this time.

Unlike the last time the commission tackled the subject, no one talked of one-meter rises in sea level. No one denounced the findings or demeaned its authors. No one bemoaned the effects on tourism or coastal land prices. Legislators aren’t likely to find anything in the new report, when it lands on their desks in 2016, that will tie their knickers in a knot and lead to embarrassing bills that are lampooned on cable television and newspaper editorial pages.

It was all rather, well, boring.

“We can all be proud of this report and work done by our Science Panel,” Frank Gorham, the commission’s chairman, said after Margery Overton, who heads the panel, summarized the draft report at the CRC meeting at the NOAA Lab on Pivers Island. “This report gives us a great deal of credibility.”

Frank Gorham

Todd Miller

That wasn’t the word used in 2010 when the Science Panel presented its first report on climate-induced sea-level rise in North Carolina. That report forecast a likely 39-inch rise by 2100 as the climate warms, or about triple the historic rate. Though it was in line with those in similar reports from around the world, the forecast still raised the ire of some coastal developers and local governments, who feared that regulations to head off such a calamitous future would stifle economic development on the coast.

Their howls where heard in Raleigh in 2012 where Republicans, then newly empowered at the N.C. General Assembly, wanted to forbid state and local governments from using the forecast when planning for the future. The effort was ridiculed worldwide as an attempt to outlaw sea-level rise, including a scathing parody by Stephen Colbert on his TV show. Even old King Canute had a brief resurgence in popular media.

Legislators backed off a bit and passed a bill that shelved the report and directed the CRC to issue a revised version. The commission, at Gorham’s urging, then ordered its advisers earlier this year to limit their forecast to 30 years with revisions every five years. Other similar reports use much longer timeframes to capture the expected acceleration in sea-level rise in the second half of the century as the oceans respond to a much warmer climate.

The engineers and scientists on the Science Panel, Overton explained Wednesday, used information from five tide gauges along the coast to come up with a range of forecasts for different coastal regions. Historic data from the gauges, the draft report notes, indicate a mean sea-level rise in the next 30 years of 2.4 inches at Wilmington, 3.2 inches at Beaufort, 4.3 inches at Oregon Inlet and 5.4 inches at Duck on the Currituck Banks.

Regionalizing the forecasts is a directive contained in the bill passed by the legislature and is a great improvement over the single, statewide prediction of the original report, noted Greg “Rudi” Rudolph, a geologist on the Science Panel who directs Carteret County’s Shore Protection Office.

“No other state has done that,” he said. “I think it will be a great benefit as we move forward.”

How high the sea gets depends on where you’re standing on the coast. The rate of rise tends to be higher north of Cape Lookout because the land there is sinking – subsidence, the geologists call it — and is closer to the Gulf Stream, which recent research has shown increases the rate.

The 30-year timeframe that the commission ordered the Science Panel to follow is meant to avoid the scary projections of the original report and others of its kind. They show sea level rising at historic rates until later in the century when they accelerate dramatically because of the continued emissions of gases warming the climate.

The panel, in its report, acknowledged that possibility by including two other predictions that account for the influence of greenhouse gases. Data from the latest forecasts from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the report notes, suggest mean sea level will rise about three more inches then the tide gauges predict over the next 30 years if emissions are reduced from current levels:  5.7 inches at Wilmington, 6.5 in Beaufort, 7.6 at Oregon Inlet and 8.7 at Duck. Add another inch at all locations if emissions continue at peak levels, the report says.

Everyone at the meeting Wednesday seemed to be happy with the report, but there’s a contrarian in every crowd. Todd Miller, the executive director of the N.C. Coastal Federation, noted that there was no talk Wednesday about the implications of even a modest rise in sea level over the next three decades.

“Look at what’s happening now with flooding and damage from minor storms,” he said. “How much worse will it be if the sea rises six more inches?”

At the same meeting that the CRC praised a report that attempts to minimize sea-level rise, the commission talked about increasing development near inlets and allowing it closer to the ocean, Miller said. “No one seems to be connecting the dots,” he said.

The draft report will next be sent to Robert Dean, professor emeritus in the University of Florida’s coastal and oceanographic engineering program, and James Houston, a retired engineer at U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for peer review. Then, it will be available for public comment, probably starting in March. A final report will be submitted to the legislature by March 1, 2016.

MERRITT — A coastal environmental group is planning to notify two federal agencies today that it intends to sue them for not enforcing federal law to protect more than 250 acres of wetlands near this small Pamlico County community.

The N.C. Coastal Federation plans to send a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers telling them that they have 60 days to enforce provisions of the federal Clean Water Act that prevent the illegal ditching of wetlands. If no action is taken, the group intends to file a civil lawsuit in federal court.

The Clean Water Act, the main federal law that protects most wetlands, requires that agencies be given 60 days to respond to complaints before a lawsuit is filed.

Todd Miller

The federal government reported last year that about seven football fields of forested, coastal wetlands are lost every hour in the United States, noted Todd Miller, the federation’s executive director. “Lack of enforcement of existing wetland protection laws, such has recently occurred in Pamlico County, is a major cause for these unacceptable losses,” he said. “The N.C. Coastal Federation hopes to slow these losses by insisting that we enforce existing federal laws to protect these wetlands.”

The issue has festered since 251 acres on the south side of State Road 1324 were cleared last year. The land is part of a 4,600-acre tract owned by Spring Creek Farms LLC, an agricultural firm registered in Illinois. The company had intended to clear and farm the entire tract.

Local farmers first raised alarms that the cleared land was a wetland. Aerial photographs later showed that no ditches existed on the property before the early 1990s. Any extensive ditching through wetlands would have required a permit under the 1972 Clean Water Act, but the Corps, which enforces those provisions of the law, could find no evidence that permits had been issued.

Then came the Catch-22. Under pressure from the federation and local county commissioners, state and Corps regulators visited the site in August 2013 to determine whether the cleared land was a wetland under federal law. They found two of the three things the law requires: wetlands plants and soils. The land itself, though, was too dry, the Corps decided. It therefore wasn’t a wetland under the law, the agency said, and thus no permits were needed to clear it. EPA later concurred with that decision.

Miller contended that the ditches dug more than 20 years earlier apparently without permits so changed the hydrology that the tract is now no longer wet enough to meet one of the three permitting tests. “An illegal activity eliminated the permit requirement, and what the law was intended to prevent is now allowed,” he said. “That doesn’t seem to make much sense.”

The Army Corps of Engineers doesn’t consider the cleared land to be wetlands.

The Corps’ would agree, at least according to its internal wetlands manual, said Geoff Gisler, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Chapel Hill. The center is representing the federation. In cases of past abuses, the manual requires that the Corps investigate when the ditching or filling took place to determine if a permit would have been required and if under natural conditions the land would be a wetland and currently subject to permitting, he explained.

“We’re asking the Corps and EPA to look at the entire historical record, to look at the aerial photographs to make those determinations,” Gisler said.

The federation, he said, wants the agencies to revise their assessment, assert jurisdiction over the 251-acre tract and issue an order requiring restoration of the converted wetlands. “Then there would be no need for a lawsuit,” Gisler said.

Allen Propst welcomes the action. He’s a real-estate agent in Pamlico County who was one of the first to draw attention to the land clearing. “I’m a black-and-white type of guy,” he said. “If someone is breaking the law they need to be stopped.”

The tract, he said, drains to the Neuse River and is the headwaters of at least 12 creeks. “Those wetlands are important to water quality. Once they’re gone, they’re gone forever,” Propst said. “We can’t turn our backs on this, and I’m very happy to hear that the N.C. Coastal Federation continues to lead the charge along with the Southern Environmental Law Center. The 60-day notice is the only way to get the agencies to respond.”

From an island getaway overlooking Bogue Inlet to killer stand-up paddleboards and fishing kayaks, our staff has come up with an array of suggestions for the N.C. Coastal Federation’s second Coastal Christmas Gift Guide.

Money again is no object here. The only thing we asked our staff was to limit their suggestions to items that have something to do with the marine environment.

YOUR ISLAND IN THE SUN

Here’s a special getaway gift: An uninhabited island overlooking Bogue Inlet. For $383 a night, it’s yours, along with a two-bedroom cottage and a skiff to get around in. Called Sands Island by its owners, the 31-acre retreat is only 10 minutes by boat from Swansboro but it will seem like another world.  The cottage is heated and comes with a full kitchen. The rental also includes kayaks and canoes and parking and dockage on the mainland. You can tour the local waters, visit nearby Hammocks Beach State Park for swimming and surfing or visit Emerald Isle and have supper in Swansboro.

BLENDING ART WITH OLD WOOD

As a woodworker, Ryan Stokes fell in love with the idea of using reclaimed wood from the Cape Fear River region for his art. He’s used wood from the bottom of the river itself, from old buildings in downtown Wilmington, from barns and fence posts. Using a combination of paints and stains, Stokes creates images on the wood, working with the unique colors in the grain. You can see his portfolio here and the galleries along the southeast coast that sell his art here.

HERE’S A SUP WORTHY OF SANTA

If you want to experience the natural beauty of our glorious coast and stay in shape, have Santa drop this Naish stand-up paddleboard, or SUP, down your chimney. The Nalu 10.6 is a great option for paddle boarders who want versatility and stability because the board is adaptable to everything from flat water eco-cruising, to ankle slapper waves, to double overhead surfing.  You can get more information about the board at TheDistressed Mullet, the website for all things SUP, or from the Naish website.

FOR THE SERIOUS KAYAK FISHERMAN

The Jackson Cuda 12 should be sitting under the tree for the kayak fisherman ready to step up to a serious fishing machine. All kayak manufacturers make fishing kayaks these days, but none makes a more rugged and stable boat thanJackson. The company turns out a wide range of fishing kayaks from its factory in Alabama, from 10 footers for lake fishing all the way up to the 15-foot giants preferred by big-game, offshore fishermen. We like the 12.6-foot Cuda for the inshore waters of our coast. It’s versatile, highly maneuverable, tracks straight and is stable enough that you can stand up in it. The comfortable, high-back chair – really, it’s a chair, not a cheap piece of foam strapped to the deck – can be adjusted in high and low positions. The innovative horizontal rod storage system is perfect for securing your rods in waves or surf. You can even store your rods internally if things get really bad.  The boat comes with plenty of rod holders, a place to mount your GoPro camera and adequate storage space on the rear deck for your cooler and tackle box. The folks at Jackson, though, know that fishermen are tinkerers, and they’ve provided numerous places on the kayak for things like a depth finder, live well or extra rod holder. They’re pricey, about $1,300 without a paddle, and are sold locally at Great Outdoor Provision Co.

BOOKS ABOUT THE N.C. COAST

Here are a few of our favorites to stuff a stocking:

The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast by Stanley R. Riggs, Dorothea V. Ames, et. al.This book by our old friend Stan Riggs at East Carolina University isn’t a fast read, but it provides invaluable information to help you understand the natural and manmade forces at work reshaping our coastline. The maps, charts and photos are themselves worth the purchase price.

The Great Dismal by Bland Simpson. Simpson, who teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, grew up near the swamp on the North Carolina-Virginia border. In this engaging memoir, Simpson blends personal experience, travel narrative, oral history and natural history to create an intriguing portrait of the Great Dismal Swamp and its people. A longtime N.C. Coastal Federation board member, Simpson has written other coastal books worth a read: The Inner Islands and Into Sound Country.

The Hatterasman by Ben Dixon MacNeill. This 50-year-old classic is part nature story, part historical narrative, part adventure story and part rhetorical farce, all told by a man who knew the real Cape Hatteras – the skinny, wind-swept strand of sand full of strange stories and characters.

North Carolina Beaches by Glen Morris. Long hailed as the best guide to the state’s 320 miles of coastline, this book will help you find just the right spot for a long vacation or a one-day getaway. In this completely revised third edition, Morris takes readers on a beach-by-beach tour. He details attractions and activities and provides phone numbers, addresses and websites to help with your trip planning. Maps show the best places to park and what facilities–campgrounds, showers, restrooms and more–to expect. Short features on topics from bird life to tidal forces inform and entertain.

Mariner’s Menu: 30 Years of Fresh Seafood Ideas by Joyce Taylor. This is the perfect gift for any cook, cookbook collector or seafood enthusiast. The resource book gathers 30 years of seafood wisdom and contains more than 100 original recipes developed by the dedicated testers and tasters of the N.C. State University Seafood Lab kitchen.

THE GIFTS THAT KEEP GIVING

And, finally, you probably saw this “ask” coming, but giving a gift membership to the N.C.  Coastal Federation – to yourself if you’re not a member already – is a pretty good way of giving something back to our coast. Your money will be used to educate kids, support the good journalism you see here on Coastal Review Online and protect baby pelicans. The federation is restoring habitat for brown pelicans on Beacon Island, one of only nine pelican nesting sites remaining in North Carolina. Your gift membership will help the federation create a master restoration plan for the island. The annual membership includes invitations to events and programs. A membership packet complete with 2015 calendar will announce your gift.

You can also donate in honor of someone this holiday season. The federation will mail a gift announcement to your recipient and explain the Beacon Island project.

The federation’s nature shop at its headquarters on N.C. 24 in Ocean near Morehead City carries an assortment of coastal books and federation apparel.  The shop is open Monday through Friday between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. Shop in person or call 252-393-8185. Apparel can be ordered online.

And, finally, try to do your holiday shopping at AmazonSmile. Amazon donates 0.5% of the purchase price to the federation.

Last of two parts

Janice Ray Lewis Ditto, second from left, talks about growing up in the Promise Land at a reunion of descendants of Shackleford Banks fishing families. Photo: Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center

HARKERS ISLAND – Ca’e Bankers were no strangers to foul weather. They lived at the water’s edge, in scattered, isolated settlements on what is now uninhabited Shackleford Banks in Cape Lookout National Seashore. Blows of various intensities were part of life: Frigid, winter nor’easters howled for days, summer squalls with dangerous lighting and winds that could capsize a fishing boat appeared suddenly on the horizon. Most feared, though, were the hurricanes, as yet unnamed, that blew up from the tropics in late summer and fall.

It was back in the days before all-seeing satellites and clever computer models. The Bankers knew only what the sky and sea told them.

And the signs were not good on Aug. 16, 1899. The ocean’s swells were larger than usual and the high tides that day inched farther up the beach. A brisk breeze blew out of the northeast, and cirrus clouds streaked the sky.

If they had had access to a newspaper, the Bankers would have read horrifying accounts of a hurricane that struck Puerto Rico a week earlier, killing hundreds. The storm hit on the day Puerto Ricans honored Saint Ciriaco, who had been stoned by the Romans for refusing to renounce his faith. God then sent torrential rains to prevent the Romans from burning the body, allowing Ciriaco’s family and friends to give him his well-deserved Christian burial. That such a storm hit on such a day proves nothing except maybe that God does indeed have mysterious ways and a wicked sense of humor.

What later became known to history as the San Ciriaco Hurricane was one of the most powerful cyclones to move through the western Atlantic in the 19th century. It struck the barrier islands of North Carolina on Aug. 17 with wind gusts that approached 160 miles an hour. The devastation from Beaufort to Nags Head was nearly complete. On the low-lying Banks, there was nothing near about it.

The waters came first from the ocean, then from the sound. Every house on the island was flooded, many were destroyed. Boats were splintered. Goats, sheep and cows were drowned or simply disappeared. Wells were undrinkable and the soil so contaminated with saltwater that nothing would grow in it.

The worst thing, though, were the caskets. They floated up out of the ground.

The Promise Land

Charlie Brown Lewis tends his net spreads at the end of 12th Street in the Promise Land. Photo: Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center

The migration off the island had started as a trickle as early as the 1870s. Some Bankers wanted a different life, others a better education for their children. Hurricanes earlier in the 1890s quickened the exodus. But after that day in August 115 years ago, the island was no longer inhabitable. By 1902, the Banks were deserted.

Many of the refugees loaded their possessions, including their houses, onto small boats and sailed the two miles across Back Bay to Harkers Island. Others ended up in Marshallberg or Salter Path on Bogue Banks. Still others started anew in what was then an undeveloped section of Morehead City.

The neighborhood the Bankers created there along Bogue Sound became known as the Promise Land. Stretching from the railroad track along Arendell Street south to the sound, between 10th and 15th streets, it is now a very desirable place with expensive houses lining the water. The descendants of the original settlers have formed their own society to celebrate their history and heritage. They have a festival each October and have even published two books full of reminisces and photographs.

It wasn’t always that way, noted Rodney Kemp, a local historian who lives on Shepard Street in the Promise Land. Though not a descendant of a Ca’ Banker, Kemp has been adopted by those who are. “Some people didn’t want to be Promise Landers, as terrible as that sounds,” he said. “They didn’t like the stigma that they were ignorant fishermen.”

Janice Ray Lewis Ditto, whose people came from the Banks and who grew up in the Promise Land, felt the bigotry first hand. “They thought we were ignorant,” she told a crowd of Ca’e Banks’ descendants who gathered last month at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers Island for a two-day reunion. “We were speaking a different language. We were the poor people who moved to town. We were shunned at school. The Promise Land is now a wonderful place, but we worked night and day to do that.”

The bigotry is reflected in the stories of how the neighborhood got its name. One version has a prominent Morehead City resident reminded of the Old Testament when he witnessed another sailskiff loaded with refugees coming down Bogue Sound. He said admiringly that it was like the Israelites heading for the Promised Land. Another version is similar, but the speaker spits out the words derisively, “So you think you’ve found the Promised Land?”

Kib Guthrie’s  store, with its distinctive lean, was the unofficial town hall of the Promise Land. Illustration: Core Sound Waterfowl Musuem & Heritage Center

Whichever version you ascribe to, just make sure you drop the “d.” And don’t add an apostrophe, as is sometimes done. As one descendant told Kemp, “We don’t talk in apostrophes.” It’s simply “Promise Land.”

The original lots along the water sold for as little as $10, Kemp explained. The goal was to accumulate enough money to move to higher ground near the railroad track, he said. “The idea was to get away from the flooding,” Kemp noted.

The beach between 10th and 15th streets was known as The Landing and was the center of activity in the neighborhood. Fishermen tied up their boats there and spread out their nets to dry in the sun. Neighborhood kids used it as their playground.

If The Landing was the Promise Land’s community center then Kib Guthrie’s Store on the corner of 12th and Evans streets was its town hall and its owner, Kilby Guthrie Jr., its unofficial mayor. “Step right up, don’t be ashame,” Guthrie would say to customers when they walked in. “Go to Charlie Wallace’s for your purse seine.”

Adolya Guthrie Bennett, 83, remembers Kib and his store with the distinctive “east’ard” lean. She remembers running through the net spreads as a child and the old net house on Shepard Street where she grew up.

“The floor was dirt and the walls were cardboard boxes from the store,” Bennett said. “But I went to bed every night and knew that I was loved. We never had nothing, but we would never go hungry. The men from the Promise Land would come by and say ‘I got some nice oysters’ or ‘I got some sea mullet.’ I’ve got scales for skin because I’ve eaten so many fish.”

The Mayflower Whale

Nineteenth century whalers hunt a whale with harpoons and a whale gun. Illustration: National Archives

Whalers on Shackleford Banks cut the blubber from a whale. Illustration: N.C. Division of Archives and History

Capt. Reuben Willis was the first of the six boats to reach the pod of 10 right whales that had come into the Lookout Bight early in the morning of May 4, 1874. Willis stood in the high bow of the 25-foot-long boat, directing his crew of four oarsmen and the man in the stern with the steering oar towards one of the whales, which looked to be about 50-feet long. They had to evade the trashing tail yet get close enough for Willis to accurately throw the harpoon.

Closer, Willis urged his crew. Just a little closer, lads.

He threw the harpoon, aiming for the vital organs just below the blow hole. The weapon flew straight with its line tailing behind it. Called a toggle iron, the harpoon was one of two types of hand-thrown weapons used by 19th century whalers. Its spear point was affixed to the shaft by a pin. By pulling on the line, the whaler would pivot, or toggle, the point to a right angle after the harpoon struck the whale.  Once set, the harpoon wouldn’t come out and the whaler was then “fixed” to his prey. The other type of harpoons had razor sharp edges designed to penetrated deep into the whale.

Willis’ harpoon hit its mark, and the captain pulled mightily on the line to fix the point. The whale’s tail came up below the boat, flipping it over and throwing Willis and his crew into the water.

A gasp went up from shore. Families from Cape Hills and Diamond City, from Bell’s Island and Bald Hill Bay, from Sam Windsor’s Lump and Whale Creek gathered on the beach to anxiously watch the battle. Mothers said silent prayers for their boys manning the oars.

Capt. Josephus Willis and his Red Oar Crew approached next. Capt. Seef brought the heavy whale gun to his shoulder. Such guns were common by the 1870s. Made by various manufacturers, they fired small harpoons and lances that exploded inside the whale. The benefits were obvious. The whaler could fire his harpoons from a safer distance and they would penetrate deeper into tough blubber.

James Templeman Brown, in his 1887 book The Whale Fishery, described the major failing of all these guns: “…the gunner was kicked as far aft as ‘midships, and it was found necessary then, even as it is now, to tie the gun to the boat with a lanyard in order that it could be regained when it was ‘hoisted overboard.’ The recoil of the old shoulder-guns was immense. I have heard of two men who had their collar bones broken by a heavy gun.”

Willis’ gun packed a meaner kick than most. Gun makers Julius Grudchos and Selmar Eggers of New Bedford, Mass., wanted to make a lighter whale gun when they designed this model in 1857. They succeeded in making a gun that was several pounds lighter than the competition. That meant, though, that its recoil was greater.

The skeleton of the Mayflower Whale hangs in the N.C. Museum of Natural Science around 1900. Photo: N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences

Capt. Seef was an old hand at this, though, and fired his gun apparently without incident.

It took most of the day to kill the whale, and Capt. Seef was credited with striking the mortal blow. When the bloody business was over, the boats encircled the animal and the crews held their oars straight up in the air and gave three loud whoops. That was the sign for the people watching along the shore to “put on the pots.”

Capt. Absalom Guthrie, an island elder, was in charge of coordinating processing the whale. Almost everyone had a job. Crews cut the blubber into chunks that the women and children toted ashore in wash tubs and dumped into large iron kettles or “trypots.” Some women were charged with fixing meals or getting fresh water; others gathered up the driftwood to keep the fires going. Then there were the dippers who used ladles to dip out the oil in the kettles when it was separated from the blubber.

The tradition on the Banks was to name each whale taken. There was the Lee Whale and the Tom Martin Whale, the John Rose Whale and the Little Children’s Whale. That one was named after the young boys who took the oars in the whaleboats because most of the men were away when the whale was sighted. They called this one the Mayflower Whale after the month it was killed and the flower-like markings on its side.

The whale ended up producing more than 40 barrels of oil and 700 pounds of baleen that were worth several thousand dollars in Beaufort. Its unexpected value as a teaching tool, though, has been priceless, as they would say in the TV commercial.

It’s not clear how John D. Whitford, the president of the old Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad, came to own the skeleton of the Mayflower Whale, but he donated it to the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in 1876. No one on the museum’s small staff knew how to assemble a bunch of whale bones. So the skeleton lay under a table for the next 18 years until the state hired a naturalist and taxidermist H.H. Brimley in 1893. Though he had no experience with whales, Brimley set about cleaning decades of dust and tobacco juice from the whale bones and putting them together with steel rods and wire.

The assembled skeleton was first exhibited in April 1894, making it in all likelihood the longest-exhibited item in the museum. Countless thousands of school children have seen it on their spring field trips and have learned something about whales and the men who once hunted them. Capt. Seef would probably be pleased with that.

The Light That Binds

Some of descendants gathered on porch of the lightkeeper’s house at Cape Lookout as the sun set behind Shackleford Banks. They had spent the day sharing stories and memories. They had supped on grilled mullet and had climbed to the top of the light that so bound their ancestors. They were listening to stories about Billy Hancock, purported to be the fastest man on the Banks, and the day the taxman came over to collect back taxes. He threatened to take a fisherman’s seaweed-filled mattress.

“Go ahead,” the fisherman said. “When the tide goes out, I’ll make me another.”

It was a hard day for Karen Willis Amspacher, the executive director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center. There were meals to coordinate for the reunion, speakers to shepherd, ferry schedules to meet. That was easy, though, compared to the other stuff, the emotional stuff.

She wanted the reunion to be more than just a gathering of people with a common history. “It had to be personal,” said Amspacher, a native of Harkers Island. “Otherwise it would be just another event.”

She also wanted it to be a celebration of a way of life that often brought shame and ridicule because of the way people talked or the way they made a living. “You had to grow up and talk right,” she said. “It’s not that way anymore and we can hold our heads high.”

A banner at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center welcomes descendants of the hardy fishing families who once lived on what is now Shackleford Banks in the Cape Lookout National Seashore. 

First of two parts

A Guthrie family memorial at the Diamond City Reunion on Harkers Island.

Devine Guthrie was a boat builder, whaler and preacher. This is one of the few surviving photos from Diamond City and Shackleford Banks. Photos: Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center.

HARKERS ISLAND – It took more than a bit of courage to fire this old whale gun. The steel, rifled barrel is encased in sturdy hardwood that smells of linseed oil and has taken on a deep, reddish-brown hue after more than a century of loving care. Trimmed with brass plate, the gun is a little more than three feet long but weighs almost 17 pounds. Capt. Seef Willis must have held his breath and muttered a prayer when he hoisted it to his shoulder and steadied himself in the heaving pilot boat before pulling the trigger to help bring in the most famous and perhaps the most vicious whale ever caught along the N.C. coast.

“Because she packed a kick,” Thurman Douglas Willis, the captain’s great-great grandson, said of the old gun. “She could knock you overboard.”

Willis was among the hundreds of people who gathered on Harkers Island in Carteret County last month to take part in a special reunion. Most were descended from the hardy fishing families who once lived in scattered, small settlements on what is now uninhabited Shackleford Banks in Cape Lookout National Seashore.  Ca’e Bankers, they called themselves, after conveniently removing the “p” from “cape.”

From Cape Hills near the lighthouse, across The Drain to Diamond City and Bald Hill Bay, to Sam Windsor’s Lump and all way to Wade Shore at Beaufort Inlet, the Bankers lived in isolation and wrestled meager livings from the sea.

They had been doing it for more than a century before it all came to a sad end when the worst hurricane anyone on the Banks could remember slammed ashore 115 years ago. Houses were left in shambles, boats lay splintered, wells were flooded and the soil too contaminated with salt to grow anything for a long while.

So those who remained reluctantly left the island. Family by family, they loaded their possessions and even their homes onto small boats and sailed the two miles across Back Bay to Harkers Island. A few ended up in nearby Marshallberg. Those at the western end of the Banks crossed the Beaufort Bar to Gillikin, now Salter Path, on Bogue Banks or sailed farther west in Carteret County to Broad Creek. Some of the refugees went to the bustling port town of Morehead City where they set down stakes and started life anew in a neighborhood they called the Promise Land.

By 1902 or so, the Ca’e Bankers were gone. All evidence that they had even been there soon disappeared as well. Waves and wind have a way of erasing history if given enough time. All that’s left now are the artifacts the Bankers left behind and the stories told by their descendants.

Every five years or so, they come together at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center to tell those stories, to sing the old hymns, to lay a wreath at the old cemetery on Shackleford and to display the old pictures and letters and other pieces of that old life — great-great grandmother’s shawl,  great-aunt’s flowered quilt, Capt. Seef’s whale gun.

“We need to preserve this heritage because this the last generation that will care about it,” said Rodney Kemp, a noted local historian and himself a resident of the Promise Land. “That’s what makes these gatherings so important.”

Whaling on the Banks

Nor’easters had been plentiful during the winter of 1874. The mullet fishing, as a result, had been a bust. The fishermen of the Banks relied on jumping mullet in the fall and winter. Female mullet were especially prized for their roe, which fetched a pretty premium over in Beaufort. Banks’ fishermen also went after croaker, spot, flounder, trout and even porpoises at various times of the year.

Late winter and early spring, though, was money time. A good whaling season could make a man forget about winter blows and empty nets. The oil boiled from the fat and blubber of right and sperm whales was valuable as lamp oil and lubricants. The baleen that right whales use to strain water was refashioned into women’s corsets, umbrella tips and such. The whalers collected a very high quality wax called spermaceti from the heads of sperm whales that was used in expensive candles. Ambergris from the sperm whales’ digestive systems was somehow turned into a fragrance and fixative in perfumes. Three or four of the giants, then, were far more valuable than many boatloads of mullet.

Yankee fishermen from New England started hunting whales off Cape Lookout in the 1720s, dropping anchor in the protected waters behind the cape’s hook and intercepting northbound whales on their spring migrations. It was sort of hit and miss, though, and not very profitable, but it got the few people then living on the Banks to thinking. They, too, started whaling, launching small boats from the beach when a whale was spotted and then hauling the animal back for processing.

The old cemetery on Shackleford Banks. Photo: Frank Tursi

The captain of an English ship, making a detailed survey of the Cape Lookout area in 1764, noted several buildings just west of the cape that he identified on his map as “Whalers Hutts.” Within 100 years, the fishing and whaling would attract a fairly sizable population. Estimates vary. Some think that as many as 2,000 people lived on the island during its heyday in the mid-1870s. Others put the number at half that. The U.S. census takers in 1850 counted 302 people on the Banks, but they probably missed as many.

The Ca’e Bankers lived in a string of small settlements that started in the high dunes around the lighthouse and stretched west to Beaufort Inlet. A shallow swash that the Bankers called The Drain separated the lighthouse area from the rest of the island, but residents could walk across it at about any tide. A hurricane in 1933 opened what’s now Barden’s Inlet at The Drain and made Shackleford a separate island.

None of the settlements was very large, Kemp explained, maybe a dozen or so related people living in a collection of houses. “They were family groupings, really,” he said.

The groupings took on the names of the families that lived in them – Ed Moore’s Point, Kib Guthrie’s Lump, Tyre Moore’s Camp, Sam Windsor’s Lump, Joe Lewis’ Neighborhood.

The exception was the sprawling collection of buildings that spread out from Yellow Hill, a 40-foot-high sand dune just west of The Drain. The official U.S. Coast Survey of 1853 identified the settlement as “Lookout Hills.” Thirty or so years later it would take the name of the familiar pattern of the nearby lighthouse, Diamond City.

As many as 500 people may have lived there by the mid-1800s. Most were fishermen, but there was also a smattering of carpenters and shopkeepers and at least two mid-wives. The place boasted three general stores and a schoolhouse, where teachers from the mainland came each summer to give the island’s children a couple of months of instruction. The building also did double duty as a church, where itinerant preachers occasionally stopped. The Pentecostals always drew large crowds at their camp meetings “under the cedars.”

Smoke on the Beach

This picture of the last Shackleford Banks whale boat was taken in the 1940s. The boat was last used by John E. Lewis. Photo: N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences

The fishermen in the three pilot boats that gathered in the bight at first light on May 4, 1874, probably didn’t talk much about Pentecostals or teaching young’uns. The tobacco embers in their pipes glowed in the pre-dawn as the men lamented the winter’s poor fishing and expressed hope that the spring would be better.

Josephus Willis was among them. At 46, Capt. Seef, as he was known to all, was already one of the Banks’ most respected men. Born on Shackleford, he had been a private in the Confederate Army and was at Fort Macon when it fell to the Yankees in 1862. He spent two days at a prison camp in New Bern before being paroled. He came home to stay.

Five of his eight sons were in the boat with him that morning. Old Capt. Seef must have had a bit of a showman in him because he had his boys paint the oars bright red. They called themselves the Red Oar Crew.

The boats were about to head out for the start of the day’s fishing, when one of Capt. Seef’s sons pointed to the sky behind them. “Look,” he yelled, “smoke.”

Capt. Absalom Guthrie had shore watch duty that morning. His job was to scan the seas from the top of a high dune and look for whales. He was to send up a smoke signal if he spotted any.

The men in the boats stowed the gear for small fish and got the harpoons and lances ready before rowing out to sea. Other whalers had seen the signal and were dragging their boats into the water.

Among them was Sam Windsor, the only black man living on the Banks. He was known for his level head and melodious voice. He brought Bankers nearly to tears when he raised it in supplication to sing his favorite hymn, “How Tedious and Tasteless the Hours.”

“Oh, drive these dark clouds from my sky;
Thy soul-cheering presence restore;
Or take me unto Thee on high,
Where winter and clouds are not more.”

Capt. Seef wasn’t thinking about cheering souls and Sam’s singing, as his boys rowed hard to meet the whale. He was too busy loading the gun.

Tuesday: The Promise Land and the Mayflower whale

John Runkle with his wife, Nancy.

EMERALD ISLE — When he attended that meeting at the aquarium in Pine Knoll Shores all those years ago, John Runkle had no idea that he was making a long-term commitment. He went merely to represent the N.C. Conservation Council at a meeting about coastal environmental issues.

“Just about every county along the coast had something going wrong,” Runkle remembered. “All the way from up the road Corolla way, there were coal ports here and there, filling in wetlands, all the beach issues and that kind of thing. It was quite compelling for anybody who thought that the coast was not having serious, serious problems. So we needed an organization to go ahead and take care of those things.”

Because it’s his way, Runkle volunteered to serve on the board of the new group that soon formed. Thirty-two years later, he’s still on the board of directors of the N.C. Coastal Federation, the only person on the 30-member board who has stuck around all this time. “These board meetings are a great reason to come down the coast four times a year,” he joked.

We were sitting on the deck of a rental oceanfront house in Emerald Isle after one of those meetings, looking out at the ocean while drinking coffee and eating biscotti that Nancy Dole, Runkle’s wife, made.  She was 14 when the 16-year-old Runkle met her in high school. They’ve been married for 37 years.

And she makes a mean biscotti.

Runkle took a bite out of one before explaining the real reason why he stuck with the federation all this time. “I think it does good work,” he simply said. “It’s the only organization I’ve been involved in that long and it’s one of the few boards I’ve stayed on.”

Because he’s been there from the beginning, Runkle brings a unique perspective to the board, noted Todd Miller, the federation’s founder and executive director. “John knows where the federation has come from, what it’s been through and has a good sense for where we need to head,” he said. “Having that perspective on the board is important so that we don’t re-invent the wheel or learn from our mistakes a second time around.”

Social Worker Turned Lawyer

Runkle was born in northern Ohio in 1952 and still has family in the Cincinnati-Dayton area. He entered George Washington University in Washington at the height of the Vietnam War protests. “My freshman year, my dorm was gassed four times,” he says. “We had to go up to the top level to get out of the gas a couple of times.”

He ran out of money after two years and finished college closer to home at the University of Cincinnati. With a degree in social sciences, Runkle was a social worker for a while and ran homes for abused and neglected children. The work drained him. Law school sounded good.

John Runkle at the podium accepting the N.C. League of Conservation Voters’s Jane Sharp Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.

Runkle headed south to Chapel Hill in 1979 and entered the University of North Carolina. “Law school was an easy three years,” he remembered. “Once you decide you’re not going to be top of your class, it’s not that hard. You show up and read the books and it’s not that dramatic.”

While in law school, Runkle began working for the Conservation Council. He continued with the group after graduation until he opened his own law firm in Chapel Hill in 1988. Concentrating in environmental law, the practice flourished.

“By the time I went into private practice, I knew every environmentalist. I knew all the professionals and I knew most of the leaders of the organizations,” Runkle said. “So when they were looking for something they came to me.”

Growing up in Ohio, Runkle enjoyed camping, hiking and other outdoor activities. Environmental law, then, seemed like a natural fit, he said. There are some side benefits as well. “Most of the environmentalists that you meet are interesting, fairly healthy,” Runkle said. “You get to go to neat places and see neat things. I can’t say that it ever paid very well, but if my car ever broke down somewhere in North Carolina, there’s somebody who would put me up for a week or two.”

His clients have included national coalitions opposed to nuclear energy, large environmental organizations, local governments and small, single-issue groups – “You know,” he said, “friends of this and people against that.”

Most of his work now consists of rate and solar-energy cases before the N.C. Utilities Commission, but he’s handled everything – nuclear and coal plants, hog waste and hazardous waste, sewage  discharges and land conversation. He’s argued cases at every level of the judicial system and has been the primary or supporting attorney in at least 12 cases before the state Supreme Court.

The N.C. League of Conservation Voters honored Runkle for all that work in 2010 by giving him its Jane Sharp Lifetime Achievement Award. Since 1980, Runkle was an integral part of the group since as staff or board member, president and legal counsel.

Moonshine and Oysters

Most of the time, money was the usual form of payment. A group up in the mountains, though, once paid Runkle in moonshine. “I did a coastal permit case once and got two bushels of oysters and a hundred dollar bill,” he said. “I thought that was a good deal for a day’s work. I gave Nancy the hundred dollar bill and invited all the neighbors for an oyster roast.”

Though the northwest corner of the state’s mountains is legendary for good corn liquor, Lou Zeller has always paid Runkle the conventional way for all the work he’s done over the years.

John Runkle at a N.C. Coastal Federation retreat. That’s staffer Ana Zivanovic-Nenadovic at the table with him.

“John’s the best environmental attorney in the state, bar none,” said Zeller, the executive director of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in Glendale Springs. “What he understands that many attorneys do not is how community organizing campaigns work. He will tell you if that’s a bad idea and won’t work. When we do get into a campaign John is willing to work with us side by side.”

Runkle said he’s always surprised at how little local groups understand local politics. “Half of what I do is social work and organizing, breaking down who knows whom on the commission,” he explained. He considers it a mark of success when one of his former clients later is elected to local office.

As the lawyer from Chapel Hill, Runkle is often branded by opponents as nothing more than a hired-gun, or worst, a radical environmentalist. After a county commissioner in a zoning case leveled that charge, Runkle went down the row of locals who had hired him and asked how long their families had been in the county – 1818, 1846, 1895. “I could see this commissioner’s head getting bigger and bigger,” Runkle laughed. “If I had done two more his head would have exploded.”

When he’s not defending the state’s environment, Runkle likes to fish at the beach or tend the large vegetable garden he and Nancy plant each year at their home in Orange County, about four mile from downtown Chapel Hill. They pick about 100 quarts of blueberries from their bushes and this year planted more than 500 onions and 50 tomato plants. Runkle now works from a home office, which allows him to stir the tomatoes that seem to be constantly simmering on the stove in the summer.  “I can do that and work at the same time,” he said.

And that home is always open to clients, noted Janet Marsh, the founder of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League. “He’s always eager to open his home to our staff,” she said. “We save money but I believe he enjoys the social interaction because John is an activist as well as an attorney. That gives him a very special place in my heart because that’s essentially what we are.”

ATLANTIC BEACH — After listening to the public and consulting the experts, the superintendent of Cape Lookout National Seashore decided to back away from his controversial request  that dredged sand be considered to shore up the eroding end of Shackleford Banks, a wild, uninhabited island that is part of the park.

“We heard from a lot of people and we consulted with a number of scientists,” Patrick Kenney said yesterday. “After weighing all that, I decided that it was in the best interest of the park that we not accept sand for the next 20 years. It wasn’t an easy decision.”

Pat Kenney

Kenney, in a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers on June 11, asks that the Corps remove Shackleford Banks from its draft 20-year dredging plan for the harbor at Morehead City, Beaufort Inlet and the channel that connects the two. The Corps, which has been dredging those places for more than a century, had proposed for the first time, putting some of the dredged sand on Shackleford.

Kenney had requested that the island be considered in the plan because of the increased erosion at its western tip, which abuts Beaufort Inlet. The erosion rate there in recent years has exceeded 100 feet a year, according to Carteret County surveys. Marine navigation lights that a few years ago were in the dunes are now at the water’s edge.

The proposal touched off jitters across the inlet in Atlantic Beach, which has come to depend on the Corps’ dredged sand to re-nourish its beaches.  If some of that sand started going to Shackleford, the town and county would have to cough up millions of dollars to make up the difference. They now pay next to nothing for the sand.

Atlantic Beach’s mayor, Trace Cooper, was breathing a little easier yesterday. “Maintaining deep water at the Morehead City Harbor is important to our local and state economy,” he said. “At the same time, our beaches are the backbone of our tourism industry.  Diverting much needed sand from Bogue Banks to Shackleford would have been a lose-lose outcome.”

The proposal also raised sand with beachcombers and bird watchers, campers and fishermen, boaters and sunbathers and anyone else who appreciates Shackleford’s wildness. They packed the auditorium at the Duke Marine Lab near Beaufort in January for a public hearing on the draft dredging plan. Dozens of people spoke against the proposal. No one spoke in favor of it.

Kenney got the message.
He also consulted respected geologists like Stan Riggs of East Carolina University and Orrin Pilkey of Duke University. Kenney heard their message as well. “They had some pretty strong opinions about this,” he said. “One of the things that stuck me after talking with them was that the amount of sand we were going to get wasn’t really going to benefit the island. You had to weigh that against the adverse social and environmental effects.”

Neither were the scientists convinced that the long-term dredging of the inlet triggered the increased erosion on Shackleford. That was the justification Kenney used for asking to be included in the Corps’ plan. Park Service policy generally lets nature have its way, but it does allow superintendents to step in to salve man-made wounds.

The survey of the west end of Shackleford Banks shows the location of the shoreline at high tide in 2009 (yellow line), in April 2013 (red), in June 2013 (green) and in August 2013 (orange). The green square is the location of the range marker light. Source: NPS

In his letter to the Corps, Kenney said the shoreline surveys and other data were too limited in time and scope to accurately determine how much of the erosion on Shackleford was caused by dredging.

While it no longer supports placing sand directly on the beach at Shackleford, the park wouldn’t object if the Corps put some just offshore where waves, wind and current would theoretically push it to the beach, Kenney said. To do any good, though, the sand would have to be dumped close to shore in less than 24 feet of water.

“That seems to be the rub,” Kenney said. “The dredges that the contractors use won’t let them put it that close to shore.”

Putting sand off Fort Macon at the end of Atlantic Beach – called a “near-shore berm” in the dredging business – didn’t replenish the town’s beaches, noted Greg “Rudi” Rudolph, the Shore Protection manager for Carteret County. “It’s been proven that it doesn’t re-incorporate into the system,” he said. “It will just remain out there, though the Corps will say otherwise. For the same reason, we’re not happy with a near-shore berm off Shackleford.”

Any sand placed off Shackleford is sand that won’t be directed towards Atlantic Beach, noted Rudolph. “If the Corps is going to put sand anywhere offshore Shackleford Banks and not on Bogue Banks, that’s completely unacceptable. Obviously, the short-term win is no sand on Shack. In the long term, there is still work that needs to be done.”

Kenney noted that that the public review process did as intended. “That’s an important point to make,” he said. “It was a planning process to look at alternatives. We looked at them and after talking to experts we came to a different conclusion. The process worked.”

Rudolph agreed. “I’m as guilty as anyone else in declaring the ink is dry when we see the word ‘draft’ on a federal government proposal, and it’s refreshing to know the process can work – it may be messy and frustrating, but it can work,” he said.

MOREHEAD CITY – The chairman of the state’s commission that sets coastal development policy deftly defused what could have been the next explosive issue in the politically charged sea-level rise debate by appointing a respected geologist to the commission’s panel of science advisers while passing on nominees who have publicly questioned either the scientific validity of climate change or that seas would rise as a result.

“I really wanted the CRC to be respected,” Frank Gorham, the chairman of the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission, said yesterday after making the appointment. “The way to do that is to respect the process and to respect the current Science Panel. I don’t agree with some of the personal views of some of the panel members but I respect their credentials.”

Frank Gorham

Gorham and the four other members of the CRC’s Executive Committee met yesterday in a conference call to discuss filling four vacancies on the Science Panel, which is made up of volunteer scientists and engineers who advise the CRC on a wide range of issues. Normally, such appointments are made with little fanfare, but they took on significance this time because the panel’s most pressing job will be to update its controversial 2010 report on sea-level rise in North Carolina.

That report included a forecast of a 39-inch ocean rise by the turn of the next century, which raised the ire of some coastal developers and local governments and attracted the attention of the state legislature, which first wanted to outlaw planning for sea-level rise entirely. After they become the butt of international ridicule, lawmakers instead passed a law in 2012 that forbids state and local governments from using the forecast until the CRC presents a new report to the N.C. General Assembly in 2016.

In this charged atmosphere, CRC and Science Panel members nominated 14 people to fill the four vacancies or to become so-called “ad-hoc” members who would assist the panel in devising the new report. Many on the list are noted marine geologists or coastal engineers. Some, though, have no apparent expertise in coastal geology or engineering or in climate science but are frequent contributors to web sites that question various aspects of climate change or have close ties to groups that fiercely opposed the original sea-level report.

Gorham avoided them and appointed Greg “Rudi” Rudolph, a geologist who heads Carteret County’s Shore Protection Office, to the Science Panel. The three other spots should remain vacant until the panel completes its report, Gorham told his Executive Committee yesterday. He said he saw no need to appoint the ad-hoc members.

“I believe with pretty good certainty that we have all the expertise we need on the panel to produce a good report,” Gorham told the committee.

The committee members agreed with their chairman’s assessment and offered no objections.

Rob Young

Some of the nominees clearly had agendas, Gorham said after the meeting, and he wanted to avoid the media circus that would have surely evolved had any of them been appointed. Gorham would have also likely faced a mutiny by the scientists currently on the panel. Many said they would quit if any of the nominees with credentials they considered questionable were chosen.

Gorham heard the grumblings, but he said they didn’t affect his decision. “I really didn’t do this to avoid a mutiny,” he said. “This was done to respect the CRC and the Science Panel. I want to be known as trying to be fair and to have respect for people’s opinions and the process.”

Rudolph, Gorham said, was the right choice. “He’s a hard worker and he does his homework,” he said. “He met all my criteria.”

The long-time manager of Carteret’s Shore Protection Office, Rudolph is familiar with most of the issues the Science Panel will tackle. “I know a bunch of the people on the Science Panel already, both professionally and personally. Working with them won’t be a problem,” he said. “I think my reputation as a straight shooter will be of help on the Science Panel.”

Rudolph will be a good addition to the panel, said Rob Young, a geologist and panel member who heads the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.

“I think the chairman has come up with a workable compromise that will keep the Science Panel together,” he said. “I was afraid that we were on the verge of losing an institution that was important to the state. He’s walked a fine line to keep us together.”

ATLANTIC BEACH – The state’s Coastal Resources Commission took the first tenuous steps along a seemingly old but tortuous path, but its new chairman charted a different course this time, one that he hopes will make for a smoother ride and lead to a happier destination.

Hoping to avoid the potholes of the past, the commission heeded the urgings of its chairman yesterday and directed its panel of scientific advisors to once again take a look at the contentious issue of sea-level rise and a warming climate, but to limit their assessment this time to how high the ocean might get 30 years in the future and not forecast, as they did the last time, on how high it might be in 2100.

Frank Gorham III

Bob Emory

It was that long-range forecast that got the commission in such hot water – pun intended – the last time it tackled the subject. That was four years ago, and the resulting study, which included a 39-inch ocean rise by the turn of the next century, was revised a number of times but was so controversial that it raised the ire of some coastal developers and local governments and attracted the attention of the legislature, which first wanted to outlaw planning for sea-level rise entirely. After they become the butt of international ridicule, lawmakers instead passed a law in 2012 that forbade state and local governments from using the forecast until the CRC presented a new report to the N.C. General Assembly four years later.

Frank Gorham III wants things to go better this time around. A resident of Wilmington and a property owner on Figure Eight Island, Gorham was appointed last year by Gov. Pat McCrory to lead a commission revamped by the legislature. “Probably the most politically sensitive subject we’re going to deal with is sea level-rise,” he told the commission. “I only get calls about sea-level rise. We want to do this right. We want to be objective and we want to be fair.”

To avoid the scientific uncertainty that comes with trying to forecast what the ocean might do a century from now, Gorham urged the commission to direct its Science Panel, which is made up of volunteer scientists and engineers, to restrict itself to how the sea might behave in the next 30 years and then do follow-up examinations every five years, making adjustments to the forecast as needed. Gorham called the result a “rolling 30-year timetable.”

The state sets its oceanfront setback rules on the average 30-year erosion rate and banks mortgage houses for 30 years, Gorham said. Why not sea-level rise, he asked.

“Whatever we do has to have credibility,” he concluded. “So 30 years is a good place to start.”

Most of the commissioners supported the approach, except for Bob Emory of New Bern who chaired the commission when it undertook the first sea-level rise study. All other similar scientific assessments, he noted, use a 100-year forecast period to account for the long lag time before the ocean responds to a warming climate. The CRC would never set policy on such a long-range prediction but it would provide an opportunity to educate people about what the future might hold, he said.

The commission, Emory suggested, should allow its science advisers to assess future sea-level rise with the same long-range methodologies used in other studies around the world and then base any policy on shorter term forecasts.

“I don’t know why we can’t do both,” he said. “If we limited it to 30 years, the work we do will not have much credibility on the national and global scales.”

The commission voted 9-1 to accept its chairman’s proposal. Emory was the only dissenting vote. Suzanne Dorsey of Wilmington abstained.

After the vote, Gorham urged the commissioners to stick to the script. “I implore everyone to say we made a business decision based on 30 years,” he said. “Let’s stick with that and move on.”

The great majority of climate scientists expects the world’s oceans to rise at an accelerated rate this century as the climate warms. Ocean water expands as it heats up, called thermal expansion, and melting glaciers will add their volume of water to the oceans. How quickly and how much the seas rise would depend on how warm the climate gets and how fast the glaciers melt.

That uncertainty accounts for the wide disparity in sea-level rise predictions beyond the next couple of decades. For its original report, the Science Panel reviewed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific reports and recommended in a draft policy that the state prepare for a sea-level rise of up to 55 inches by 2100, with a 39-inch rise being likely. It forecasts very little change from the historic rate of sea-level rise for the next 30 years, but the rates then accelerate dramatically. Those findings are in line with the results of other reports done around the world.

Recent events may have made those forecasts too conservative, however. Two teams of scientists released papers this week that reached the same conclusion. A significant chunk of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun to disintegrate and, owing to the ice sheet’s peculiar topography — much of it lies below sea level — this process is now unstoppable. The melting of that ice sheet alone, the scientists suggested, could account for a 10-foot rise in global sea level over the next 200 years.

But Pete Peterson won’t worry about that.  He’s a researcher at UNC’s Institute of Marine Sciences and the only member of the Science Panel to attend yesterday’s commission meeting. Thirty years is now his target. “We can do that quickly,” he said. “For 30 years all the forecasts are crunched together. So we won’t have much to do.”

The commission may have opted for the practical approach, Peterson said, but not necessarily the one that will best protect future generations. “I’m maintaining my house, but if I ask my children if they’d be happy if it burned down in 30 years, I think they wouldn’t be,” he said.

Pete Peterson

Rob Young

The effects of a rising sea are already being felt along the nation’s coast, explained Rob Young, a Science Panel member, and are dramatically evident during storms like Hurricane Sandy two years ago.  “I’ve grown more concerned that we’re not doing a good job responding to storm damage, erosion and coastal hazards that we know exist now,” said Young, a geologist who heads the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.

The state, he noted, is preparing to spend $500 million to bridge washed out portions of N.C. 12 on the north end of Hatteras Island. “That part of the island is disintegrating,” Young said. “When we’re doing things like that, the sea-level rise debate is a distraction. The first step in responding wisely is to address the problems we’re having now.”

The first potential bump in the new road on which the commission has embarked will come next month when Gorham chooses people to fill the four vacancies on the Science Panel and the so-called “ad hoc” members who will work with the panel on the new sea-level rise study. Commission and Science Panel members have nominated people for the slots. Some have publicly denied or questioned the existence of climate change. If he chooses any of those candidates, Gorham could have a mutiny on his hands among the scientists on the panel, and other nominees may have misgivings about volunteering their time.

Young hopes that doesn’t happen. “Science Panel members have always done a good job putting aside their business interests or their personal preferences as conservationists and reaching decisions that they thought were best for the state. The panel has been a real service to the state and I hope that continues,” he said.

Gorham said yesterday that he intends to announce his appointments by the end of June so that the Science Panel can start work on the new study. A draft is due to the commission by March 31 next year and a final report to the legislature a year later.

Orrin Pilkey spent his career advocating for beaches around the world.

BEAUFORT — The new research building on the shores of Pivers Island at the Duke Marine Lab commands a stunning view of water. I stood on the second-floor deck eating grilled chicken on a stick and flaky pastry puffs filled with figs and was surrounded by water. There was Beaufort harbor to the left, the ship channel leading to the port in Morehead City on the right, Beaufort Inlet dead ahead and the Atlantic Ocean shimmering on the horizon.

Funny, I thought, as I finished off the third or fourth pastry puff. They named this place with the killer view that’s a stone’s throw from the water after a guy who has devoted his life to studying the world’s coasts and preaching retreat from them.

“If you can see the ocean,” he liked to say, “it can also see you.”

That guy was down in the lobby surrounded by a hundred or more colleagues, former students and other well-wishers who came to this island near Beaufort Sunday for the dedication of the Dr. Orrin H. Pilkey Research Laboratory.

“Hey, pal,” said the honoree, taking a break from shaking hands and having his picture made with someone’s smiling wife, daughter or grandchild. “Have you eaten? I’m hungry.”

The trays on the buffet tables were by then pretty picked over. The one with the pastry puffs was bare.

“You shoulda had those fig things,” I said. “They were tasty.”

“Damn,” Pilkey replied. “Late for supper again.”

I suggested he try the tables on the second floor. The old Bully of the Beach nodded and trudged up the stairs in search of a meal.

He’s almost 80 now, but back in his day Orrin H. Pilkey Jr. was a man to reckon with if you had notions about building high rises along a N.C. beach or were contemplating putting up a seawall to protect a row of beachfront houses. And heaven help you if you happened to work for the Army Corps of Engineers. You were then incompetent or worse.

Soon after joining the faculty in 1965 as Duke University’s first marine geologist, Pilkey began publicly preaching about threading lightly along the strand of sand bordering the ocean, which he warned behaves unpredictably and at times destructively. He delighted in blowing into some beach town to attend a public meeting about some kind of oceanfront development and to kick sand in the faces of developers and mayors with his warning of what happens to buildings perched precariously on stilts and with his advice of caution and retreat.

To reporters who covered such meetings, Pilkey was their go-to guy — always accessible, always willing to patiently explain some obtuse facet of geology or oceanography and, most importantly, always quotable.

For decades, he led the charge for sane beachfront policies in North Carolina. He successfully fought twin jetties at Oregon Inlet on the Outer Banks. His haranguing finally persuaded regulators to ban seawalls and jetties on the beach and he argued persuasively that the threatened lighthouse at Cape Hatteras should be moved to higher ground rather than merely encircled with a steel wall.

He did all this with a smile and a laugh. Pilkey isn’t an imposing man with a thunderous voice and a wicked cackle, as you might expect of a Prophet of Doom. He is, instead, short and round and soft spoken. His full beard, which is standard issue for geologists, is now mostly gray and reinforces the image of a kindly munchkin rather than an ominous Darth Vader.

Along the way and over the years, Pilkey became a national advocate for retreating from the oceanfront, noted his colleague Joe Ramus, and he educated untold millions through dozens of books and hundreds of op-ed columns. Thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, including such heavyweights as National Geographic, Esquire and New York Times Magazine, have featured Pilkey and his teachings about the natural forces that constantly remake beaches.

“Orrin was a pioneer in the application of science in public policy,” said Ramus, a professor emeritus at the marine lab and one of its former directors. “Plus he was no shy wallflower. And he was persistent as hell. Decade after decade, he stayed on message. That message wasn’t what coastal property owners wanted to hear. As a result many hated him.”

Why he became the man so many loved to hate is still somewhat of a mystery to Pilkey. “I had that burning desire to save to the world, I guess,” he said with a shrug.

Well-wishers fill the lobby of the new research lab during its dedication. Photo: Frank Tursi

We were sitting on the back deck of his house off U.S. 70 in Hillsborough some weeks before the dedication. There was not a puddle of water in sight. We were surrounded instead by acres of majestic oaks just budding green. The air was filled with pollen and the melodious chirping of songbirds. Buddy, the family dog, did what Jack Russell terriers do, incessantly retrieving a thrown plastic bone during the entire two-hour interview.

“He’ll get a heart attack before he stops,” Pilkey said, after it became apparent that Buddy had no intention of heeding his master’s repeated entreaties to go find something else to do.

Pilkey noted that he first arrived at the marine lab 50 years ago this year for his job interview. He was working on Sapelo Island off the Georgia coast as a young researcher for the University of Georgia’s Marine Institute. The school didn’t require that he teach and provided a house for him and his wife, Sharlene.

“What a perfect job,” Pilkey said. “I didn’t realize until years later what a good deal that was, but it was too isolated for me.”

Born in New York City in 1934, Pilkey did most of his growing up in Richland, Washington, where his father, an engineer, worked at the Hanford Labs. The top-secret lab was created in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project and produced the plutonium that was used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. For the workers and their families, cancer was a byproduct of helping to end World War II. Pilkey and his brother survived childhood bouts of thyroid cancer.

Moving to the West, with its jumbled, scarred terrain sparked an interest in geology. Pilkey has always been a collector of things – stamps, arrowheads, seashells, rocks, mortars and pestles and even air sickness bags – and as a youngster he was drawn to the orderliness of sediment layers and fossils. He went on to get undergraduate and graduate degrees in geology and a Ph.D. in 1962 from Florida State University.

Pilkey spent the summers during college jumping out of airplanes and otherwise fighting fires for the U.S. Forest Service in Montana. “I used to be very proud of that because I thought we were saving the forest,” he said with a laugh. “Now, of course, I know better.”

The Dr. Orrin H. Pilkey Research Laboratory has a killer waterfront view. Photo: Duke University

He was studying the sediments of the continental shelf off Sapelo Island when the marine lab called. The National Science Foundation was prepared to give the lab its first research vessel, the Eastward, but Duke had to hire geological and chemical oceanographers to work on the ship. “I was the geological oceanographer,” Pilkey said.

During that first visit to the lab, Pilkey went out on the Eastward for a short cruise and promptly got sick. “How embarrassing is that?” he said. “A marine geologist gets sick on his first cruise.”

But Duke hired him anyway.

He didn’t intend to arrive in Durham and step into the spotlight by taking on beach developers. One of his first research trips on the Eastward, however, started to open his eyes. “It was a dull cruise,” he remembered. “It was one of those cruises where you have 10 people but really only need two.”

Pilkey spent most of the time playing the card game hearts with a scientist from the Smithsonian Institution, who explained the effects of seawalls on beaches. Such structures over time tend to destroy the beach, he told Pilkey. Worst of all, he said, the federal government pays for the walls.

“I was outraged by it. It was all right in front of my eyes,” Pilkey said. “That guy died recently, by the way, but then almost everyone I once talked to has died.”

On the bright side, there’s no evidence that Pilkey got sick on that cruise.

That public money is spent on practices that harm or destroy beaches is what fuels Pilkey’s passion, Ramus said. “He’s not ideological,” he said. “He just doesn’t like public money used to encourage recklessness.”

Hurricane Camille, which roared ashore in August 1969 as one of the strongest hurricanes to hit the United States, altered the landscape of the Gulf Coast and Pilkey’s career forever. His parents by then lived on the Mississippi coast, and Pilkey helped them shovel mud out of their living room and salvage what little remained.

Bullhorn in hand, Orrin Pilkey often led tours for the media to highlight some assault on the state’s beaches. Photo: Western Carolina University.

“It was awesome, just awesome. Houses were blown off their stilts and flung sometimes a quarter mile,” Pilkey said. “Seeing the force of the sea was new to me, and it was very impressive.”

The experience led to How to Live With an Island. Published in 1975 with Pilkey’s father as coauthor, the book was the first of many on coastal development. In it, Pilkey set out on the philosophical course that guides him still. Barrier islands, such as those along the N.C. coast, are ever changing, he wrote. The thin ribbons of sand are sculpted and shaped by wind and waves and moved inexorably westward on journeys that take thousands of years. Building permanent structures on such island, Pilkey has said time and time again, is folly. Man’s only logical response is retreat.

“I thought the book was rinky dink,” he said. “I had done it just to work with my father. But we got calls from people wanting to quote something I had written. Imagine that? I became an instant expert.”

The idea that barrier islands are dynamic and changeable was rather new back in 1975. Few geologists were espousing it then, none publicly. The same was true of the destructive effects of seawalls, noted Todd Miller, the founder and executive director of the N.C. Coastal Federation. He’s been involved in just about every fight over coastal policy in the last 30 years.

“Orrin was a voice in the wilderness back in the 1960s when he raised the alarm that seawalls on the oceanfront would kill our beautiful beaches in N.C,” he said. “Today, just about everyone agrees that seawalls should never be allowed along the ocean, and there is a state law that prohibits them. “

The state’s strict setback for buildings along the oceanfront can also be traced to Pilkey.

“I think I’ve accomplished a lot as far as public awareness,” he said, as Buddy took a short break to catch his breathe. “Back in the early days to say we should move houses or let them fall in was unthinkable and radical. It’s not that way anymore. I think I’ve had a major role in making that thinkable.”

Philip Froelich, left, speaks to Stan Riggs, a geologist at East Carolina University, at the dedication. Photo: Frank Tursi

He’s grateful for having worked at Duke, especially when his ideas were considered radical. “There is no way I could have been as forceful as I was if I had worked for a public university,” Pilkey said. “As someone pointed out to me, I would have had a broom closet for an office.”

He knows professors at public universities who have had their research projects audited, their hard drive confiscated and their emails subpoenaed after advocating positions that powerful people disliked.

Pilkey never had to worry about anything like that. As a private university, Duke doesn’t get its money from the state. Chancellor Terry Sanford, a former governor and a future U.S. Senator and presidential candidate, once approached Pilkey at a cocktail party, smiling. “Orrin,” he said, “I got three calls about you this month.”

He turned away and nothing more was ever said.

“I’m very proud of Duke,” said Pilkey, who retired in 1999 and now has the title of “emeritus” before his name. “It says a lot about the university that no one ever told me to shut up.”

That he changed lives says a lot about Orrin Pilkey, noted Philip “Flip” Froelich. “He certainly saved mine,” he said.

Froelich was a junior majoring in chemistry when he dropped out of Duke in 1967, just before his parents pulled him out or the dean threw him out because of flunking grades. He went home to Winston-Salem to work in the shop of his father’s Cadillac dealership. “I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life under cars,” Froelich said.

Someone suggested he go see Pilkey. “I walked into Orrin’s office that first time. He was sitting at his desk behind stacks of papers and books. It was like looking at him through a tunnel,” Froelich remembered. “He had that full beard. It was like talking to Santa Claus.”

The mess that was Pilkey’s office was legendary among his students. One in the mid-1980s had taped this note on a file cabinet: “One blue-cloth, three-ring binder has been lost in this office for… (the numbers one through eight had been crossed out)… years. Can you find it?”

Pilkey suggested that Froelich re-enter Duke and finish his senior year at the marine lab, where Pilkey would watch over him. Froelich went back to school and joined a winter research cruise on the Eastward to the Gulf Stream. “He got on that ship,” Pilkey said. “And once he found the sea, he found himself.”

Froelich got his chemistry degree, much to the astonishment of many, and went on to earn his doctorate in oceanography from Florida State, Pilkey’s alma mater. He recently retired as one of the most distinguished oceanographers in the world.

“I ended up having a successful career and it was all because of Orrin. He picked me up and set me straight,” Froelich said. “There are basically three dozen stories like mine from kids all over North Carolina.”

To show his gratitude, Froelich and his wife, Kathy,donated all of his inheritance, some $2 million, towards the construction of the new building. “It was a no-brainer to name it after Orrin,” he said.

BEAUFORT – Sheldon Whitehouse came to North Carolina this week gathering more facts for his one-man crusade to persuade his colleagues in the U.S. Senate to finally awaken to the dangers of climate change.

He stood on the stern of the Susan Hudson, the Duke Marine Lab’s research ship, as it slowly steamed past the Beaufort waterfront on Taylor Creek. Surrounding him was a gaggle of local scientists, who took turns telling Whitehouse about their work on climate change and the coastal environment.  Wetlands and oyster reefs could disappear, he was told. Groundwater could be contaminated, and the population of krill in the Artic could be so reduced that humpback whales will be in more trouble than they are now.

Whitehouse listened earnestly, nodded at appropriate times and asked a few probing questions. His staff took copious notes. One suspects that much of what he heard Monday will end up in a few of his weekly Senate lectures.

For this Rhode Island Democrat is something of an oddity in America today – the rare politician who cares about climate change, understands the dangers it poses and isn’t afraid to publicly say so. Every week that the 113th Congress has been session – that’s 63 stretched over two years — Whitehouse has taken to the Senate floor for another installment of his “Time to Wake Up” speeches on climate change.

Scientists crowd the stern of the Susan Hudson for a chance to talk with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, right center in red jacket. Photo: Sam Bland

Armed with graphs, charts and photos, he has talked about rising temperatures, about inundation and droughts, about wildfires, about disruptions to the farming and fishing industries, about threats to national security, about acidic oceans, about displaced coastal communities, about the moral imperative of preserving God’s creation.

Whitehouse does it, he says, “hoping that someday spark will hit tinder. “

In every speech, Whitehouse acknowledges the manufactured propaganda churned out by, what he calls, the “climate denial network” that has stymied any real political action. “But the facts speak for themselves,” he told his colleagues on Feb. 12. “The denial position has shown itself to be nonsense; a sham.  Yet, in Congress, we sleepwalk on.  Every day, more and more Americans realize the truth, and they increasingly want this Congress to wake up.  They know that climate change is real.”

Don’t count the N.C. Republicans vying for a seat in that Congress as being among the group of newly aware Americans. In televised debates this week, the four leading GOP contenders for Democrat Kay Hagan’s Senate seat laughed derisively when asked by moderators if climate change was real. They all, of course, responded with emphatic “Nos.” But, then, one of the candidates also said that evolution was a fantasy.

If elected in November, the new Republican senator from North Carolina would be in good company. Sixty-five percent of current Senate Republicans also deny climate change. Over 56 percent of Republicans in the House deny the basic tenets of climate science. What this means is that they have made public statements indicating that they question or reject that climate change is real, is happening now and is caused by human consumption of fossil fuels.

The numbers on the other side of the aisle are a little better. In fairness, though, it should be pointed out that Hagan hasn’t exactly been a proponent for action. She has been criticized for her support of the Keystone XL pipeline, which figures prominently in the climate-change political debate. Though not a denier, Hagan is more of an Obama-style centrist, opting for the President’s “all-of-the-above” approach to energy issues.

Alex Mandela, top, talks to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse about climate change’s potential effects on groundwater. Patrick Kenney, the superintendent of Cape Lookout National Seashore, tells him what might happen at the park. Photos: Sam Bland

So that leaves a few lone wolves, like Sheldon Whitehouse in the Senate and Harry Waxman in the House, barking their warnings.

To collect more ammunition, Whitehouse decided to hit the road during Congress’ Easter recess to learn about the research being done on climate change’s effects and to see what communities are doing to adapt, explained Seth Larson, the senator’s communication’s director. After a day in North Carolina, Whitehouse planned to make stops in South Carolina and Georgia before ending in Miami, Florida.

“His big hope is to get legislation to limit carbon pollution,” Larson said. “He’s hopeful that with the right pressure there will be a window to make that happen.”

Maybe in 2015, Larson said.

Until then, Whitehouse listens to people like Alex Mandela, a hydrologist at East Carolina University. Mandela used his few minutes on the back of the boat to tell the senator what would happen if the sea behaved as many climate scientist expect and rises three feet by the end of the century.  Low-lying land will be flooded, yes, but even those on high ground will have a tough time of it, Mandela said.  Most people along the N.C. coast get their water from wells, but a rising ocean will contaminate those wells with salt water, Mandela said.

Flushing the toilet may also be a problem for those on septic tanks, he said, because a rising water table will flood drain fields.

“If the water table rises and compromises septic system, then water quality will be threatened,” Mandela noted.

Chris Taylor, a fisheries biologist at the NOAA lab on Pivers Island near Beaufort, told Whitehouse about the fish sampling that lab scientists have done at nearby Beaufort Inlet for decades. “We’re seeing a lot more tropical fish coming in, like lionfish and species you see in Florida,” he said. “We know these populations will shift, but it’s these long-term data sets that are telling us that.”

Antonio Rodriguez of UNC’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City described his work of monitoring oyster reefs to see if they will grow fast enough to keep up with a three-foot rise in sea level in 100 years, while Mike Burchell of N.C. State University told of his research on whether wetlands will do the same. Answer to both: Yes, depending on the location and circumstances.

But it was Mike Orbach, the former director of the Duke Marine Lab, who offered the sobering message. “We can’t mitigate a way out of this,” he told Whitehouse as the Susan Hudson made the turn in the creek and headed back to the lab. “The time frames are too long and the scales too great. Even if we all started driving Priuses tomorrow, the sea will rise a meter. We will have to adapt to it.”

Back at the dock, Whitehouse thanked the scientists for joining him on the boat ride. He promised that he will continue pushing for action. “It’s the least I can do,” he said.

No one really how many clams Elmer Willis shipped out of this now ramshackle building in Williston, but it was an economic force and a proud symbol of the region known as Down East. Photo: Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center

WILLISTON – There’s really no telling how many clams and scallops Elmer Willis shipped out of the now derelict cinder block building that sits on the bulge of a sharp curve along U.S. 70 in eastern Carteret County.

“Millions, maybe?” speculates his daughter Nancy Lewis.

Enough, notes Jonathan Robinson, to make Willis Brothers Seafood for decades one of the main employers in this end of the county. “My aunt and uncle worked there,” says Robinson, the chairman of the county commissioners and a former commercial fisherman from down the road in Atlantic. “A lot of people did. Man, you had to see those ladies’ hands a-flyin’ shucking those clams.”

Elmer Willis, The Clam King. Photo: Nancy Lewis Collection, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center

There’s a picture of Willis on the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center web site. He’s fit and smiling and dapper. Arms folded across his chest and dark hair slicked back, Willis looks almost regal. It’s the pose of The Clam King, which is what they called him back in the day.

It’s all gone now, of course. Willis died in a car wreck in 1977. The clam house died with him. The thriving fishing industry that supported them both is now a shadow of itself. All that’s left of that glorious time is the sad hulk of an abandoned building – its roof rotting, its windows gone, its walls obscured by weeds and trees. What was once a proud symbol of a region they call Down East and of the fishing folks who live there is now, frankly, an eyesore.

Karen Willis Amspacher thinks The Clam King and the heritage he represents deserve better.  A native of the Down East community of Harkers Island, she is the director of the museum and a fierce protector of local culture.

“This place was an institution,” Amspacher says as we walk to the back of the old building, through the weeds and across the decades of discarded clam shells that cover the ground. “My hope is that the people of Down East can hold on to it. It may never be a clam house again but we may be able to adapt it to another use.”

A move is afoot to do just that. In the end, it will likely take the Marines and a bunch of ding-batters – local parlance for people who ain’t from around here – to make it happen, but so be it.

The Conservation Fund, which has saved more than seven million acres of land and water all across the country, is trying to buy the old clam house and the  90 or so acres – marsh mostly – that come with it.  The fund is working with the Down East Council, a group of volunteers who are involved in an initiative coordinated by Amspacher called Saltwater Connections. The four-year-old effort aims to protect cultural heritage and sustain livelihoods and natural resources Down East and on Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks.

The fund last week submitted a request for $130,000 to the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund, a state agency that provides grants to preserve ecologically sensitive land. The Marine Corps, explains Justin Boner, may pay the remainder of the $185,000 purchase price for the clam house from a program to prevent development from encroaching on its bases and training areas.

“The Marines are always concerned about tall structures, such as cell towers,” says Boner, the fund’s director of North Carolina real estate.

Fisherman unload bushels of clams onto Willis Brothers dock in the 1940s. Photo: Nancy Lewis Collection, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center

The clam house property, he says, sits under the convergence of three flight paths used by aircraft from the Corps’ air station in Havelock.
If all the pieces fall into place, the fund could own the property by the end of the year. It would then donate it to the county for public use.

No one knows just yet exactly what to do with it. There’s talk of picnic tables and a kayak launch, maybe even a public restroom. There’s not one on U.S. 70 along its 40 or so miles through Down East. The old clam house itself, though, would likely have to come down.

“Hopefully, we’ll be able to develop some public access there,” Robinson says. “It’s the most picturesque spot in the eastern end of the county.”

Right across Williston Creek, the waterfront site commands a sweeping view of Jarrett’s Bay. Historic Davis Island sits on the horizon, where the bay empties into Core Sound. A good pair of young eyes can see the roof of the old hunting lodge above the tree line. The rest of us need binoculars.

Lewis hopes something is done with her Daddy’s old place. She’s 77 now and it pains her to drive by it. She sits a few miles away, on the back porch of her house in Davis. Spread out on the table in front of her or piled in a box at her feet are old family photographs, newspaper articles and other bits and pieces she has collected that tell of a happier time for the old clam house.

In 1960s the clam house was in its prime, selling thousands of clams a week. Photo: Nancy Lewis Collection, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center

“Here, take a look at this,” Lewis says as she hands me a page from a Willis Brothers receipt book from the mid-1940s. The handwritten numbers tell the story: 22,000 clams, 50,000 clams, 78,000 clams, 100,000 clams. That’s for one week.

“There were a lot of clams that went out of that building,” she says. “People just don’t realize it.”

A native of Williston, Willis quit school after the eighth grade to help his father fish commercially. He left for Norfolk where he worked for a time as an engineer on boats, but he came home to stay in 1939, bringing with him a wife – Pearl Smith of Atlantic – and a 2-year-old daughter, Nancy. Another daughter, Beverly, would be born later.

Willis opened a general story on the big curve just past the bridge crossing the creek. It housed the post office, where Pearl was the postmistress for many years. He also opened a boat-building shop near the store and then in the early 1940s, Lewis says, started the seafood business with his brother Wesley, who Willis later bought out.

Clams became the company’s main product after Heinz Soup came a calling. For years, Willis provided every clam that Heinz put in its cans of chowder. Again, to the receipt books: 5,000 gallons of clams were shipped to Heinz’s plant in Pittsburg every week in the mid-1940s. Willis got about $2.20 a gallon.

Gov. Kerr Scott, center, attends one of Elmer Willis’ clambakes. Photo: Nancy Lewis Collection, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center

Soon after Willis signed the Heinz contract, Pearl bought a can of the company’s chowder and served it to Willis one night without telling him what it was.

“Do you know what you’re eating, Elmer?” she finally asked.

“I sure do,” he responded. “It’s vegetable soup.”

“I will always remember that,” Lewis says, still chuckling at the memory. “There were so few clams in that chowder that Daddy thought it was vegetable soup.”

But he kept sending clams to Pittsburg.

He also shipped them to Cleveland, Ohio, which for some odd reason is known as the Clambake Capital of America. Every three days each fall, 100,000 little necks arrived in Cleveland from Williston.

Some of the clams stayed closer to home. Willis sponsored a clambake one fall to raise money for a cafeteria at his daughters’ public school in Smyrna. They became yearly fundraising events for the local schools.

“They were a big deal,” Lewis remembers. “A thousand people would come. I’ve got pictures of governors at the clambakes.”

Nancy Lewis, the daughter of Elmer Willis, is surrounded by memorabilia of her father’s seafood business. Photo: Frank Tursi

Willis also perfected a scallop-shucking machine that he later patented, against Lewis’ advice.  It would be too expensive and too difficult to defend, she thought. “But he just had to have that patent,” she says.

Willis had a heart attack in the 1960s. Lewis visited her father one day in the hospital in Chapel Hill. On a table beside him was a huge, gorgeous flower arrangement from the patent attorneys. “That’s a $65,000 bouquet,” Willis cracked.

After the car accident, Pearl sold the clam house, but the new owners couldn’t keep it going for long.

“A business is sort of in a man’s head,” Lewis explains. “It’s not the buildings. Daddy had a vision in his mind. If the clams were dwindling around here, he’d jump in a car and drive all over to get clams. That’s the way he was.”

The clam house closed, and a fire in the 1990s destroyed the old store and boat works.

All that’s left is a ramshackle building probably beyond saving, but Amspacher will try. “I have to try and save it,” she says. “I’d be happy with one wall that we can paint Elmer’s picture on. But even if it all ends up as a pile of rubble, we have to keep it as a memorial to Elmer.”

The lab soon after it opened on Pivers Island in 1902.

Inside the ground floor of the lab in 1902. Photos: U.S. Fish Commission.

BEAUFORT – The second-oldest federal fisheries laboratory in the country will have to close its doors on Pivers Island near this Carteret County port town if Congress passes President Obama’s 2015 federal budget.

Funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab isn’t included in the president’s $3.9 trillion budget proposal, which was released 10 days ago. The lab opened in 1899 in a house on Front Street in Beaufort, moving to its current location on an island outside town three years later. The NOAA lab in Woods Hole, Mass., which opened in 1882, is the only federally funded fisheries research lab that is older.

The decision to close such a venerable institution wasn’t easy, said Ciaran Clayton, NOAA’s director of communications. “NOAA’s Beaufort Laboratory has conducted valuable fisheries and coastal science for more than 100 years,” she wrote in an email. “However, this aging facility requires infrastructure repairs and improvements exceeding agency budget resources now and for the foreseeable future. The president’s FY2015 budget request addresses this challenge by proposing closure of the lab.”

NOAA would get $5.5 billion under Obama’s budget, a 3.2 percent increase over this year. The budget aims to enhance public safety, economic opportunity and community resiliency, while also making smart investments to better position NOAA for the future, Kathy Sullivan said in a statement yesterday. She was confirmed last week by the U.S. Senate as NOAA administrator.

“It continues efforts to strengthen our oceanic and coastal programs, our internal and extramural programs and our long-range and short-term research investments,” she said of the NOAA budget.

But in its budget request to Obama, NOAA recommended that the lab on Pivers Island be closed and another lab downsized as cost-saving measures.

If the lab closes, it’s expected that the 45 employees would be offered positions at other NOAA labs. Its projects and programs would also move to other labs. Formerly known at the Center for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research, the lab does a wide range of research on how changes in coastal habitats affect marine creatures. Its research also support federal assessments of fish stocks.

The lab seen from the water. Photo: U.S. Fish Commission

Congress rarely passes budgets proposed by presidents. The “PresBud,” as it’s called on Capitol Hill, is really just a president’s suggestions for funding priorities and levels. House and Senate budget committees can use it as a framework when fashioning their budgets, but Congress can totally ignore a president’s wishes when passing a federal budget. In fact, the last two Obama budget proposals that came for a vote in the House or Senate were roundly defeated.

So Gene Huntsman isn’t too worried at the moment that the lab where he spent almost 30 years will shutter its doors. He got excited emails all day yesterday from worried former co-workers. “Some of us older heads are saying ‘Oh, again?’” said Huntsmen, who retired in 1995. “These stories about the lab closing have happened over the years. Sometimes, they’re just hype and sometimes they’re just bologna. But they never come to pass.”

But the story gave him an opportunity to talk about the importance of the lab to Carteret County. Scientists started spending summers in Beaufort in the 1870s to do fisheries research. They came from Johns Hopkins University, then the University of North Carolina and Duke. The lab, first under the U.S. Fish Commission and then the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, became their base of operations. The ties between Duke and the lab became so close that lab in 1935 sold land on Pivers Island to the university for its own marine lab. UNC and N.C. State University now also have marine research centers in the county.

“The NOAA lab is the grandfather of all the other labs,” Huntsmen said. “They wouldn’t be here if the lab wasn’t here.”

Last of two parts

Bill Holman, left, and Ric Taylor stand in front of the old barn at Flyway Farms. Photo: Frank Tursi

KNOTTS ISLAND – Ric Taylor came from Connecticut five years ago to look after the old house, which was showing its age and years of neglect. He’s still not sure why he didn’t get back in the car and go home after taking stock of the place.

“When I got here you couldn’t see the tennis court from here,” Taylor said from the front yard, pointing to the court about 100 feet away.

“You couldn’t even see the shoreline,” he continued, gesturing toward the North Landing River, which was a lot closer. “That’s how overgrown everything was.”

He stops and shakes his head at the memories, before turning around to face the grand, old house. “It was eaten up with termites, and people were walking into the house and taking stuff,” Taylor continued. “I must have been crazy to stay.”

This “island” – it’s really a peninsula – in a far-off corner of Currituck Sound has a way of beguiling folks. Maybe it’s the remoteness or the acres and acres of wide, open spaces.  Maybe it’s the breathtaking view of the river and Back Bay or that nature in all its beauty and fickleness is always close by.

Taylor can’t explain in.

“But, I don’t know if I can leave now,” he said.

The Conservation Fund recently bought the house, the rambling barn and the 425 acres of Flyway Farms from Taylor’s in-laws, Ogden and Mary Reid, for $2.4 million. It was a bargain, noted Bill Holman, who directs the fund’s work in North Carolina. The property appraised for almost twice that amount, he said. The fund plans to sell most of the land to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which will add it to its Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge. The 8,300-acres of water and marsh account for almost two-thirds of Knotts Island. The fund plans to sell the house, barn and seven to 12 acres to a “conservation buyer,” Holman said.

The Corey Lodge was owned by William E. Corey, president of U. S. Steel, and was built around 1924 on Knotts Island. Corey built the 75-foot steel tower visible in the background to see poachers on his property. A fire destroyed the club in 1940. Photo: Knotts Island Scrapebook

The Swan Island Club’s 38-foot power boat “Teal” is shown with club members and a harvest of ducks and geese in 1919. On a return trip from Currituck Courthouse on Nov. 12, 1925, the Teal struck a submerged piling and sank, the men were rescued by a passing schooner. Photo: Knotts Island Scrapebook

“Acquiring this property has long been a goal of the Fish and Wildlife Service and conservation organizations,” he said. “We are very grateful to the Reid family for making it possible.”

Ogden Reid’s daddy, also named Ogden, wouldn’t have had a hard time explaining his affinity for the island and why he built the original house in 1920. The surrounding water and marshes at the time attracted what seemed like endless flocks of ducks and geese, making Currituck Sound one of the finest spots for waterfowl hunting in the world.

By the time the elder Reid arrived, duck hunting and Currituck were almost synonymous. Waterfowl had always been an important part of the region’s history. The very name, Currituck, is derived from an old Indian word for wild geese — Coratank. But the heyday for hunters probably started when old Currituck Inlet, near the Virginia line, closed in 1828. The shallow sound’s salinity dropped, its ecosystems changed and freshwater grasses soon covered its bottom. Ducks and geese followed in numbers that stagger the imagination.

This excerpt from the Southern Planter in 1857 gives us an idea. “Edgar Burroughs, farmer of Princess Anne, on Long Island, Back Bay, hires 20 men to kill waterfowl and deliver them to Norfolk. From the beginning of the season to December 30, 23 kegs of gunpowder and shot in proportion consumed. Waterfowl were brought to Norfolk once a week and piled up in the warehouse of Kemp and Bucky; 15 to 25 barrels were shipped each Wednesday to New York – highest shipped in one week – 31 barrels. Kinds shipped – canvasback, redhead, mallard, black duck, sprigtail (pintail), bullneck (ringnecked duck), baldpate, shoveler, etc., to which may be added a good proportion of wild geese.”

Waterfowl hunting for market became a leading occupation on the sound just after the Civil War and continued until 1918, when federal law made the sale of migratory waterfowl illegal.

By then, Currituck’s ducks were attracting a different breed of men. Starting in 1854 with the Currituck Shooting Club south of Corolla, rich and powerful Northerners built hunting clubs along the sound. Here’s a partial roster: George Gould, the son of Jay Gould, the tycoon who was said to own one of every 10 miles of railroad tracks in the United States; William E. Corey, president of U.S. Steel; George Eastman, the founder of Eastman-Kodak; the Proctors of Proctors & Gamble; the DuPonts; Joseph P. Knapp, publisher of the Ladies Home Journal; and George Hill, president of American Tobacco Co.

Flyway Farms sits on the banks of the North Landing River. That’s the house at the bottom of the photo and the barn at the top. Photo: The Conservation Fund

Al least 43 hunting clubs lined the shores of Back Bay and Currituck Sound in 1927, from the Sandbridge Club way up on North Bay in Virginia to the Dews Island Club south of Coinjock on the mainland in Currituck County. Some consisted of a house in the woods rented by a few friends, but many were sumptuous estates with household staffs, tennis courts and swimming pools.

Ogden Reid, the powerful publisher of the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune, employed as many as 22 people at his Flyway Club. They prepared and served meals, mowed the seven-acre lawn, tended the orchard of 900 peach trees, raised the 500 turkeys, milked the cows and acted  as hunting guides for Reid and his guests.

For decades, Flyway and the other large hunt clubs were major employers in the sparsely populated region, providing steady jobs for local girls like Janet Simons. “My cousin (Beverley Dixon Rainey) and I worked with our other cousins, Linda and Butch Grimstead, during high school holidays at Flyway Club during the early 1960’s,” she wrote on an island web site. “My Uncle Harvey and Aunt Rosa were caretakers then. Beverley and I earned our first ‘real’ money: cleaning, cooking and helping with the Reid children. Daddy took Grandma Grimstead, Aunt Frances, Beverley and I (to) downtown Norfolk shopping. We each purchased a camel hair coat with a raccoon collar and brown high-heel shoes! We were ‘styling!’ Beverley later also went to New York during summers to work at the Reid’s home in New York.”

The household staff lived in the barn, which housed horses, cows and four automobiles on the ground floor and had 11 bedrooms and three baths on the second story. In its day, the barn was a splendid structure but since the Reids stopped coming regularly and the club’s fulltime caretaker died in the 1980s, the old building has been slowly falling down from the rafters.

“It’s a fixer-upper,” Holman admitted.

The great room in the house features exposed wooden beams and a rock fire place. Photo: Knotts Island Scrapebook

Taylor has been doing his part, painting, plastering, replacing rotted boards. “I’m trying to remodel each of the bedrooms to what they could have looked like in the 1920s,” he said in a room with waterfowl prints on the newly painted walls and wooden decoys on the shelves. “It’s been slow, but we’re getting there.”

The house is in better shape. The original burned down on Christmas Eve in 1958. Nelson Rockefeller, then the governor of New York and a Reid family friend, sent his architect to Knotts Island to rebuild it according to original specifications. The house was completed in 1960.

We sat in plushy chairs in the house’s great room with its dark wooden exposed beams and giant rock fireplace. Family photos crowded the tables. Winston Churchill would have felt at home. The British prime minister visited Flyway in 1941 to persuade Reid to support American intervention in the war raging in Europe. Pearl Harbor a few months later made the argument moot.

Herbert Hoover, an old family, visited often to fish. Dwight Eisenhower came during his presidency in the 1950s.

“This is the last of the great family lodges,” Taylor said. “There is a lot of history here, and it’s coming back alive. But there’s still much to do.”

Knotts Island is really a peninsula that hangs from Virginia, top of photo, and separates North Landing River, bottom, from Back Bay. Most of the residents live on the east side of the peninsula. Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge, left, makes up two-thirds of the peninsula. The Currituck Banks stretch down the right side of the picture. Photo: Knotts Island Scrapebook

First of two parts

KNOTTS ISLAND – It’s good to know that there are still some remote places left in North Carolina like this misnamed “island” in a  far-off corner of our coast. It’s even better to know that someone cares enough to save a piece of it and the rich history that comes along with it.

But then, Bill Holman has always been that kind of guy. He has a long pedigree as a protector of North Carolina’s wild and beautiful places, starting more than 30 years ago when he was the first and only environmental lobbyist roaming the halls of the N.C. General Assembly. In those days, he might as well have walked around with a “Kick Me” sign pinned on his back. But Holman gradually wore down the hidebound men who dominated the legislature at the time, persuading them finally to repeal laws that prevented the state from passing environmental rules more stringent than their federal counterparts.  Holman then watched with chagrin decades later as the current crop of lawmakers merrily undid his signature accomplishment. Talk about kicking a fella.

The Knotts Island ferry carries island children to school. Photo: NCDOT

But by then Holman had long left the legislative business, but he didn’t abandon the state’s environment. He headed a state trust fund that provided money to buy ecologically sensitive lands. He took on the thankless task of leading North Carolina’s environmental agency – more thankless these days, I suspect, with federal prosecutors sniffing around — and now Holman directs the Conservation Fund’s work in the state.

That’s what brought him recently to the state ferry dock in Currituck on a bright but chilly winter’s day that hinted of snow. Founded in 1985, the Conservation Fund has protected more than seven million acres of America. Holman was heading across Currituck Sound to nail down the details of saving a few hundred more here in North Carolina.

“We’re very happy to finally secure this property,” Holman told me a little later as the ferry pulled away from the dock on the start of its 45-minute trip across the sound. “The fund has been interested in this property for a long time.”

It announced in December that it had finally bought the 425 acres on Knotts Island, which is really a peninsula that hangs down from Virginia between North Landing River and Back Bay, the northern reaches of the sound. The ferry is the only way to get a car there from North Carolina without first driving it all the way up to Virginia Beach.

William Byrd

The waterfront property that the fund bought has great ecological significance, but it’s the land’s connection to the history of this region that really drew me up here. For Flyway Farms, as the place is majestically called, is the last of the great hunting clubs of Currituck. The farm is one of the few reminders of the days when great wealth and seemingly endless flocks of ducks and geese made the marshes and waterways of this remote part of the state the exclusive playground of the rich and mighty.  Great captains of industry and princes of finance had lodges along the sound. Presidents and prime ministers often joined them. The region had such a gilded reputation that the train that carried the potentates south from Norfolk was called the Millionaire Special.

William Byrd may have been the first of the breed to come this way. A Virginia aristocrat and politician, Byrd apparently enjoyed looking down his long nose at his lesser neighbors in North Carolina. He came to mind as the ferry slowly steamed past duck blinds and around the notorious shoals that so bedeviled Byrd and his pilot in 1728. He had been assigned the job of helping survey the disputed boundary between the two colonies. Byrd later wrote about the experience in what is now a famous book, Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina.  In it, Byrd makes great sport of poking fun at the rubes he encounters, but the book is formal and rather staid compared to the “Secret History,” which Byrd compiled on the spot and had intended just for friends. In it, he tells us what he really thinks.

“This Navigation was so difficult by reason of the perpetual Shoals, that we were often fast aground,” Byrd wrote of his Currituck crossing. “Our Pilot wou’d have been a miserable Man if One half of that Gentleman’s Curses had taken effect.”

Byrd and his cussing companion finally made it to Knotts Island. After slogging ashore through knee-deep mud, they waited in a farmhouse for the surveyors.  Word of their arrival spread through the sparsely settled country, and a small crowd slowly gathered to catch a glimpse of the distinguished visitors.

“Amongst other Spectators came 2 Girls to see us, one of which was very handsome, & the other very willing,” Byrd wrote. “However we only saluted them, & if we committed any Sin at all, it was only in our Hearts. Capt White, a Grandee of Nott’s Island, & Mr. Moss, a Grandee of Princess Ann, made us a visit & helpt to empty our Liquor.”

This is one of the sketches William Byrd’s surveying party did of the boundary between North Carolina and Virginia. Notice  the peninsula that’s labeled “Nots Island.” Source:  Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina

Alas, no booze or babes awaited Holman and me when we arrived on the island. We were greeted by long stretches of two-lane blacktop that coursed past farm fields and modest homes with boats in the front yards, past the small Methodist Church, past the volunteer fire department and the island’s only grocery store.

We took a left on the aptly named Marsh Causeway and entered another world. The seven-mile-long peninsula is really two places. Most of its 2,000 or so residents live on a thin strip of high ground along the east side of the peninsula. Ducks, geese and swans have the rest of it.

Almost two-thirds of the peninsula is within the 8,300-acre Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge. Much of it is open water and marsh, now wearing its amber winter coat and stretching to the horizon on both sides of the causeway, the main road through the refuge.

This land has its own colorful history after the Mackie family started acquiring it in 1716. One of its later owners, Thomas Dixon Jr., grew up on a farm near Shelby, in the state’s foothills, during the Reconstruction. He became a Baptist preacher and a prolific author whose writings glorified the antebellum South; white supremacists are still fond of quoting him. Director D.W. Griffith turned  Dixon’s novel and play The Clansmen into “Birth of a Nation,” a 1915 silent film that is considered a ground-breaking  technical achievement that launched modern filmmaking but is so disgustingly racist that it’s impossible to find on Netflix.

Joseph Knapp feeds pheasants at his house on Knotts Island. Photo: Knotts Island Scrapebook

Joseph P. Knapp, who bought the land from Dixon, was less notorious and more helpful to the ducks and geese. The Brooklyn, N.Y., native fell in love with the marshes and the birds of Knotts Island. A publisher and philanthropist, JP, as he was called, built a palatial estate here and experimented with various techniques to better manage waterfowl. It was on the island, says local folklore, that he started what is now Ducks Unlimited. JP was 86 in 1951 when he died in his sleep in his Manhattan apartment. More than 400 people attended the funeral. He left instructions for his body to carried to little Myock, just across the sound, so that he could be buried near his island home.

The Mackay land changed hands several times after Knapp’s death before the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bought it in 1960 to establish the refuge.

Holman and I pulled off on one of the few wide spots along Marsh Causeway and into a gravel lot. It was empty except for a black Harley Davidson in the corner. A small, elevated boardwalk extended over the marsh. The scenic stop is part of the Charles Kuralt Trail, a self-guided auto tour that snakes through the coastal refuges of North Carolina and southeastern Virginia. It was named to honor our state’s most famous traveler, who wore out six motorhomes taking a generation of TV viewers to the backwaters of America. It was only after Kuralt’s death in 1997 that we learned just how far he wandered off the trail.
“This is a good place to take a look at the refuge and where our property boundaries are,” Holman said as we walked up the boardwalk. “And it’s a pretty day.”

The boardwalk overlooked a portion of Back Bay. Duck blinds dotted the water like little brown islands. Decoys bobbed in front of several.

“They’re wasting their time,” the man in the black motorcycle chaps said as he peered through binoculars toward the hunters. “It’s too nice of a day. Cold and snow tomorrow. That’s when I plan to be out there. The hunting will be better.”

The owner of the Harley turned out to be a local guy, born and raised just across the state line. He comes often to Knotts Islands to hunt, fish or peer through binoculars at those who are.  He was happy to hear that Holman’s outfit has bought old Flyway Farms.

“This place is special,” he said. “It needs to stay that way. It doesn’t need subdivisions and shopping malls. You can go anywhere for those.”

Tuesday: Flyway Farms and the hunting clubs of Currituck

The 2,300-acre Owens’ easement is the latest parcel along the Northeast Cape Fear River that has been preserved by the N.C. Coastal Land Trust. Source: N.C. Coastal Land Trust

WILMINGTON – Two families have preserved more than 2,300 acres of forestland along the Northeast Cape Fear River in northern Pender County, the N.C. Coastal Land Trust announced yesterday.

The property had been a high priority for the land trust since 2002, noted Camilla Herlevich, its founder and executive director.  “Everyone understands that saving land along rivers, lakes and streams means cleaner water for all,” she said. “These particular lands are truly special.”

It was a nice Christmas gift then when the land trust completed purchase of the conservation easement on Dec. 23.

Stretching for five miles on the east side of the river just south of the Duplin County line, the property is marked by numerous high bluffs. Wedged between the river and the state’s Angola Bay Gamelands, the land’s forests have an incredible variety of trees, from longleaf pine and mixed loblolly pines. The pine forests give way to bottomland hardwood wetlands and small ponds as the topography changes.

“Even the appraiser called to tell us it was one of the most beautiful tracts of working forest that he had ever seen,” said Herlevich. 

She won’t say exactly how much the land trust paid for the easement, except to note that it was a six-figure price.  The property appraised at four times the purchase price, Herlevich said. Fred and Alice Stanback of Salisbury, the state’s leading conservation philanthropists, provided all the money for the purchase, she said.

The owners, the Owens and Williams families, joined together to preserve their connections to the land for future generations.  “We are pleased to have worked with the Coastal Land Trust, and proud that the streams, forests and riverfront will be preserved into the future,” said Steven Owens, representative of HVW Legacy Holdings, the family company that owns the property.

Even the appraiser thought the tract was a beautiful example of a working forest. Photo: N.C. Coastal Land Trust

Sometimes called the “East Branch,” the Northeast Cape Fear River flows 130 miles from just south of Mount Olive in Duplin County, past Albertson and Chinquapin in Pender County. It joins the main channel of the Cape Fear at Point Peter, just north of downtown Wilmington.

Palmetto and cypress grow along its banks. Alligators lurk in its waters and pileated woodpeckers nest in its trees. Researchers at the University of North Carolina Wilmington found that the river is home to at least 45 species of fish. Crappie fishing is especially popular along the river, with Prince George Creek, Long Creek, Morgan Creek and Island Creek known as particularly good fishing spots.

No wonder, then, that the Northeast Cape Fear has been a focus for the land trust since 1999, when the Thomas family donated a conservation easement of over 1,200 acres at its Five Eagle Partners Farm. Since then, the land trust has protected another 10 places on the river or its tributaries, primarily in Pender County. The latest purchase brings the total to more than 7,300 acres that the land trust has preserved along the river.

The land trust has the right idea, noted Mike Giles, a coastal advocate for the N.C. Coastal Federation who has been among the leaders in the fight to stop Titan America from building a cement plant along the river north of Wilmington.  “The land trust’s preservation efforts along the river provide an alternate vision of what the river can be, rather than the industrial wasteland envisioned by Titan,” he said.

New Hanover County officials should also take note, Giles said. They are currently working on a long-range, comprehensive plan and economic strategy for the county, he noted. “They could include utilizing those unique river resources in a positive way while promoting a growing and sustainable economy,” Giles said.

BEAUFORT – The latest skirmish in the ongoing Sand Wars is being waged on unfamiliar terrain and pits a new opponent against an unusual alliance of adversaries.  

Though the first shots have already been fired, it all breaks out in the open 6 p.m. today at a public meeting at the Duke Marine Lab on Pivers Island over a proposed federal dredging plan for the Morehead City harbor.

Pat Kenney

For all the billions of grains of silica along the 320 miles of N.C. coastline, getting quality sand to widen beaches so as to protect the buildings along them from erosion, storms and a rising sea is maddingly difficult and frighteningly expensive. Once that sand is found, people then tend to fight over it. Seaside squabbles over who gets that sand and who pays for it have erupted over a wide front, from the mouth of the Cape Fear to the wind-swept strands of the Outer Banks. Combatants have included beach town mayors, federal engineers, taxpayers, scientists, bird lovers and turtle watchers.

The newest fight was ignited, as these things often are, by the Army Corps of Engineers, which has proposed a new 20-year dredging plan for the Morehead City harbor, Beaufort Inlet and the channel that connects the two. The Corps has been dredging these places for more than a century. Since 1986, it has used some of the resulting sand to widen the beach at nearby Atlantic Beach in order to protect the houses, hotels and roads of one of the oldest beach towns in North Carolina.

The relationship between the Corps and the town and Carteret County has had its ups and downs over the years, but everybody was more or less happy with the current arrangement. Then, the Corps released a draft of its new plan late last year. It proposes for the first time placing sand from the channel dredging, not only on Atlantic Beach, but also across the inlet on Shackleford Banks.  

Part of Cape Lookout National Seashore, Shackleford is 19 miles of nothing – no houses, no roads, no motels, no condos, no people.  It’s what makes the island so special. It has gorgeous sand dunes, ancient maritime forests with gnarled live oaks, deserted beaches, a herd of wild horse and a colorful history that includes the famed whaling port of Diamond City.

The western end of the island that abuts the inlet also has an erosion rate that in recent years has exceeded more than 100 feet a year, according to county surveys. Marine navigation lights that a few years ago were in the dunes are now at the water’s edge.

The map shows Shackleford Banks in relationship to Morehead City and Atlantic Beach.

The survey of the west end of Shackleford Banks shows the location of the shoreline at high tide in 2009 (yellow line), in April 2013 (red), in June 2013 (green) and in August 2013 (orange). The green square is the location of the range marker light. Source: NPS

Pat Kenney doesn’t think he can just sit idly by and watch the end of an island he’s charged to protect wash into the ocean. “We’re not taking this decision lightly,” said Kenney, the superintendent of the seashore. “But as managers, we’re always looking for options. You hate to walk away from any option you may need in the future.”

That’s why the National Park Service, which manages the seashore, asked the Corps in 2010 to include Shackleford in its long-range dredging plan. The Corps agreed and made Shackleford part of its preferred alternative, suggesting that about 40 percent of the sand dredged from the channel be placed there. The park, the plan notes, has the option of refusing when the time comes.

No decision has been made on whether the sand would actually be used, Kenney maintained. “But if we’re not included in this process it could be 20 years before we get another opportunity,” he said.

Having another possible suitor for the sand triggers jitters across the inlet in Atlantic Beach, which has come to depend on dredged sand. Pipes from the Corps’ dredging in 2011 spewed about 1.2 million cubic yards of sand from the state park at Fort Macon at the tip of Atlantic Beach to the Circle in the middle of town. That’s about 200,000 dump truck loads. About 600,000 cubic yards are scheduled to be spread along the town’s beach this year.

Trace Cooper, the mayor of Atlantic Beach, admits that he’s in this fight for selfish reasons. “This is a fight about sand,” he said. “My role as mayor is to protect the homes at Atlantic Beach and make sure we have good beaches for tourists. I think there’s a distinction between protecting a fully developed island and one that’s managed as a national wildlife area.”

Greg “Rudi” Rudolph, as manager of the county’s Shore Protection Office, is a seasoned sand warrior. He doesn’t relish picking a fight with a national park, but there’s big money involved. The county, Rudolph explained, is devising a beach re-nourishment plan for Atlantic Beach and all the other towns on Bogue Banks. That plan assumes that the Corps’ dredged sand will fortify much of Atlantic Beach. If even 40 percent of it goes someplace else, he said, the county will have to make up the shortfall. That will cost millions of dollars, Rudolph said. “We’d be screwed,” he said. “It would wreak havoc with our engineering and economics.”

The county and Atlantic Beach now pay next to nothing for the sand.

Trace Cooper

“We don’t want to make Shackleford Banks the red herring just to cover our butts,” Rudolph said, “but at the end of the day this is about saving our butts.”

With so much at stake, the town and county have gone on an early offensive. Lawyers have been hired and a public relations campaign launched with its obligatory web site.  Mailings have been sent out, and “Keep Shack Wild” signs have sprouted up along roadsides and are particularly prevalent along U.S. 70 and Harkers Island Road in the eastern end of the county. Kenney thinks they were put there for his benefit. He drives the roads every day from his home in Beaufort to the park’s headquarters at the end of Harkers Island.

Opponents of the Corps’ plan have also reached out to unlikely allies. They’ve put aside old differences with scientists who have been critical of re-nourishment projects on Bogue Banks in the past and urged them to speak out against the plan.

“It’s not really our place to speak to the natural resource issues on Shackleford,” Rudolph explained a little sheepishly. “So we have asked others who are more knowledgeable.”

Certainly the most famous of these strange bedfellows is Orrin Pilkey. The esteemed geology professor at Duke University is an old war horse who has railed for decades against over-development of the state’s beaches.  He led media tours in 2005 of a botched re-nourishment project that littered a section of Atlantic Beach in mud balls.

Pilkey appreciates the irony of now coming to the town’s defense, but his love of Shackleford, where he has led hundreds of graduate students on spirited jaunts through the dunes and along the beach, demands it.

“I’m very distressed by the plan,” he said. “This is very serious because we see the park service backing away from its very courageous policy of letting nature have its way.”

The navigational range finder that was in the sand dunes at the tip of Shackleford Banks a few years ago is now in the water. Photo: NPS

The Keep Shack Wild web site also makes much of this apparent backpedaling.  They are all talking here of Section 4.8.1.1 of the 2006 park service policies regarding shorelines and barrier islands. It says:

“Natural shoreline processes (such as erosion, deposition, dune formation, overwash, inlet formation, and shoreline migration) will be allowed to continue without interference. Where human activities or structures have altered the nature or rate of natural shoreline processes, the Service will, in consultation with appropriate state and federal agencies, investigate alternatives for mitigating the effects of such activities or structures and for restoring natural conditions…”

The park service, Kenney said, maintains that the accelerated erosion at the tip of Shackleford isn’t natural. “There is science to support the contention that the erosion rate at the end of the island is due to the dredging of the inlet,” he said. “That’s why we want to be considered.”

Rudolph, a geologist himself, doesn’t disagree. Shackleford, he speculates, has continued its slow migration south and west, as barrier islands along our coast tend to do.  Its western tip is now at the edge of the deep shipping channel maintained by the Corps. It has nowhere to go but in the ditch, Rudolph said.

The Corps recognizes that reality by proposing to put the dredged sand not on the island’s tip where it would quickly disappear but farther up the beach or just offshore. In theory, natural currents would then move the sand towards the end of the island.

“But depositing sand on Shackleford doesn’t solve the problem,” Rudolph says. “Nothing in the plan addresses the ultimate cause of the erosion.”

Pilkey isn’t so sure that dredging is the culprit. “It is absolutely normal. The inlet goes back and forth. What we’re seeing is typical,” he said. “Yeah, so the range finders are almost in the water. So what?”

Charles “Pete” Peterson would ask the same question. He is a researcher and biologist at the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City. A resident of Bogue Banks, Peterson was vocal in his criticism of re-nourishment projects a decade ago that dumped what he thought was inferior sand on the island’s beaches.

Pete Peterson

Putting sand – even the good stuff – on Shackleford provides no natural benefits, he said. Allowing the island’s end to erode – even if dredging is the ultimate cause – would.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right, and the cure is likely worse than the disease,” Peterson said. “That end of Shackleford is a breeding area for shore birds, and it still has active, healthy dunes. Having that as a mobile point is providing habitats. It would allow shoals to form where birds feed. It represents critical habitat that we don’t have much of. It forms a unique complex. That system as a whole is more valuable than the separate parts.”

Kenney concedes that those are all good points that will be considered during the public review process.  “That’s why we have this process,” he said, “but understand that I’m not trying to counter the loss of little bits and pieces of the island. I’m trying to hang on to an option for a future I don’t know.”

Gird for fight, then, Rudolph warns. “It is Sand Wars,” he said. “It’s about winning and losing at the end of the day. And we will bring all our resources to bear.”

As one year ends and another begins, it’s time to step back and take stock. At Coastal Review Online that means reviewing what I think were the top stories of the more than 240 that appeared here in 2013.

Some of the stories on my Top 10 list made waves; others caused a few ripples. A few went beyond the headlines to explore important topics in depth. I chose some simply because they were good reads or slightly offbeat.

A 250-acre tract in Pamlico County was completely cleared, and activists worry what that means the future of wetlands protection. Photo: Rick Dove

As I culled through the stories, though, a theme quickly emerged. Many of those on the top of the list explore the inherent conflict that exists between protecting our coastal environment and the remaking of our state government to be smaller, less reliant on rules and regulations and more focused on jobs and economic development. A new Republican governor and GOP majorities in the state legislature have cut budgets, eliminated rules and refashioned the state’s major environmental agency to be more, in their words, “customer friendly.” How they did that while still upholding their constitutional duty to protect the state’s natural resources was at the heart of stories about returned federal grants and wetland protections.

Legislative reporting was an important part of the news service while the N.C. General Assembly was in session. Our coverage of environmental bills also focused sharply on the conflicts between political philosophy and constitutional obligation.

Though it’s still unclear how well limited government more intent on creating jobs will protect our environment, the stories start to provide an answer. You can expect the topic to continue to be an important focus of our reporting this year

The Top 10

1. State Declines $600K in Federal Grants, Sept. 23

No story we did last year received more statewide attention than the one we broke about the state’s refusal of almost $600,000 in federal grants to strengthen its wetlands program and to monitor streams in the central Piedmont where fracking for natural gas is likely to occur. Most daily newspapers and large TV stations in the state did their own versions after our story broke. So did major Internet sites, such as Salon, the Huffington Post and Grist. The story even inspired an online petition demanding that the state ask for the money back.

It didn’t. State officials maintain that the grants no longer meet the “core” mission of restructured environmental agencies and that they can do work themselves if necessary without federal help, though the state originally applied for the grants.

The hot-button issue of fracking was certainly one reason why the story had such statewide traction. The News & Observer, in an editorial that prominently credited us for breaking the story, hit upon what I think is the larger reason: Returning the grants was the first indication of the new administration’s commitment to environmental protection.

2. Pamlico Land Clearing Raises Concerns, Oct. 3

This is another story we broke. Though it didn’t get much play across the state, the story raised a fuss in Pamlico County and stirred the local government to action.

A Midwest grain farmer bought several thousand acres near the Neuse River and cleared several hundred for farming. No wetland permits were needed because state and federal agencies charged with protecting wetlands decided none was present.

Local farmers and real-estate agents, knowing how wet the land can get, found that hard to believe.  They took their case to the county commissioners, who wanted answers from the permitting agencies and began the process of fashioning a local ordinance that would require that the county be notified before large-scale land clearing is done in the future. We covered that story as well.

3. Can the Coast Still Be Protected?, Feb. 15

We were able to break the first two stories because we’re in the loop. As an environmental organization we often hear things before others do. We broke this story because we know things.

The legislature was considering a severe remake of the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission that we knew would raise alarms at the federal agency that supports the state’s coastal-management program. We broke the story that the changes, if approved, would likely threaten the millions of dollars the state gets each year in federal grants for its coastal program.

Worried about what loss of federal money would do to the program, coastal legislators forced the bill to be pulled. It was later modified and passed.

4. Bill Guts Safeguards for Terminal Groins, May 15

We led the reporting on a bill that would have removed most of the environmental and financial safeguards legislators put in place in 2012 when they lifted the ban on small jetties along the beach. Proponents of these so-called terminal groins found that building them would be difficult with the restrictions in place. So they lobbied legislators to remove them.

Publicity about the bill slowed it down and triggered the opposition of Gov. Pat McCrory. A much more moderate version eventually passed as part of the state budget.

Plants like this one in Ahoskie will turn trees from Eastern North Carolina into pellets that will power European utilities.

5. Are Wood Pellets Really Green?, Jan. 8-11

This four-part series explained the policies and science behind the use of wood pellets to generate electricity. It remains the fullest exploration of the subject published in the state.  

Throughout the year we also followed plans at the state ports to ship pellets made from Eastern N.C. trees to utility companies in Europe and the changing overseas’ policies that will influence the development of this emerging issue.

Expect more of these types of in-depth stories about topical issues in the new year.

6. Bad Moon Arising Over State’s Wetlands?, Dec. 17-18

This was another series of stories that stepped back from the headlines to delve deeper into breaking news.  Brad Rich, an experienced reporter who has longed covered coastal environmental issues, explained whether a series of policy decisions made by new administrators of state environmental agencies are indicators of how wetlands will be protected in the future.

7. News Service Takes Next Logical Step, Sept. 5

The N.C. Press Association, the state’s only professional journalism trade organization, accepted Coastal Review Online’s application for membership. This was big news for us because it helped mark us as a legitimate news outlet.

Despite its connection to a well-known environmental advocacy group, the news service has tried hard to meet journalistic standards of fairness and balance. Membership in the association proves that we generally met those standards.

“We saw stories that were objective and could appear anywhere,” Beth Grace, the association’s executive director, said at the time after reviewing our archives. “We got over our fears fast. We liked that you have a focus of coverage, but you don’t have a mindset.”

That made an old newsman like me smile.

Bleached keyhole urchins, better known as sand dollars, covered the winter beach on Bear Island. Photo: Sam Bland

8. Our Coast: Bear Island in the Winter, Jan. 31

“Our Coast” is an ongoing series that highlights places where people can go to experience the coast’s natural beauty.  Sam Bland, the retired superintendent of Bear Island State Park near Swansboro and now the N.C. Coastal Federation’s naturalist, has written many of the “Our Coast” features. Unlike most of our writers, Sam isn’t a professional, but as his winter walk along the beach as Bear Island shows he has a knack for writing and brings to the task a deep knowledge of the nature of the coast.

Sam, a native of Carteret County, often sprinkles his stories with personal experiences, like he did in his account of gigging for flounder. Our readers seem to appreciate it.

9. There’s No Classroom Like the One Outdoors,   Nov. 25-26

This two-part series illustrates how the federation’s educational philosophy of taking kids outside to learn about the coastal environment fits into new research that shows that kids have more meaningful learning experiences when they get out of the classroom.  

10. Jockey’s Ridge: Saving the Giant, Feb, 21; Our Coast: A Tour of N.C. 12, June 12-13

These were among my favorite stories of 2013. I couldn’t decide between them for the final spot on the list. So I declared a tie. As editor, I can do that, you know.

The first story is about the late Carolista Flecther Baum, who 40 years ago last year stepped out in front of bulldozers to start a movement to save the highest sand dune on the East Coast. The dune is now preserved as a state park. I’m a sucker for historical stories, especially those that show that the actions of one person can indeed change history.

I’m also partial to offbeat stories, like our travelogue of sorts that takes readers on a guided tour of battered N.C 12 on the Outer Banks.  Nowhere on the East Coast are the effects of a rising sea more apparent than along a 25-mile ribbon of asphalt on Bodie and Hatteras islands. All it takes is a car to see the future of America’s barrier islands. This story tells you what to look for. 

MOREHEAD CITY – The state next year will eliminate 41 sites along coastal rivers and sounds from its program that monitors water quality for swimming because of cuts in a federal grant.

The N.C. Shellfish Sanitation and Recreation Water Quality Section in Morehead City won’t sample any sites next year in the Neuse and Pamlico rivers, Pantego Creek near Belhaven, Wilson’s Bay in Onslow County, Swan Quarter Bay in Hyde County, Vandemere Creek in Pamlico County and in the tributaries of Albemarle Sound.

Louis Daniel, the director of the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries, sent a letter last week to county health directors, town managers and directors of summer camps in the affected areas notifying them of what he called the “temporary suspension” of sampling. The sampling program is part of the division.

The program had to scale back its monitoring after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cut about $22,000 in an annual grant that supports the sampling, said J.D. Potts, who heads the sampling program. EPA has historically given the state about $305,000 for the program, which tests 240 swimming areas in the ocean, sounds, bays and rivers on the coast. The grant was cut to $283,000 for next year, Potts said.

“The sites we chose to suspend are the ones with low usage,” he explained, “but they are the sites that require the most fuel t to sample. That’s what makes those areas more expensive to sample.”

Started in 1996, the monitoring program tests for bacterial contamination at popular swimming areas along the coast and posts warning signs when bacteria levels exceed the standard considered safe for bodily contact. Swimming in polluted water exposes people to pathogens that can cause gastrointestinal illness, diarrhea, vomiting, skin rashes and ear, eye and staph infections.

The 100 most popular swimming areas, which include all testing sites along the ocean and the most-used sites in the sounds and rivers, will still be tested weekly during the spring and summer next year, Potts said. The remaining sites are tested at least twice a month during the swimming season. Testing is less frequent at all sites during other times of the year. 

Potts knows that a number of summer camps are on the Neuse and Pamlico rivers, but the campers, he said, don’t normally swim in the rivers. Most of the camps have pools or chlorinated lakes for swimming, Potts said. Contact with river water is incidental, such as when a camper gets in or out of a kayak or canoe, he said.

Directors of several camps didn’t return phone calls asking for comments.

As in other states, the N.C.  sampling program expanded after Congress passed the BEACH act in 2000. The law created the EPA grant program, which has paid more than $110 million to states and U.S territories for water-quality testing at swimming beaches. EPA didn’t include the $10 million in grant money in its budget for this fiscal year, but it was carried over in the continuing budget resolution passed by Congress. Some of the money, though, was cut along with all federal funding as part of the so-called sequester.

Potts doesn’t think EPA included the grant money in its budget for the next fiscal year. The grant pays the salaries of three staff members, he said, and half the salaries of two others. If the federal grant disappears and the N.C. General Assembly doesn’t replace it with an increased state appropriation, Potts has said that he would be forced to reduce testing to just the 100 most popular swimming areas.

RALEIGH – Saying they don’t need the money to meet their new mission, state environmental officials recently turned down almost $600,000 in federal grants. The money would have been used to set up a network of sites to begin testing streams in the Piedmont where natural gas production is likely to occur and to establish a long-term planning and monitoring program to protect wetlands.

The N.C. Division of Water Resources declined the two Wetlands Program Development Grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, though the state had applied for them and was notified in June that the money would be distributed later this year.

It’s the first time a state in EPA’s Southeast region has refused a grant since the program started in 1996, an agency spokesperson in Atlanta said. North Carolina could be the only state in the country to ever decline the grants.

The state decided to turn the money down, noted Tom Reeder, the division’s director, because it isn’t needed to meet the division’s revamped mission set out by its new boss, John Skvarla.

John Skvarla

Tom Reeder

Appointed by Gov. Pat McCrory, Skvarla this year took over as head of the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources, or DENR. Reeder’s division is part of the department.

“Secretary Skvarla has emphasized on numerous occasions since he arrived at DENR that the department will diligently comply with both the letter and spirit of all federal and state laws, regulations and mandates that the division is tasked to implement,” Reeder explained. “Quite simply, the grants were not needed for the division to meet our core mission. We will diligently meet our mandates under state and federal law, and these grants aren’t needed to do that. We’re simply slimming down.”

Critics, however, note that the almost $223,000 grant to collect basic water-quality data in streams in the central Piedmont where hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas could take place was a recommendation in the department’s 2012 study of gas and oil production in the state.

“Not doing that is falling through on what was a key recommendation in that state report,” said Robin Smith, who left DENR as an assistant secretary after McCrory’s election last year. “Collecting that sort of baseline data has wide support on the new energy commission and in the legislature.”

The grant would have set up a network of testing sites to collect information, such as water temperature, pH and chemistry, and to survey the animals that live in the streams before fracking occurs, explained Peter Benjamin, the field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Raleigh. The service, the U.S. Geological Survey and the N.C. Department of Transportation were partners with the division in the grant.

“The intent was to get better baseline information so that we can anticipate the negative developments that could occur and better assess those effects and plan a better response to them,” Benjamin said.

He said he was surprised when he learned that the state had turned the grant down. “We just learned about it and we have not gotten any information about any of the circumstances behind the decision,” Benjamin said late last week. “We still want the work to be done, but we’ll have to regroup and find some other avenue of funding.”

Reeder noted that the N.C. Division of Energy, Mineral and Land Resources, another DENR division, will devise fracking rules.

“My current understanding is that the comprehensive rules package that will allow fracking in N.C. will require the permittee to develop baseline groundwater quality data in the area where their fracking is to be conducted, before they are allowed to commence their operations,” he wrote in an email.  “So that serves to further illustrate my point that these grants were not needed for the division to be able to perform its core mission.”

Molly Diggins

The fracking grant, though, would have established a network to test the quality of streams, rivers and other surface waters and not set up underground sites to monitor groundwater.

Turning down the fracking grant fits a disturbing pattern, noted Molly Diggins, state director of the N.C. Sierra Club.  “This is just the latest example of what appears to be an intentional effort to starve DENR of resources,” she said. “This fits into a pattern where the administration and the legislature seem to continually hamstring the agency from doing its job.  Now, the McCrory administration has turned down funding that would help communities facing fracking to get information about water-quality impacts.”

Declining the almost $360,000 for wetlands planning and monitoring means the end of a program that allowed the state to meet its obligations under federal law to protect wetlands, said John Dorney, who started the so-called Program Development Unit  in the mid-1990s and retired two years ago after more than 30 years in state government.

The program subsisted mostly on these EPA grants, having gotten at least two dozen of them totaling about $10 million. It used that money, Dorney said, on a variety of projects that provided the science and technical assistance for the state to better protect its wetlands.  He provided a long list of program accomplishments, which to the uninitiated sound wonky and esoteric. A sampling:

• Determining the regulatory success of wetland, stream and buffer mitigation
• Development of a database to track mitigation sites
• Stream mapping
• Developing and refining wetland monitoring protocols
• Mapping and assessing isolated wetlands
• Training field staff

It all sounds rather dull, Dorney knows, but he said almost all the projects gave the state the science and technical expertise needed to protect its wetlands. “Most things were integral to make sure that we had the policies in place and the standards in place for the wetlands program,” he said. “The whole purpose of the group was to apply research to figure how to improve the wetlands.”

A scientist sets up monitoring equipment in a wetland. Photo: EPA

Dorney’s shop was highly regarded by EPA, the agency spokesman noted, and many of its projects were held up as models for other states to follow.

The new grant was to put the unit on firmer, longer-term, financial footing, but it will disappear when two existing EPA grants are completed in the next year or two, Reeder said. The six employees working in the program, he said, have been or will be offered new jobs within DENR.

Refusing the grants doesn’t mean the state is reneging on its responsibilities to protect wetlands, Reeder emphasized. ” I can say without a doubt, that the State of North Carolina did not need to accept and execute either of the federal grants that we recently returned to EPA in order to continue to … adequately protect wetlands within the state,” he wrote in an email. “That is why the grants were returned.”

Reeder will find it hard to meet that pledge without the type of applied science and expertise that the wetland program provided, said Dorney, who is rather philosophical about the death of his professional life’s work.

“I was around for many changes in governors. Every time there’s a change in governors, there’s a change in policy. That’s democracy. So I don’t’ take offense to a change in policy,” he said. “The bigger issue is to take applied science and make the programs better. That’s not going to happen now. How are the programs going to improve? No one will be doing the science and planning to make that happen.”

MOREHEAD CITY – The state agency that regulates air pollution will hold a public hearing on a controversial proposal to use a highly toxic gas to fumigate logs at the state port here.

“The Division of Air Quality has received numerous messages from citizens in the Morehead City area about the proposed fumigation facility at the state port,” Sheila Holman, the division director, said yesterday in announcing the decision to hold a hearing.  “We appreciate those concerns and will make sure that the public has opportunities to review plans for the facility and the draft air quality permit, when available.”

No date or specific meeting location has been set, but Holman said the division will give the public 30 days’ notice with details about the meeting and the draft permit for the facility.

Royal Fumigation, also known as Royal Pest Solutions, applied in June for an air-quality permit to fumigate logs that would be exported from the port. The company proposes to use methyl bromide gas to treat logs covered by tarps. After treatment, the tarps would be lifted and the gas would escape into the atmosphere.

Methyl bromide is widely used in agriculture and industry to kills insects, weeds and other pests. For example, strawberry growers in California use it extensively to fumigate fields before planting, and it has been used for decades to kill pests in commodities such as tobacco and wood before shipping them overseas.

Workers prepare a strawberry field in California for fumigation with methyl bromide. Photo: USDA

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies methyl bromide as a hazardous air pollutant, or HAP. Facilities that could emit 10 tons a year of any HAP or 25 tons a year of any combination of HAPs must receive a federal air permit. The proposed fumigation facility at the state port could emit as much as 140 tons of methyl bromide a year.

Though kelp and algae naturally produce small amounts of methyl bromide in the ocean, the odorless and colorless gas is highly toxic in concentration, according to the EPA. Studies indicate that short-term inhalation of methyl bromide can cause severe lung damage. Chronic exposure can lead to neurological effects in humans.  Those who apply the gas are most at risk.

But it’s methyl bromide’s effects on the ozone layer that got it banned in the United States in 2005. Like the more famous trichlorofluoromethane, or freon-11, methyl bromide has shown to be adept at destroying the ozone layer, which absorbs most of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. And like freon-11, the gas was banned under the federal Clean Air Act and the terms of an international treaty that the United States and almost 200 other countries have signed.

Since the ban went into effect, the EPA has allowed uses of methyl bromide under what it calls “critical-use exemptions.” There is also a “quarantine and pre-shipment” exemption to allow methyl bromide to be used to fumigate commodities, like logs, that are leaving or entering the country to kill non-native pests.

The number of exemptions and amount of permitted methyl bromide has decreased steadily since the ban was put into place and viable alternatives developed, according to figures supplied by EPA. Seventeen industrial sectors qualified for exemptions in 2005, the agency said. That’s now down to four: commodities, strawberry growers, ham producers and food facilities. During that time, the amount of methyl bromide authorized for critical uses has declined from about 8,442 to 609 tons.

Such numbers would have brought little comfort to the people who showed up for a public meeting last week to hear port officials talk about their plans for the Morehead port.  Fumigation raised a stink.

Jim Willis of Atlantic Beach, known as “Capt. Jim,” finished to rousing applause when he warned port officials: “You need to withdraw this fumigation plan now. Otherwise, we will mobilize against you tomorrow.”

Jeff Miles

Dick Bierly

It didn’t take much longer than that. By the weekend, Nelson Owens of Beaufort was circulating an online petition opposed to the fumigation plan. He said he was getting 200 signatures a day. Town managers in Morehead City and Beaufort were asking the state about a public hearing on the proposed permit. So was State Rep. Pat McElraft of Emerald Isle.

Jeff Miles, the acting executive director of the N.C. State Ports Authority, assured people at the meeting last week that ports was with them. “The effects on the environment and human health are concerns we share,” he said. “I can’t speak more sincerely about how we want to be a good partner with the community. We don’t want to do anything to negatively affect your lifestyle, harm the environment or be unsafe.”

He noted that the fumigation proposal was still “theoretical,” and that the ports authority had asked the Division of Air Quality to produce a report on methyl bromide’s environmental and health effects.  “We’re relying on regulators to give this a thorough scrubbing before we make a recommendation,” Miles said. “We haven’t committed to doing this, but we are committed to doing this safely.”

He said he would share the report with the public.

Miles didn’t mention at the time that Royal Fumigation had already submitted a permit application. He acknowledged that later after someone in the audience brought it up.

A spokesman for the Division of Air Quality, after checking with the division’s director and deputy director, said that the division hasn’t received a formal request from ports for a report on methyl bromide.

A public hearing on the permit is the proper course, noted Dick Bierly. He’s he president of the Clean County Coalition, a group in Carteret County that formed two years ago to successfully lead the opposition against a proposed sulfur smelter at the Morehead port.

“We are grateful that DAQ will schedule a public hearing. This provides time to carefully look at the plans of the port and consider alternatives to the fumigation plan for which they asked Royal to seek a permit,” said Bierly, who is also president of the N.C. Coastal Federation. “Once again, the port authority launches a plan without consulting local officials.”

The division is still analyzing the permit application and has requested more information from Royal Fumigation. It will use that information – along with an analysis of comparable facilities in other states – to develop a draft permit for public review. That process could take several months.

Royal Fumigation may need other state and federal permits to operate, depending on the scope of the project.

The storage dome and other infrastructure for the wood pellets would be built in the lower right corner of the port.

MOREHEAD CITY – They had a public meeting here Wednesday about the state’s plans to ship wood pellets – they really do look like rabbit food — made from N.C. trees to England, where they will be fed into the maws of power company boilers. They talked for almost two hours about storage domes and conveyer systems, about railroad cars and cargo ships, about dust suppression and fire extinguishing.

No one, however, mentioned the 300-pound gorilla that lurks across the Atlantic and could decide, more than all the blueprints and well-laid plans, the future of wood pellets here in North Carolina.

The Carteret County and Morehead City commissioners called the meeting to give officials at the N.C. State Ports Authority an opportunity to update people about their plans to build a shipping and storage facility for wood pellets at the port.

Those were once grand plans, indeed. When first revealed last fall, the project called for a $200 million investment at the ports here and in Wilmington. Four domes, each 150 feet high, would grace the Morehead waterfront at the port and likely become convenient landmarks for offshore boaters finding their way to Beaufort Inlet. The domes would hold more than a million tons of pellets brought there by trains from private plants scattered throughout the coastal plain that would be busily compressing trees into pellets. Train traffic down the single line through the middle of Morehead would quadruple, raising fears about summertime logjams of cars full of tourists blocked from the beaches by lumbering locomotives and their tails of squealing stock.

Jeff Miles

“The initial estimate of the market was significantly overstated,” Jeff Miles, the ports’ executive director told the 60 or people at the meeting. “So we made some adjustments.”

The new plans call for one dome and shipping about 300,000 tons of pellets a year out of Morehead City. Train traffic would be reduced to about 60 additional cars a week, or 20 extra cars on each of the three trains that now go to the port weekly, Miles said.  “We tend to think that will be undetectable,” he said.

A lower price tag comes with all this whittling. The state now plans to initially spend about $15 million on the pellet facility in Morehead City, Miles said, but could spend more in the future to add additional storage domes if the market demands it. A private contractor would build and operate a similar facility in Wilmington

Miles said the ports hope to start shipping pellets by the end of 2014.

“We’ll be well positioned to take advantage of any future growth in the market,” he noted

The Gorilla

Any discussion about the future of the pellet industry and the ports’ role in it brings us to that gorilla.

A day before the meeting in Morehead, the British Broadcasting Co. published a story that critics of using wood to make electricity say should give pause to anyone planning to turn trees into pellets or to ship them to power plants in England.  The BBC reported that the United Kingdom is turning away from its controversial policy of subsidizing utilities to generate electricity from burning wood.

There’s some disagreement about whether the BBC overstated that conclusion, but there’s no denying that those policies in the UK, along with similar ones in other countries in the European Union, have fueled the demand for wood pellets made in the Southeast. Any changes to those policies could have real implications for the future of the industry in North Carolina and thus the ports’ pellet facilities.

A little background seems to be in order.

European countries in 2009 instituted ambitious policies that encourage power companies to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases and increase their use of renewable energy sources by 20 percent in 10 years. Heavy taxes were placed on carbon emissions, and subsidies were offered to power plants that switched from coal to renewables, which included wood and other so-called biomass.

England and other countries in the European Union at the time considered wood to be “carbon neutral,” meaning that burning it produced no additional carbon dioxide that could contribute to global warming. A tree used photosynthesis to store CO2 throughout its life, went the prevailing theory at the time, and burning it merely released that CO2 back into the atmosphere. It was, in essence, a wash as far as CO2 emissions went.

Some scientists at the time questioned the simplicity of the theory, but no matter. European power companies grabbed onto it with gusto. The consumption of wood pellets in Europe has increased almost 50 percent since the polices were instituted, far outpacing the ability of the continent’s forests to meet the demand, which is forecast to continue its dramatic rise for the rest of the decade.

The growth ignited a boom here in the United States, transforming what had been a small industry that made wood pellets from sawdust to heat homes in New England into a rapidly growing export trade of pellets made primarily from Southern trees. The piney woods of the Southeast have long been one of the globe’s wood baskets, and those trees have now propelled America into the world lead in the production of pellets. At least 30 pellet plants have been built or are proposed – many with the financial backing of Europeans – in Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and, most recently, North Carolina, according to a study done last year by the Southern Environmental Law Center. All but one of the existing plants have opened since 2008.

New Science, New Thinking

Danna Smith

Harry Huyton

As the boom boomed, scientists looked more closely at the wood-carbon issue. They learned that the answer isn’t as simple as originally depicted. It all depends on where the wood comes from, how it’s harvested, whether whole trees or wood waste — such as tops, limbs and sawdust — are used and if the land is replanted with trees afterward.

These varied conditions and the actual method used to account for the carbon explain the mixed research results. Some studies showed a no net gain in carbon emissions when burning wood pellets, while more recent studies suggest it takes decades for a new tree to reabsorb the CO2 that’s emitted when an existing tree is burned.

The new research is making the UK rethink its subsidies on wood pellets, noted Danna Smith, executive director of the Dogwood Alliance. The environmental group based in Asheville has long been involved in forestry issues in the Southeast. It issued a report last year that documented that whole trees were being used by pellet producers in the region and not wood scraps as was claimed by the industry.

“The new science is questioning many of the assumptions that went into those policies,” she said. “The BBC report is an indication that they are thinking differently about these issues than they were just a few years ago. There is a different take now, and Europe is trying to slow things down. The story is an indication of that.”

Ed Davey, the UK’s energy secretary, told the BBC that biomass was always considered a temporary solution to climate change targets while other renewable energy systems are developed. That’s why government subsidies will end in 2027.

His department, in a statement to the BBC, acknowledged that burning pellets and other types of biomass in power stations built expressly for that purpose offers poor savings in carbon emissions compared with wind power or even natural gas. The UK last year instituted a cap on subsidies for such plants. The cap doesn’t apply to plants that have been converted from coal or use a combination of biomass and fossil fuels, or so-called co-fired plants.

Harry Huyton of RSPB welcomes what he sees as a change of heart. His group is the UK’s largest conservation charity and one of the most vocal critics of the subsidy policies. “This is good progress, and we’re talking it up to try and encourage government to keep on going and to apply a cap on conversions and co-firing, too,” he wrote in an email.

Miles hadn’t seen the BBC story and wouldn’t comment on what the implications on the ports’ plans might be if the UK changes it subsidy policies. He said during the meeting, though, that the storage domes could be used for agricultural products.

No Changes Planned

Melanie Wedgebury

Drax, the UK’s largest power station, has been converting half its boilers from coal to wood pellets. It imports most of the pellets, primarily from the United States. It would burn the pellets shipped from Morehead City. The company has no plans to change that strategy, Melanie Wedgebury, a company spokeswoman, wrote in an email exchange.

“To be clear, our plans are not affected in any way,” she wrote. ” There was nothing new in that (BBC) report, and our understanding is that there has been no change in government thinking and government policy remains unchanged. “

Biomass conversions from coal are a key element of the package of renewables required to meet carbon reduction targets from 2020 and beyond, Wedgebury wrote. “Support for converting coal units to biomass, as previously announced, will continue until 2027 which is the basis on which Drax has planned its investment in conversion,” she wrote.

Drax has invested heavily in wood pellets, Smith noted, but others should be more wary, especially if they’re planning to use taxpayer money. “North Carolina will have big problems into the future because the future of this is uncertain at this point,” she said. “It makes it very risky for government to invest in this and companies to put their money in this. It could dry up in the near future. There is a lot of controversy and unsettled science. It’s just too risky.

The shallow water and shifting sand bars of Rich Inlet provide habitat for animals and are a playground for people. Both would be threatened if Figure Eight Island, on the right, were to build a terminal groin. That’s Lea-Hutaff Island to the left of the inlet. Photo: Army Corps of Engineers

FIGURE EIGHT ISLAND – A dozen or so double-crested cormorants huddled on a sand bar in Rich Inlet, their backs to the brisk east wind.  Hunched over and their long necks pointed skyward, the birds held out their wings as if in prayerful supplication.

“They’re drying their wings,” Mike Giles informed the group as he guided the Jones Brothers’ skiff past the bar on a recent beautiful but breezy early spring day.

The boatload of gawking people slowly wending its way through the labyrinth of sand spits and bars startled a small flock of bufflehead ducks that were bobbing and diving in the water. These little sea ducks with the bulbous heads are common winter visitors along the N.C. coast, where they find shelter and food in the shallow estuaries and inlets. They will be gone soon, heading to the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska. There, the females will raise their young in borrowed tree cavities made by northern flickers. The flickers don’t seem to mind.

Hundreds of boaters use the sand bars, the northern tip of Figure Eight Island and the shoreline of Lea-Hutaff Island as getaways. Others hunt for clams in the little creeks that course through the marsh. Photos: Mike Giles

The little ducks took to the sky as one, flying low to the water and squawking at the intrusion.

A splash on the port side. Then another, followed by the inevitable oohs and aahs on the boat. Dolphins.  A small pod broke water not 20 feet away. Giles shifted the boat into neutral.  The dolphins swam around the drifting boat, some jumping several feet out of the water.

“Why do dolphins jump like that?” Giles asked the group.

Most were probably trying to come up with the scientific answer for leaping dolphin. No one could, though.

“Because they can,” Giles said.

Several dolphins came alongside, gliding just inches below the surface. The eyes of these undulating apparitions were clearing staring up at the boat. They saw a pod of humans staring back, most clicking away furiously with their cell phones.

People are also common inhabitants of the inlet, said Giles, a coastal advocate for the N.C. Coastal Federation who lives a few miles away up the Intracoastal Waterway. They come in flotillas of watercraft in the summertime to fish, to swim and to play on the inlet’s stunning array of islands and bars.

“There might be 200 to 300 boats lining that shoreline,” Giles said, sweeping an arm toward Lea-Hutaff Island. Much of the uninhabited island is a protected bird sanctuary.

“They’ll meet with friends and neighbors and barbecue on the beach. They’ll sit in chairs to sunbathe and read. The kids play in the water. It’s a social happening,” Giles said, as we approached our ultimate destination. “And it may all be gone.”

The bow of boat bumped gently onto the beach of Figure Eight Island, and the boat’s passengers piled out. Lindsay Addison, a biologist for Audubon North Carolina, was right behind. She beached her boat and its passengers followed the others up the beach.

The 15 people gathered in a circle on the north end of the island. The wide beach was deserted.  Off in the distance, beyond the rise of low sand dunes, loomed some of large houses that make up this exclusive, private island.

Those houses were the real reasons these people had come. Audubon, the federation and the N.C. Sierra Club sponsored the trip here to show what might be lost in order to save a handful of them.

About a dozen of Figure Eight’s houses are said to be threatened by erosion.  To protect them, the island’s homeowners association wants to build a 1,600-foot-long wall of rock and sheet metal that would encase the north end of the island and extend into the Atlantic Ocean.

This small jetty, called a terminal groin, would be built not too far from where the people were standing.  If it were already there, these people would be swimming.

Mike Giles, right, stands by one of the survey stakes that mark the prospective path of the groin. Photo: Frank Tursi

Lindsay Addison said many species of birds have few places left to feed and nest. Photo: Frank Tursi

Until 2011, such things used to be illegal on the beaches of North Carolina because of their demonstrated abilities to protect private houses while destroying public beaches. After intense and prolonged lobbying by some Figure Eight property owners and others, the N.C. General Assembly changed the law to allow four terminal groins on the coast. Figure Eight’s project is currently undergoing environmental review.

Addison has been fighting for birds all of her career. She’s heard proponents of one type of beachfront construction project or another brush off her concerns by noting that the threatened birds could go somewhere else.

“We’ve been telling birds to go someplace else for years,” Addison told the group. “This is someplace else. There’s not a lot of good bird habitat left along the East Coast. They can’t lose much more.”

As if on cue, a piping plover was seen pecking along the wet sand of the falling tide. The sparrow-sized bird nests and feeds only on sandy and gravel beaches in North America. Hunted for its plumage, the plover’s population plummeted in the early 20th century. A federal law in 1918 stemmed the widespread killing and the birds’ population started to recover only to have its habitat later destroyed by beachfront development. It is now an endangered species on both the federal and state lists.

A dozen pairs of eyes watched through binoculars or sighting scopes as the plover went about its daily routine of feeding itself.

Some in the group broke off to wander up the beach to look at the huge sand bags that protect some of the houses or to stand between the metal and plastic poles that mark the jetty’s prospective path to the ocean.

If the rock and sheet metal wall is built, this end of the island will be gone, Giles said. “This will be open water,” he said. “No more piping plovers, no more Sunday outings to walk the beach with the kids.”

The jetty will also likely change the dynamics of the inlet itself. The sand bars and spits that are the favorite haunts of praying cormorants and splashing children will likely disappear as well.

“These shallow inlets are very special places,” Giles said on the trip back to the mainland. “They are wonderful habitat for animals and a great place to come and sit and enjoy the beauty of our coast. They should be protected, not destroyed.”

RALEIGH — North Carolina’s environmental agency has warned legislators that they are putting the state’s federally approved coastal-management program in jeopardy if a bill that remakes the coastal commission becomes law.

In a memo to legislators, the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources, or DENR, said the federal government would probably consider the changes to the state’s Coastal Resources Commission, or CRC, that are contained in Senate Bill 10 significant enough to require a public hearing, reviews by several federal agencies and a study of the changes’ environmental effects.

The federal government would likely in the end approve the changes because of the “relatively flexible nature” of federal law, the department said in the memo. “Still, this is ultimately a federal decision so there is no guarantee that S10 will not jeopardize program approval,” the memo concludes.

If the state’s coastal program fell out of federal favor, the N.C. Division of Coastal Management, the agency that administers commission rules, would lose $2.5 million a year in federal money that pays for staff and planning and the ability to enforce several types of federal permits. The state would also not be able to block federal projects or permits that are inconsistent with state rules and policies.

The bill could also lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to question whether the state could adequately enforce federal environmental laws because of changes the bill also makes to the Environmental Management Commission, Robin Smith, a lawyer and former DENR assistant secretary, writes in a recent blog.

These are the counties that come under the jurisdiction of the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission. Map: N.C. Division of Coastal Management

The N.C. Senate passed the bill in a few days with no public comment and little debate. The state House has been more deliberate. Rep. Rick Catlin, a Republican freshman from New Hanover County, will reportedly lead a  review of the bill’s possible implications for the CRC. He recently told a meeting of the League of Women Voters that he has serious questions about the bill.

“I have concerns about the loss of institutional knowledge by completely reconstituting these boards,” Catlin was quoted as saying in the Lumina News of Wrightsville Beach.

Todd Miller, the executive director of the N.C. Coastal Federation, has been very critical of the bill and is encouraged by the state House’s apparently more studied approach. “They’ve slowed the train down in the House,” he said. “This bill has such serious and wide-ranging implications that it at least deserves a long, hard look.”

The bill would reduce the size of the coastal commission and, more importantly, change its composition. Seats representing various coastal interests, such as agriculture, commercial and sports fishing, forestry, local government and conservation, would be eliminated or their number reduced on the reconstituted board. The number of coastal developers or landowners would double. The governor and the legislature, which would make the appointments, would also have more freedom to choose whomever they like to at-large seats, which would increase from three to five.

None of the new commission members, under the bill, would have to live on the coast, as most must now, or even in the state. The bill also does away with the restriction that a super majority of members not earn a “significant” portion of their income from activities that the commission regulates.

North Carolina is among the 34 states and territories whose coastal-management programs are approved under a 1972 federal law that provides money and assistance to states to help them better protect the coastal environment. The law requires, though, that the federal government approve any changes to the programs.

It approves most changes to state programs as “routine.” Those that are so substantial that they could alter the ability of a program to meet the mandates of the federal law are considered “amendments” to the state program and require a letter from the state justifying why the change is needed, a public hearing, a review by federal agencies and a study of the change’s potential environmental effects. Federal rules require that all this be done before “final state action” on the proposed change, and they allow grants to be suspended while the review takes place.

Robin Smith, a former DENR assistant secretary, wonders how EPA will react to the proposed changes to the Environmental Management Commission.

The Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, administers the federal law and manages the state programs. The acting director of the program has declined to publicly comment on the bill and its implications.

But NOAA has apparently told DENR that the proposed changes to the CRC are significant. “S10 changes the membership makeup and the conflict of interest standards for the CRC,” the DENR memo to the  legislature explains. “Based on preliminary consultations with NOAA, the proposed changes to the Coastal Resources Commission in S10 will likely be (DENR emphasis) considered as a ‘Program Amendment’…”

DENR’s public information office referred questions about the memo to Crystal Feldman, Gov. Pat McCrory’s press secretary. She didn’t return a phone call.

Smith, the former DENR assistant secretary, wonders in her blog how EPA will react to eliminating the income restrictions for those who serve of the Environmental Management Commission, the state’s major rule-making board.

“… Senate Bill 10 repeals language requiring that at least nine EMC members must be people who do not derive significant income from activities regulated by the commission,” she writes. “The language … exists in part to meet federal requirements for delegated permitting programs under the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. Complete repeal of the language may cause EPA to question North Carolina compliance with federal rules governing those delegated programs.”

North Carolina’s coastal-management program risks losing millions of dollars in federal money each year and the ability to affect the outcome of federal permits if a bill that changes the composition of the state’s coastal commission becomes law and fails to meet federal muster.

Much of the publicity surrounding Senate Bill 10 has centered on the mass firing of members of the state’s four major rule-making commissions, which would allow a new Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature to immediately appoint like-minded members instead of waiting a few years for their terms to expire.

Political opponents and newspaper editorial writers heaped invectives about “power grabs” on the N.C. Senate after it passed the bill last week. Ignored, though, have been the wide-ranging effects the bill could have on the state’s 40-year-old program to protect natural resources along the coast and the role the federal government has in approving any changes to that program.

A bill making its way through the N.C. General Assembly would change the composition of the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission. Photo: WWAY-TV

The hub of the program is the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission, which sets development rules and policies under the state’s 1974 Coastal Area Management Act, or CAMA. The bill would remake the commission. It would reduce its size from 15 to 11 members and, more importantly, change its composition. Seats that represent agriculture, commercial and sports fishing, forestry, marine ecology, conservation and banking would be eliminated. Local governments in the 20 coastal counties under the commission’s jurisdiction would have one representative on the reconstituted board, instead of two.  The number of coastal developers or landowners would double. The governor and the legislature, which would make the appointments, would also have more freedom to choose whomever they like to at-large seats, which would increase from three to five.

None of the new commissioners, under the bill, would have to live on the coast or even in the state. Now, all but two of the members must reside in one of the 20 coastal counties and no more than two can live in any particular county. The bill eliminates any residency requirements.

It also does away with financial restrictions. Currently, nine of the members can’t earn a “significant” portion of their income from coastal land development, construction, real estate sales or lobbying. Neither can they serve as agents for land development or related businesses, such as engineering and banking. The bill would theoretically allow all the board members to earn their living in development and real-estate activities.

And that’s just not right, said Todd Miller. He’s the executive director of the N.C. Coastal Federation, a conservation group that Miller founded soon after the commission developed the first set of CAMA rules. There’s probably no one in the state who has attended more commission meetings – he’s rarely missed one since 1981 – or who knows more about how the commission works.

To insure that the commission could even-handedly set development rules, the crafters of CAMA were careful to fashion a board that represented the broad interests and concerns of the coastal counties, he explained. While it isn’t perfect, Miller said, the formula has generally worked to achieve a balance between the commission’s dual role of economic development and environmental protection.

“These are radical changes that threaten that balance,” he said of the bill. “They would also call into question the commission’s ability to protect the natural resources of the coast, which is its mandate under federal law.”

He’s talking here about the federal Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972, which helps states manage coastal habitats and resources. North Carolina is one of 34 states and territories that meet the requirements of the law. As a federally approved program, the state has gotten millions of federal dollars over the years to pay for planning and for staff at the N.C. Division of Coastal Management.

Todd Miller

Jeff Benoit

The state also has the authority to determine if federal development activities or permits are consistent with the state plans and policies. That can be a powerful tool. It was the state’s determination in the late 1980s that offshore drilling was inconsistent with its coastal-management policies that ultimately convinced then Mobil Oil to drop plans to drill off the N.C. coast.

Federal agencies have also delegated to the state a lot of authority over issuing federal permits, such as those needed to build bulkheads, docks and marinas. That’s meant quicker permit reviews in many cases.

But with the federal money and authority come strings. The federal government must approve any changes to state programs. Most are considered routine and don’t require much effort on the part of the states. Changes that are so substantial that they could alter the ability of a program to meet the mandates of the federal law are considered “amendments” and require a letter from the state justifying why the change is needed, a public hearing and possibly a study of the change’s potential environmental effects. The federal government uses that information to decide if a program can be amended and still meet the law.

Ultimately, the decision on whether a change is routine or substantial rests with the federal government, noted Braxton Davis, director of the coastal-management division. “They make the call,” he said, “but I don’t anticipate problems.”

The Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administers the federal law and manages the state programs. Margaret Davidson, the agency’s acting director, declined to comment about the proposed bill and its possible ramifications.

A former director, though, thinks the proposed changes are substantial enough to be considered an amendment to North Carolina’s program. “I think they are very significant changes to the coastal program,” said Jeff Benoit, who headed the NOAA agency in the late 1990s and approved the guidelines the agency still uses to determine when changes to programs warrant full review as amendments. “The real core of CAMA is the commission and the balance of that commission. It even says that in the act that created CAMA. To alter the composition this significantly raises real questions about how the authorities and the polices of the state program will be interpreted by the commission.”

Undergoing a full review as an amendment doesn’t mean that the changes won’t be approved by NOAA, said Benoit. “But it’s a public process and requires public review,” he said.

Benoit is now president of Restore America’s Estuaries, a coalition of conservation groups that works to protect and restore coastal estuaries.

If NOAA ultimately decides that the changes in the bill are an amendment that would prevent the state from fulfilling the protection requirements of federal law, the state would have to drop them or lose federal approval. The same would happen if the state chooses to ignore the federal requirements for amending its coastal program.

For one thing, that means no more federal money, said Davis. His agency got about $2.5 million from NOAA this year to pay for staff and to use as a match for grants. Maybe more important than the money is the ability to review federal projects or permits for consistency with state policies, he said. “It’s a very strong states’ rights component of the federal program and is what makes the program attractive to the states.” Davis said.

Senate Bill 10 is currently awaiting consideration in the state House.

Jim Snyders of Ohio won first prize in the federation photo contest with this serene scene of a glorious fall sunset over Boathouse Creek in Carteret County.

By Frank Tursi

Debby Gleeson won second place with this photo. We’ll let her explain: “I was driving to a school event and there it was a foggy field, I stopped and shot and this is what I came up with after about 4 or 5 shots. I call it Horizon. It is in Richlands N.C.”

OCEAN — Jim Snyders chose a glorious October day to visit one of our special places, the Cedar Point Natural Area in the Croatan National Forest in Carteret County. He walked by the little public boat ramp in Boathouse Creek and an artistic inkling struck him and stuck.

“Earlier in the day I noticed this area when walking the beautiful and tranquil trails,” he wrote us. “Later in the day when seeing the potential for a beautiful sunset and no wind I drove back to capture this serene image long after sunset.”

Snyders’ photo of a glorious fall sunset along the N.C. coast won the $500 first prize in the N.C. Coastal Federation’s 2012 Photo Contest. Snyders lives in Ohio but has a house in Emerald Isle.

Debby Gleeson of Jacksonville took second place and $250 for her serene photo of a foggy field near Richlands in Onslow County, and Miriam Sutton of Beaufort captured third place and $100 for the mystic fisherman of Ward’s Creek in eastern Carteret County.

Four other photographers were awarded honorable mentions. They will receive federation memberships.

The winners and all the other 46 entries are in our Photo Gallery. Go take a look. We think you’ll agree that they are a diverse bunch of photos. We had asked people to send us photos of their favorite places along the N.C. coast. Yes, we received plenty of beach scenes, but people also took pictures of cotton fields and pastures, swamps, ducks waddling along a lawn and even a green car in crowded street.

The diversity of the scenery and the technical excellence of many of the photos struck Scott Taylor, a professional photographer who has a studio in Beaufort and was among the three judges of the contest.

“The quality of the entries in this year’s competition was outstanding which made judging both enjoyable and challenging,” he said. “There were so many great images to choose from. The winning photographers used their creative vision to rise above the crowd and show that cameras don’t make the picture, people do. In today’s Instagram, over-saturated world they have shown that there is more to creating a quality image than having an ‘App for that.’”

Once again, we thank Emerald Isle Realty, which provided the prize money.

Todd Miller, the federation’s executive director, hopes the beautiful photos inspire people. “There are so many beautiful places along our coast – many are hidden treasures,” he said. “We hope that by seeing some of these special places, people will want to visit and learn more about them, and become more engaged stewards of our state’s coastal areas.”

Miriam Sutton of Beaufort took third place with this photo of a fisherman in Down East Careret County. “‘Fishing the Fog’ was captured on a foggy fall morning along Ward’s Creek,” she writes. “This fisherman had the silence and beauty of this morning to himself. A Carteret County Down East commute is undoubtedly one of the true treasures in N.C.”

First of four parts

The quiet piney woods of the N.C. coast are a long way from the bustle of Berlin, London and Amsterdam, but those trees may soon be lighting up those far-off foreign capitals thanks to the unlikely convergence of European eco-policy and abundant Southeastern pine trees.

In a sort of back-to-the future moment, Europe is turning to the fuel source of the Middle Ages to fire up its power plants and is looking increasingly to Southern states to supply it. Europeans have circled back to the past because policy makers there think they know something futuristic that the dukes of Cornwall or the earls of Hapsburg couldn’t conceive centuries ago when they threw another log in the fireplaces of their medieval castles: Wood is “green.”

The European Union considers wood to be a renewable energy source that is also “carbon neutral,” meaning that it won’t worsen global warming by adding additional carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when burned. Coal, which is the primary fuel for generating electricity in Europe as it is in North Carolina, is neither of those things.

Wood pellet production by country: The highest increase in production capacity was in North America  and Russia,followed by traditional European-producing countries,such as Germany, Sweden and Austria. Source: Global Wood Pellet Industry Market and Trade Study, IEA Bioenergy, Dec. 2011.

European countries in 2009 instituted ambitious policies that encourage power companies to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases and increase their use of renewable energy sources by 20 percent in 10 years. Utility companies responded by switching from coal to wood pellets, pencil-sized, compressed forms of wood that burn more efficiently and transport more easily than logs.

And they’ve been doing it with gusto.  The consumption of wood pellets in Europe has increased almost 50 percent since 2008, far outpacing the ability of the continent’s forests to meet the demand, which is forecast to continue its dramatic rise for the rest of the decade.

The growth has ignited a boom here in the United States, transforming what had been a small industry that made wood pellets from sawdust to heat homes in New England into a rapidly growing export trade of pellets made primarily from Southern trees. The dense forests of the Southeast have long been one of the globe’s wood baskets, and those trees have now propelled America into the world lead in the production of pellets. At least 30 pellet plants have been built or are proposed – many with the financial backing of Europeans – in Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and, most recently, North Carolina, according to a study done last year by the Southern Environmental Law Center. All but one of the existing plants have opened since 2008.

To cash in on the boom, the N.C. State Ports Authority announced plans late last year to invest as much as $200 million at its two sleepy ports in Wilmington and Morehead City to ship pellets made in North Carolina to Europe.

Using the state’s coastal forests as fuel depots for foreign countries raises numerous questions that should be considered before we rush off into the woods with chain saws roaring. We’ll explore some of those questions here over the next four days: Can our forests handle all this cutting and still maintain their aesthetic qualities and their ecological importance to wildlife and water quality? Does the state have policies in place to prevent clear cutting and ensure that cut tracts are replanted? What will increasing train and truck traffic mean in Morehead City, whose residents and businesses rely primarily on tourists for their livelihood?

Is Wood Really Green?

Driving the overseas policies that will affect the forests of the N.C. coast is the assumption that wood pellets are better than coal, that burning them will not overheat the planet. But is it true? In other words: Is wood really green?

Will McDow of the Environmental Defense Fund in Raleigh has spent a great deal of time studying what’s known as “bioenergy,” which refers to renewable energy contained in living or recently living biological organisms. Organic material, such as plants and trees, contain bioenergy that is known as “biomass.”

Christopher Galik

Will McDow

We first posed the question to McDow two years ago for the federation’s State of the Coast Report on renewable energy.  This is what he said then: “It’s a shade of green. It’s a very challenging subject. You have a lot of cheerleaders out there and you have the naysayers. It depends on how you collect it, what you use and how you use it.”

Like many environmentalists, McDow supports biomass as a future fuel because it’s renewable and less polluting than coal, but he also knows that, as with any fuel source, there are tradeoffs. Relying on the trees of a few U.S. states to power a continent could have serious implications, he said recently.

“We’re very reluctant to draw black and white lines in the sand,” said McDow, who co-wrote a study last year on the implications of pellet plants in the Southeast. “But we have to raise these questions. We don’t want to see so much capital investment that it overshoots our forest inventory.”

Burning wood produces various emissions that would have to be controlled and, like coal, creates carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas. Promoters like to claim that wood is “carbon neutral” because the trees soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow, and that balances out the CO2 they produce when burned.

It’s not that simple, though, noted Christopher Galik, senior policy associate at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.  “We stay away from the term ‘carbon neutral,’” he said. “It’s a more nuanced story.”

It all depends on where the wood comes from, how it’s harvested, whether whole trees or wood waste — such as tops, limbs and sawdust — are used and if the land is replanted with trees afterward.

These varied conditions and the actual method used to account for the carbon explain the mixed research results. Some studies show a no net gain in carbon emissions when burning wood pellets, while more recent studies suggest that burning pellets actually emits more CO2 than an equivalent amount of coal.

The ‘Carbon Debt’

The Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences in Massachusetts did probably the most famous and influential study on the subject in 2010 for that state’s Department of Energy Resources.  The study blew a major hole in the carbon-neutral theory. It concluded that there’s a carbon “debt” when biomass is burned for energy and that burning trees or other types of biomass often releases more carbon at the time of combustion than an equivalent amount of fossil fuel. It then takes a certain amount of time to repay that debt by recovering that additional carbon.

A wood pellet plant in Ahoskie.

In other words, the CO2 released from burning a large pine tree, say, would exceed what’s emitted by an equal amount of burned coal. The extra CO2 wouldn’t be recovered for years, until a new pine tree grows large enough to take up the extra carbon through photosynthesis.

The study’s researchers concluded that it takes about 42 years to begin to create a net carbon dividend compared to coal when biomass is used to make electricity.

Researchers for the Southern Environmental Law Center came up with similar findings in their study. Based on current trends in using wood for utility-scale power plants and exporting pellets to Europe, biomass energy in the Southeast is projected to produce higher levels of atmospheric carbon for 35 to 50 years compared to fossil fuels, they concluded. After that, biomass will result in significantly lower atmospheric levels as re-growing forests absorb carbon from previous combustion.

“The timing problem is central to this issue, since adding even more carbon from biomass to the atmosphere over the next 35 to 50 years could accelerate global warming stressors,” said Julie Sibbing, director of agriculture and forestry with National Wildlife Federation. “We run the compounded risk of losing forests to severe weather events triggered by climate change, such as droughts and flooding, undermining their ability to sequester carbon over the long run.”

The Carbon Inventory

The law center study also predicted that whole trees, and not just limbs and other wood “waste,” would have to be used to meet the demand of European utilities. If the logged tracts aren’t replanted – and there’s no law in North Carolina that would require that on private land – then even any future carbon savings would be jeopardized.

Trees store a lot of carbon during their lifetimes, McDow noted. Reducing future forest cover would likely lead to even higher increases in future atmospheric CO2.

“In past debates on forestry issues, we always argued about having enough trees,” he said. “This has changed the debate to can we do this in a way that doesn’t reduce the carbon inventory.”

Ninety scientists and researchers on this issue made the same point in a letter to Congress in May, 2010. “… clearing or cutting forests for energy, either to burn trees directly in power plants or to replace forests with bioenergy crops, has the net effect of releasing otherwise sequestered carbon into the atmosphere, just like the extraction and burning of fossil fuels,” they wrote.

Wednesday: The potential effects on coastal forests

A new poll of N.C. voters seems to offer a warning to state legislators and the new governor as they pursue policies they say will create more jobs: Don’t run roughshod over the environment while doing it.

Seventy percent of those polled said protecting the state’s environment is at least as important as economic development.  Many of those voters – almost 40 percent — said Gov.-Elect Pat McCrory’s track record on protecting the environment will be very important when they again cast ballots for governor in 2016.

“The poll clearly indicates that many voters want the environment to be well managed,” said Todd Miller, executive director of the N.C. Coastal Federation.  “Only 26 percent of people who voted for Pat McCrory in the last election said that the governor’s future track record on protecting the environment would not be important to them.”

The federation commissioned the telephone poll, which was conducted Dec. 11-12 by Public Policy Polling in Raleigh. It surveyed 500 voters who cast ballots in this year’s gubernatorial election, which McCrory, a Republican, won handily over Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton, a Democrat.

More than two-thirds of those who voted for Dalton and more than half of the McCrory voters think environmental protection is equally as important as economic development. Almost 60 percent of Dalton voters said McCrory’s record over the next four years for protecting the environment will be very important when they decide who to vote for in 2016. Only a quarter of McCrory voters felt that way. Forty-four percent of those voters, however, said McCrory record will be “somewhat” important.

A desire to protect the environment seems to cross party lines.  Seventy-seven percent of registered Democrats, 69 percent of independents and 61 percent of Republicans said environmental protection is at least as important as economic development

They differ, though, when asked how important McCrory’s environmental track record will be if he runs for re-election. More than half of the Democrats said that it will be a very important factor when deciding how to vote, while only 23 percent of Republicans felt that way. Less than half of the Republicans polled — 47 percent – said that McCrory’s record will be “somewhat” important to them.  Independents fell somewhere in the middle. Thirty-eight percent will consider McCrory’s record very important, while 40 percent said it will be “somewhat” important.

Miller said the poll is a reminder that voters in N.C. want their political leaders to safeguard the environment.  “We look forward to working with the new governor as he tackles environmental challenges and opportunities,” Miller said. “We will applaud his accomplishments, and work hard to draw attention to environmental management decisions that are good, bad and ugly.”

Gary Pearce and Carter Wrenn, two seasoned political strategists in North Carolina, caution about reading too much into the poll. Pearce, a Democrat, and Wrenn, a Republican, have directed 11 statewide campaigns for governor, senator and president. They share a blog about state politics.

Take that 38 percent of voters who say McCrory’s record on protecting the environment will be very important when they decide whether to vote for him in 2016. But how important will other issues be? Pearce asked.

“There are always five to 10 issues that drive how people vote,” he said. “Absent something really bad, it’s impossible to know where the environment will fall.”

Todd Miller

Gary Pearce

Carter Wrenn

Cynical political strategists, noted Wrenn, might advise McCrory to ignore that 38 percent. “They may say those are voters he’s not going to get anyway,” he said.

About an equal number of voters said McCrory’s environmental record will be “somewhat” important if he runs for re-election. Combine it with the 38 percent and an impressive three-quarter of those polled said they will consider McCrory’s environmental track record to some degree when deciding who to vote for in 2016. But neither Pearce nor Wrenn are buying it.

“’Somewhat’ is nebulous,” Pearce said. “What do people think it means?”

Wrenn thought he had the answer. “To most people it means I care about it a little bit, but not a lot,” he said.

Environmental protection itself as a political issue is one of interpretation, Wrenn said. How voters and politicians define it will likely change as the economy remains at the top of the list of concerns, he said. Voters, for instance, might be more inclined to live with cuts in regulations if more jobs are created as a result, Wrenn said.

“When it comes to economic development and environmental protection, people naturally say they want both, and they do,” he said. “If presented with a choice they might push for jobs now. But what’s necessary to protect the environment? That’s the line I’m talking about. The debate isn’t about whether to protect the environment but what’s necessary to protect it.”

Miller agreed with Pearce and Wrenn’s overall assessment.  “We are under no illusion that the environment will sway a huge number of voters in the next election,” said Miller.  “However, this poll indicates that some voters will pay attention to the governor’s environmental decision-making, and in a hotly contested election his track record could swing enough votes to make a difference in the race.”

Miller notes that N.C. is a very evenly divided state politically, and statewide races are generally much more closely contested than Congressional or state legislative district races.  “In this past election, the 13 democratic candidates for U.S. House of Representatives received 81,190 more votes than their republican opponents, and yet they only won four seats, or 30 percent of these races.  Obviously, there are no safe districts in a statewide race, and in a close statewide contest every vote counts.”

Chris Hill on his paddleboard approaches a humpback whale off Surf City. Photo: Steve Young

By Frank Tursi

SURF CITY – Chris Hill surfs on a paddleboard.  In fact, he does it professionally. That means he’s on the water a lot and is accustomed to sharing the ocean off this beach town on Topsail Island with a variety of sea creatures.

“I’m used to seeing a lot of animals,” says Hill, known as “Chill” to paddlers. “Sharks. Things like that.”

Hill was on his paddleboard about 100 yards from shore near the Surf City Pier around noon one recent Sunday. Something big broke the water about two pier lengths off the beach.

“When that humpback popped up, I had to paddle out to it,” he says. “I had never seen one while paddling. It was a no-brainer really.”

On the beach, under the pier, Steve Young was doing what he normally does. He was shooting photos of surfers and the ocean. He had seen the whale moving up the beach and had taken a few photos of it.

“I wasn’t very happy with them because they didn’t give you a sense of scale,” he says.

Then he spotted Hill paddling out towards the humpback. Young focused his camera on Hill and hoped that the whale would surface again. It did. Young hit the shutter button.

“I really didn’t think anything about it, and went home and started editing,” Young, a retired firefighter from Jacksonville, explains. “I put the photo on my Facebook page. Then it really took off.”

Humpback whales are known for their magnificent aerial displays. Photo: NOAA.

The picture shows an upright Hill on his paddleboard, silhouetted against the bright sky and surrounded by a dead-calm blue ocean. The dark solitary figure looks to be walking on water. The big, arched back of the whale seems to be just yards away.  It is a picture of both serenity and power, of mere man and mighty beast.

It is also the kind of picture that Facebook and other social media sites seem to be made for. Hill, who lives in Surf City, made it the wall photo on the Facebook page of Ohana Paddle Sports, the business he and his wife, Jennifer, own in that town. Hundreds of people shared it with hundreds more, who passed it on. And like that it quickly went around the globe.

“Spiritual,” commented Susan Ballenger of South Carolina.

“That’s sweet,” wrote Matthew Johnson of Holland, Mich.

“Wow. You got blessed with this one,” noted Bonnie Ann Evans of Santa Cruz, Bolivia

“Magnifique,” wrote Francoise Espina of Paris.

“It was pretty cool,” Hill agrees.

Endangered humpback whales are among the most easily recognized of the whale species. Reaching between 40 and 50 feet in length, a humpback can weigh up to 48 tons. Their large flippers, almost one-third of their body size, and the hump on their backs distinguish them from other whales.  Their color ranges anywhere from a gray to black and they have white markings on their undersides that are unique to every whale. These markings are like fingerprints, allowing researchers to identify individuals.

Humpbacks are a fairly common sight along the N.C. coast in the winter when they migrate from Arctic waters to calving grounds in the tropics.

Though the whales usually travel in groups, Hill only saw one during his encounter. And it was big, he says, about 50 feet long.

“It was the length of a bus,” Hill, 44, says. “Big enough that I didn’t want to get too close. I stayed about 12 feet away.”

Twelve feet? Maybe that’s why they call him Chill.

Source: Bureau of Ocean Energy Management

In a significant first step toward developing wind energy off the N.C. coast, the federal government yesterday asked for project proposals for three offshore areas, one off the Outer Banks and two near Wilmington.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, part of the U.S. Department of Interior, has identified an area six miles off Kitty Hawk and two areas seven to 13 miles from Cape Fear as having potential for commercial wind energy. The three areas total about 1,400 square miles.

Yesterday’s “Call for Information and Nominations” is meant to gauge the industry’s interest in developing wind projects in the areas. It will be followed with a formal announcement today in the Federal Register along with a request for public comments for the environmental assessment that will be done on wind-energy development in any of the three areas. These are the first steps in the federal planning process that could lead to leasing all or part of the areas to companies that would build the giant wind turbines.

North Carolina is considered to have to strongest and most consistent wind on the East Coast for commercial wind-energy development. Studies have concluded that if it were harnessed to make electricity wind could theoretically supply all of the state’s electricity needs.

“This is good news and an important step in North Carolina’s responsible development of our offshore energy resources which will move our nation closer to energy independence,” Gov. Beverly Perdue said yesterday in a press release. “The development of offshore wind energy diversifies the state’s energy sector, creates much needed jobs in our coastal communities and positions our state for a 21st century economy.”

Following today’s formal announcement in the Federal Register, the bureau will accept public comments for 45 days about environmental and social issues that should be addressed in the assessment. Comments can be transmitted electronically. Click on the “Open Comment Documents” link and follow the instructions to view relevant materials and submit comments.

Comments can also be mailed to The Office of Renewable Energy Programs, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, 381 Elden Street, HM 1328, Herndon, Va., 20170-4817.

Todd Miller

The bureau will soon schedule public information meetings to provide additional opportunities to comment. Once scheduled, information about the public information meetings will be found online.

Todd Miller, the executive director of the N.C. Coastal Federation, welcomed yesterday’s announcement. “This is a significant step forward in providing a clean source of energy to power our homes and workplaces,” he said. “Unlike oil and gas, wind energy will not leave tainted fish and beaches as its lasting legacy.

Other East Coast states have already gone through the process, and leasing has moved forward in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Virginia, noted Zak Keith, the offshore wind coordinator for the N.C. Sierra Club. No wind turbines have yet been built in U.S. waters.

“The bottom line is that we are one step closer to developing North Carolina’s tremendous wind resource off our coast,” he said in a press release. “We have a strategic energy reserve right off our coast and we don’t have to risk an oil spill to get to it.”

Take a break from the hectic holiday hubbub to look up at the sky. You may be rewarded with the best meteor show of the year.

The Geminid meteor shower, the final major meteor shower of every year and one of the best, peaks overnight Dec. 13 and Dec. 14, though you can see Geminid meteors any evening starting Thursday.

If you liked the Perseids meteor shower  in August, you should love this show. NASA reports that the Geminids are a relatively young meteor shower, with the first reports in the 1830s citing rates of about 20 meteors an hour. Over the decades the rates have increased, regularly spawning between 80 and 120 an hour at their peak on a clear evening with a dark sky.

A Geminid fireball explodes over the Mojavi Desert in 2009. Photo: NASA.

That can be pretty spectacular. Just take a look at this video of the Geminid shower. You can also look at some spectacular photos of the Geminids.

Intrigued? If you live in or around Pender County, you may consider looking at the meteors with some experts. The Cape Fear Sierra Club and the Cape Fear Astronomical Society are teaming up to offer a free viewing of the meteor shower on Friday, Dec. 14, at the Holly Shelter Game Lands.

They chose Holly Shelter because it’s pretty dark there. And a dark sky, free of light pollution, is the essential ingredient to a good show, noted Mitch Odess, president of the astronomical society.

But even with the inkiest of skies overhead — and this month’s  new moon falls on Dec. 13 – viewers shouldn’t expect to see a hundred meteors an hour, Odess said.

“When you think meteor showers you think about it snowing meteors, but it doesn’t work like that,” he said. “If you see one or two every 15 minutes, you’re doing well. A lot has to do with the darkness of the location.”

But there are plenty of other interesting things to see in the night sky, Odess said. His club will have telescopes available to view the moons of Jupiter, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Orion Nebula and other celestial big names. “We want to show people things they may have heard of but never seen,” he said.

The viewing will start at 5 p.m. and go on until whenever. Be warned: The best showing of the Geminids will probably be from about 1 a.m. to 3 a.m.

You don’t need to bring anything special, noted Nancy Card of the Sierra Club. A chair, a flashlight with a red filter, a mug for the hot cider Card will bring and maybe a sleeping bag to stay warm.

Call Card at 910-540-3088 or email her if you’re interested to set up a time and place to meet. She doesn’t want people driving into the game lands at all hours with their car headlights messing up the viewing.

You can also view the show on your own. Just find a dark place, settle in and scan the sky, looking particularly to the constellation Gemini. A star chart or a sky map app for your smart phone will tell you where it is. The Geminid meteor shower is named after the constellation, which is located in roughly the same point of the night sky where the meteor shower appears to originate.

Most meteors in annual showers trace their origins to comets. But the parent of the Geminid meteor shower is a mysterious body named 3200 Phaethon, which may be an asteroid or the rocky skeleton of a comet that lost most of its outer covering of ice after too many close encounters with the sun.

The Geminids are fairly bright and moderate in speed, hitting our atmosphere at 21.75 miles a second. They are characterized by their multicolored display – 65 percent being white, 26 percent yellow and the remainder blue, red and green. Geminids also have a reputation for producing exploding meteors called fireballs.

So take a break from the Christmas shopping and holiday parties to spend some time outside looking at the sky.

OCEAN — Let us take a moment to consider the marshes that surround us.

They are home to rare plants and animals and are nurseries for the fish and shellfish that have become the staples of our dinner table and restaurant menus. That fried flounder and shrimp combo once spent time in a marsh, though sans House Autry and slaw.

Pretty pictures and paintings of marshes adorn the walls of our homes and businesses, though Hollywood screenwriters haven’t been so kind. The swamp of their imagination is usually a dark and foreboding place. Robert Mitchum stalked Gregory Peck in such a place and Gollum hid with his Precious in one. Giant leeches and crawly creatures rose from them – black lagoons, they were called ominously — to scare a young boy who ignored his mother’s warning and watched those late-night movies anyway.

The movies merely reflected Americans’ attitudes toward the swamps. For much of our history, marshes were considered places of pestilence and danger and given names like Dismal, Great Black and Hell Hole. We did our best to drain them and turn them into something else.

We now know that our marshes occupy special places on the fringes of our watery world. Here, the freshwater of the land meets the salt of the sea. In the resulting briny mix life thrives. So much life, in fact, that the salt marshes of the Southeast coast tend to be the most productive ecosystems in the world.

North Carolina has about 2.5 million acres of estuaries and marine waters. They are among the most productive ecosystems on the planet. Photo: Bill Meserve

So, not only should we consider them, but maybe we should raise a glass to them. A celebration seems to be in order.

We even have a day to do it. We have days for lovers and mothers, for fathers and their secretaries. We have one for St. Patrick and another for catfish. Why not for marshes?

Though you won’t find a sappy Hallmark card to mark the occasion, Saturday, Sept. 29, is National Estuaries Day – that’s the fancy name for marshes and swamps. Since 1988, the last Saturday in September has been set aside to honor estuaries. Countless activities, involving tens of thousands of people, will go on across the country, from photo contests in Florida to canoe trips in Washington.

Here, on the N.C. coast, the federation will get a jump on the others with estuary day activities on Sat., Sept 22. Whether you like kayaking, biking or just getting dirty, the activities will give you a chance to learn about our marshes and experience them firsthand.

Ocracoke Kayak Trip

Teachers helped create the marsh that the kayakers will see.

On Ocracoke, the federation and Ride the Wind Surf Shop will team up to lead a two-hour kayak trip around the island. The kayak trip will begin in Silver Lake Harbor, launching from the N.C. Center for the Advancement of Teaching, at 10 a.m.  Kayakers will explore several of the federation’s living shoreline projects, learning about different restoration techniques used to protect the estuaries in Pamlico Sound.

Fees range from $15 to $35 depending on whether you’re a member and if you bring your own kayak. A portion of the proceeds will support the federation’s restoration efforts.

Reservations are required. Call Ride the Wind Surf Shop at 252-928-6311 to sign up.

Atlantic Beach: Cycling for the Coast

Pump up the tires on that old Schwinn or grease the gears on your Cannondale for a ride down Bogue Banks in the federation’s second annual Cycling for the Coast.

A bicycler in last year’s ride.

The ride is great for all ages and biking levels, offering 20K, 40K and 80K options. It will begin and end at Fort Macon State Park in Atlantic Beach. Riders will leave in waves, beginning at 8 a.m. with the 80K group; the 40K and 20K riders will leave a little later, biking towards Atlantic Beach and turning around at specified points on the island. Volunteers will assist along the way with safety, snacks and water.

Natty Greene’s Brewing Co. will sponsor an “after party” for riders and sponsors in the Atlantic Beach Circle, beginning around noon.

A portion of the entry fee will support federation restoration projects.

Holly Ridge: Oyster Restoration

If you want to get into the muck of the marshes, head down to Holly Ridge in Onslow County where Ted Wilgis, one of the federation’s educators, will put you to work restoring an oyster reef and marsh in Stump Sound.

Volunteers will fill mesh bags with oyster shells, plant salt marsh grasses along the shoreline and pick up trash and debris on the 52-acre preserve. The federation will supply a Bob-Cat to help with bagging oyster shells and heavy lifting, but many hands will be needed to help cut, seal and stack the bags of shells, gather debris and plant seedlings.

NEW BERN – Though the turnout was low, emotions ran high.

About 20 people showed up Thursday night for a public meeting intended to find out what people think about reorganizing the two state agencies that manage fish and wildlife populations. Other meetings were held over the past two weeks in Raleigh and Manteo. It’s all part of a study mandated in a bill passed last session by the N.C. General Assembly.

Legislative leaders say they want to save money, and merging the state’s Division of Marine Fisheries and the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission is one possibility they will consider. The division manages all commercial and recreational fisheries in the coastal waters, while the commission regulates freshwater fish and administers hunting, trapping and boating laws.

“That’s a bad, bad idea,” Ron McPherson, a charter boat captain in Atlantic Beach, told agency representatives at the meeting. “The merger won’t save anyone a dime.”

“I say no, no, no,” Bertie Potter, who owns a fish house in Hobucken, said rather emphatically. “Commercial fishermen are hurting and this is our livelihood.”

“This will be the end of commercial fishing,” said Sandra Gaskill, a commercial fisherwoman from Stacy in Carteret County.

Other comments followed the same the drift. None of the five speakers had anything good to say about the merger idea.

Rob Bizell

Neither did the Marine Fisheries Commission, an appointed body that sets saltwater fishing regulations and policies. It voted 8-1 last week to oppose any merger. The lone dissenter doesn’t want to see the agencies combined but supports moving marine fisheries intact to the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, said Rob Bizzell, the commission’s chairman.

“The other eight commissioners, including myself, can’t see how either the resource or our state will be better served by changing our agency’s assignment,” Bizell said in the Carteret County News-Times. “We have the scientists in place, the enforcement in place and there’s a cost involved in restructuring that would be hard to justify.”

A marine fisheries division has a long history as a separate agency of state government. The division can trace its roots back to 1822, when the legislature imposed gear restrictions on oyster harvests. That was later followed by separate fish and shellfish commissions, which were combined in 1915 to form a commercial regulatory body. In 1965, the scope of the commission was expanded to include regulatory authority over recreational fishing activities in coastal waters.

The division now does a lot more, including inspecting fish houses. Louis Daniel, the division’s director, warned earlier this year against shifting that responsibility. There are more than 700 fish dealers in the state, he said, and keeping track of the catch means constant contact with them.

“We have a tremendous amount of interactions with fish dealers,” he said at a commission meeting in June.

Information from the dealers, he said, is the state’s main method of managing fish quotas, which is essential to complying with Atlantic fisheries regulations and quotas.

“It has the potential to have extraordinary consequences to our industry,” he said.

Pam Morris

Gaskill and Pam Morris, a commercial fisherwoman from Harkers Island fear that a merger would destroy the industry.

“We’ll get the shaft,” Gaskill said after Thursday’s meeting. “The reason for all of this is to get the commercial fisherman out of the water. They don’t want us in the creeks; they don’t want us in the rivers; they don’t want us in the sounds.”

Commercial fisherman, Morris said, view the potential merger with great suspicion.  The idea is being driven by inland legislators, who have no particular knowledge of the industry or empathy with those who work in it, she said. They are more sympathetic to recreational fishermen, Morris said and more comfortable with the Wildlife Resources Commission.

“This is all being done under the guise of saving a dollar, but that’s not what this is all about,” she said.

Many recreational fishing groups have for years lobbied the state to follow the lead of other Southern states and ban gill nets, a common type of commercial fishing gear, from inshore waters, Gaskill noted.

“They want the nets out of the water,” Gaskill added. “That means, we’ll be out of the water, too.”

The fisheries division and the wildlife commission must submit their report to the legislature by Oct. 1.

Today is the deadline for public comments on the reorganization. Submit comments online or mail them to S821 Comments, 1701 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-1701.

Hispanic students from Durham sample marine life around Jones Island in the White Oak River. Photo by Sam Bland.

SWANSBORO – It was one of those sweltering July days when the temperature approached triple digits and the White Oak River was more like a hot tub.

Luis Hernandez didn’t seem to mind. The14-year-old held one end of a tape measure as part of a team of students measuring a plot of marsh grass on Jones Island.  “This is cool,” he said, obviously not about the weather. “We’re seeing a lot of things and we’re learning a lot.”

Hernandez was one of 26 middle-school students who spent the day on the island in the White Oak to help the N.C. Coastal Federation monitor recently planted marsh grasses and new oyster reefs.

The federation has put a lot of kids to work on Jones Island over the years. But these kids were different. All were Hispanic from inner city neighborhoods in Durham. None had ever been to the coast before.

They were chosen to make the trip because they are among the top science students at their schools, said Rafael Mendoza, a middle-school teacher and one of the chaperones. “They are among the best students in their schools. They were chosen because they’ve shown an aptitude for science,” he said. “And it’s good to get them out of the neighborhoods.”

The N.C. Society of Hispanic Professionals paid their way to the island. The nonprofit in Chapel Hill promotes the education of Hispanic students at all scholastic levels. It offers kids guidance, provides them with tutors and mentors. Its Good Stewards of the Environment Program tries to peak their interest in science.

Students measure the density and height of marsh grass. Photo by Sam Bland.

No telling what you’ll find in the net. Photo by Sam Bland.

Created in 2008, the program chooses as many as 30 rising seventh, eighth and ninth graders in five counties in the Triangle who have shown an aptitude for science. The kids learn about research and experimentation, explained Ana Bolchalk, the program’s director, and take part in discussions about current environmental issues.

“This coastal trip teaches them that it’s important that they understand what they do at home,” she said. “It all flows here.”

Lexia Weaver, a federation scientist, explained to the kids the importance of precision. She showed them how to measure the density and height of marsh grass. By taking annual measurements, the federation can judge the health of the marshes it creates on the island.

Armed with tape measures and clip boards, the kids set off in teams into the marsh. “It’s nice to know that we’re helping,” Hernandez said.

Mendoza hopes the experience on the island will have a long-lasting effect on the kids. “We want to instill in them that there is a future in getting an education,” he said.

• Versión Española

Second of two parts

HAMPSTEAD – Andy Wood gently lifted the broad spatterdock leaf that was floating on the surface of the water. He turned it over, revealing five dime-sized circles of yellow spots.

Snail eggs.

“We’re going to have a baby boom,” Wood said, a broad smile spreading across his face. “In a couple of weeks, we’ll be crawling with snails.”

Wood can be forgiven for beaming like an expectant father. For 20 years, he has searched the ponds and creeks of the southeast N.C. coast looking for the magnificent ramshorn snail, a once common creature of the lower Cape Fear River basin. It has slowly disappeared, though, and Wood has taken it upon himself to save them from extinction.

He raised them first in fish tanks and then in his sons’ wading pool. Those simple beginnings have eventually led to this: Seven large, circular plastic tanks in the woods of Pender County shaded and stocked with native plants to mimic the snail’s natural habitat.

Wood figured he may now have as many as 1,000 snails inching along just below the surface. Some Wood even knows on sight. He plucked one particularly large specimen from the underside of a leaf. Green algae grew on its rust brown shell.

First of two parts

HAMPSTEAD – Caring for a species is a tough job. Just ask Andy Wood, who has been at it for two decades.

“In the last few years it has begun worrying me,” said Wood, as we stood in the shade amid large black plastic tanks filled with water and tangles of spatterdock. “I lay down to go to sleep at night and I think this is all very tenuous.”

Andy Wood has cared for the magnificent ramshorn snail, breeding them in tanks filled with spatterdock. Photo by Sam Bland.

There was the time in 1996, for instance, when Hurricane Fran ripped through Wilmington. Wood and his family lived near Bradley Creek. The creek came up, sweeping away one tank and tipping another. Wood rushed into the tempest to save what he could. His wife and two boys stood aghast at the doorway urging him back.

Yes, a tough job.

The members of this species are no bigger than a quarter and weigh about as much. That doesn’t make the job any easier, however. In fact, Wood may have gotten more help over the years if the object of his obsession was something as grand as a California condor, as fierce as a timber wolf or as cute as a polar bear.

It’s none of those things. It’s a snail.

Not just any snail, mind you, but the magnificent ramshorn, the king of pulmonate snails.

But a snail nonetheless.

“It’s not an ivory bill, it’s a snail,” Wood conceded, as the temperature rose in the shade of the canopy, promising another sweltering day. “But to the snails, they’re ivory bills.”

And they share the planet. To Wood, a fourth-generation biologist, that makes them worth saving.

For the past 20 years, he has been poking around the millponds and beaver ponds, the lakes and creeks of the southeast coast looking for snails and enrolling some in his shoestring breeding program. Wood found his last snail in 2004, however.

The magnificent ramshorn snail’s coiled shell looks like a ram’s horn. Photos by Sam Bland.

Those languidly inching along the spatterdock in these tanks deep in the piney woods of Pender County may then be all that is left of a creature once common to the freshwater swamps and ponds of our southern coast.

John Fridell, a biologist and endangered species specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, can’t be 100 percent certain about these things because you can never look everywhere. “But if it weren’t for Andy, I feel pretty certain that the magnificent ramshorn snail would be extinct,” he said. “And Andy’s done this on his own.”

A Snail in Trouble

Bill Adams deserves some of the credit. It was his phone call in 1992, after all, that tipped the first domino. Adams at the time was a biologist for the Army Corps of Engineers and served on a state committee looking into the alarming decline of mollusks and gastropods, the shelled critters at the bottom rungs of life’s ladder. The magnificent ramshorn, Adams knew, was living on borrowed time, assuming it was living at all.

Planorbella magnifica shouldn’t be confused with the common ramshorn snails found in pet shops. Like them, it has a lung of sorts – a pulmonate snail – and a coiled shell that looks on profile like a ram’s horn.  But magnifica is the largest pulmonate snail in North America – and thus worthy of the lofty adjective — and its geographic distribution was never as widespread as its pet store cousins’.

Adams thinks, though, that the snail was once pretty common in the lower Cape Fear River basin, back when the river was shallow and fresh almost to its mouth. The rice plantations that once dotted the lower coast were probably filled with them, he said.

The snails were “discovered” in 1903 by Henry Augustus Pilsbry, a prolific naturalist and mollusk man. Scientific literature published a few years later placed the snail in Greenfield Lake in Wilmington, but it hadn’t been seen anywhere in decades when Adams started looking. He found some in 1986 in a millpond in Brunswick County.

A few years later, he tried to raise the snails in his garage but couldn’t keep them alive.  “I was having little luck keeping them in captivity and I needed help,” Adams remembered. “I called Andy.”

At the time Wood was the education curator for the N.C. Aquarium at Fort Fisher. Adams knew he had access to fish tanks, filters and everything else necessary to keep aquatic creatures alive.

Wood also had something else: An affinity for small things. His father and uncle had been entomologists.  As a kid in Connecticut, he liked looking under flag stones for toads and bugs.

A scientist himself, Wood has devoted his life to teaching others about the natural world. His nature commentary on the local public radio station is widely popular and his work as the former education director of N.C. Audubon highly respected. His nonprofit, the Coastal Plain Conservation Group, works with coastal landowners to provide habitat for threatened species.

When it’s all said and done, though, his signature professional accomplishment will in all likelihood be defined by a snail. Wood, 57, knows it, and he also knows who to thank. “Bill knew they were in trouble,” he said. “It was his idea to start up a captive program. I’m honored that he called me.”

Soon after the call, Wood found his first snail in a pond in Brunswick County. He can still get very animated when relating the details. “It was all very exciting,” he said.

Magnificent but Picky

The first attempt at keeping them in captivity, though, nearly ended in disaster. Wood put some snails in a fish tank at the aquarium. The water was fresh, clean and thoroughly filtered. After two weeks, though, the snails withdrew into their shells and fell to the bottom.

Bill Adams

Salt is the snail’s kryptonite. Even the slightest whiff of it – which is about all there must have been in the air inside the marine aquarium – will send them retreating into their shells. Enough will kill them.

Adams, in fact, thinks the snail disappeared from the Cape Fear itself after the river was dredged to make way for bigger ships and Snow’s Cut was opened in 1930. Tidal amplitude in the lower Cape Fear went from several inches to four feet, Adams said.

“The entire lower river was changed,” he said. “Salt moved farther upriver, and salt is the one thing these snails can’t stand.”

The snails were driven back into the upper reaches of creeks and into ponds and lakes, where they hung on for decades. “Life is tenacious,” Adams said.

The ailing snails in the aquarium wouldn’t make it, though. Wood rescued them and took them home, commandeering his sons’ wading pool.

And so it began.

Wednesday: A baby boom and relief.

Alice and Fred Stanback

OCEAN – A grassroots organization that fought off a smelting plant, a county that encouraged innovative techniques to control stormwater and farmers working to restore wetlands won 2012 Pelican Awards from the N.C. Coastal Federation.

The Clean County Coalition in Morehead City, Pender County officials and the Mattamuskeet Drainage Association in Hyde County are among the 16 award recipients from across North Carolina. The winners will receive the awards Saturday at a luncheon at the N.C. History Center in New Bern.

The annual Pelican Awards recognize exemplary action to protect and preserve the coastal environment, noted Todd Miller, the federation’s founder and executive director.

“These awards are our way of recognizing extraordinary commitment to protecting and preserving our coast,” he said. “We should never underestimate the power that many people bring to the effort of assuring that our coast remains a healthy and vibrant place. We can’t thank them enough.”

This year, in honor of its 30th anniversary, the federation is giving a special award to Fred and Alice Stanback of Salisbury. Donations from the Stanbacks and their family members have had a huge effect throughout state in protecting the environment and in building the capacity of dozens of conservation groups, including the federation, Miller noted.

“In fact, over the years they have become the single most influential force in building the capacity of citizens to watch out for environmental quality in North Carolina,” he said. “Their financial support exceeds any other form of environmental philanthropic giving.”

Northeast Coast Winners

Pat Armstrong  sits with here students at Columbia Middle School. She won a Pelican Award for her environmental education.

The foresight and cooperation of the 30 landowners in the Mattamuskeet Drainage Association in Hyde County will have sweeping consequences for the health of Pamlico Sound

The 42,500 acres now part of the Mattamuskeet association were intensively ditched and drained in the 1960s and ‘70s for forestry and farming operations. Over the past 20 years landowners have placed nearly half the land in the Wetland Reserve Program, a federal initiative that restores former wetlands and protects them with conservation easements. By partnering with the federation through a series of projects, the easements will be further enhanced to improve water quality and reopen closed shellfishing waters in Pamlico Sound.

2011 was a benchmark year. Two landowners within the association enrolled nearly 4,400 acres in the wetlands program, bringing the total acres of land enrolled and available for restoration to over 20,000.

The Pelican Award recognizes this achievement and the cooperation of the farmers to develop a long-range restoration and management plan for the land and water, said Erin Fleckenstein, a federation scientist who heads the group’s regional office in Manteo.

The cooperation of the association, the federation, the federal government and other partners is a shining example of a non-traditional alliance working toward environmental conservation that can serve as a template for other projects, she said.

The other regional award winners are: Pat Armstrong, a retired teacher in Columbia, won an education award and Marcia and Jim Lyons of Buxton won for their volunteer work.

Central Coast Winners

The Clean County Coalition won a Pelican Award for stopping a sulfur smelter at the state port in Morehead City.

The plans for a sulfur smelter at the state port in Morehead City had been shrouded in secrecy when the first reports dribbled out in the spring of 2011. The project had received most of its needed state permits when Leigh Johnson, Renee Coles, John Nelson and Neil Littman called some people together at the old train depot in Morehead City. Seated around the table were people representing downtown businesses, the Realtors Association, the local tourism agency and environmental groups.

They formed the Clean County Coalition, which for the next two months rallied people against the smelter. Hundreds of people attended town board meetings. Thousands packed two public informational meetings that the coalition sponsored. Its members organized petition drives and public rallies and marched at the port gate.

It all came to a stunning conclusion when Gov. Beverly Perdue held a press conference in Morehead City to announce that the smelter plans were being scrapped. Though that issue faded, the coalition did not. It intends to remain involved in important local issues.

“Most of these types of fights don’t end in such a clear-cut victory,” Miller said. “That this one did is a testament to the coalition’s broad public support and its tireless dedication.”

Other regional award winners are: East Carolina Community Development Inc. of Beaufort, the N.C. History Center at Tyron Palace in New Bern, Second Wind Eco Tours & Yoga Studio in Swansboro and the Roberson family of Swansboro for their volunteer efforts.

Southeast Coast Winners

J. Taylor Ryan, right, works with students on an oyster project in St. James. Ryan and a town committee won a Pelican Award for the work.

The Pender County commissioners in 2010 involved many people and groups in the county to develop and adopt a comprehensive land-use plan and a unified development ordinance.  Included in the plan and ordinance are several goals and policies to encourage the use of low- impact development, or LID, which are techniques that  reduce stormwater runoff by mimicking natural hydrology.

Recognizing the multiple benefits of LID, Ben Andrea with the Pender County Planning Department wanted to ensure that developers were provided information and tools to better understand and use these methods in future projects. Andrea drafted policies that encourage LID. The commissioners approved the policies in the fall of 2011. Planning staff solicited input from the Business Alliance for a Sound Economy and the federation. Both organizations strongly supported the effort.

Other winners for work in the region are: The N.C. Department of Transportation for LID pilot projects on roadways mostly in Brunswick County; Terry Brinson, a teacher in Wilmington, for environmental education; Lovey’s Café in Wilmington for business; J. Taylor Ryan and the town stormwater committee in St. James for building oyster reefs in the Intracoastal Waterway; the Lumina News in Wrightsville Beach for local media coverage of environmental issues; and Dustin Miller and Heidi Messina of the Department of Media Production at University of North Carolina-Wilmington for producing the federation’s award-winning documentary, Habitats, Heroes & Hallelujah: Stories of Hope from the North Carolina Coast.

With state legislators still wading through the issue of rising seas, a new federal report released yesterday seems to further muddy the water.

Contrary to what we heard from some legislators the last few weeks, not only does the sea seem to be rising along the state’s northern coast, but it’s doing so at a rate three or four times faster than anyplace else in the world.

That, at least, is one of the conclusions of a new study of sea-level rise that the U.S. Geological Survey published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Analyzing information from tide gauges along the north and mid-Atlantic coasts, agency researchers found that sea level along a 600-mile stretch, from Cape Hatteras to north of Boston, has increased 2 to 3.7 millimeters a year, starting around 1990. That’s as much as 2.75 inches during that span. The average global increase over the same period was 0.6 to 1.0 mm. a year, or about three-quarters of an inch total, the study notes.

Peter Howd

If global temperatures continue to increase this century because of global warming, the Atlantic Ocean in this region is expected to continue to rise at a faster rate than it will elsewhere, the researchers said. The sea along this stretch of coast, which contains some of the country’s largest metropolitan areas and densest coastal landscapes, could rise 8 to more than 11 inches higher than the global average by 2100, the research showed.

It’s not just a faster rate, but at a faster pace, like a car on a highway “jamming on the accelerator,” Asbury Sallenger Jr., an oceanographer at the agency and the study’s lead author, told the Associated Press.

Seas will rise gradually over time, noted Peter Howd, an oceanographer under contract with the USGS and one of the paper’s other authors, but greater flooding from winter storms will be the first signs.

“People are starting to recognize that winter storms that used to pass by without producing any flooding, all of sudden they are getting flooding,” Howd said in an interview last week. “Where it’s really going to hit home is that the storms that we get 3 or 4 times a winter will start looking like the storms that we get every 3 or 4 years.”

Science and Politics

The new research seems to counter arguments made by backers of a bill that passed the N.C. Senate a couple of weeks ago. The bill was widely interpreted as preventing the state from using the latest scientific modeling when planning for future sea-level rise because of global warming.

Warming atmospheric temperatures in the future are expected to push up sea levels by melting ice sheets in Greenland and west Antarctica, and because warmer water expands. Climatologists use sophisticated computer models to predict how high the seas could get under different warming scenarios.

After reviewing the consensus of those models, a panel of scientific advisors told the state Coastal Resources Commission in 2010 to prepare for a sea-level rise of 39 inches by 2100, or more than triple the historic rate. Though the new research suggests adding a few more inches to that total, the forecast was in line with those made by major scientific organizations around the world and by several countries and other states.

But the state report immediately came under fire from development interests and some coastal counties. They feared that regulations to protect against such a drastic rise in sea level would stifle economic growth on the coast.

Critics also questioned the science behind the state report. That was echoed by sponsors of the Senate bill. The science of sea-level rise was unsettled, they said, and the models were speculative at best. Credible evidence exists, they noted, that indicates sea levels haven’t risen appreciably in the past 100 years.

The bill that passed the Senate would have forced the state to use those historic rates when planning for what the ocean might do in the future. Those long-term average rates of historic sea-level rise, when extrapolated into the future, indicate the ocean might rise only 8 inches this century, not 39.

After being lampooned by commentators, scientists and writers around the world, the bill died last week when the N.C. House refused to vote on it. Representatives from both chambers are trying to devise a compromise.

The names of Robert Dean and James Houston came up often in the debate. They are well-respected coastal engineers who studied data from tide gauges and determined that long-term average sea-level rise for the past 80 years has been negligible even though temperatures have risen.

The USGS researchers tried to replicate Dean and Houston’s findings by using the same tide information from across North America, Howd noted. To determine if the rate of rise has recently accelerated, though, they analyzed smaller time segments of tide gauge data and in a way that removed long-term trends associated with vertical land movements.

“Dean’s numbers are correct for what he calculated, the long-term average acceleration over the last 80 years,” Howd explained. “That’s a very different answer as to whether there’s any recent acceleration. We just asked a different question.”

AMOC and You

This is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC.This great conveyor belt could be affected by global warming, causing among other things rising seas along the northern N.C. coast.

The answer they got has everything to do with the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, called AMOC by those who study such things. It’s part of the oceans’ conveyor system, which constantly redistributes heat and cold. AMOC carries warm water from the tropics to high northern latitudes near the surface and returns cold water from the north Atlantic in the deep ocean to the Southern Hemisphere. In that way, a balance is achieved. The Gulf Stream is AMOC’s main highway north.

How AMOC does all this is complicated, involving water temperature, salinity and density in the subpolar north Atlantic, but scientists have long thought that a warming climate could affect the circulation. The USGS study, though, may be the first to indicate that might be happening already. The report shows that the sea-level rise “hotspot” north of Cape Hatteras is consistent with the slowing of AMOC, Howd said.

So much water is flowing north in the Gulf Stream and at such a quick pace that the core of the stream is two meters higher than the water at the shoreline, Howd explained. “When the current slows down, the Gulf Stream falls and the water levels increase at the coast. That’s the simple answer, but it’s pretty complicated.”

The magnitude of this see-saw affect will be greater farther from the Gulf Stream, Howd said. The Stream hugs the N.C. coast before veering east across the Atlantic north of Cape Hatteras. Howd and the other researchers saw no evidence of accelerated sea-level rise above the global average for much of the state’s coast. It became evident north of the cape, he said, but the rate there was lower than it was farther north.

Because of its proximity to the Gulf Stream, the northern N.C. coast could expect to see seas rise at the low end of the study’s estimates, about 8 inches above the global average by 2100, Howd said.

Whatever the they do in the future, the oceans won’t do it at the same rate in every location, noted Marcia McNutt, the director of the USGS. Differences in land movements, strength of ocean currents, water temperatures and salinity can cause regional and local highs and lows in sea level.

“Many people mistakenly think that the rate of sea-level rise is the same everywhere as glaciers and ice caps melt, increasing the volume of ocean water, but other effects can be as large or larger than the so-called ‘eustatic’ rise,” she said. “As demonstrated in this study, regional oceanographic contributions must be taken into account in planning for what happens to coastal property.”

And it may not take years to feel the effects of rising seas, Sallenger said.

“Cities in the hotspot, like Norfolk, New York and Boston already experience damaging floods during relatively low-intensity storms,” he said in a press release. “Ongoing accelerated sea-level rise in the hotspot will make coastal cities and surrounding areas increasingly vulnerable to flooding by adding to the height that storm surge and breaking waves reach on the coast.”

BEAUFORT – A state meeting on sea-level rise a month or so ago would have drawn a few planners and maybe a handful of scientists from the nearby marine labs. Yesterday, though, the room was packed to hear a committee of the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission discuss the state’s tortured, but now famous, draft policy on sea-level rise.

“I don’t think I’ve seen this many people at a planning meeting,” Tancred Miller, a coastal policy analyst for the state Division of Coastal Management, noted before outlining the latest changes to the policy for the CRC’s Estuarine and Ocean Committee.

That’s what worldwide media attention will do. The budding policy, which has quietly gone through several revisions over the past two years, fell into the glare of the media spotlight after the N.C. Senate began considering a bill a month ago that was widely interpreted as preventing the state from using modern scientific techniques to forecast how high the Atlantic Ocean might get this century because of global warming.

Melvin Shepard Jr.

The Senate was reacting to the CRC’s draft policy that was first presented by its scientific advisors in 2010. That version recommended that the state prepare for a sea-level rise of 39 inches by 2100, or more than triple the historic rate. The forecast was in line with the ones used by major scientific organizations around the world and by several countries and other states, but it immediately came under fire from development interests and some coastal counties. They feared that regulations to protect against such a drastic rise in sea level would stifle economic growth on the coast. They were much more comfortable with the Senate’s prescription, which would have forced the state to prepare for an 8-inch rise this century.

Googling “sea-level rise and N.C.” will produce a list of hundreds of newspaper stories, TV reports, blog posts, editorials and columns from around the world. Most aren’t complimentary. In fact, they’re downright scornful, accusing the state of ignoring science and trying to make global warming illegal. Stephen Colbert, the TV comedian, devoted five minutes of his popular “The Colbert Report” to thoroughly skewer the bill and its backers.

“This is a brilliant solution,” Colbert said of the bill, his tongue firmly implanted in his cheek. “If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law that makes the result illegal. Problem solved.”

The current version of Senate bill died Tuesday after Republicans who control the N.C. House refused to take it up for a vote. It will now go to a committee of senators and representatives to work out an agreeable compromise. A plan is brewing that would prevent the CRC from using climate models that forecast accelerated rates of sea-level rise this century until the state completes a study of the science behind those forecasts. Legislative backers of such an approach think the study could take as long as five years to complete.

Whether such a plan can avoid another round of scorn remains to be seen. Melvin Shepard Jr. hopes so. He’s a CRC member, the owner of a commercial-fishing supply store in Sneads Ferry and the president of the N.C. Coastal Federation.

“I don’t want to see us become the subject of ridicule,” he said before yesterday’s meeting. “Even the BBC took shots at us.”

There’s not much left in the draft policy to poke fun at or raise eyebrows over. The various revisions have thoroughly diluted it. “Watered down,” is the way David Webster, a CRC member described it yesterday.

Miller noted in his presentation to the committee that most of the controversial topics, such as forecasts for sea-level rise and recommendations for regulations, were removed from the policy last year. But Bob Emory, the CRC’s chairman, directed the committee at the last CRC meeting to take another look at the draft policy to eliminate anything that might be considered controversial and to ensure that the policy is simply aimed at fact gathering and education.

“It is my hope that this committee will develop sea-level rise policy that the CRC could adopt,” Emory said yesterday.

Bob Emory

Not much needed changing, Miller said when he presented his latest edits yesterday. A few words were changed here and there and a few sentences deleted or recast. A new revision allows the CRC to seek information about sea-level rise from people who don’t serve as science advisors.

Maybe the most significant revision came from the audience after Miller’s presentation. The policy noted that it “shall” be revised every five years to reflect the latest scientific research. Charles Jones, a retired director of the division, suggested changing the verb to “should.”

Miller made the change, thus removing any obligation that the policy would be updated, and the committee voted unanimously to accept it and the others. The CRC must now adopt the policy. The commission is scheduled to discuss it at its meeting today on Pivers Island, but Emory doesn’t expect that it will be voted on.

David Weaver, a retired assistant manager for New Hanover County and a member of the CRC’s citizen advisory group, wonders how helpful the policy will be to county engineers wanting guidance from the division before designing a new sewer plant or roadway.

“What kind of helpful information would the division be able to provide?” Weaver asked after the meeting. “There is no range of forecasts, no guidelines, no recommendations.”

Just having a policy will help, noted Braxton Davis, the division’s director. It will allow the division to collaborate with other state or federal agencies, prepare educational materials and conduct research, he said.

“Given the sensitivity of this issue, the policy is very important as to how we would move forward,” Davis said. “Without a policy, there would be some questions about the role of the division on this issue.”

Shepard is just glad something was done. “At least we have something on the books that you can read,” he said. “You can build on that.

Thirty-three counties in Eastern North Carolina, from Brunswick to Pasquotank, make up one of 11 priority areas in the Southeast where there are innovative opportunities to preserve large tracts of  “working forests” that could otherwise be developed,  according to a study released Tuesday by a nonprofit land conservation organization.

Although development has slowed since land prices peaked in 2006, the analysis by the Open Space Institute in New York suggests that as many as 344,000 acres of forestland along the coast —one of the world’s most productive for growing timber—could ultimately be converted to other uses, which would cost North Carolinians jobs while compromising water quality and wildlife habitat.

This analysis is drawn from Retaining Working Forests: Eastern North Carolina, an institute report released in collaboration with the Partnership for Southern Forest Conservation.

The institute protects scenic, natural and historic lands to ensure public enjoyment, conserve habitats and sustain community character. Through land acquisition and conservation easements, it has preserved 110,000 acres in New York State and has assisted in the protection of an additional 1.8 million acres, mostly in New England.

The partnership is a broad coalition of nonprofit groups and state and federal government agencies working to develop and promote innovative approaches to protect large forested tracts across the South.

“We hope the study shines the light on Eastern North Carolina because it contains critically important forestlands,” said Peter Howell, the institute’s executive vice president. “We want to inspire action by giving people good and comprehensive information to take those actions.”

North Carolina is currently the top forest-related employer in the Eastern United States. The industry, the study notes, employs nearly 80,000 people while contributing nearly $5 billion to North Carolina’s gross domestic product and generating $445 million in income taxes each year.

Coastal forests also bring irreplaceable public value by protecting clean water sources and wildlife habitat while buffering the state’s substantial investment in already-conserved public lands.

This combination of economic and ecological rewards is at the heart of the definition of a “working forest.” Such a forest stores carbon, filters water, controls floods, provides a home for plants and animals and offers a place to hunt, fish or take a leisurely walk in the woods. A working forest may also produce income for its owner by providing timber, pulpwood, herbs, wild edibles and medicines.

All that is obviously lost if the forest is cut down and replaced with a shopping mall or a housing development. The institute’s report raises that specter by outlining the economic realities facing the state’s forestland owners. That ownership has been in flux for more than a decade. The large timber and paper companies, which once owned vast tracts of Eastern North Carolina, have sold much of their holdings. The buyers in many instances have been entities called timber investment management organizations, or TIMOs, and real estate investment trusts, or REITs. They manage large tracts of forestland for investors.

Because of the size of their holdings, these investment groups, the study notes, are both critical conservation partners and important contributors to local economies. The average size of forestland ownership in North Carolina is less than 15 acres, the study reports, but the seven TIMOs and REITs with forestland in the region hold an average of 153,000 acres.

These investment groups bought much of the land at the height of the market, Howell said. They’re fragile and may be underwater, he said

These REITS and TIMOs are really different than industrial forest owners,” Howell said.  “Unlike the industrials which were really only, or mostly about timbering, these new entities are committed to doing whatever they can to achieve the highest possible return, whether it be timber harvesting or development.  In some ways, they’re focused much more on the bottom line.”

Forestland in Eastern North Carolina plays a critical role in maintaining rural drinking water quality. The conversion of these forests to other uses would increase sediment and nitrogen loading within estuaries, degrading household and municipal water sources for some 4 million people, the report says.

The eastern part of the state also boasts the richest coastal biodiversity in the United States outside of Florida. The region supports endangered wildlife habitat, with as many as 83 at-risk species per county, including the red-cockaded woodpecker, Bachman’s sparrow, red wolf, Carolina crawfish frog and mimic glass lizard.

Those benefits, which are detailed in the report, along with the eastern forest’s economic return to landowners got Steven Troxler’s attention. He is the state’s commissioner of Agriculture and his department contains the state’s forestry division.

“I highly encourage giving careful consideration to this report,” he said. “We must make thoughtful decisions to ensure that North Carolinians continue to reap the benefits of our working forests.”

But only 2 percent of the state’s working forests are protected with conservation easements—one of the primary tools that landowners, nonprofits and government agencies have used in other parts of the country to preserve working forests.

Much of the money for those easements came from the federal Forest Legacy Program under the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Since its inception in 1990, the program has paid for easements that have protected more 2 million acres in 43 states and territories, but less than 5,000 of those acres are in North Carolina. Easements allow owners to continue to own the land and harvest the trees, but prevent the land from being developed

The report also evaluates other conservation tools, such as Department of Defense programs, wetland mitigation, endangered species banking and longleaf pine restoration credits.

As the lasting implications of the 2008 economic downturn become clear, the study emphasizes that nonprofits, landowners and policymakers must work together to identify ways to keep forestland as forest.

The study offers some new strategies to do that, noted Camilla Herlevich, the executive director of the N.C. Coastal Land Trust in Wilmington. “It’s always good to highlight the tools that are out there, especially right now when state funding is on the skids,” she said.

After several years of budget cuts to the state conservation funds normally used to protect forests, landowners and conservation groups need to become creative in fashioning projects, she said. Those timber investor groups, for instance, could be attracted to deals that provide ways to make money from a forested tract’s recreational or habitat values, Herlevich said.

“These timberland investors are not any different than the timber companies because they are looking for returns,” she said. “The investment groups may be more nimble and more open to other ways to make that return.”

That kind of creative thinking is needed, said Kim Elliman, the institute’s CEO and president. “We are at a critical juncture and must identify new markets and strategic incentives for retaining large working forests,” she said. “In this report, we state the challenge and find some new opportunities for achieving conservation at scale.”

EMERALD ISLE – You won’t have to wander far at the N.C. Coastal Federation’s Native Plant Festival this weekend to bump into a Parrot Head. They will be everywhere – waiting on customers, hauling plants to cars, directing traffic in the parking lots.

The Emerald Isle Parrot Heads, year in and year out, supply the most volunteers to the annual plant festival. There will be 18 of them roaming around the festival grounds in Ocean today and Saturday.

We’ll let you in on a little secret as long as you promise not to tell Jimmy Buffett: Some may not like his music. Heck, one or two may not even know who he is.

The Parrot Head clubs – and there are more than 200 of them spread across the country – were inspired by Buffett’s music and the tropical lifestyle he personifies. But you apparently don’t have to be much of a fan to be a Parrot Head.

Ken and Sue Stone

“There are some in the club who never heard of Jimmy Buffett,” Ken Stone says.

Stone is a Parrot Head and, for the record, likes Buffett’s music. His wife, Sue, is the club’s secretary. Together, they organize the club’s plant festival volunteers.

“A lot of people think the club is made up of a bunch of old Jimmy Buffett fans,” Sue explained. “It’s only very loosely a Jimmy Buffett club. It’s more of a social club that has a lot in common with Jimmy Buffett.”

Yes, club members like their margaritas and, yes, they like to party. “But we party with a purpose,” Ken said.

Some of that partying last year raised more than $3,000 for wounded veterans. Other monthly parties and events benefitted Habitat for Humanity, the Humane Society, Toys for Tots, battered women, cancer patients and stray cats. When they’re not partying, club members may be out along N.C. 58, picking up roadside trash near the Emerald Isle bridge.

“People see us as a bunch of partying drunks,” Sue said. “But we have a lot of members who don’t drink. Everything we do we do for a good cause.”

The club added the Plant Festival to the list several years ago. “We just started asking people if they wanted to help,” said Sue, who along with Ken, is a federation member. “Now, it’s become a tradition.”

Mike Haut, the owner of the Emerald Club, started the local Parrot Head chapter 10 years ago with about 15 members, Ken said. Membership now fluctuates between 240 and 300, depending on whether tourists are on the island. Haut is still the president. “Because he owns a bar,” Ken added.

Ken and Sue joined soon after moving to Emerald Isle seven years ago. They came from Albany, N.Y., where both retired from state government. It was their first home in the South.

“The club really helped us get acclimated,” Sue said. “That’s where we met people.”

While the club’s activities have benefitted many local charities, club members get something in return. “We both have pensions, so you could say they’re paying us to volunteer,” Ken explained. “But the truth is that we all feel good what we do because we’re giving back to our community.”

Last of two parts

Before falling on hard budgetary times, the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund had distributed about $970 million in more than 1,500 grants. More than a quarter of that money – about $255 million – was spent in the 20 coastal counties.

The money has been used to buy sensitive lands threatened by development, clean up hog lagoons, improve sewer plants and reduce stormwater runoff. It also bankrolled major planning initiatives, including a blueprint for restoring the state’s once-great oyster population.

Goose Creek Game Land: The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission bought the Beaufort County portion of the game lands with $1 million from the trust fund.Below are highlights of a few coastal projects. Go here for a complete list.

The game land is a series of waterfowl impoundments, each about 200 acres, on a peninsula on the south side of the Pamlico River between Aurora and Hobucken in Beaufort and Pamlico counties.

The best time to see waterfowl is from January through February, while May to August is prime time for wading birds. The impoundments are north and east of N.C. 304 and are best reached from several public launch sites nearby. Visitors will need a boat to see much of the area. The water can often be rough so boats 16 feet or longer are advised. The swamp forest is south and west of N.C. 304.

Hunting is allowed during fall, winter and April through May, on Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and holidays. The best time to visit the game land is on non-hunting days.

Bird Island: One of the great conservation victories in North Carolina ended with a $2.7 million grant from the trust fund that allowed the state to buy Bird Island on the southern tip of Sunset Beach in Brunswick County and permanently protect it as part of the N.C. Coastal Reserve.

People had put up a 10-year fight, starting in 1992, to save the uninhabited island from developers. Aided by the N.C. Coastal Federation and other groups, they banded together to write letters, raise money, pack public meetings and lobby legislators. What started as a local effort soon spread throughout the state. Tourists from towns across America joined the cause.

Since the island was saved, tens of thousands of tourists have walked its lonely beaches, Many stop at the famed Kindred Spirit mailbox in the dunes where they record their most cherished thoughts, reminiscences and prayers.

A human chain moves bags of oyster shells to create an oyster reef near Jones Island in the White Oak River.

White Oak River: Special places sometimes need special friends. Since 1999 the trust fund has provided $8 million to enable the federation, Hammocks Beach State Park and other friends of the White Oak River to work effectively to protect and restore its water quality and fisheries habitat.

The river stretches 48 miles through Jones, Onslow and Carteret counties. Government agencies, private organizations, local residents, schools and visitors are making sure the river remains a place to celebrate. They have used these state grants to leverage an additional $13.7 million in federal, local and private funds to buy nearly 4,000 acres along more than 17 miles of shoreline. Much of this property is now available for public use as either part of the state park or as wildlife game lands. Hundreds of volunteers visit Jones Island, now part of the park, to help the federation restore oyster beds and salt marshes

“A healthy river is good for business and recreation,” says Jimmy Phillips of Clyde Phillips Seafood in Swansboro. “These clean water investments keep the White Oak River a great place to live, work and play.”

Dover Sewage Improvements: The trust awarded a grant to Dover in Craven County to build a collection system and pump stations designed to move sewage to a regional pump station and force main to Kinston. Onsite systems throughout the town weren’t functioning, resulting in untreated sewage being discharged into surface waters.

“Our town’s central sewer system would not be possible without Clean Water Management Trust Fund participation,” Malcolm Johnson, the Dover mayor, says on the trust fnd Web site. “Vacancy of homes within town was becoming a problem as owners could not obtain septic tank permits to allow rehabilitation efforts to be performed. Central sewer will improve the standard of living within our community.”

Eagles Island: The trust fund gave the New Hanover Soil and Water Conservation District $255,000 to buy 239 acres on the northwestern edge of this complex of islands in the Cape Fear River across from Wilmington.

Now a total of 746 acres of wild freshwater tidal marsh on the northern part of Eagles Island are protected from future development. The protected area can be seen while driving on U.S. 74/76 towards Leland.

Eagles Island is a quick paddle from downtown Wilmington.

Eagles Island and the Lower Cape Fear River basin are home to ecologically sensitive plants and animals including the shortnose sturgeon, the rare skipper butterfly and the Carolina bishopweed, which is found only in a few places in the world.

The conservation effort began in 2001 when Whitey Prevatte, owner of the former Whitey’s restaurant, gave 53 acres on Eagles Island to the New Hanover Soil and Water Conservation District.

Since then, the Eagles Island Coalition, a group of concerned people including planners from area municipalities and state agencies, formed to protect water quality, promote education and awareness, conserve and restore the habitat for wildlife and establish passive recreational opportunities such as canoe and kayak trails, hunting and fishing and wildlife viewing areas.

Holly Shelter: Hervey McIver, protection specialist with The Nature Conservancy, describes the 950-acre McLean tact in Pender County as “one of the best remaining savannas in southeast North Carolina.”

These fire-dependent woodlands are recognized as significant natural heritage areas that can provide habitat for endangered species such as red-cockaded woodpeckers. “You also find many plants that garner a lot of attention such Venus fly traps and pitcher plants, as well as beautiful little well as beautiful little orchids,” McIver says on the trust fund Web site..

The McLean tract is most recent acquisition funded by the trust fund as part of an ongoing effort linking up conservation lands with the 50,000-acre Holly Shelter Game Land and the 25,000-acre Angola Bay Game Land. Area game lands support the hunting industry.

These conservation efforts also support military installations such as nearby Camp Lejeune, and are part of a local initiative known as the Onslow Bight Conservation Forum that partners conservation goals with the interests of local military installations.

Buckridge Coastal Reserve: Through funding partnerships with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the N.C. Natural Heritage Trust Fund and the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund, the N.C. Division of Coastal Management in 1999 bought  27,000 acres that a year later became the Emily and Richardson Preyer Buckridge Coastal Reserve — the largest and first inland component in the N.C. Coastal Reserve Program.

The Buckridge reserve is habitat for several rare and threatened species.

About 15 miles south of Columbia in Tyrrell County, the site is between the Alligator River and Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge and is part of the East Dismal Swamp, a vast wetlands complex that encompasses more than 320,000 acres in Dare, Tyrrell, and Washington counties.

Scattered remnant bald cypress and Atlantic white cedar stands occur in the deep organic soils of the preserve, while sweet gum grows in the rare mineral soils and black needle rush rims the perimeter of the site. Most of the oldest Atlantic white cedar forest has been cut, but there is a 30-year-old area of about 4,000 acres that represents the most extensive contiguous example of this forest type in the state.

Buckridge is habitat for several rare, threatened or endangered species. Confirmed rare species on site include the red wolf, red-cockaded woodpecker, bald eagle, American alligator, timber rattlesnake and pigmy rattlesnake. Habitat for Atlantic and shortnose sturgeons and high priority neotropical migrant birds is also maintained at Buckridge. Certain migratory birds, such as the black-throated green warbler, Swainson’s warbler, and prothonotary warblers, are dependent on southeastern-forested wetlands of the coastal plain for breeding.

BEAUFORT – The state’s long, tortuous and at times rocky journey towards a planning policy to address an expected future of higher seas came through this coastal town yesterday and left a little closer to its destination.

The N.C. Coastal Resources Commission, at its meeting on nearby Pivers Island, charged one of its committees with the task of turning a two-year-old draft policy that met with stiff resistance from development interests and some coastal counties into a friendlier document focused more on education and designed to draw less ire.

Bob Emory

Margery Overton

Robert Young

“Where we are with sea-level rise is in the education and dialogue phase,” Bob Emory, the commission’s chairman, said after the meeting. “We have to get people comfortable discussing this.”

That uneasiness became apparent in March 2010 when the commission’s scientific advisors, its Coastal Hazards Science Panel, completed a requested draft policy on future sea-level rise. The oceans, the panel noted after reviewing the best available science on the subject, are expected to rise at an accelerated rate this century because of a warming climate. Ocean water expands as it warms, called thermal expansion, and melting glaciers will add their volume of water. How quickly and how much the seas rise depend on how warm the climate gets and how fast the glaciers melt.

Because of that uncertainty, the panel offered a broad range of forecasts, noting that the Atlantic Ocean along the N.C. coast could rise 15 to 55 inches by 2100, or more than double the historic rate. That prediction is in line with forecasts made by other states. Delaware, for instance, is adopting a plan for sea-level rise of up to 60 inches by the end of the century. Southeast Florida is projecting a 9- to 24-inch rise by 2060, and the California State Lands Commission is preparing for a 55-inch rise by 2100.

In its draft, the commission’s science panel also suggested several planning initiatives to begin adapting to the expected watery future. It also recommended that the plan be updated every five years to incorporate the best available science and forecasts.

But once the report went public, the backlash came swiftly. NC-20, a group representing some coastal counties and development interests, questioned much of the data in the science panel’s report and the basic science underpinning climate change. It offered evidence that it said refuted the contention that sea level is currently rising. The draft plan, it feared, was the first step toward land-use regulations that would stifle economic growth in the coastal counties, and several of those counties passed resolutions opposing the plan.

In the face of such opposition, the Coastal Resources Commission asked the science panel to review the objections. It did so in an addendum that Margery Overton, the panel’s chairwoman, presented yesterday. She affirmed the panel’s original findings, but noted the uncertainty of its forecasts for future sea-level rise. If the ocean rises at the same rate that it has in the past, the debate is moot, she said.

“If you use the historical data and do the math, you don’t get a one-meter (39-inch) rise,” said Overton, an engineering professor at N.C. State University. “So the forecasts are based on the expectation that sea-level rise will accelerate in the future. Acceleration is the key.”

And it could be decades before that happens, Emory noted. “We need to get our arms around sea-level rise,” he told the commission. “I don’t think we’re at a point where rules are necessary, but we need a policy that focuses our attention on sea-level rise.”

He suggested that the commission’s Estuarine and Ocean Systems Committee fashion such a policy from the science panel’s draft. It needs to focus more on educating people and less on forecasting how high the sea might get in the future, he said.

“If there’s anything in there that we don’t need but will only draw fire, it needs to be taken out,” Emory said. “We’re not through the dialogue phase yet. We’re receiving resolutions from local governments at a fairly rapid pace. I don’t want this policy to be seen as a back-door to regulation.”

None of the other commission members suggested an alternate course.

Overton was pleased with the outcome. “I’m happy with it,” she said. “This is a very difficult problem, and we have time.”

Robert S. Young was less enthusiastic. He’s a geologist who heads the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University. He’s also a member of the science panel and one of the primary authors of the addendum to the original report.

“I agree that this isn’t an emergency, but I don’t think we have 30 years to figure this out,” he said. “Nothing will get better in the next decade. Storm damage will only get worse. Beach re-nourishment projects will only get more expensive. Good planning is about preparing for the future.”

But first people have to get comfortable with the concept, Emory said. “I’m not trying to minimize what we might see 50 years from now,” he said. “But we’re not ready to discuss it yet.”

PANTEGO — The developer of a proposed wind farm in Beaufort County plans to follow voluntary guidelines that the federal government recently issued that are meant to reduce the number of bird strikes while promoting increased use of wind power.

But the manager of a nearby wildlife refuge isn’t convinced that the turbines, which would be higher than the Washington Monument, won’t threaten the tens of thousands of migrating waterfowl that are attracted to the refuge each winter.

Pantego Wind Energy LLC, a subsidiary of Chicago-based Invenergy LLC, recently received approval from the N.C. Utilities Commission to build an 80-megawatt wind farm that could generate enough electricity to serve about 15,000 houses.

The project, though, has been controversial because the 49 turbines, which will reach 500 feet into the sky, would be built near three national wildlife refuges that are the winter homes of thousands of snow geese and tundra swan.

The new guidelines from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are meant to protect birds and other wildlife by providing a scientific basis for developers and government regulators to identify sites with low risk to wildlife while allowing for more wind energy projects on private and public lands, Ken Salazer, the U.S. Interior Secretary, said when they were made final on March 23.

“These voluntary guidelines have been developed through an intensive public process with significant help from the wind energy industry, state agencies and wildlife conservation groups and are designed to achieve the best outcome for wildlife and wind energy development,” he said.

Using a tiered approach, the guidelines are meant to provide a structured, scientific process for developers and regulatory agencies to identify sites with low risk to wildlife, and to help them assess, mitigate and monitor any adverse effects of wind energy projects on wildlife and their habitats. If they follow the guidelines, developers are unlikely to be prosecuted under federal law in the event of bird deaths.

Thousands of tundra swan migrate to the widlife refuges in eastern North Carolina. Can they co-exist with wind turbines?

The Utilities Commission, in giving the Pantego project its blessing, required that Invenergy follow the guidelines, said David Groberg, a company vice president of development

“Invenergy has successfully used the tiered approach recommended by the Fish and Wildlife Service on prior projects, and has implemented this approach on the to project, even prior to last week’s publication of the final guideline,” Groberg wrote in an email in response to questions.

That gives Howard Phillips little comfort. He is the manager of the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. It and other nearby federal refuges – Alligator River and Lake Mattamuskeet – have become winter havens for migrating waterfowl from Canada and Alaska. The Fish and Wildlife Service runs the refuges.

The first steps in the new guidelines, Phillips noted, are meant to help choose locations that minimize a wind farm’s effects on wildlife and habitat. The guidelines call on the wind industry to eliminate from consideration areas that would pose high risks to birds and other wildlife and to take steps to alleviate problems by restoring nearby habitat and other actions.

Implementing the guidelines after the site has been chosen would seem to bypass those safeguards, Phillips said.

“The concerns that the site presents to me haven’t changed,” he said. “They are doing some studies, but I’m going to have reservations and concerns until I’m convinced that I shouldn’t be concerned.”

Groberg noted that Invenergy followed earlier drafts of the guidelines while developing the project. “Invenergy is already implementing the Fish and Wildlife Service-recommended tiered approach from prior drafts of the guidelines to reduce risks to wildlife at the Pantego project,” he wrote. “In accordance with this approach, we are evaluating the science as data become available and will use these final guidelines to guide the decision-making process as we move forward with the project.”

The American Bird Conservancy, an advocacy group that has pushed for mandatory standards, said voluntary guidelines are largely unenforceable and will do little to protect millions of birds killed or injured by wind turbines.

The group “supports wind power when it is ‘bird-smart.’ Unfortunately, voluntary guidelines will result in more lawsuits, more bird deaths and more government subsidies for bad projects,” Kelly Fuller, the group’s wind campaign coordinator, told The Washington Post.

While no one knows exactly how many birds are killed by wind turbines, a 2008 study by a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that wind farms were killing about 440,000 birds a year in the United States.

The number of wind turbines has grown significantly since then, with overall output increasing from about 25,000 megawatts of electricity in 2008 to nearly 47,000 megawatts last year, according to the wind energy industry.

Its goal of providing 20 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2030 could lead to a million bird deaths a year or more, according to the American Bird Conservancy.

The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that up to 1 million birds die annually in oil field pits and at waste facilities, but says millions more are killed by cars, cats and collisions with buildings, power lines and radio towers.

David Yarnold, president and CEO of the National Audubon Society, called the guidelines a good compromise that reflects years of consultation with interested groups, including environmental groups. Audubon was among those groups

Joe Albea

“Conservationists can’t have it both ways: We can’t say we need renewable energy and then say there’s nowhere safe to put the wind farms,” Yarnold told the Post. “By collaborating with conservationists instead of slugging it out, the wind power industry gains vital support to expand and create jobs, and wildlife gets the protection crucial for survival. These federal guidelines are a game-changer and big win for both wildlife and clean energy.”

Joe Albea has another word for it. He’s a writer and television producer in Greenville who has extensively filmed and photographed waterfowl in the region. He was also among the leaders of a successful fight to defeat a practice landing field that the Navy wanted to build in the region several years ago.

“Audubon and Fish and Wildlife are just placating an industry that wants to expand all over,” Albea said. “We’re allowing as a state slowly but surely the loss of what was attractive to the black bears and the birds. We have to make a decision about what we want. Do we want the industrialization of our coast? This may be a green industry and all that but it’s still an industry.”

WILMINGTON – Thirty years ago, Todd Miller returned to coastal North Carolina with an idea.

He had grown up along Bogue Sound in what was then rural Carteret County.  He had fished its bountiful waters, played in the lush maritime forests that lined its shores. He had also sailed across the sound to the relatively undeveloped Bogue Banks and had watched as the wild dunes and thick forests were turned into housing developments and shopping malls.

Fresh from Chapel Hill, Miller arrived back home in 1982 with a degree and a desire. He didn’t want to see the land and water he so cherished despoiled by development. He didn’t think others wanted that either. So Miller started the N.C. Coastal Federation from the back of his home in Ocean. He had a simple premise: People of goodwill and good sense could be brought together in the common cause of protecting the coast.

Black bear now roam wildlife refuges that were developers want to mine for peat.

The formula has worked remarkably well in the 30 years since. During that time, the federation has grown into one of the most effective environmental organizations in North Carolina, maybe in the country.

“This year the Coastal Federation celebrates 30 years of work,” Miller told a packed house last night at the Lumina Theater on the campus of the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. “It’s hard to believe that we’ve grown from a small office in my home in Ocean, North Carolina, to an organization with 10,000 members, a staff of 21 and three offices – in Wrightsville Beach, Ocean and in Manteo.”

People gathered last night at UNCW for the debut of a documentary that marks the federation’s anniversary by celebrating the works of hundreds of ordinary people who banded together to protect the coast’s water and landscapes.

“Habitats, Heroes & Hallelujah: Stories of Hope for the North Carolina Coast” focuses on three campaigns that the federation waged over the years. Two resulted in some of the greatest conservation victories in North Carolina and the other aims to protect a river. All involve the work of many people.

“Over the years, I’ve learned that everyday people can make an extraordinary difference,” said Miller, still the federation’s executive director. “We wanted to make this film to show just how effective an individual or small group of people can be when it comes to protecting and restoring the coast.”

The film was co-produced by the federation and UNCW’s Department of Media Production. Bland Simpson narrates the film. He’s a creative writing professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and is well-known on UNC-TV where he has hosted several program. Simpson is also a federation board member.

While it focuses on the three projects, the documentary is also part travelogue, taking viewers on a tour of the natural features unique to different regions of the coast. It offers suggestions on places to visit to explore those features and even where people can go to grab a bite to eat or experience local culture.

Volunteers help build an oyster reef in the White Oak River.

The film opens along the northeast coast where the federation had its earliest and, maybe, greatest success. Strip miners had proposed mining the region’s rich peat soil to turn into methanol for fuel. Then the federation’s only staff member, Miller crisscrossed the region alerting commercial fishermen and residents to the proposal’s environmental dangers. Thousands of people rallied against the project in a protest that garnered nationwide media attention. The proposal was eventually dropped, and the land is now protected in a string of wildlife refuges that harbor black bear, endangered wolves and great flocks of wintering waterfowl.

The area is still remote, noted Dustin Miller, the director of UNCW’s Department of Media Production, and presented the greatest challenges to the film crew, which worked for two years on the project. They almost ran out of gas in Hyde County before sputtering into the only gas station in Engelhard, he noted. Miller also remembered the mosquitos, which were ferocious and the mucky peat, which was embracing.

“We experienced peat in the best way possible, which is knee deep,” said Dustin Miller, who is no relation to Todd Miller.

Local people fought for a decade to save Bird Island.

The middle of the film is devoted to the White Oak River, a small river that flows through Jones, Onslow and Carteret counties in the central portion of the coast. Polluted runoff affects more than two-thirds of the oyster and clam beds in the river, but the federation had helped protect thousands of acres along the White Oak. Each year, hundreds of people pitch in to build oysters reefs in the river or restore marshes that line its shore.

The documentary closes on the last bit of sand in North Carolina and features the local people responsible for saving Bird Island, which is now part of Sunset Beach. The federation helped them in their 10-year effort to ward developers who wanted to build a marina and subdivision on the uninhabited island. The land is now preserved as part of the state’s Coastal Reserve and attracts thousands of tourists each summer.

“What was really memorable was to get in these little pockets of North Carolina and learn about the beauty that’s just off the highways that you never see,” Dustin Miller said. “I had no idea of the diversity of the wildlife and habitats that existed in Eastern North Carolina.”

And that’s worth celebrating.

The federation plans to show the documentary throughout the year as part of its anniversary observance. The next scheduled showing is April 25 at the Outer Banks Brewing Station in Kill Devil Hills. Check the Events Calendar throughout the year for other showings.

• The Making of the Documentary, Part 1

NAGS HEAD — Unimaginative meteorologists called it “The Great Atlantic Coast Storm of 1962.” The late Aycock Brown, though, was a more lyrical sort. As the longtime publicist for Dare County, Brown had a flair for turning a phrase. He was also a religious man. Brown looked at the calendar and noted that the great storm had hit on the first Wednesday of Lent.  Thus, he christened it with the name that has come down through history, The Ash Wednesday Storm.

It arrived 50 years ago this week. For three days, it lashed almost 500 miles of the Eastern Seaboard, from the Outer Banks to Cape Cod, with unremitting winds that topped 70 miles an hour. It hurled 30-foot waves against sand dunes and beach towns, cutting new inlets, flooding roads and collapsing buildings. Atlantic City’s famous steel pier crumpled under the onslaught; Ocean City’s boardwalk splintered. Assateague Island in Maryland was so inundated that plans to develop the island were scrapped and it later became a national park.

Aycock Brown, left, and David Stick. Photo: Outer Banks History Center

Nor’easters don’t generally kill, but when this one was done, 40 people were dead. The price tag for the damage was later estimated at $500 million in current dollars. The U.S. Geological Survey considers it to be one of the 10 worst storms in the United States in the 20th century.

Though no one died in North Carolina, the northern Outer Banks were staggered by the blow. Sixty buildings were destroyed outright. More than 1,300 others were heavily damaged. A new inlet flowed near Buxton, cutting off southern Hatteras Island.

“It was total devastation,” remembers Wayne Gray, a freshman at N.C. State University at the time who went to Nags Heads the weekend after the storm to help his uncle with the clean-up. “It looked like a tidal wave had hit.”

The Ash Wednesday Storm and Hurricane Hazel in 1954 remain the yardsticks against which other coastal storms in the state are measured.

No Warning

It came with no warning on the moonless night of March 7. This was before the days of all-seeing satellites and clever computer models. “We didn’t have the modern technologies we have today,” noted Stockton “Stocky” Midgett, 84. “The weather on the radio was all local.”

But there were signs of trouble. A brisk northeast wind had been blowing for a couple of days.  Small craft warnings were up north of Hatteras. The Weather Bureau issued a gale warning for Tuesday night.

Inland, a blizzard had blanketed much of North Carolina with snow. North, in the Shenandoah Valley, as much as 23 inches covered the ground.

Yet, there was no hint of what was to come in the Wednesday morning newspapers. Gary Powers dominated the front pages. The U2 spy pilot who had been captured and later released by the Russians had testified Tuesday before a Senate committee. The morning newspaper in Norfolk offered encouraging news that no significant snow was expected in the Tidewater. By the time its carriers tried to deliver the paper to the Outer Banks, though, the flooding was so severe that they couldn’t get through.

The Croatan Hotel area, Kill Devil Hills. Photo: The Ash Wednesday Storm by David Stick

The remains of Oregon Inlet Marina. Photo: The Ash Wednesday Storm by David Stick

The storm struck at the worst possible time. The moon was closest to the Earth, and the sun and the moon were aligned. These astronomical conditions produced the feared perigean spring tides that only occur every two years. The storm would continue through five cycles of maximum high tides.

David Stick, then the chairman of the Dare County Board of Commissioners, quickly found out what that meant. The late historian and author, who would write the definitive book on the storm, left his home on Colington Island before noon Wednesday with his three sons, heading to Kitty Hawk School, the county’s disaster control center. No stranger to driving on sand or through low water, Stick pressed forward in his Jeep station wagon. In Kill Devil Hills, near the Avalon Beach bypass, his car drowned out.

“The stupidest thing I ever did,” Stick told an interviewer in 2008. “It (the Jeep) was a box, and it was rocking back and forth. The water came up in the car and we watched a cottage over by the ocean disintegrate and then the various parts came by us on both sides, though fortunately none hit us.”

After an hour of terror, a friend pulled Stick’s vehicle to safety and he continued on to the school, and “from then on I didn’t leave that school for about two or three days,” he said.

Cut Off in Buxton

Carol Dillon remembers how hard the wind was blowing and how loud the ocean roared that Wednesday morning. She and her family lived in their motel in Buxton. She took comfort in the wide beach that fronted the village.

“I remember looking out the window and seeing this wave come down the road and into the parking lot,” she said. “It was the first time we ever had water in the parking lot.”

Dillon would find out later about the “Gem.” The 501-foot Liberian tanker was taking on water as she struggled through heavy seas near Ocracoke. She would break in half that night, killing one aboard.

Neither did Dillon know that morning that she and her neighbors were cut off from the rest of the world. Storm waves had pushed through Hatteras Island, creating a new inlet between Buxton and Avon.

“We were isolated for days,” Dillon said. “They had to bring in food by ferry.”

Midgett nearly became the storm’s only casualty in North Carolina when he and others tried to cross the new inlet in a friend’s small dory.” I like to got drowned in the new inlet that was cut,” he said. “The current was running through so strong that it nearly threw me overboard. They had to grab me by my legs to save me.”

Midgett and his late brothers ran a bus line from Hatteras to Manteo. “I was driving that bus when I was 10 years old,” he said. “I had to sit on a pillow and look through the driving wheel.”

The storm cut a new inlet between Buxton and Avon. Photo: Program for the Studies of Developed Shorelines, Western Carolina University

Having a bus also meant having a garage to store and work on the buses. Garages naturally become the final resting places for old cars, many of which found another life as inlet fill. “We put a bunch of old cars in that inlet to try and fill her up,” Midgett said. “Everybody who had old cars dumped them in the inlet.”

They didn’t work, Dillon said. Neither did the old drums dumped into the break. The inlet was briefly bridged and finally filled by two dredges.

Heroes Aplenty

No one died on the Banks that day because of the heroism of many. Stick’s book The Ash Wednesday Storm recounts many acts of valor that undoubtedly saved many lives. In Nags Head, Ephey Priest rescued so many people from flooded houses with his road grader that no one ever knew the exact number. Men in Kill Devil Hills repeatedly launched little skiffs into the tempest, checking house after house and rescuing all they found. They would return home, change into dry clothes and go out again.

In Kitty Hawk, Sam Beacham and Bill Quidley attached a small outboard motor to a skiff that had washed up on the U.S. 158 Bypass. They plucked people waving from the rooftops of houses or stranded in flooded cars. Quidley, a Specialist 5 in the Army, was later awarded the Army Commendation Medal for his heroism.

Far from his home in Kitty Hawk that day, Coast Guardsman Gary Perry was on the deck of his ship in Guantanamo Bay. A radioman came topside.

“You Perry?” he asked.

Perry confirmed that he was.

“You’re from the Outer Banks?” the radioman inquired.

Yes, again, said Perry,

“They ain’t there no more,” the man said.

It would be three weeks before Perry, now the mayor pro tem of Kitty Hawk, returned to Norfolk to learn that the Banks had survived. But it was a near thing.

MOREHEAD CITY – Stan Riggs seems to be on a mission these days. His goal is ambitious: To save our beautiful coast – its inlets and marshes and barrier islands – and in the process to save our coastal economy. To do that, though, he has to persuade us to change our ways.

Dr. Stanley Riggs

The East Carolina University professor and researcher has been, for more than 30 years now, the N.C. coast’s preeminent marine geologist. He’s poked more holes in its landmasses and sediments than probably any man alive – “Some people accuse us of causing sea-level rise with all our holes,” Riggs says. He’s walked, driven or boated along every inch of the coast from Calabash to Currituck – well, almost. He knows every creek and stream, spit and swamp, beach and dune.

“I know this system,” Riggs says. “It’s part of my world, of who I am. And I don’t want to see it screwed up. I care about these beautiful natural resources and I care about the people.”

So Riggs takes to the road preaching a message of change. One night could find him in Wilmington. The next, in New Bern or Raleigh or Manteo. Monday night, Riggs was at Carteret Community College for a local environmental group’s annual meeting.

“I have probably taken this picture over and over again in the last 10 years,” he told members of Carteret County Crossroads as a photo of a row of beach houses loomed large on the screen. The surf rolled beneath the houses. Stairways have collapsed; the tops of septic tanks, looking much like concrete caskets, poked from the eroded dunes.

“Is this good for tourism?” Riggs asked.

Most in the crowd agreed it was not.

Neither are the crumbled, jumbled pieces of asphalt; the flooded roadways; the army of bulldozers plugging gaps in sand dunes; the rocked shorelines; and the sandbags that armor expensive beachfront houses. All were the subjects of more photos.

“We haven’t been very good stewards,” Riggs said.

Mixed among the photographs were maps and charts that chronicle a million years of the coast’s geologic history. Islands have come and gone, and inlets have opened and closed. The ocean was once much higher than it is now and much lower.

Stan Riggs says the future of the N.C. coast could be one of seawalls or natural beauty.

“There will always be a shoreline, but it will always move,” Riggs noted. “It has always moved. Change is the only constant.”

In a perfect world, tourists wanting to buy their piece of beachfront paradise would heed the message. As would highway planners intent on building bridges over moving inlets or roadways over shifting sands. But in world we live, the houses and roads and bridges are built, followed by expensive and usually futile – thus the photos of crumbled highways and collapsing buildings – attempts to control the sea.

That has been the modern history of human development along our coastline, Riggs noted. It was never really sustainable, he said, and is even less so in era of accelerating sea-level rise.

The oceans have always risen when the temperature has warmed – Riggs has a chart to prove it. Water expands as it warms and melting glaciers release their volume into the oceans. The seas have been rising since the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago, and the rate of rise will increase this century as the climate warms dramatically. The scientific consensus is about a three-foot rise by the end of the century. It all depends on how much and how quickly the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica melt.

Guys like Riggs who poke holes everywhere know where the ocean was the last time the ice caps melted. It’s no mystery, not a matter of conjecture. It’s happened before and would happen again. “If we were to melt the rest of the ice in Greenland and Antarctica, the shoreline would move up to the Fall Line along our rivers,” he said. “That’s I-95, folks.”

Given that possibility, it makes even less sense to build our permanent structures so close to shore, Riggs said. The cost of protecting them will become astronomical and the coast’s natural resources and the beauty we derive from them will be destroyed in the rush to build walls and jetties and revetments, he notes, as will the coast’s tourist economy.

“What we have here in coastal North Carolina is unique in the world,” Riggs said. “If we are going to preserve what we have into the future, we have to change the way we do things.”

Instead of fighting the inevitable, we need to accept it, Riggs suggested. Once over that mental hurdle, we then need to start planning to adapt to a watery future, he said. In real terms, that means, for instance, that we could continue to maintain a roadway along the Outer Banks but understand that it will disappear into ocean, along with large chunks of the islands themselves.

Small ferries and water taxis leaving from a series of terminals at small rural villages, such Stumpy Point, Bayboro and Engelhard, could provide transportation to the islands. Once there, visitors could rent electric cars or bicycles to get around. They could hire charters to go on cruises to photograph dolphins and sharks and migrating whales. They could board helicopter for aerial tours. They could camp, fish, or go birding. They could step lightly.

“We don’t need to compete with Myrtle Beach and Florida,” Riggs said. “They don’t have what we have. Let’s use it.”

The vision, which is explored in depth in Riggs’ most-recent book, The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast, will seem preposterous to some, fanciful to others. The alternative – continuing as we have in the past – is unthinkable to Riggs.

“I may not see it happen,” he said, “but the tide has turned. I’ve given this talk everywhere and no one hoots or calls me names. People want to know what’s going on. They are starting to get it.”

MOREHEAD CITY — North Carolina would likely have to cut by more than half the number of coastal swimming beaches that it routinely tests for contamination if the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency follows through with a plan to eliminate federal grants for the monitoring.

Citing the “difficult financial climate,” the EPA said in its budget request last week that it would do away with the $10 million in grants it gives each year to state and local agencies in coastal and Great Lakes states and U.S. territories to test for tainted water at swimming beaches.

“While beach monitoring continues to be important to protect human health and especially sensitive individuals,” the EPA said in an emailed statement published in the Los Angeles Times, “states and local governments now have the technical expertise and procedures to continue beach monitoring without federal support.”

But do they have the money to continue the programs at the same level?

North Carolina certainly doesn’t, noted J.D. Potts, who heads the monitoring program for the N.C. Shellfish Sanitation and Recreation Water Quality Section in Morehead City. The program is part of the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries.

“If these cuts go through, it will have a huge impact on our program,” he said.

The state routinely monitors popular swimming beaches for bacterial contamination.

The state has gotten about $300,000 a year from the EPA for the testing program, Potts said. To put that into some perspective, Florida and California typically get about $500,000 a year, the most of any state or U.S. territory. The yearly grant to North Carolina pays the entire salaries of three staff members, Potts explained, and portions of the salaries of three others. A quarter of Potts’ salary comes from the grant, which also buys equipment and lab supplies.

Started in 1996, the monitoring program tests for bacterial contamination at popular swimming areas along the coast and posts warning signs when bacteria levels exceed the standard considered safe for bodily contact. Swimming in polluted water exposes people to pathogens that can cause gastrointestinal illness, diarrhea, vomiting, skin rashes and ear, eye and staph infections.

As in other states, the N.C. program expanded after Congress passed the BEACH act in 2000. The law created the EPA grant program, which has paid $111 million to states and U.S territories for water-quality testing at swimming beaches. In the dozen years since the law was passed, the number of monitored beaches has more than tripled to more than 3,600 in 2010, the EPA announced last month.

Potts and his staff currently test 240 swimming areas in the ocean, sounds, bays and rivers. Dare County, with 57 sites; Carteret County, with 56; and Brunswick County with 39 have the most testing sites.

The 100 most popular swimming areas, which include all testing sites along the ocean and the most-used sites in the sounds and rivers, are tested weekly during the spring and summer. The other sites are tested at least twice a month. Testing is less frequent at all sites during other times of the year.

“If these cuts go through, we would be forced to cut back to doing the top 100 sites,” Potts said. “We may have to cut back on some of them as well.”

It’s unlikely that the N.C. General Assembly will increase state funding to make up for the cut, Potts said. “The money’s just not there,” he acknowledged.

EPA included the cut in its budget request. Already some states and environmental groups are pressing the agency to restore the money.

“I’m sure this budget will go through several iterations,” Potts said. “I’m hoping and praying it doesn’t end up like this. This is a public health program. If they want to save money, it seems they could cut other areas and not public health.”

MOREHEAD CITY – This port town in Carteret County is uniquely situated to take advantage of any green-energy boom off the N.C. coast, an officer with the N.C. State Ports Authority noted last week at a public forum to promote offshore wind energy in North Carolina.

The town and its state port are in the middle of areas off the coast that are considered to be prime for wind energy, and those off  Virginia are just a short steam away, noted Glenn Carlson,  the chief commercial officer for the ports authority. The Morehead City port, he said, has deep water, easy access to the ocean and plenty of land on Radio Island where the various components for the wind farms could be collected, assembled and shipped to the sites.

“We’re sitting right in the middle of 80 percent of the best sites off our coast,” Carlson said. “We are ideally situated to take advantage of this opportunity.”

Nearly 200 people packed Joslyn Hall at Carteret Community College on Feb. 7 to listen to Carlson and the other panelists at the forum, one of three public meetings to promote offshore wind that the N.C. Chapter of the Sierra Club has sponsored in the state. Carteret County Crossroads, a local environmental group, was one of the co-sponsors of the Morehead City meeting. Helping sponsor the forum seemed like a perfect fit for the group, said Mark Hooper, its president.

“I believe in this issue from a broad environment perspective,” he said. “It will reduce CO2 emissions and emissions of air pollutants. Our goal is to ensure that this be done in the best way possible way.”

The forum focused only on offshore wind’s purported benefits. So there was a lot of talk about studies that estimate the wind off the N.C. coast to be the best in the country for energy production. PowerPoint slides highlighted wind’s environmental benefits, costs and power-generating potential. You can view all the presentations here. The N.C. Coastal Federation’s 2011 State of the Coast Report contains a comprehensive look at wind energy in North Carolina.

Until last week, though, the PowerPoints have largely ignored the benefits wind farms off the coast could bring to Morehead City and its under-used port. City and port sit between two offshore areas that are considered to be prime development sites – one in Onslow Bay and the other off Cape Lookout National Seashore. Another good site off the Currituck Banks is a short sail north. Even areas for wind-energy development off the Virginia coast aren’t far away.

Developers of those sites will need a nearby deep-water port to use as a staging area, Carlson said. Twenty acres, a 400-foot-long berth and a mobile crane capable of lifting equipment that weighs as much as 240 tons are the essential pieces, he said.

With a turning basin that averages 42 feet deep, the Morehead port is deepest on the East Coast. It has plenty of dock space, and more than 150 acres is available on Radio Island for industrial development. All the Morehead port lacks is the crane. “But we could easily acquire one,” Carlson said.

The port also has the added feature of being an easy four miles from the open ocean with no overhead obstructions.

“We’re looking forward to working with all entities to bring this business to North Carolina,” Carlson said.

The discussion comes at a critical time. The N.C. Department of Transportation, which runs the state’s ports in Morehead City and Wilmington, is completing a study to determine the future of the ports, which lost almost $14 million over the last three fiscal years.

Meanwhile, Morehead City is re-evaluating its zoning code for the port after PCS Phosphate proposed to build a sulfur smelter at the port. The company withdrew its plans last summer after thousands of people protested.

It could be helpful if everyone involved sat down to figure out a common strategy, but those talks haven’t happened. “We probably should talk with them,” Carlson said of meeting with city officials.

Neal Littman would much rather see turbine blades stored next door than belching smokestacks. He’s co-owner of the management company that runs the Morehead City Yacht Basin, a port neighbor. He was one of the leaders of the opposition against the smelter.

“Yes it would be a very good thing,” Littman said of the prospect of wind developers using the port. “It would probably be one the highest and best uses for state port property.”

The green areas are those considered to be prime for wind-energy development. Source: U.S. Offshore Energy and Minerals Management.