This is the 11th installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

Stormwater that pours onto our roads and drowns our yards has become the most visible and alarming harbinger of what coastal communities are facing with climate change.

As flooding has rapidly worsened in scale and frequency, people are demanding action from their governments. But stormwater management is a costly problem that is not easily solved, even if political will, funding and community sentiment are miraculously aligned.

According to a draft report in March from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Financial Advisory Board, “Evaluating Stormwater Infrastructure and Financing Task Force,” there is no comprehensive, nationally representative numbers on what is required for stormwater capital and operation and maintenance.

“The needs are great,” the working paper said, “and the funding gap is very wide — estimated to approach $10 billion annually.”

Needs, however, are also urgent.

Of the seven highest rainfall events since 1898 in coastal North Carolina, six have happened within the last 20 years, according to recent research from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City.

The study, published July 2019 in the journal Scientific Reports, pointed to catastrophic rain in hurricanes Floyd in 1999, Matthew in 2016 and Florence in 2018 as a consequence of the warming climate creating more moisture. Florence alone dumped an average of 17.5 inches of rain on 14,000 square-miles of the Carolinas, the report said.

To make matters worse, nontropical storms are also now dumping record amounts of rainfall. Existing drainage has been overwhelmed, exposing the inadequacy of often haphazard and poorly maintained systems. But even some well-designed, modern municipal stormwater systems can no longer keep up.

According to a 2019 study published in Geophysical Research Letters, extreme rainfall events happened 85% more often in the eastern U.S. in 2017 than they did in 1950.

“The take-home message is that infrastructure in most parts of the country is no longer performing at the level that it’s supposed to because of the big changes that we’ve seen in extreme rainfall,” Daniel Wright, the study’s lead author and a hydrologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in press release.

Depending on whether it’s an urban or rural location, stormwater runoff can be loaded with nonpoint source pollutants such as nitrogen-rich fertilizers, heavy metals, toxic pesticides and fecal bacteria from waterfowl, dogs and septic tanks. It also can be laced with oil, gas and noxious chemicals washed off streets, buildings, lawns and farmland.

In numerous North Carolina coastal communities, including on the Outer Banks, it runs, often unfiltered, directly through outfalls and pipes into the ocean and sounds, or the bays, creeks and rivers that feed into them.

As a result, big storms with lots of runoff overload estuaries and coastal waters with nutrients, sediment and contaminants. Wetlands and recreational waters can be compromised, resulting in fish and shellfish kills, algal blooms and temporarily closed beaches.

The National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, or NPDES, created by the EPA in 1996 and implemented in parts of North Carolina in 2001, requires larger urban areas to manage stormwater with certain best management practices, or BMPs, to reduce flooding, runoff and pollution impacts on watersheds.

North Carolina’s patchwork stormwater regulations require stricter containment and discharge rules mostly to protect water quality in the 20 coastal counties from stormwater runoff impacts from new development.

But beyond those rules, local governments with smaller populations can decide how to manage its nonpoint source stormwater, that is, discharges that don’t come from a specific source such as a sewer pipe.

The volume of stormwater has become increasingly overwhelming and persistent. In many communities, the largely unseen network of pipes, culverts and ditches that is supposed to take stormwater away from streets and property has been maintained infrequently, if at all. Certainly in North Carolina’s low-lying northeast coast, numerous drainage systems are deteriorating and outmoded. Often, the infrastructure, which could be a century-old ditch attached to half-century-old culvert that’s attached to a series of various sized pipes, crisscrosses and zig-zags over different properties, public and private.

Sometimes, no one knows who is responsible when the system is clogged and numerous properties are flooded. In some areas, drainage is so antiquated, it’s not clear what exists, where it is, what condition it’s in, or who owns it. Regulations to maintain the drainage ditches and structures are spotty or nonexistent.

To complicate matters more, the North Carolina Department of Transportation is responsible for maintenance of all the roadside drainage infrastructure within its right of way. Once water leaves the right of way, however, it becomes the responsibility of the downstream property owner. And severe budget shortfalls have limited the department to mostly piecemeal improvements to its drainage or crisis responses when roads flood.

On the Outer Banks, residents in recent years have been shocked by the amount of water inundating their property even when there is no tropical low. Intense rainstorms have, in a matter of hours, transformed entire neighborhoods into lakes and rushing rivers. Water has flooded buildings that have been dry for decades.

In July 2018, for example, more than 15 inches of rain fell for 10 days straight on Roanoke Island, leaving much of the north end flooded for weeks, even months. An engineer later estimated that 50 million cubic feet of water had fallen.

“The amount of rain we got is crazy,” Brent Johnson, Dare County project manager for grants and waterways, said in a recent interview, referring to the event as a 500-year storm. “We don’t design for that level of water.”

An engineering study of the most affected areas later estimated that drainage improvements would cost about $2.6 million, not including engineering and easement acquisitions.

Dare County has so far dealt with flooding and stormwater on a case-by-case basis. But with more of the unincorporated areas of the county having frequent flooding issues, Johnson said, the county is seeking grant funds to start development of a comprehensive long-term stormwater management plan.

Johnson said that such a plan could manage the watersheds within larger areas to address natural flow and drainage challenges. Realistically, he added, funding for stormwater management would have to be shared between local government, public agencies and private property owners, likely through a combination of bonds, special district taxes and grants.

Roanoke Island illustrates the complexity of draining flooded communities on the coast, where land is flat, water bodies of some form are plentiful and sea level rise is making the water table higher. There is not enough slope or grade in spots, causing water to pool and stagnate. Numerous ditches are routinely clogged with debris, roots and overgrown weeds. Regulations forbid flow to be impeded in ditches, but enforcement is lax. Underground pipes and culverts are often different diameters, broken or improperly connected. What one property owner does or doesn’t do on their land affects whether their neighbor’s property will drain or flood, but even when the issue is addressed in stormwater ordinances, it’s difficult to resolve.

“A lot of the issues we have in our area … you can’t stop the water from coming up from the ocean and the sound,” Johnson said. “That’s what we really have to focus on: How do we get the water back to where it’s supposed to go?”

Each town on the Outer Banks is responsible for its own stormwater management. The town of Nags Head, which is upgrading its stormwater infrastructure in phases, funded through a stormwater fee, got an early start on serious comprehensive improvements.

Farther south, the city of Jacksonville in coastal Onslow County charges a stormwater utility fee, which totals about $5 a month for an average home, to pay for its stormwater management.

Two crews “do nothing but clean drainage,” said Pat Donovan-Brandenburg, the city’s stormwater manager, and other staff are charged with monitoring water quality. Stormwater controls include the slow release of water to prevent flooding and allow it to filter.

Donovan-Brandenburg, who took over the program from the state in 2005, said the city has been steadily making improvements in its infiltration, repairing broken pipes and replacing small pipes with larger ones.

“We’ve been taking care of it little by little,” she said. “No municipality has the money to take care of it all at once.”

The city is in the middle of the New River watershed and is surrounded by wetlands, which is a lot friendlier to flood control than acres of impermeable asphalt and concrete.

“We have probably a lot of storage area,” Donavan-Brandenburg said. Other advantages are that the area downstream of the city is lightly developed, and the city has no heavy industry.

Jacksonville also requires stormwater permittees to renew every January to make sure that everything is as it should be, whereas the state only requires renewal every 10 years.

“Imagine not cleaning their houses for 10 years,”  she said.

Donovan-Brandenburg, who had served for four years as director and is also currently serving as secretary with the Storm Water Association of North Carolina, which supports best practices for stormwater management, said that coastal communities hardest hit by the big storms benefit even more with resiliency measures such as green space that drains and filters stormwater and deep setbacks for waterfront properties. And whether it’s urban or rural, she said, all communities gain by planting and protecting wetlands in the watershed to control stormwater while promoting cleaner water and healthier fisheries.

“Wetlands do much better with flooding and wave energy than a man-made seawall,” Donovan-Brandenburg said.

Also, simple measures as grass alongside roads — such as grassy swales and grass ditches — slows down water to “a nonerosive rate,” she said, adding: “Curb and gutter allows water to pick up speed and velocity.”

The stormwater panel has been urging NCDOT to use some of those kinds of BMPs on Interstate 95 and I-40.

Clearly, the best answer for stormwater management, she said, “even in the mountains, is not taking away the floodplain. One thing that everybody can do is start planting more trees.”

The North Carolina Coastal Federation and The Pew Charitable Trusts in March launched a yearlong initiative, “Advancing Nature-based Stormwater Strategies in North Carolina,” to encourage natural solutions to flood risk.

By merging the expertise of academics, developers, investors, landscape architects, conservationists and others, the effort is working to promote cooperative strategies that allow stormwater to filter into the ground, rather than runoff into the waterways. Permeable pavement, rain gardens, cisterns, living shorelines and preserved green spaces are some ways to engineer roads and landscapes that help reduce runoff and erosion.

The working group is expected to issue recommendations this winter, according to Pew.

Some environmentally sensible stormwater control tactics studied by academic partners include bioretention devices, wet ponds, green roofs, stormwater wetlands, grass swales, sand filters and dry ponds. UNC campuses and North Carolina State University have programs that study stormwater issues.

In 2019, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Environmental Finance Center released a report on stormwater funding. Compared with water and wastewater infrastructure needs, the report said, it has been difficult to quantify costs of stormwater infrastructure needs.

“Recently, however, there has been a change in this trend, and more state and federal entities are starting to focus on identifying stormwater needs,” according to the report. “Communities are going to have to identify dedicated sources of revenue for stormwater and to be more intentional about matching revenue generation with capital needs as the future of the North Carolina stormwater landscape develops.”

Even in extraordinary times of overlapping public emergencies, flooding will continue. Without adequate stormwater infrastructure, communities will be condemned to a future of polluted water and flooded neighborhoods and downtowns.

“Stormwater infrastructure requires funding and it has been neglected, or inadequately funded, for far too long,” the EPA said in the draft stormwater working paper, comparing the investment to the federal highway system.

“Municipalities and local utilities need federal and state help in defining long-term reliable funding sources,” the draft report said. “Funding must be available in all states and be sufficient to support both capital expenditures and long-term operation and maintenance costs.”

This is the 10th installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

A state assessment of sea level rise compiled a decade ago met fierce political pushback, but in the years since, North Carolina has boosted its efforts to study and prepare for climate change, and some say work to address issues now commonly associated with rising seas had begun years earlier.

In 2009, the state Coastal Resources Commission directed its panel of scientists to put together state-level data and projections regarding sea level rise, rather than relying on international and national reports.

The next year in March, the CRC Science Panel, with contributions from other state experts, released its North Carolina Sea Level Rise Assessment Report. It included high, medium and status quo projections through 2100, along with a recommended planning benchmark of 1 meter, or around 39 inches, of sea level rise by 2100.

Spencer Rogers, a member of the science panel, said that the science had “a rough start” 10 years ago, “when the Science Panel on Coastal Hazards Sea Level Rise report for the Coastal Resources Commission was prohibited by law from application by the General Assembly.” Rogers is on the faculty of University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science and is the coastal construction and erosion specialist with North Carolina Sea Grant.

Jessica Whitehead, who was named last year as the state’s first chief resilience officer said in a recent interview that the science itself was sound, and the expectation was that sound policy would follow.

Ten years ago, Whitehead, who heads the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, or NCORR, was working a split position with South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium and North Carolina Sea Grant, based out of Charleston and serving both states. In her role at the time, she attended and provided input at workshops that led into both the first state sea level rise report and another guide intended for public and private planners, the 2012 Climate Ready North Carolina: Building a Resilient Future report.

“The approaches we took 10 years ago to climate planning were state of the art for the field at the time,” Whitehead explained. “2010 was still the ‘information deficit’ model of climate planning: everyone thought that if you did a climate assessment and provided information on what the ranges of average temperature and rainfall would be under climate change, that would be all decision makers needed to come up with and implement policy to reduce those risks.”

But in response to the release of the 2010 report, two bills were introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly, one that didn’t pass followed by a successful measure that put constraints on what the state could do regarding sea level rise.

The 2012 law forbid adoption of any rule or policy that defined a rate of sea level rise for regulatory purposes. And while it made the CRC the sole state agency authorized to define rates of sea level rise, it was directed to refrain from setting rates for regulatory purposes prior to July 1, 2016.

Rogers said that the report was intended as a planning rather than regulatory document, so restricting any implementation “had little impact.”

Rogers said that to the General Assembly’s credit, the 2012 legislation also required five-year updates to the sea level analysis, “making North Carolina one of the few, if not the only state, with legislation requiring peer-reviewed, sea level rise reporting.”

The final draft of the report was complete March 31, 2015, and the report was finalized March 1, 2016.

Rogers also noted that the 2015 updated report was delivered without apparent controversy in the General Assembly or the Coastal Resources Commission.

East Carolina University geologist Stan Riggs, who was a founding member of the science panel, resigned from the post in July 2016, for reasons including lingering frustration with the General Assembly’s response to the 2010 report. He’s more encouraged with the way the latest required five-year update to the report is being handled.

“The CRC has backed off to allow the science panel to do their (2020) report based on the science, not dictated by the way the 2015 report was. We were told exactly what we could do, what we couldn’t do, who we could talk to, who would review. And that was outrageous. That was just unacceptable,” Riggs told Coastal Review Online in mid-May.

Tancred Miller is the coastal and ocean policy manager with the Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management. Miller said that the updated report in 2015 included regional rates of sea level rise for different parts of the coast, based upon tide gauge data and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, scenarios. Although the prohibition against adopting sea level rise rates for regulatory purposes has since expired, the CRC has not yet considered adopting any sea level rise policies or regulations.

In 2019, the CRC directed its science panel to begin work on the 2020 update, and while the science panel has started, its ability to meet and work has been hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The panel has been requested to update the report for 2020 and work is underway,” Rogers said. Although COVID-19-related restrictions will delay its completion, “the primary observations and recommendations are expected to be improved and more detailed, but are not likely to be much different than in the previous reports.”

Miller said that the sea level rise report shows the state’s continued commitment to study and present the best available understanding of data, trends and projections.

“DEQ and DCM’s perspective and approach have remained consistent, and we continue to provide technical and financial support to local governments to help build resilience to climate hazards,” Miller said. “The state continues to invest time, resources, and importantly, the invaluable efforts of the CRC Science Panel, into updating the SLR Assessment Report on a regular basis. The report is available to state and local governments and all other interested parties as a resource to support planning and decision making.”

DEQ led the development of the state’s first Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan, which was released earlier this month, and worked closely with NCORR, and other cabinet agencies.

“Academic partners, led by the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, stepped up in a huge way, producing, pro bono, the state’s first ever climate science report,” Miller said, adding that the plan is relevant to virtually every part of the state and would be updated on a regular basis.

Miller explained that the Division of Coastal Management has been able to direct federal funds to local government resilience planning and is contracting with North Carolina Emergency Management to increase the number of tide gauges on the coast.

“DCM is also beginning to work with NCORR and other partners with funding from the N.C. Disaster Recovery Act of 2019 and a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to create a grant program to support local government resilience planning and project development to be launched later this year,” Miller said.

Rogers said that a likely surprising observation for most, including the General Assembly and the Coastal Resources Commission, “is that sea level rise adaptation in coastal North Carolina was well underway before the first report and is still actively being enhanced today.”

Most sea level rise adaptation has been implemented at the community level. “It has been more common in coastal North Carolina than in most of the rest of the nation,” he added.

Local implementation has been typically proposed and justified as a response to other coastal hazards, such as increased coastal storm effects during the last 25 years, continuing long-term shoreline erosion threats and higher levels of interest in nuisance flooding, Rogers said.

Common coastal community responses include new requirements for construction, participation in the National Flood Insurance Program’s Community Rating System and an increasing number of coastal water level gages to measure sea level changes, he added.

“Sea level rise is an important component of climate change in coastal North Carolina,” Rogers said. “Although not typically implemented for climate or sea level rise adaptation, actions to address more immediate coastal hazards are often the same actions appropriate for longer-term adaptation. In 50 to 100 years, the communities will not care why they adapted to climate or sea level rise, only if they did.”

This is the ninth installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

One of the most repulsive things about post-storm cleanup involves wading through fetid water filled with raw sewage.

That plight is not exclusive to post-hurricane recovery — fecal pathogens in leaks and spills now often pollute stormwater after heavy rains.

Climate change is coming for our backyard septic tanks, and eventually, our municipal waste treatment systems.

“In the long run, sea level rise is going to overrun all of this,” Lawrence Cahoon, a biology professor and researcher at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, said in a recent interview. “I think if we’re going to live on the coast for any length of time, sewer systems are going to let us down and septic systems are going to fail. They already are.”

Septic systems are widely used in coastal North Carolina to dispense with human waste, our humble byproduct and vector of disease. But higher groundwater, more rain deluges and epic flooding from intense storms have been causing systems to leak or become inoperable.

Those same climate forces also risk compromising the aged and deteriorating municipal sewer systems that service mostly urban communities.

“The solution is to fix the system,” Cahoon said. “Generally, the problem is people don’t want to spend the money to do it.”

Costs for public wastewater treatment plant systems are usually borne by the local government, which cover the expense through bonds and hookup fees to the property owner. Some governments, such as Brunswick County’s, have water and sewer systems operated through a separate authority.

In rural Tyrrell County, a northeast county with a high poverty rate, septic systems in the wetlands-dominated communities had been failing for years. Thanks to a grant from the state Clean Water Management Trust Fund, about 65% of the county’s communities have been hooked up to a complex sewer system that has a pump and tank at each property, said county manager David Clegg.

The county completed that first phase of construction in the early 2000s. A second phase was completed in 2011 and a third in 2018. The next phase is in the planning stages and county officials are seeking funding.

Since gravity systems aren’t an option, the waste has to be pumped miles away to a treatment plant. So far, the system has cost about $20 million and needs about $10 million more to be completed, Clegg said.

Tyrrell, ranked one of the most economically distressed counties in the state, could never afford such a costly system without help. But wastewater treatment plants are a fiscal challenge even for wealthier communities.

“Central sewer is hideously expensive,” Cahoon said, “and if something goes wrong, you can’t afford to fix it.”

Older infrastructure typically includes cast-iron pipes, which tend to corrode, he said. As long as the joints are sound, sewer pipes made from PVC are durable and reliable.

Upgrades to corroding systems, however, can be cost-prohibitive, and full replacement would be more so.

“There’s not enough money in the world to do this,” Cahoon said.

Along with Marc Hanke at University of Houston Honors College, Cahoon researched the effects of inflow and infiltration, or I&I, on sewer plants. Inflow is water coming from above ground, such as a manhole. Infiltration is groundwater seeping through breaches, such as cracks in pipes.

One impetus for the research, he said, was the lack of understanding about the impacts of higher mean sea level on the systems: how much saltwater intrusion was evident? What is happening with tidal influences? What effects are heavy rain and higher groundwater levels having on flow and capacity?

According to the study published in 2017 in Water Science & Technology, I&I can cause system overflows and degradation of systems and impair water quality. The research analyzed system flow responses to rainfall and temperature at 93 gravity-collection wastewater treatment plants in eastern North Carolina.

Data on hurricanes was purposely not included.

“I wanted to know what’s going on, on a regular basis,” Cahoon said.

Over two years, the research looked at coastal water gauges and daily tides, as well as data on rates of sea level rise, temperatures, and cumulative and daily rainfall amounts.

Since there’s a limit in how much to design for, even the newest plants are not immune to spills during big storms that overwhelm the system. For instance, a 2-inch rainstorm can produce about 40% extra flow.

“So if that 40% carries you over the capacity of the plant,” Cahoon said, “you probably will have spills, or poor treatment, or both.”

State regulators recognize that the systems’ design can’t accommodate huge volumes of rain and allow up to 1,000 gallons to be spilled before a reporting requirement kicks in.

Often, Cahoon said, the property owners’ pipes that hook up to the public system need repair or replacement.

“The average owner has no clue” about their condition, Cahoon said, adding: “The connector pipes are probably half the system.”

The study found that heavy rainfall, temperature — likely as effects of seasonal variation in groundwater levels — and sea level, expressed as a day’s highest tide, all had significant effects on 90% of the wastewater treatment systems in coastal North Carolina.

“These collective results demonstrate the potential vulnerability of coastal wastewater collection and treatment systems to breaches in system integrity that allow extraneous flows, primarily through groundwater elevation, to drive further infrastructure degradation and environmental pollution,” Cahoon and Hanke wrote.

Last year, another team of researchers began a study, Wastewater Infrastructure Tipping Points: Prioritizing Implementation of Climate Adaptation Plans in Decentralized Systems, focused on septic systems, including single residential tanks as well as “package” systems, onsite treatment plants that serve larger facilities or a group of properties in a neighborhood. Extreme rainfall and high-tide flooding, as well as rising sea levels, have threatened the function and effectiveness of septic systems, especially on the coast, according to the abstract.

The two-year study was funded by a grant of about $300,000 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office.

Working in partnership with the towns of Nags Head and Folly Beach, South Carolina, the team of researchers from North Carolina State University, North Carolina Sea Grant, East Carolina University, South Carolina Sea Grant, the Coastal Studies Institute and the University of Georgia will evaluate existing decentralized, or onsite, wastewater treatment systems and future alternative technology.

The project builds on prior research and will seek input from septic industry experts.

Septic on the Outer Banks has been compromised not only by the higher rate of sea level rise on the northeast coast and its vulnerability to tropical storms, but also by extraordinarily heavy rainstorms that have been happening in recent years.

As a result, there is a higher water table, said Michael O’Driscoll, associate professor at ECU’s Department of Coastal Studies.

O’Driscoll, who also works at the Coastal Studies Institute, said there should be at least 1½ feet of dry soil under a septic system to allow proper drainage and dispersal of nutrients. At the very least, there is less of that space available now, especially in older systems.

“Since the 1980s, it looks like for Dare County that the groundwater level has risen about a foot,” O’Driscoll said. “Some systems may have less soil to treat the waste, some systems have higher groundwater.”

There is also a shorter-term effect from a big storm. One event that dumped 7 inches of rain temporarily raised the groundwater table by 4 feet.

It’s hard to say how long the systems will continue to function, O’Driscoll added. But if it’s wet all the time, septic will fail.

The researchers will review available waste treatment technologies, economic analysis and legal requirements to help communities evaluate suitable climate adaptation strategies. In addition, they developed survey and interview questions to gather input from industry operators and experts.

Interviews will also be conducted with county health departments, which are only required to handle the initial state permit or reports of health concerns.

“That part of our project is to really get a better understanding of the records, permitting and monitoring,” said Jane Harrison, coastal economics specialist with North Carolina Sea Grant.

Two million households in North Carolina use septic systems, and more than one in five nationwide, she said.

At the end of the project, Harrison said, there will be a report with proposals, and hopefully a website to provide public information.

It’s not an issue that people are clamoring to learn about, Harrison said, but the public has become more interested in climate change. And they will soon understand the effect that climate is having on their toilet flushing.

“Septic has been kind of missing piece of the puzzle,” she said.

Still, with climate change happening, it’s become an issue up and down the East Coast: Miami, Florida, and Rhode Island each have done studies on how to address the problem.

“When the population density gets high, the septic systems just can’t work,” Cahoon said.

Before central sewer was available in Brunswick County, he said, Sunset Beach had as many as 10 septic tanks per acre. Restaurants in Calabash were forced to have their septic tanks pumped out every day. When infrastructure was replaced about 10 years ago, it was found that one restaurant’s septic was piped directly into the creek, and the post office’s was straight-piped into the Cape Fear River.

“But this is not unusual,” Cahoon said. “You read horror stories.”

Even though revulsion for the subject has made sewage treatment an “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” issue, Cahoon believes that the public is starting to express more concern about related pollution.

“I think there’s more attention now,” he said. “I think there’s been a shift to some degree. Sewage is like that — until it’s in your face, you tend to ignore it.”

But hurricanes and their effect on sewage treatments, he said, have “whacked us on the head.” Solutions are likely to be complicated and expensive.

“It’s going to take some leadership from people fairly high up,” Cahoon said. “The regulators are not going to do that on their own. Their job is regulation, not innovation.”

This special video feature is included in our series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. Coastal Review Online has partnered with the Working Narratives’ Resiliency Media Fellowship to present select works from the series, which was originally published by Shoresides, a project of the nonprofit Working Narratives.

WILMINGTON — Nearly two years after Hurricane Florence, community journalists are touring a homegrown documentary series calling attention to underrepresented hurricane stories.

The series, a portion of which is presented here, takes an up-close look at the storm through the lives it changed and through the effects that continue to ripple out.

With rising temperatures brought on by climate change, hurricanes have increased in power and frequency, weakening infrastructures and increasing displacement. The team of community producers hope to use their films to talk about these problems and to lay the civic foundation for building stronger and more resilient communities.

“Mi Casita” tells the story of a family and their struggle to stay in their home after Hurricane Florence. 

This year, the Resilience Film Festival is a project of the Wilmington-based nonprofit Working Narratives, and is being made free for screenings to communities across coastal North Carolina.

The festival films were created by community journalists mentored through the Working Narratives’ Resiliency Media Fellowship. Through the Resilience Film Festival, the journalists will present stories about resilience to audiences across the state.

“When Florence Came to Wilmington” is a look at the impact of Hurricane Florence on one family and their life after.

Resiliency Media Fellowship facilitated a series of workshops training nine coastal residents to be journalists. The media training program was created in 2019 out of Working Narratives’ commitment to underserved communities and underrepresented stories.

“My challenge was to find Latinos who wanted to share their hurricane story, Latinos who are undocumented and fearful of opening up,” said fellowship participant Yolanda House. House, who’s Latinx and bilingual, created a short documentary that focuses on the aftereffects of Florence in a Latinx community in New Hanover County.

“When the Water Was High” explores how families, and communities, stuck together during Hurricane Florence.

“Working Narratives believes that good journalism and good democracy go hand in hand,” said Sarah Sloan, producer at Working Narratives. “As coastal community members use media to tell their own stories, they become an instrumental part of a civic engagement process that helps community members come together to understand, confront, and solve pressing community challenges.”

Working Narratives is an arts and social justice organization. For over a decade it has presented stories amplifying the work, voices and concerns of people of color communities and rural communities in the South. Through its media stories, it works to address historical inequalities, to result in healthier communities and a stronger democracy.

“Not Finished Yet” presents a Hurricane Florence story of the service economy and people who work in it.

Learn more

• Host a screening of the Resilience Film Festival

This is the eighth installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

Now that the state’s 2020 resiliency plan has been submitted, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency will begin working with other state offices to address vulnerabilities caused by climate change.

“Going forward, our team looks forward to supporting other agencies with guidance and with working across the state on some of these big cross-cutting resilience challenges as part of the North Carolina Resilience Strategy,” Chief Resilience Officer Jessica Whitehead told Coastal Review Online.

The North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan was submitted Tuesday to Gov. Roy Cooper by the state Department of Environmental Quality. The plan looks at climate stressors that include flooding, drought and extreme heat events as well as nonclimate stressors such as population growth, aging infrastructure, public health threats and increased development as well as strategies to move forward.

NCORR worked with NCDEQ to create the resiliency plan, one of the directives in Executive Order 80, North Carolina’s Commitment to Address Climate Change and Transition to a Clean Energy Economy, that Cooper signed Oct. 29, 2018.

“We have a responsibility to mitigate the damage caused by these storms and the shifting weather pattern and to make all of our communities more resilient. We have to rebuild stronger and smarter and ensure that we can withstand the impacts of climate change that we will be seeing in the foreseeable future,” which is why Cooper asked that a statewide risk and resiliency plan be developed as part of Executive Order 80, NCDEQ Secretary Michael S. Regan told the Wilmington Rotary Club during an address earlier this year.

NCORR resilience team had leadership roles writing the “Climate & Environmental Justice” and “The Path Forward for a Climate Resilient North Carolina” chapters for the 2020 Resiliency Plan. The agency will continue working to address climate change by being part of the North Carolina Resilience Strategy, which includes four elements: North Carolina Climate Science Report, State Agency Resilience Strategies, Statewide Vulnerability Assessment and Resilience Strategies, and the North Carolina Enhanced Hazard Mitigation Plan.

A division of the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, NCORR was established after Hurricane Florence in October 2018 to streamline recovery programming and assistance and administer programs for homeowner recovery, affordable housing, mitigation, buyout and local government grants and loans.

So far, the state has spent more than $3.5 billion in state and federal funding in recovery for hurricanes Matthew and Florence.

In anticipation of the release of the resiliency plan, NCORR put out at the end of April a 16-page online document, Natural Hazards Resilience: A Quick Start Guide for North Carolina Communities to help local governments be better prepared to take their own action when the resiliency plan gets published, Whitehead said.

“As we looked at the literature, there’s a lot out there on how to do a risk assessment, but not a whole lot about how to set yourself up for success in building resilience,” she said, adding some rural communities really need help with the coordination and time for data gathering that you need to even start assessing risks, much less deciding what to do.

The team at NCORR synthesized ideas in the Colorado Resiliency Playbook for state agencies with Whitehead’s experience with working with leaders at the local level to create North Carolina’s Natural Hazards Resilience Quick Start Guide, she said.

“Any local government or community group can take these principles and start building teams to be ready to divide up the work and support each other in integrating resilience thinking every day,” she said. “Now that the state published the 2020 Resilience Plan, we can build out the support the state is offering and have more communities ready to take it and run with getting to local action. It’s very much intended as a first step.”

Whitehead explained that the Quick Start Guide was put under extensive review by the resilience practitioner community, local governments, the state Department of Public Safety, other state agencies, the governor’s office and volunteers.

“The feedback we got was constructive, but universally positive – our reviewers thought it was very well done. The guide doesn’t read like a typical government document, and that’s a good thing,’ she said. “I’m so proud of my team because it was a big challenge to produce something easy to read that would also provide expert level guidance on a very bottom-up, local process.”

Though she wasn’t with the state at the time, Whitehead said she understood that plans were in motion for Executive Order 80 before Hurricane Florence hit in 2018.

“Now that the state published the 2020 Resilience Plan, we can build out the support the state is offering and have more communities ready to take it and run with getting to local action. It’s very much intended as a first step.”

Jessica Whitehead, Chief Resilience Officer, North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency

“I would say Florence was less of a catalyst and more of a reinforcement that this work needed to proceed in earnest,” she said. “Another critical way Florence changed the conversation was in helping people to better understand the potential magnitude of what we are dealing with statewide.”

For example, she said, North Carolina Sea Grant, The Nature Conservancy, North Carolina Coastal Federation and the state Division of Coastal Management facilitated Swansboro’s Vulnerability, Consequences and Adaptation Planning Scenarios, or VCAPS, meeting about three weeks before Florence happened. VCAPS is a planning tool to help decision makers look at the effects of climate change and develop strategies.

“When we walked through those exercises with town decision-makers and asked them to think about absolute worst-case scenario rainfall events, it stretched their imaginations to think of 10-15 inches of rain in a single storm. Three weeks and 34 inches of rain later, it wasn’t such a stretch to think about what the impacts could be. It really changed the conversation across the board,” she said.

Before Florence, she said the VCAPS partners would have had to spend time convincing some audiences that this was a discussion worth having.

“Now we almost have the opposite problem – people accept it but want to skip the part where we plan and jump straight to what to do. There’s a danger in that – when we act quickly without planning to make sure that we are doing the most amount of good we can for the broadest variety of people, we run the risk that our action may leave some of our most vulnerable people behind,” she said. “We also run the risk of investing time in actions that make us feel safe without knowing that we are really making the best choices to actually reduce risk.”

Whitehead, who took her role at NCORR after serving as North Carolina Sea Grant’s coastal hazards adaptation specialist from 2013 to 2019, explained that the team’s definition of a resilient North Carolina “is a state where our communities, economies and ecosystems are better able to rebound, positively adapt to, and thrive amid changing conditions and challenges, including disasters and climate change; to maintain and improve quality of life, healthy growth, and durable systems; and to conserve resources for present and future generations.”

She said that there’s a lot of ideas about resilience such as building sea walls and fortifying structures that “overlap with hazard mitigation and imply that we will engineer our way out of disasters. That is not the one-size-fits-all vision we have for North Carolina.”

While those solutions may work and may be the only viable option in some situations, “so are options like figuring out how to live with water, using green infrastructure and in some places where flooding has been too repetitive, offering programs to buy out homeowners at risk and reconstruct affordable housing in lower risk areas so people have somewhere to go,” Whitehead said. “We will continue to build out how we implement that vision, but it will be across all hazards — not just flooding — and include building resilience from the mountains to the coast. be seeing in the foreseeable future.”

Funding challenges

Another challenge with resiliency and climate change is how to fund action, Whitehead explained.

“When we have so many challenging issues in affordable housing, education and health care, it’s just as easy today as it was in 2010 to budget for the next year and put off those long-term issues like disaster planning or climate change for later,” she said. “I think we have a better understanding though that everyone faces that funding challenge – worldwide, not just in North Carolina. Today, we are better equipped than we were a decade ago to network and stay in touch around the nation and the world to learn lessons about innovative or best practices to meet some of those funding challenges.”

Regan explained to the group in Wilmington how the lack of funding affects both the environment and economy.

Since 2010, the portion of DEQ staff responsible for protecting the state’s water quality has been cut by 40% by the North Carolina General Assembly, he said. “And so one could say that in 2010, 11 and 12, the rationale for cutting the enforcement arm — the scientists, the engineers — was because the economy was slow, and there was some that did not want the DEQ to get to reform and quote-unquote overregulate.”

From 2012 on, Regan continued, the state economy has been doing well and with the reduction of staff, his office has not only been unable to protect water quality for the 10 million residents the way they’d like to but the state has had an influx of businesses who are waiting up to two years just to get a permit from the state to operate.

“So, I would argue that prior to my arrival, we were on that downward slope of getting the resources that we need,” Regan said. Since being appointed secretary, he said he’s attempted in a very bipartisan fashion to approach the General Assembly and make the argument that protecting water quality is just as good for the environment, and public health, as it is for the economy.

“As you all know, our robust coastal economy depends on the protection of our beaches and our sounds and the marine life. And we stood with mayors and county leaders along the coast, who oppose offshore drilling and seismic testing,” Regan continued. “Our coastal communities, already have enough to deal with. The science tells us that if we do nothing, climate change means more intense storms. But we’re not just worried about the hurricanes. Climate experts working on North Carolina’s climate science report say rainfall events will be heavier and sea level rise will impact our beach communities.”

“Our coastal communities, already have enough to deal with. The science tells us that if we do nothing, climate change means more intense storms. But we’re not just worried about the hurricanes. Climate experts working on North Carolina’s climate science report say rainfall events will be heavier and sea level rise will impact our beach communities.”

Michael Regan, Secretary, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality

Whitehead explained that what we know about how climate adaptation happens in 2020, or how risk is communicated, is very different.

“We understand better that defining overall trends is just a first step – to get that information to a decision, like how big a pipe should be to convey enough stormwater in 2050, is a lot more complex. You have to translate those projected precipitation scenarios into the intensities, durations and frequencies of rainfall events to be able to successfully design a stormwater pipe,” she said, adding you also need to consider other factors that go into that decision, like how expensive it is to create larger scale stormwater projects today and what is affordable.

“And then you need to prioritize – if you only have so much funding, do you put your efforts into improving stormwater infrastructure in a downstream location, or do you get more bang for your buck investing in a project upstream first? Science doesn’t have a good answer for this anywhere yet – but in North Carolina we are again asking these questions and outlining plans for how to get to answers we can implement, which puts us right back on the cutting edge of climate response,” she said.

Whitehead said that there’s “still no one-size-fits-all solution to climate change, but we know a lot better about how to engage and tailor scientific information. That said, there’s still a lot we have to learn about how to know which solutions are best in each place – or even what a viable solution is in some cases, like long-term land loss due to sea level rise, or how to make sure the rapidly urbanizing Piedmont has enough drinking water in 2050.”

She added that it’s been hard to tell how COVID-19 will impact the way people respond to climate change issues.

“COVID-19 has exposed so many of the ways our social and economic systems are vulnerable to shocks and stressors. A pandemic is definitely a shock, while climate change is a long-term stressor punctuated by shocks. I think we are still in response mode on COVID-19, and it remains to be seen in the long term how we change the ways we understand how widespread or deeply challenging something like a pandemic or climate change can be,” she said.

“I think it will shift how we process risk as a society. Importantly, as we begin to think of pandemic recovery, many of the things we do to improve social and economic resilience – the ways we care for our most vulnerable people, the ways we diversify our economies and think differently about resilience in supply chains or infrastructure so that it’s more able to handle major disruptions – are the things that will also reduce the harms and increase our abilities to adapt to climate change.”

This is an installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

North Carolina in the last decade has gone from the state that passed a bill in 2012 restricting the use of sea level rise data for regulatory purposes, which drew criticism for “outlawing science,” to introducing this week what the state calls its most comprehensive effort to address climate change.

Submitted to Gov. Roy Cooper by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, the North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan is to serve as a framework to guide state action, engage policymakers and stakeholders and facilitate collaboration across the state, officials said Tuesday. The plan is also intended to focus the state’s attention on climate resilience actions and address underlying stressors such as the changing climate, aging infrastructure, socioeconomic disparities and competing development priorities.

“Climate change impacts the health, safety, and financial stability of North Carolinians, and we must take it head on. A resilient North Carolina is a stronger and more competitive North Carolina,” said Cooper.

One of the many charges the governor gave cabinet agencies when he signed on Oct. 29, 2018, Executive Order 80, North Carolina’s Commitment to Address Climate Change and Transition to a Clean Energy Economy, the plan “is the state’s most comprehensive effort to date, based on science and stakeholder input, to address North Carolina’s vulnerability to climate change,” said DEQ officials.

DEQ submitted the 372-page document on behalf of the Climate Change Interagency Council, which prepared the resilience plan under the direction of the executive order.

In addition to the resilience plan, Executive Order 80 established several goals for the state to accomplish by 2025 that include a reduction of statewide greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 2005 levels, increase the number of zero-emission vehicles to a minimum of 80,000 and reduce energy consumption per square foot in state-owned buildings by at least 40% from fiscal year 2002-2003 levels. The Climate Change Interagency Council was formed to help the cabinet agencies work together to achieve those goals, according to his office.

The plan is an 11-month collaborative effort with the state, federal partners, state universities, local governments, community planners, nongovernmental organizations including The Natural Resources Defense Council, NC Conservation Network, North Carolina Coastal Federation, The Nature Conservancy, NC Councils of Government, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Environmental Defense Fund, climate justice leaders, stakeholders interested in nature-based solutions and other partners.

“As we begin another hurricane season with even greater challenges facing North Carolina this year, the administration’s leadership has better positioned our state to prepare our most vulnerable communities,” said DEQ Secretary Michael S. Regan, chair of the Climate Change Interagency Council. “The Risk and Resilience Plan takes the experience and knowledge of the experts and leaders from across the state to ensure a comprehensive approach to address the risks to our infrastructure and economy.”

The 2020 Resilience Plan puts in place next steps for implementing and updating resilience initiatives and establishes the North Carolina Resilience Strategy. The four elements of the strategy include the North Carolina Climate Science Report, State Agency Resilience Strategies, Statewide Vulnerability Assessment and Resilience Strategies, and the North Carolina Enhanced Hazard Mitigation Plan.

“This plan will be tested repeatedly with every major storm that strikes our coast. Strong and persistent leadership must now translate into meaningful day-to-day policy and management decisions that actually reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather events. Today’s report establishes benchmarks by which the success of this framework will now be measured,” Todd Miller, executive director of the North Carolina Coastal Federation said Tuesday after the report was released. The Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review Online.

Environmental Defense Fund Director Will McDow said in a statement that after devastation from back-to-back hurricanes and in the face of rapidly rising seas, “North Carolina must act with urgency to build meaningful resilience. This plan marks an important milestone towards a more resilient future for our state.”

“The Resilience Plan begins to address protecting vulnerable communities who are bearing a disproportionate share of the climate change burden,” said EDF Manager, Partnerships and Outreach Marilynn Marsh-Robinson. “What’s needed next is additional community engagement and holistic approaches developed hand-in-hand with the communities they are designed to protect. It’s critical to support those most impacted throughout the process and equip them with what is needed to implement long-term solutions.”

“The governor is starting an important dialogue on how best to prepare our state for the impacts of climate change,” added McDow. “We must now work together to move this plan into action to build meaningful resilience for our communities, businesses and ecosystems.”

Yaron Miller, an officer with The Pew Charitable Trusts’ flood-prepared communities initiative, told Coastal Review Online Tuesday that the plan is an important step for North Carolina as its residents face the impacts of frequent flood-related disasters.

“We are pleased that among the many resilience strategies identified, there is a chapter about applying nature-based and low impact development practices across the state, as well as recommendations to immediately incorporate these strategies into planning.  These are important tools to manage flooding and improve water quality,” Miller continued. “Pew and the North Carolina Coastal Federation have convened a diverse group of stakeholders to develop policy recommendations for how these solutions can be employed by state, local governments, and businesses to address flooding in the state.”

The shift in outlook on climate change has not gone unnoticed by state officials.

Regan said that following hurricanes Matthew in 2016 and Florence in 2018, audiences have become more receptive to talking about climate change.

“I think people are really feeling the implications of climate change, both from an environmental standpoint, a public safety standpoint and then from an economic standpoint,” he told Coastal Review Online following a presentation at a Wilmington Rotary Club meeting at Cape Fear Country Club earlier this year. “So our communities are experiencing these changing weather patterns, and now I think more people are open to the conversations about not only what do we do to prevent, but what do we do to recover once these events occur.”

Not only has the conversation shifted but the state’s official response is also different and includes the launch in October 2018 of the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, or NCORR, to “streamline disaster recovery programs statewide and help communities rebuild smarter and stronger.”

NCORR Chief Resilience Officer Jessica Whitehead said that the nature of the conversation about climate change has in the last decade gone from “Is it happening?” to “It’s happening. Now what do we do?”

“What’s stayed the same is that there are still big challenges to defining what we do,” Whitehead said. “We know climate change isn’t just what we saw in the last flood – it’s droughts, and extreme heat, and landslides, and fires, and sea level rise. North Carolina has 100 counties, and they are all different places with diverse populations who will need to recover from and adapt to these diverse hazards.”

Looking to the future, “one of the greatest challenges we face is a changing climate,” Regan told the group during his talk. “As you all know better than anyone, your communities live and work on the front lines of climate change. Less than two years after Hurricane Matthew struck North Carolina, Hurricane Florence ended up being the costliest natural disaster in our history, causing the great state of North Carolina over $17 billion in damage. And last year, Hurricane Dorian hit some of our same communities.”

When Cooper, a month after Hurricane Florence, introduced the executive order to address climate change and transition to a clean energy economy, he was being proactive, Regan explained.

“That executive order is the most ambitious step ever taken in North Carolina’s history to combat climate change and transition North Carolina to a cleaner energy economy, while keeping the economy, front and center,” Regan said, adding that the order was a message that the state could no longer wait on federal government to act, “because our environment, our economy and our way of life could not wait.”

Executive Order 80 calls for every cabinet agency under the governor’s leadership to develop a carbon-reduction strategy. Cooper tasked NCDEQ with developing the North Carolina Clean Energy Plan submitted in the fall of 2019 to serve as “a visionary roadmap of viable policies for North Carolina’s clean energy future,” Regan said.

The plan requires the state’s electric power sector to reduce carbon emissions by 70% by 2030 and be carbon neutral by 2050. Carbon neutral means to function in a way that compensates completely for atmospheric carbon emissions, as through carbon offsets or tradeoffs.

“We know climate change isn’t just what we saw in the last flood – it’s droughts, and extreme heat, and landslides, and fires, and sea level rise. North Carolina has 100 counties, and they are all different places with diverse populations who will need to recover from and adapt to these diverse hazards.”

Jessica Whitehead, Chief Resilience Officer, North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency

Though lauded by many, Executive Order 80 was also met with criticism.

“While arbitrary platitudes might satisfy far-left donors, our state’s energy policies have to account for the real costs they impose on the public,” Senate Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, was quoted in a news report when Executive Order 80 was introduced in October 2018.

“I support an all-of-the-above energy strategy that includes renewables, but I don’t support programs that have minimal positive impact and can only sustain themselves with taxpayer and ratepayer money from those who can least afford it. The key is to find solutions that actually work in the private market, and I’m open to any and all ideas that help get us there.”

A few days before Cooper signed Executive Order 80, Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, announced Oct. 26, 2018, appointees to the joint select committee on storm-related river debris/damage in North Carolina.

“Hurricane Florence’s devastation makes it clear that we need to work in every direction to protect lives and property from future flooding. This committee’s work will be integral to the comprehensive resiliency planning that will take place over the coming years,” Berger and Moore said in joint statement when the committee was announced.

The committee was tasked with studying flood damage mitigation caused by extreme rainfall events and are to submit a report by 2020, according to the October 2018 announcement. The scope of the study will be river basins that experienced at least 10 inches of rainfall during Hurricane Florence. The committee’s webpage on the state General Assembly website Tuesday did not have information about the release of a report.

This is the sixth installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

RALEIGH — It was not the kind of Earth Day that North Carolina State Climatologist Kathie Dello had imagined.

On April 20, Dello opened a weeklong series of events at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, but instead of an in-person talk with the giant Earth at the museum’s entrance as a fitting backdrop, she joined via teleconference from her Raleigh home.

For the better part of an hour, Dello, on the job since last July, led a virtual walk-through of the findings in the state’s new climate report, an extensive, first-ever compilation of the science, impacts and unknowns about climate change in the state.

The major takeaways from the 236-page report are familiar: a warmer, wetter North Carolina with coastal areas threatened by rising seas and more frequent heavy downpours, along with increased flooding in all parts of the state.

Dello’s job that day and every day is to put that kind of data into context.

“North Carolina is warming and we’re expecting warming unlike anything we’ve seen in our past,” she explained to museum viewers.

Dello is the state’s fifth climatologist and the first woman to lead the State Climate Office, based at North Carolina State University. Before taking the job, she served as the associate director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute and the deputy director of the Oregon Climate Service.

In her talk illustrating the details in the new report, Dello pointed to effects seen around the state, breaking down the impact of warmer nights on public health and agriculture and how more intense rain events spell more frequent urban flooding. Stone fruits, like peaches, and other crops won’t do well without cool nights, she explained. Farmworkers and other outdoor laborers will experience more heat stress during the day, while warmer nights mean no chance to cool down.

It’s important, she said, to recognize that climate change is in our present as well as our future and has to be addressed accordingly.

“We’re feeling climate change now so, we don’t get to the luxury of talking about this as a future problem anymore,” she said. “It’s here in North Carolina. It’s here in our backyard and we’re seeing it through the sea level rise and extreme downpours.”

In getting to know the state, Dello said she’s been struck with its diversity, in ecological terms and the human communities within its borders.

For Dello a big part of the job of state climatologist is communicating science in a meaningful way, bringing home to people what a changing climate means. She helped author a “plain language” summary of the North Carolina Climate Science Report, which is aimed at making the science more accessible and useful for the public as well as planners and policy makers.

Creating the complex climate models, the math, is the easy part, she told viewers on Earth Day.

“I’m not being flip, that really is the easy part. The most difficult part is the human component, us, how we’re going to behave, how we’re going to react.”

In plain language

In climate science circles, North Carolina is known both for the intensity of storms and the debate here over climate science. Dello said that when she got here, only one was apparent.

“When I got the job, people were shocked that I would leave the West Coast, which seems to be a friendlier place to talk about climate,” she said in an interview with Coastal Review Online. “But I found the opposite here.”

Dello said she saw much more resistance and organized opposition in Oregon.

“I don’t know if it’s just Southern hospitality or that people are a little bit nicer, but I find that people are ready and willing to talk about climate change here,” she said. “In some cases, they haven’t been engaged at all and are grateful that someone is willing to approach the subject with them.”

Recent storms here likely played a role in that, she said. “I’m finding that folks are open and willing to have the conversation and certainly the weather and the climate over the past few years has probably helped that out.”

“I don’t know if it’s just Southern hospitality or that people are a little bit nicer, but I find that people are ready and willing to talk about climate change here.”

To understand what the future of our climate holds, Dello said it’s important to recognize that we are already seeing what climate change looks like.

“We’re in for more of it. We’re in for worse,” she said. “It’s hotter, it’s wetter, the ocean communities are dealing with sunny-day, nuisance flooding and coastal erosion.”

“Flooding is going to impact the entire state,” Dello said. There’ll be more frequent heavy rain events and more large-scale urban floods, especially when there’s a combination of events, such as a big storm after leaves have just fallen.

“The mechanism might be different — it’s not going to be high tide in Raleigh — but it may be something else.”

What that means for hurricanes is unclear, in terms of where the storms might travel, she said, but wherever they go, more intense wind and rain and more damage are likely.

“We don’t necessarily know where hurricanes make landfall. Climate models don’t reconcile that very well but we’re stacking the deck with more conducive conditions for dangerous hurricanes.”

That outlook is daunting for policy makers, and Dello said the state will have to confront repeated devastation to vulnerable communities and the disparate impact on people who work outside or can’t afford to cool their homes when heat indexes rise.

“I think this is going to take a really close look at some of our inequities across our state,” she said. “The communities that going to be hit the hardest, that have been hit the hardest are just going to keep getting hit. I think we have some tough questions to ask of ourselves.”

She said the coronavirus pandemic is reminder that it is pointless to talk about a “new normal” as if there will be a point where things plateau.

“We talk about a new normal and we were talking about a new normal before all this other stuff started happening,” she said. “But that’s not a great classification, because we’ll check in at a new normal and then there’ll be another new normal and another new normal.”

NC’s opportunity to lead

The new state climate report and its focus on the impact of climate change is one part of a state resilience and mitigation strategy put in place by Gov. Roy Cooper. The climate change report is integral to the next step in the process, a statewide resiliency plan that is due out this month.

“I think North Carolina has a really unique advantage in that we are seeing climate change loud and clear here in this state and we’re recognizing that we need to do something about it.”

Cooper’s strategy represents a considerable shift from his predecessor, Gov. Pat McCrory, who advocated for offshore drilling and inland fracking. But Cooper has been limited mostly to executive action. Following the recent series of devastating storms, the state’s legislature has been willing to back resiliency efforts, but as yet is still unwilling to enact major policy changes, such as carbon reduction goals.

Dello said that often the resistance to changes at the state level is based on the contention that it won’t make a difference.

“What people who don’t want to take action on climate use as an argument is that one individual state can’t do enough on its own. I don’t think the point is that North Carolina is trying to do this on its own. North Carolina is saying, ‘Hey, we contribute to this problem,’” she said. “Sure it’s global, but recognizing our contribution to it and knowing that the atmosphere doesn’t stop at our borders, we’re going to look closely at what we can do.”

Given its reputation, she said, North Carolina has an opportunity to show other states a way forward.

“We’ve seen with policy change in the past in the U.S., it’s the states that make the federal government act,” Dello said. In environmental policy usually those state changes come from places like California and New York.

“I think North Carolina has a really unique advantage in that we are seeing climate change loud and clear here in this state and we’re recognizing that we need to do something about it. The politics may have changed a little bit, but folks don’t see us as the most progressive state around the country. I think that North Carolina can be a leader in showing other states you can do this.”

Lessons from lockdown

“I think one of the things I keep reminding myself is that climate change isn’t stopping because of any of this,” Dello said. “This break in emissions isn’t doing very much for us.”

Still, the early reaction to the coronavirus pandemic in which most people were willing to pitch in and take the stay-at-home order seriously gives her some hope that people are willing to adapt for a common cause.

“I’m seeing folk ask questions of themselves — I’m doing it too — Why do I travel so much? Why do I go to conferences all over when really I could have them online?”

Some of those changes will carry forward, she said, but they’re only a small part of what’s needed and there’s the worry that once things return to some sense of normalcy the collective spirit will fade.

“The problem we have on our hands is really, really big, and watching people struggle with this one, I don’t know” Dello said. “I bounce back and forth between optimism and pessimism.”

This is the fifth installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

Twenty-seven years ago, an interagency panel of bureaucrats, politicians and scientists gathered for the first time in Atlanta, Georgia, to study how to save a North Carolina coastal highway skirting the volatile waters of the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

No one back then talked about resilience or adaptation, and certainly not retreat. Still, the diverse group turned out to be pioneers of brainstorming and collaborating to solve the multitude of challenges from sea level rise and other climate change impacts.

The two-lane road has been a headache for the state practically from the day the first tire hit the pavement. In 1962, the infamous Ash Wednesday Storm ripped open an inlet in Buxton and destroyed 25% of the dunes that buffered the road from ocean waves.

Still, the extreme and worsening coastal conditions for N.C. 12 serve as both lesson plan and cautionary tale for teams like the Outer Banks Task Force, working against time while begging for funds to maintain vital transportation infrastructure into the future.

Gov. Roy Cooper’s executive order in 2018 directed 10 cabinet agencies and the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to “integrate climate adaptation and resiliency planning into their policies, programs and operations.”  In response, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency was created to coordinate agencies and assist communities facing storm recovery and/or risks of future climate change impacts.

But complex problems that involve many players, a slew of stakeholders and tons of money can become unwieldy — and paralyzing.

At least 10 government entities — federal, state and local — were represented on the task force, in addition to several coastal engineers and scientists from different universities.

“How do we simplify what we’re trying to do so that we get something done?” former Dare County Board of Commissioners Chairwoman Geneva Perry asked the revived task force in November 1998, as quoted then in The Virginian-Pilot. “This thing has been going on forever, and unless we keep kicking it, it dies again.”

Built in phases during the 1950s, N.C. 12 bisects Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge and seven villages. It is also the only route for millions of tourists that contribute to the Outer Banks’ $1 billion tourism economy.

The roadway, with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the massive Pamlico Sound on the other, is inches above mean sea level and crosses numerous weak spots on skinny barrier islands that are subject to severe beach erosion. To add to its vulnerabilities, the islands are close to the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, the “super-highway” for Atlantic hurricanes.

Over the decades, the road has been repeatedly over-washed by ocean and sound tide; undermined by ocean surge; inundated by moon tide and rain deluges; buried by mountains of sand from storm-flattened dunes; broken apart by hurricanes and nor-easters; and covered by telephone poles, trees and debris from destroyed buildings.

Sections of road have been replaced, elevated, bridged or moved further from the ocean. Adjacent beaches have been widened and walkways have been built to protect dunes.

And the dunes between the beach and the road have been built, knocked down and rebuilt, higher, longer and stronger. Then flattened again.

“It’s a very good example of a corridor being impacted by climate,” Jerry Jennings, Division 1 engineer with the North Carolina Department of Transportation, said in a recent telephone interview. “Certainly, from Division 1’s perspective, there’s not another road that has the challenges that N.C. 12 has.”

Located in the northeast corner of North Carolina, Division 1 is a huge, mostly rural territory that encompasses 14 counties. It not only includes the second-largest estuarine system in the nation, its coastal area — the Outer Banks — is one of the most vulnerable regions in the U.S. to the impacts of sea level rise.

Maintenance and repair of the road from Oregon Inlet to Ocracoke village has cost NCDOT about $75 million in the last 10 years, not including N.C. 12 improvements that were part of the recently completed Bonner Bridge replacement project.

Opened last year, the new Marc Basnight Bridge spans the inlet and incorporates phased work on the road to just south of Rodanthe.

The only other comparison in the state to N.C. 12 cited by some transportation officials could be the heavily traveled Blue Ridge Parkway in the mountains, which is subject to costly landslides and intense winter weather.

But a lot of environmental changes generally have been observed over time in coastal regions and in low-lying areas, Jennings said. Shoreline erosion along water bodies, for example, can impact roadway shoulders and potentially threaten the road. Flooding is a persistent problem on roads in Mackey’s Island, Aydlett and Water Lily in Currituck County and on N.C. 94 at Lake Mattamuskeet in Hyde County.

“There’s a number of those out there,” he said. “It’s not just a beach thing.”

An ongoing improvement project on Colington Road in Kill Devil Hills includes elevation of parts of the road vulnerable to tidal flooding, he said, “which seems to be a longstanding problem.”

“That project will attempt to resolve that,” Jennings said. “It’s hard to say what is directly related to climate change.”

NCDOT had been working with the new North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, or NCORR. But NCDOT’s resiliency work has been suspended indefinitely while the agency addresses severe budgetary shortfalls aggravated by COVID-19 shutdowns.

Unspecified cuts are also expected in NCDOT’s Ferry Division, which operates about 20 ferries on seven regular routes on the coast. The passenger ferry between Hatteras and Ocracoke islands has been canceled for the season.

In March, North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies released the North Carolina Climate Science Report, an assessment of current and projected climate impacts to the state. The report is a component of the comprehensive N.C. Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan that is expected to be completed this summer.

The report found that future impacts in the state from climate change — some effects are already apparent — will likely be more intense storms, increased rain volume, more wildfires and drought, more hot days and higher humidity, increased flooding — including sunny day tide — and higher sea levels, especially on the northeast coast.

“For transportation, it means offering people multiple ways to get around, by better connecting roads and sidewalks and providing quality transit services,” the report said.

Jessica Whitehead, chief resilience officer with NCORR, said that NCDOT has been an engaged participant in discussions about such critical needs as building redundancy and updating old infrastructure.

Even with NCDOT’s and other state agencies’ budgetary woes from the pandemic, Whitehead said that resiliency work will continue.

“The thing about climate change in any of this, it’s not going to go away,” she said. “We’re still going to figure out ways to plan for it.”

Transportation projects in North Carolina have already been engineered for environmental changes, said Chris Werner, director of technical services at NCDOT.

“Resiliency is a critical part of how we design and build our infrastructure,” he said. “We work with all our partners across the state.”

Werner said that the agency has an inbuilt culture that fosters innovative and proactive approaches to problem solving.

“We’re always looking for cutting-edge analytics and software,” he said. “Most of us are engineers. The more data we can get, the more analytics we can perform.”

One example is application of the state’s data-rich Flood Inundation Mapping Alert Network, or FIMAN, to not only predict flooding on roads and bridges, but also to design for it by looking at trends in the data.

The agency, he said, is in the process of expanding the FIMAN gauge system from a property-impact focus to provide data specific to transportation infrastructure. For instance, data collection can be tailored so it can be used to prevent future road washouts.

It’s not just a matter of fixing a damaged structure, he explained, the goal is to keep it from happening again by building redundancy and resiliency.

When severe flooding on U.S. 421 in Wilmington in 2018 during Hurricane Florence damaged the road and cut off traffic, Werner said, the agency took the opportunity to “build better and stronger.” After analysis of historic and current data, instead of just replacing ruined culverts, the department replaced them with a new bridge. Another bridge was also built nearby, providing the transportation corridor with both redundancy and resiliency in the event of future flooding.

“Our goal is to build infrastructure that’s durable and safe and resilient as possible,” Werner said. “As civil engineers, we’re constantly improving what we’ve done in the past. That’s what we do. It all stems from field observation and data.”

Other measures NCDOT has put in place, he said, are monitors of water levels at low bridges, and identifying alternative travel routes on its READY NC app. The department has partnered with Google Maps and WAZE to feed their traffic data into the app. Also, DRIVENC.gov shows up-to-date closures and maintenance work on the state’s roads.

In reality, the feats of engineering for NCDOT are not so much in dramatic crane work at bridge construction sites or road restorations after storms. It’s mostly what goes on behind the scene at research centers and laboratories.

“We do a lot of work with our universities,” said Neil Mastin, NCDOT Research and Development manager. “We work with business units and academics.”

In May 2019, the department presented its first Research & Innovation Summit at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to discuss transportation-related innovations and research.

Although it is not often a focus of public discussion, NCDOT has been studying numerous issues that could result in transportation improvements, although its research program for 2021 has been postponed, Mastin said.

Ongoing or planned research projects include the following:

• How to reduce environmental impacts of road construction.
• Building 2-D scour models to improve understanding of water interaction at bridge pilings.
• Monitoring erosion on the Outer Banks going back 20 years, along with an ongoing coastal monitoring program, that gathers data on island width, the size of the dunes and distance of the road to the ocean.
• Documenting stormwater impacts from recent storms (on pause) and studying Neuse River watershed flood abatement study (ongoing).
• Forensic analysis of sections of girders from the old Bonner Bridge that spanned Oregon Inlet to learn how they withstood the harsh coastal conditions.
• Analysis of submerged aquatic vegetation in the Currituck Sound to understand where it is and how to protect it.
• Biologic stabilization of soil to potentially increase resistance to erosion.
• Using dredged material from the Rodanthe emergency ferry channel potentially to build bird or material disposal islands or to fill eroded areas.

Mastin said that NCDOT is also “hyper-aware” of the public concern about drainage issues. The state is responsible for the ditches and culverts within road right of ways, as well as the nine ocean outfalls in the state, all of which except one is on the Outer Banks.

“Water in general,” he said, “is the enemy of transportation networks.”

In the past, locations of all small and medium drainage pipes around the state were mapped, he added, with the ambitious goal — yet mostly unfulfilled — of eventually replacing them. But that’s just pipes — and flooding is getting increasingly worse.

“Eastern North Carolina in particular, with land as flat as it is, makes it extremely challenging,” Mastin said. “We can fix one problem somewhere and it makes it worse somewhere else.”

Drones are being used more often by NCDOT to provide footage of flooded areas and to help manage flood gates, he said.  They’re also used to build wetlands, to identify plant types, to measure elevation and to help determine where to send crews after disasters. Researchers are also studying development of drones to inspect bridges.

Improvements of material — mostly concrete and asphalt — are constantly being studied, Mastin said. One example of research results is the proposed bridge replacement on Harkers Island, which would be the state’s first fully composite reinforced bridge. Rather than using corrosion-prone steel rebar, he said, the structure will be built with a mixture of carbon fiber prestressed strands and “fancy” fiberglass.

“We’ll be monitoring this closely,” he said. “This is really exciting.”

The new Marc Basnight Bridge over notoriously wild and wicked Oregon Inlet was designed to last 100 years and was built with high-performance, less-permeable concrete made to better endure corrosive salt air and water. It is the first bridge project in the state to use stainless reinforcing steel, and the bridge has longer and deeper pilings to withstand scour.

The Outer Banks Task Force, in a significant way, laid the groundwork for the bridge and the N.C. 12 improvements by determining where the problems were and what to do about them. Most importantly, the panel recognized the need for safety and access for both the bridge and the road and linked them together as a single corridor.

Jennings, the division engineer, said that over the last few years, feasibility studies have been completed looking at long-term options for eroded areas in Buxton, Hatteras and Ocracoke, as well as costs of the alternatives and how long projects would last.

Years before the panel was replaced by a “merger team” that worked on planning and permitting for the road and bridge projects, the Outer Banks Task Force had designated six vulnerable “hot spots” between Oregon Inlet and Ocracoke village that were critical to address, and started the planning process on each one.

Predictions about the dire risks at each of the hot spots – from storm surge, beach erosion, road loss, dune breaching, even another inlet cutting through – have since played out all too often.

In 1999, John Fisher, a N.C. State University civil engineer and then-chair of the task force science panel, called a reconstructed dune lost during Hurricane Dennis at the eroding Ocracoke hot spot a “Band-Aid” that wouldn’t last.

“We seriously think you should think about abandoning that whole stretch of road and relocating the ferry system,” he told the task force, according to The Virginian-Pilot on Nov. 7. “It didn’t make sense to us to try to maintain the highway.”

That is exactly what NCDOT is now considering. After storm after storm over the last 20 years wiped out dunes in the same hot spot, it seems Hurricane Dorian last September may end up taking that one off N.C. 12’s list.

This is the fourth installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

Nearly every year on the Outer Banks brings a new hurricane, storms that wipe out parts of the beach road and flood homes, destroying years’ worth of memories in a single night — experiences that have shaped the perspectives young people on the Outer Banks have on climate science.

“I do believe in sea-level rise,” said Brady Creef, 21, and a rising senior at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

With a mother serving as a county executive and a father who is a commercial fisherman, Creef’s family knows the effects of coastal storms all too well.

“During Hurricane Irene I remember the Albemarle Sound at the end of my street had receded almost a mile out. When the storm surge returned, I remember hearing the water roaring through the marsh outside my house and the water rising to almost 10 feet above sea level.”

Karen Perez, 20, a native of Ocracoke, has seen the way that storms have affected her island.

“The strip of highway on Ocracoke is surrounded by ocean and sound water on both sides, and every year the roads feel narrower as the beach is making its way further back onto the road,” she said. “Over the years and with the help of hurricanes there is no longer sand in between the parking lot (of the ferry terminal) and (the) water.”

In 2010, the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission’s Science Panel on Coastal Hazards released a report finding that sea levels could rise up to 39 inches by 2100. This kind of change would wipe out a great deal of the coast, from homes and businesses to wildlife habitats. In 2012, House Bill 819 passed, which prevented the use of this climate change report in legislation.

Allissa Halker, 21, who was raised in Kill Devil Hills and is a field research assistant for Alternative Cropping Production Systems at North Carolina State University, said she wishes that the government would have handled climate change differently in the past and that they would approach it differently now.

“They will probably handle it poorly in the future if we don’t get out there and vote in people who actually care about the future of our climate,” she said. “Although it might not directly affect your generation, it’s still important to consider how these changes in climate will affect future generations, and we need to be prepared for them — and for us.”

In December 2019, Amnesty International’s Future of Humanity survey of more than 10,000 young adults aged 18-25 across 22 countries found that 41% of respondents see global warming as the most pressing issue facing the current world. However, instead of just silently accepting the way things are, many young people are making their voices heard.

“Recent changes under the Trump administration have rolled back several protections and programs that have been in place for years,” Creef said. Throughout his academic career, Creef has had a passion for government. He has been involved with student government at both UNC and at First Flight High School in Kill Devil Hills.

“We are actively going backward simply because politicians and certain people do not care about, or in some cases deny, science,” he said. “I would want to tell (policy makers) to listen to the experts and for once, it is okay to realize that you do not know all the answers.”

Growing up on Ocracoke, Perez has become keenly aware of climate change and seen the specific ways in which it has impacted the people who live on the island.

“I think that the government, federally speaking, has not really done a good job on enforcing action on this problem,” she said. “Unfortunately, I think it is because they don’t see it as a problem.”

Lupita Martinez, 20, of Ocracoke and a rising senior at Elizabeth City State University, believes that despite agreement on government inaction, those in charge are still doing some things right.

“I think the government has done a fine job with not permitting drilling for oil offshore,” she said. “My hope would be that the government keeps fighting to prevent offshore drilling and protect the wildlife.”

“Laws like the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act … were all great places to start building a sustainable environment,” said Creef. And it is the next generation’s job to continue that sustainability.

In North Carolina, the legislature has taken steps to curb renewable energy development. Measures to limit where wind energy projects can be built have been introduced by legislative leaders in recent years but failed to advance.

Young people here say they have found ways to respond by making changes in how they live.

“I have started to walk or cycle to places on the island,” Martinez said. “The only time I drive is when it’s necessary.”

“My small part to play in stopping climate change has been simple habits like using a reusable water bottle, consuming less meat and dairy products and supporting businesses that have sustainability as one of their key goals,” Creef said.

Halker said she has tried to cut back the amount of waste she produces, as much as possible. “The more trash I keep out of the landfill, the better. I see many people my age caring about this topic, too. It’s enlightening to see people care and put in the same effort. If everyone cared a little, we could do a lot.”

Such commitment to sustainability shows how pressing and important it is to the next generation to have these discussions, said Amnesty International Secretary General Kumi Naidoo.

“Young people are looking for fundamental changes in the way the world works,” he said. “Younger generations deserve a seat at the table when it comes to decisions about them.”

When Hurricane Florence bore down on the coast in fall 2018, “both the volume and the geographic extent were likely to be 50 percent greater than if there had been no climate change,” the New York Times reported.

Halker said she has seen the results of changes in the Outer Banks over the last 10 years. She remembers how Hurricane Irene in 2011 left her house under 5 feet of water.

“Every hurricane we experience seems to do more damage than the last,” Halker said. “You start to wonder when the ocean is going to reclaim the beaches.”

Not only are storms on the Outer Banks more frequent and more intense, the weather seems different too, with more extremes, the young people said.

“Ocracoke’s climate has changed since my childhood because of the temperature,” Martinez said. “The temperature is high one day and the next day it’s rainy and cold.”

Hurricane Dorian in September 2019 hit Ocracoke in a way island residents had never seen. Flooding reached unprecedented levels. Electricity was out at various times and for a time, there was no open grocery store, bank or health center, and tap water needed to be boiled before drinking. Businesses on the island were closed for weeks or months and residents lost treasured personal items. More than 40 structures were destroyed as a result of the storm.

“During Hurricane Dorian water got into my house and destroyed everything,” Martinez said. “I’ve lost many sentimental items and had to reconstruct my home.”

“(Hurricane Dorian) was the worst hurricane on the island with historic flooding,” Perez noted.

Growing up, she never thought of hurricanes as something to fear. Dorian was a different story.

“The house of everyone in my family (five homes) got flooded, and four of those families were displaced,” said Perez, who also lost her own home when it had to be demolished because of the extensive damage.

Usually after a hurricane, residents reach out to help others, but Perez said the difficulty in recovering led to friction.

“A lot of people are under the impression that this hurricane brought the community closer together,” Perez said. “Unfortunately, there has been lots of discussion over disagreements, mostly regarding where and to whom aid is going.”

Perez said that after her experience, it’s easy to feel anxious about the Outer Banks’ future.

“If climate change continues at the rate it is going now, I think there will be more hurricanes like or worse than Dorian,” she said. “I thought about settling down on Ocracoke after my career but after seeing the stress it puts on my family and community, I don’t think I would want to go through that.”

For those who grew up on the Outer Banks, taking  steps to change course is a way to preserve what they love about this vulnerable stretch of coastline.

“Hopefully, there is a future where the world is able to stop some changes that have already occurred,” Creef said. “For the Outer Banks, I simply hope that there is some area left where I can come back and remember my childhood years.”

Halker agreed.

“I know this is cheesy to say, but the beach is my favorite part of the Outer Banks,” Halker said. “It’s truly breathtaking. I miss the ease of driving to the beach to watch the sunrise and then going to get coffee, those little things are definitely moments I took for granted.”

This story is the third installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

While hurricanes are woven through the history of Down East Carteret County, a remote string of communities on the central North Carolina coast known for its fishing and boatbuilding traditions, Hurricane Florence was a turning point.

Before Florence hit in September 2018, no one ever talked about sea level rise or climate change, but “Florence is the dividing line. Florence caused everybody to look at things differently,” Karen Willis Amspacher explained in an interview.

Amspacher, who has always called Down East home, is executive director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

“Down East starts at the North River Bridge,” she said. North River Bridge connects Beaufort to the about a dozen communities making up Down East, many of which are bordered by Core Sound.

“I say that North River is not only the geographic divide, but it’s the cultural divide,” she continued, adding there are traits shared with other fishing communities like Hoboken in Pamlico County, Sneads Ferry in Onslow County and Hatteras, Wanchese and Manns Harbor, all in Dare County, but, “Down East, to me, is one of the last vestiges of the values of those old fishing communities that still exist.”

The heritage of many of these communities began more than a century ago on Diamond City, which encompasses all the barrier island communities of Shackleford Banks.

These fishing villages were settled by “hardy families who were accustomed to foul weather and remote lifestyles. But numerous hurricanes and northeasters near the end of the century had tested the endurance of the people known as ‘Ca’e Bankers,’” Jay Barnes wrote in his book, “North Carolina’s Hurricane History.” Excerpts of the book are included in Harm’s Way Digital Archive, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center’s online exhibit chronicling more than 100 years of storms that devastated the North Carolina coast, including the September hurricane of 1933, or storm of ’33, Hazel in 1954, Dennis and Floyd both in 1999, Isabel in 2003 and Irene in 2011.

“These storms left drifts of barren sand that replaced the rich soils of their gardens, and saltwater overwash killed trees and contaminated drinking wells. These communities had begun to see a decline in population prior to 1899, largely due to the unwelcome effects of hurricanes,” Barnes continued.

The series of storms forced families to move from their barrier island homes, many landing in the Down East communities of Harkers Island and Marshallberg, as well as Salter Path on the Bogue Banks and established the Promise Land community near the downtown area of Morehead City on the Intracoastal Waterway.

Each of the Down East communities has its own personality, its own strengths and its own characteristics, Amspacher continued, “But there’s a common thread among Core Sounders and Down East about place. And I think that’s the tie that binds us to that land.”

Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center works to preserve this heritage of Carteret County, particularly Down East, the family connections and the lives lived in the remote portion of the coast.

The waterfowl museum, which had been closed for 20 months while undergoing an estimated $3.4 million in repairs to damage caused by Hurricane Florence, was to reopen to the public May 22 but due to COVID-19 restrictions, have had to hold off. Initially the museum was set to open April 1 but that was put on hold because of the restrictions put in place to help manage the spread of COVID-19.

A few months before Florence hit, the museum had installed the “Harm’s Way: How Storms Have Shaped Our Communities, Our History and Us,” exhibit and launched the online resource about the more than a century of storms.

The exhibit will be expanded when the museum reopens to include Florence and Dorian that hit in 2019, Amspacher said, and will incorporate key elements of RISING, a North Carolina Sea Grant-funded, photography-oral history project by Ryan Stancil and Baxter Miller that illustrates sea level rise.

The sub-theme for Harm’s Way is response, recovery resilience because “that’s always been the common theme Down East. You take what comes, you did the best can with it, pick it up and move on,” she said. And on the other side of the museum, put in RISING.

“Both of these exhibitions were hanging in the museum when Florence came. Now they are hanging together with a more long-term theme of Living on the Edge and how storms are not the only force changing our landscape,” she said.

With the two exhibits featuring the landscape changing and hurricane history, “We hoped that somewhere in the process with programming and conversation, people would connect the two, and they did,” she said, adding that the exhibits were well-received and came about organically, though, she had to be careful with how it was presented.

Down East folks often see the science community as a threat because a lot of times, fisheries grant research hasn’t always helped them and it has been equated with increased regulation that’s unfair, Amspacher said.

“That being in the mindset, even more so over the past 10 or 15 years with fisheries regulations escalating, fishermen getting more and more involved in the regulatory process, and more and more academics and researchers coming and, some have been positive and some haven’t, they’re skeptical. she said. “The politics around climate change and sea level rise are very real.”

Since Florence, everybody talks about the impacts. “They don’t call it climate change. They’re not talking about the ice caps melting. They’re talking about the next storm,” she said. Florence was a signal more storms are coming and there’s very little question about it, something is changing. “The question is, how am I going to respond to it?”

She said one response was action. Homeowners raised their houses, put on metal roofs and are cutting down pine trees, because they don’t want them on their house.

When asked why folks stay Down East instead of leaving, she responded, “Where in the hell are you going to go? I’m not leaving. it’s home.

“A lot of people left after Isabel and moved to Morehead City. That’s still a move, that’s still changing your life. But people don’t have the money to move, they don’t want to move, they’ve got families here. This is everything they know and anybody who wanted to leave has already left.”

Michele Nolin stayed in her Marshallberg home during Florence.

Initially, she intended to leave when the hurricane strengthened to a Category 5 storm, but she decided at the last minute to stay, Nolin explained in an interview recorded at the waterfowl museum during a community gathering on the one-year anniversary of Florence. The museum has been working with Duke University Marine Lab students to collect oral histories.

Nolin continued that if it had been a Category 1 storm, they’d have just a few fallen limbs to clean up and that would be the end of it, but she was concerned about the storm surge. Her craftsman-style cottage was built in 1920s and is near water on three sides. Because of this, she looked at the tide chart and knew to expect high tide in the early hours.

At about 2:30 a.m., “the winds were howling and limbs were hitting the house. The storm was really rocking at that point,” and she started watching for tide to come. Every 15 minutes she would climb on a stepstool to shine a spotlight out of the three small windows of her front door, the only windows not boarded up, to see if water was rising. The first few times she checked, she saw green grass but around 3:30 a.m., around the time of high tide, she didn’t.

“I saw black and I was looking and shining the light and I could see water lapping,” Nolin said, adding that she wasn’t sure from which direction the water was coming. “I couldn’t really see. But I knew that I had tide in my front yard. I watched it kind of march across my patio and up to the first step of my house.”

Nolin said that the house is single story and there would be nowhere to go if water came inside. She didn’t know how high the water would reach.

“I had no frame of reference for that. I had been told since 1920, including the 1933 storm, there had never been tide inside that house,” she said. “But this is different, everything’s different now. You know, storms are bigger and wetter and they stay a lot longer and they dump a lot of rain and a lot of wind and a lot of surge in the water seems to be higher and higher every year around us.”

She said that this experience taught her how unpredictable storms are and what the unknowns are, “And if you do choose to stay, at some point you are on your own, it’s going to be you and the tides going to do what it’s going to do, and you may not have anywhere to go. And it is has changed me.”

Louie Piner, who is in his mid-70s and a lifelong resident of Davis in Down East, like most of those interviewed for the project, stayed in his home during Hurricane Florence.

He said that the experience with Florence changed how he prepared for Dorian.

“We had no idea that the tide would be what it was in Florence. Nobody expected that,” he said. “Florence was the one of record and that’s the one that my generation will make reference to. My mom’s generation always reference to ’33 storm. My generation will always reference Hurricane Florence.”

Amspacher told Coastal Review Online that 10 years ago, climate change and sea level rise weren’t even on the radar here.

“Isabel (in 2003) came and it tore up Down East more than Florence, I think, in some ways, and nobody equated that with sea level rise, really. It was just a bad storm, like the storm of ’33 or Hazel (in 1954). so there’s 1899, ’33, Hazel, and then Isabel and now Florence,” Amspacher said. “But now, especially with Dorian coming right behind it, I think all the conversation over the past five, six, seven, 10 years, paid off in that when Florence hit, people realized, well, maybe they were right. it had a name. it had a reason.”

Down East communities are particularly vulnerable to the effects of hurricanes, University of North Carolina Marine Institute of Sciences Director Rick Luettich told Coastal Review Online.

Overall, climate change is causing the impacts of hurricanes to be more severe in coastal areas like North Carolina for several reasons, including that a warmer climate is causing the ocean to warm up, making water expand and glaciers melt, both of which are causing sea levels to rise.

“In areas where the land is already very close to sea level, such as Down East North Carolina, small changes in sea level will cause more flooding on high tides and during storms,” he said.

Another reason is that warm water acts as the energy source for hurricanes. Climate change is likely to cause stronger hurricanes as well as hurricanes that maintain their strength farther north than in the past.

Additionally, climate change causes warmer air temperatures. “A warmer atmosphere is able to hold more moisture. Thus climate change is enhancing the amount of rainfall associated with hurricanes. If a storm moves slowly, such as Florence did in 2018, then greater amounts of rainfall will impact the coastal area,” he said.

“The Down East communities are vulnerable for two basic reasons,” he said. One is that the land is very close to sea level and so it doesn’t take much to make it flood and secondly, due to a variety of physical factors, most hurricanes tend to first move from east to west and then curve to the north.

“While this can and does happen anywhere from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, a number of the storms tend to turn to the north, east of Florida, and come up the southeastern U.S. Atlantic coastline. Eastern North Carolina sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean, especially in comparison to Florida and Georgia, and therefore often ‘catches’ these storms coming north. This isn’t particular to climate change, it’s just a fact of our geography and is the reason North Carolina is one of the states that experiences the greatest number of hurricanes,” he said.

Put together the natural tendency for hurricanes to impact eastern North Carolina and the low land there, “With the effects of climate change, one can conclude eastern North Carolina has been getting the short end of the stick when it comes to hurricanes for centuries, and unfortunately climate change is making this worse.”

Hans Paerl, Kenan Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences at UNC-IMS, said that of all the major storms recorded in eastern North Carolina since 1898, six out of seven of the wettest have occurred in the last 25 years.

Paerl has firsthand experience with flooding caused by Hurricane Florence. He said that he’s been here for 42 years and his Beaufort home, which is close to the North River, experienced flooding for the first time during Hurricane Florence in 2018.

He recently published two papers that “discuss the ‘new abnormal’ of wetter and more frequent tropical cyclones impacting us.”

The Nature Scientific Reports paper shows the increasing trend in wetter storms and is based on a 120-plus year record for the state’s coastal region, he explained. The biogeochemistry paper goes into more detail about the effects of increasing storm activity on water quality and organic matter inputs from coastal watersheds.

He said that the data shows a profound uptick in higher rainfall storms that have impacted the coast over this 25-year timeframe and he doesn’t think there’s any reason to believe that there will be a sudden change in this trend.

“The main cause appears to be due to ocean warming, and that’s not only leading to sea level rise due to more rapidly melting ice caps and glaciers and thermal expansion of seawater, but also at elevated temperatures there’s more water evaporating from the ocean into the atmosphere, generating a ‘rain pump’” he said.

The rise in ocean temperature is driven in large part by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion, methane and oxides of nitrogen from agricultural and industrial activities, and as the ocean’s surface is getting warmer, there is more moisture being generated by evaporation, which is being picked up by storm events and is partly responsible for their higher rainfall content.

“Another factor driving higher rainfall and massive flooding events is that the storms seem to be stalling more along the coastlines due to persistent high air pressure north of us, blocking the storms’ normal tracks to the north and northeast” he said.

Paerl said that the issue of persistent flooding in low-lying areas like Down East is something we’re facing more of and there’s every indication is that it is going to continue for the foreseeable future.

“We shouldn’t let our guard down,” he said, because we are in a region that is very susceptible. “I think we need to be prepared for and accept more flooding associated with these events.”

And if you throw in sea level rise, “It adds a double whammy. As sea level rises, the potential for inundation will be greater.”

Paerl added that “The take home message here is that the recent trends we are experiencing are due to the greenhouse warming effect.”

He said that while we may at times experience very cold winter periods or even an occasional snowstorm, these are short-term, unpredictable or “stochastic” events. “The long-term record is showing us that global warming is occurring at a higher rate than ever and that man-made greenhouse gas emissions play a huge role in this.”

Paerl said the only “knob we can tweak” to slow down this troubling trend is to be committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

This story is the second installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

A series of record-breaking hurricanes over the past four years has led to changes in how coastal North Carolina residents and state and elected officials talk about climate change and sea level rise.

While the above terms aren’t always part of the discussion, the words “resilience” and “resiliency” have become widely used on both ends of the political spectrum, especially when talking about vulnerable infrastructure here on the North Carolina coast.

“Certainly, resiliency is something that is being talked about a lot more, and is factored into our conversations a lot more than it has in the past,” said Jerry Jennings, the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s engineer for the division that includes the Outer Banks.

From  2002 to 2012, the state spent about $100 million maintaining 120 miles of N.C. 12 between Corolla and Ocracoke. Since then, the costs have continued to climb.

“Over the last 10 years, we spent $75 million on maintenance and repairs of N.C. 12 from Oregon Inlet to Ocracoke Village,” Jennings said, referring to the most frequently storm-damaged stretch of the highway. He added that the amount did not include the $252 million Bonner Bridge replacement project, the second phase of which is still under construction.

Geologist Stan Riggs said the economics of continuing to develop dynamic coastal islands and support and protect that development is anything but resilient.

“The reality is, ‘resilience’ is not the right word there, ‘it’s get the hell out of the way,’” Riggs said. “The human population may be becoming more resilient to this, which I don’t agree with. We’re learning a lot more about it, and we’re learning how to be safer and we’re learning how to build stronger structures, but we are not dealing with a fundamental long-term problem.”

Riggs, who is 83, said he’s seen how the barrier islands have gone from mostly wilderness to a densely built-upon area as the population exploded.

“When I moved here, the Outer Banks was nothing but beach cottages. They were little, you know, one-, two-, three-room things, and we used beach buggies — the old cars, the old junkers that you fixed up,” Riggs said.

He said that at the time, the population along the Outer Banks was still limited to a few small villages.

“It’s a different ballgame today,” Riggs said. “And rather than backing off the beach, we’re building these mega-McMansions out there now and they essentially form a hardened shoreline. It’s a wall of buildings that represents a bulkhead — it’s a house bulkhead. And in order to keep the beach there, we’re now pumping sand on over 125 miles of our beaches every two-three-four years at an incredible economic cost. That’s not resiliency, in my opinion. That’s foolishness.”

The year-round population along the Outer Banks is somewhere around 67,000, but the number normally swells to the hundreds of thousands during the vacation season. All those people have places to go and many have property to protect.

Residents and visitors expect road crews to keep transportation passages clear and safe and drainage systems functioning. Mostly, there is public good will toward NCDOT here but less for the lawmakers in Raleigh who are blamed for underfunding its projects. Storm damage becomes more costly every year and now, with the agency’s budget stretched to the breaking point by the COVID-19 pandemic, many wonder whether the constant rebuilding and repairing is sustainable.

Ditches that run along state-maintained roads are also part of the department’s responsibility and drainage is an ongoing concern, especially in low-lying areas.

Along with flooding, there is growing awareness that septic tanks and wastewater treatment plants have become more vulnerable. During Hurricane Dorian in September 2019, flooding caused untreated sewage from plants in Manteo and Columbia to spill into waterways. But most of the homes and businesses in this part of North Carolina use septic tanks, which are more at risk of leaking during storms because of higher water tables.

Intense storms and flooding will continue to affect coastal North Carolina residents for the foreseeable future, according to a report released in March by North Carolina State University’s North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies. The report finds that temperatures warmer than historic norms, disruptive flooding, increasingly intense and frequent rainstorms and hurricanes are “virtually certain” in the next 80 years.

The report also found that the past four years had the largest number of heavy precipitation events on record for the state. The study’s authors said that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were most likely causing much, if not all, of the observed changes.

On Ocracoke Island, residents continue to rebuild after Hurricane Dorian’s 7-foot surge flooded the village. Mickey Baker, co-owner of Mermaid’s Folly, a clothing shop on Ocracoke Island, said there’s little question what’s going on.

“Climate change is apparent. The icecaps from both poles are in our yard,” Baker said. “I’ve been here for 18 storms in 36 years, not counting nor’easters. We all survived. We all swam through front doors. We all lost pets in front of our eyes. The hard part was that we couldn’t stop what we were doing to help our friends. We were totally frustrated and worried. I got a text from a friend that read ‘in attic.’”

Other coastal residents say the problem is something else.

Christine Voss, an ecosystems ecologist and research associate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, noted that when real estate and other business interests along the coast became concerned that climate science might lead to regulatory change, that’s when the pushback began that led the North Carolina General Assembly to restrict the use of sea level rise forecasting in planning and policy.

“I think people acknowledged what was going on but wouldn’t always admit it,” Voss said.

Voss noted that hurricanes have happened throughout history and are not unique to climate change, but the frequency of flooding in areas along the coast is increasing. Voss’ research into how sea level rise affects coastal habitats often takes her to remote, low-lying areas such as Englehard in Hyde County on the west side of Pamlico Sound.

“There’s only really one place to stay in Englehard, the Englehard Hotel, and they kind of fancy themselves as a bed and breakfast, and in the morning, when you stay there you get a breakfast, and a lot of the town folk get together there and have breakfast. It’s kind of a little place to exchange some news,” Voss said. “We would go up to sample, usually on spring tide events because we were trying to trap fish in the marsh where there were higher water levels and to see how far into the marsh those various organisms would go and what size they were. And I remember coming up and just seeing indications of sea level rise and talking about it with some folks, and even though I had been acquainted with these folks for about a year, they were like, ‘Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no such thing as sea level rise or climate change.’”

Voss said that while discussing the changes using those terms created a sharp division, their observations were similar.

“Two weeks later, when I went back and — I believe it was in the fall — and they were talking about, ‘You know, there’s still standing water in the parking lot,’ or ‘We’re seeing marsh grass growing in the ditches,’ and somebody else was saying what else he’d seen, like “Yeah, this area just hasn’t drained and it’s killing the grass,’ and somebody else was complaining about salt on the edge of their field. Somebody else was talking about their well water wasn’t as good anymore.

“We could discuss all these different things that are impacts of, in this case, mostly sea level rise, and as long as it wasn’t labeled as climate change, they were OK, they would acknowledge it and they would tell me about it. But two weeks earlier when I had called it climate change, there was an automatic response saying ‘no.’”

Voss said the experience was a lesson in how to communicate with the public on climate science. She also learned to ask residents how they explained the changes they were seeing, such as how privately owned land that was taxable by the county was turning into marshland.

“I asked, ‘how do you explain that?’ And they said, ‘Oh, that was the earthquake of — I’m not sure what year was, I’m thinking was around 1896 — and I looked it up to be sure, and apparently there was indeed a big earthquake, I think it was based in South Carolina. They said that overnight, the land dropped about 18 inches in that part of the county.”

Voss said the earthquake probably did cause a significant shift or decrease in elevation there.

“And it taught me that it’s important, as scientists, for us to realize that there are other things that may happen in an area, or there are ways that people would justify this to themselves. And it doesn’t explain everything, but it was interesting because I think people do look for answers when there’s not a clear answer.”

Riggs said he’s has given up on trying to change minds about the threats to the Outer Banks. He’s instead turned his attention across the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds, and created a nonprofit group to help economically distressed communities along the “inner banks” capitalize on the region’s natural resources and cultural history in ways that are sustainable.

“I can honestly say, it varies from county to county because of the leadership in those counties, but I am working with some counties there and they get it. They get it, and they’re working like crazy to develop a sort of a new economy involving ecotourism sustainably that’s built around the natural waters,” Riggs said.

Riggs said that rather than trying to bring in industry that wouldn’t likely come anyway, the group is working to change the way business is done, to be more adaptive as sea level starts to impact more and more and as storms affect more and more communities.

“Ocracoke was wiped out bad enough that they’re going to come back a little better off for doing it,” he said, adding that villagers who are there are raising their houses and adapting, but the island will probably never become much like other of North Carolina’s barrier islands.

“One of the nice things about Ocracoke was that they didn’t have all the franchises there, because they couldn’t make enough money and it wasn’t guaranteed. Well now, this will make sure that there won’t be a McDonald’s or whatever else, and what’s there, it has to live within that system.

“The old timers that live there, they’ll be there. They’re going to survive. Ultimately,” Riggs said.

Voss said it’s also up to young people to bring the change.

“I hope they realize that they do have the power to affect change in the way we do things, the way we look at things. For their sake, I hope that all of us, young and old, will be considerate, be less greedy and be open to what we need to do to adapt to our changing climate. Yes, I hope the younger generation comes through. We’re counting on them.”

Catherine Kozak and Dylan Ray contributed to this report.

With the Atlantic hurricane season set to begin June 1, Coastal Review Online is examining how attitudes toward climate science in eastern North Carolina have changed during the past decade. This story is the first in a special series that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. For more information, go to pulitzercenter.org/connected-coastlines.

Start a discussion of climate change, sea level rise and the associated effects with residents of the North Carolina coast and reactions and responses will be mixed, but according to polling, attitudes and perceptions here have shifted over the past 10 years.

A decade ago in North Carolina, a panel of scientists that advises the state Coastal Resources Commission released a report that found sea levels could rise up to 39 inches by 2100. The report, to be updated every five years, was intended to guide North Carolina’s planners and policy makers. The panel’s findings however, created a backlash and prompted the North Carolina General Assembly to pass a law restricting the adoption of any rule, ordinance, policy or planning guideline that defined sea level or a rate of sea-level rise in coastal counties.

“The legislature threw out our 2010 report. They said it’s not acceptable,” Stanley Riggs, a retired coastal geologist at East Carolina University and a founding member of the science panel, recalled in an interview last week.

When it came time for the panel to do its five-year update, the commission restricted the science panel in how far out its projections could go. A 30-year outlook, based on the life of a typical home mortgage, was the imposed limit. Riggs said that despite the limits, the science behind the report didn’t change.

“When we did the 2015 report, it came out exactly the same, except we knew the numbers even better, because a lot more people had been working on it. What the legislature and what the public never understood was, it was the same damn report,” Riggs said.

Now, as the science panel works on its 2020 report, the Coastal Resources Commission, which has new members now, has removed the previous restrictions, with 30 years now set as the minimum outlook going forward.

Christine Voss, an ecosystems ecologist and research associate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, said the reaction to the initial report was the result of a push by real estate and other business interests to discredit the findings.

“I think that when folks felt like their livelihoods could possibly be threatened by acknowledging sea level rise and climate change, I think that there was a public effort of disinformation, quite frankly,” Voss said.

She said that the science panel’s report didn’t necessarily influence what the public thought, but the reaction to it changed the messaging, right down to materials displayed in state museums and aquariums.

“I found it very interesting that there was actually a push to administratively try to not even acknowledge what was happening,” Voss said.

Riggs compared the reaction to the report to the current coronavirus pandemic.

“This divided population, that half is willing to accept the science and believe the science and the other half doesn’t want anything to do with the science, it’s exactly the same issue because what they’re doing is projecting how this system is going to work, and people don’t want to hear that. And it’s an anti-science attitude that goes way beyond sea level rise,” Riggs said. “We’re seeing the same story play out with respect to the coronavirus, and with time, if it gets bad enough, more and more people may come around to accepting, but it doesn’t mean they’re glued to the science.”

According to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the average global change in temperatures over land and ocean surfaces for 2019 was the second highest since recordkeeping began in 1880.

Here on the North Carolina coast, the effects are visible and often disruptive, although some residents attribute what they say they’ve seen to factors other than a changing climate influenced by human behavior. Still, the past few years, with a series of storms that include hurricanes Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018 and Dorian in 2019, have sharpened the focus for many and possibly changed minds.

“I think that probably one of the biggest things that has changed attitudes along the North Carolina coast regarding climate change was really Hurricane Florence. I think that was a big turning point,” Voss said.

Voss, who studies the environmental changes occurring on the North Carolina coast, said it’s important to realize that for millennia, coastal areas have been dynamic places. She said signs of change such as frequent flash flooding, heavy bouts of rain and rising groundwater elevation, along with saltwater encroaching farther landward, fouling wells, killing forests and changing the landscape in other ways, are compounding with time.

Saltwater intrusion into freshwater aquifers, the main drinking water supply for much of eastern North Carolina, is potentially a significant result of sea level rise that’s happening now, Voss said. She said the changes are visible when using the historical images feature of Google Earth, which can delineate where saltwater intrusion has affected farm fields.

“If you go up Route 70 (near Beaufort), just south of East Carteret High School, in those areas it’s pretty darn evident,” she said. “In other areas Down East, you can see where the marsh has just kind of encroached, you can see the ghost forests. You can see where that line of trees versus marsh has changed.”

“Ghost forests,” or stands of dead trees, are clearly visible from along the Cape Fear River near Wilmington on the southern North Carolina coast up to the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on the northern coast. The refuge is a low-lying area, so the effects of sea level rise have been especially dramatic – formerly marshy areas are now open water and once-dry land is now marsh.

On North Carolina’s barrier islands, and on the mainland in coastal Carteret, Pamlico, Hyde, Dare, Currituck and Tyrrell counties, anywhere from a quarter to three-quarters of the land is at sea level, Riggs explained. Here, adaptation options are limited.

“We’re not going to engineer our way out of that,” he said. “We can’t do what the Dutch have done and build dikes around 10,000 miles of estuarine shoreline. You know, we can build it around Swan Quarter. But what do you do with Columbia, Engelhard and all the rest of the towns that are essentially 1-foot above sea level, 2 feet above sea level? They have no place to go.”

Voss said the politicization of science creates the biggest obstacle to the public’s understanding of the changes they are seeing.

“I think people are realizing that, yes, those things that we were told 30 years ago, 20 years ago that we would be seeing, we’re seeing it,” Voss said. “I think we’re gradually starting to realize that climate change isn’t something we’re thinking about as far as the future, but that the climate is changing now and we’re living in it. I think that is hard for people.”

Riggs agreed. He compared the environmental changes to what’s happening with COVID-19.

“It’s just like counting deaths right now. Now that we’ve got the 90,000 deaths in this country, people are starting to realize that something’s really going on,” he said.

But understanding is not the same as dealing with the fundamental, long-term problem, Riggs said.

The state’s worst natural disaster

Hurricane Florence, a deadly Category 1 storm that made landfall near Wrightsville Beach early in the morning of Sept. 14, 2018, was the state’s worst natural disaster, totaling somewhere around $22 billion in property damage. Rainfall and flooding levels across eastern North Carolina were unprecedented because of the slow-moving storm, and not just on the immediate coast.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, a state record rainfall total of 35.93 inches was set in Elizabethtown in Bladen County, breaking the previous record for rainfall from a tropical system of 24.06 inches, a four-day deluge measured during Hurricane Floyd in 1999 in Southport, in coastal Brunswick County. Florence followed another record-breaking storm: Hurricane Matthew in 2016 also made landfall in southeastern North Carolina as a Category 1 storm, was blamed for 25 deaths in North Carolina and caused catastrophic flooding across the coastal and central parts of the state.

USGS hydrologist Toby Feaster said in December 2018 that record flooding during Florence was measured by stream gauges in the state that had decades of data. Feaster led a study that showed 45 stream gauges in North Carolina and four in South Carolina recorded flows that ranked among the top five on record. There was more than 70 years of historical data at some sites with record-breaking flooding. Peak stream levels at nine locations indicated that Florence was a greater than a 500-year flood event.

“Since several of the (sites) we analyzed had more than 30 years of historical data associated with them, it was interesting that a majority of the number one and two records were from back-to-back flooding events,” Feaster said at the time, referring to Matthew and Florence.

For many along the North Carolina coast, the hurricanes of the past few years were the first natural disasters they had experienced. This is especially true for young people, including Daniel Van Skiver of Brunswick County on North Carolina’s southern coast. Van Skiver is one of several Brunswick Early College High School students who submitted essays on their experiences for this series.

“Florence left me in a state of helplessness and, being one of the many people in Brunswick County with financial problems, there was no way out,” Van Skiver writes. “My home was left in an almost unlivable state, my bed was soaked through from a hole in my bedroom roof, and the problem did not stop witha the passing of the hurricane. The water damage brought infestations of bugs and rotted away other parts of the house that had been untouched. If I had not been able to stay with my brother, I would have most likely been out on the streets, a living arrangement that would last the next seven months as me and my dad looked for a house.”

Lindsey Clark, another student at the Brunswick County school, also writes of her family’s experience with Florence, which flooded her home.

“It has almost been a year and a half since it has happened and we still feel the effects of it today,” Clark writes. “It hurt each part of the family differently and was so heartbreaking. We lost all of our old family photos, clothes and our home. It was difficult to build back up again and to try to get back on our feet. We felt stuck and felt like we had nowhere to go and did not know where to turn. You really do not realize how much you have until it is taken away from you.”

Not only young people, others in coastal communities are seeing unprecedented floods during storms.

In a recently compiled series of recordings by the Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort and the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers Island, a partner with Coastal Review Online in this reporting project, Louie Piner of the unincorporated Carteret County community of Davis said Florence was unlike any storm he’d seen. Folks in the low-lying Down East part of the coastal county are accustomed to weathering storms.

“Well, I’ve been through quite a few hurricanes. I’ve lived in Davis all my life. And we’ve had quite a few. But Florence is the only one that the house I live in has ever had water in it. The house was built in 1946. And we’ve seen a lot of storms, but it has never had water in it until hurricane Florence,” Piner said.

A poll conducted by Elon University in October 2018 sought to gauge how Hurricane Florence affected North Carolina voters and how they viewed threats to coastal communities and policy questions related to climate change. The poll found that opinions had shifted since the university conducted a similar poll in 2017. The poll found that 51.5% of North Carolinians believed that climate change is very likely to have negative effects on coastal communities, with 31% saying it is somewhat likely.

That’s compared to 45% who said the negative impacts were very likely and 28% who said they were somewhat likely in the 2017 poll. Pollsters said the shift appeared to be driven by attitude changes held by Republican voters.

The 2018  poll also found that nearly 54% believed hurricanes were becoming more severe and that 62% believed that climate science should be incorporated into local government planning and ordinances.

A year later, Dorian

Almost exactly a year after Hurricane Florence, another Category 1 hurricane made landfall on the North Carolina coast. Again, the wind-speed category was no indication of the damage to come.

Hurricane Dorian flooded the village on Ocracoke Island Sept. 6, 2019, ultimately resulting in the destruction of 47 structures, county officials said earlier this month. The number caught even villagers by surprise, Peter Vankevich, copublisher of the Ocracoke Observer, another partner in this series, said recently.

“The Ocracoke Preservation Society’s museum next to the big (National Park Service) parking lot had never been flooded,” Vankevich noted in October 2019. “’If that building ever gets flooded, this island will be in big trouble,’ someone once remarked.”

The museum suffered extensive flood damage with 5 inches of water inside.

About 400 of the island’s roughly 1,000 residents were displaced and nearly every structure on the island was damaged when the storm surge reached 7.4 feet at 8:30 a.m. Sept. 6, 2019. Ocracoke’s storm surge during Hurricane Matthew was 4.7 feet.

Mike Riccitiello, a structure specialist with the North Carolina Emergency Task Force, was part of six crews on the island after the storm to document structural damage, Connie Leinbach, the other co-publisher of the Ocracoke Observer reported.

“One gentleman I talked to has lived on the island 65 years and said he’d never seen storm surge this bad,” Riccitiello said at the time.

Jade Lopez is a co-owner of Taqueria Suazos on Ocracoke Island. She said that when Dorian came through, her family had to be rescued.

Doug Eifert, co-owner of Dajio Restaurant, on Ocracoke Island also suffered significant damage at his business. He said nobody expected the storm to be so bad.

Charles Temple, an English teacher at Ocracoke School, described Hurricane Matthew as the worst storm to hit Ocracoke since the 1944 Great Atlantic hurricane, and Dorian’s floodwaters in the village reached 18 inches higher. He called the storm’s devastation “a gut shot.”

Despite the extensive damage, federal officials determined that villagers didn’t qualify for individual assistance, the form of disaster aid that provides financial help and services for people to do home repairs and cover costs of temporary housing, clothing and medical needs.

Ocracoke’s economy is tourism. Its restaurants, small shops and accommodations largely remain closed since Dorian. The storm’s damage led officials to keep the island closed to all but residents for more than two months after the storm. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has compounded villagers’ troubles as they try to rebuild and recover from Dorian.

For those who can reopen, many are apprehensive, and some are choosing to remain closed as summer vacation season begins, Vankevich said.

“First of all, people are going to be coming to a different Ocracoke,” Vankevich said, adding that the many businesses wouldn’t be open, either because of concerns about the coronavirus or because they were damaged or destroyed by Dorian.

“All these kind of wonderful landmarks that have people coming here are not going to be there,” Vankevich said.

Jennifer Allen and Dylan Ray contributed to this report.

Next in the series: Communicating, understanding and responding

The following is a series of essays by students at Brunswick Early College High School in Bolivia on their personal experiences during Hurricane Florence in 2018 and their perceptions of climate change. This is part of a series for the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. For more information, go to pulitzercenter.org/connected-coastlines.

A State of Helplessness

By Daniel Van Skiver

Hurricane Florence truly put the “disaster” in natural disaster when it tore through in 2018. Many felt the destruction and were left with nowhere to turn after their homes were ripped apart or flooded. I am one of these people.

Florence left me in a state of helplessness and, being one of the many people in Brunswick County with financial problems, there was no way out. My home was left in an almost unlivable state, my bed was soaked through from a hole in my bedroom roof, and the problem did not stop with the passing of the hurricane. The water damage brought infestations of bugs and rotted away other parts of the house that had been untouched. If I had not been able to stay with my brother I would have most likely been out on the streets, a living arrangement that would last the next 7 months as me and my dad looked for a house.

This kind of damage is tragic, but it seems to be more common with every year. As a coastal area this kind of water damage occurs almost every year during hurricane season and displaces more and more people who cannot afford that kind of a loss. The storms seem to get worse by the year as temperatures globally continue to become more unstable and the environment gets mistreated and ignored. These disasters may be rough, and I would know firsthand, but they might only be a small part in a larger-scale issue that not enough people are concerned with.

Climate change is a very real and very dangerous threat, and not only due to hurricanes. With rising global temperatures comes droughts and extreme heat waves and rising sea levels. For agricultural-based areas, this means an endangerment of an entire way of life. Crops will shrivel and die, leading to more poverty and less preparedness for the next storm season. Furthermore, rising sea levels will lead to worse flooding than we have ever seen before. These floods do not only hurt us, but our wildlife as well. As water washes onto shore and destroys more areas, it also contaminates our water supplies. This hurts the plants and animals that make our community so beautiful and only worsens the effects of climate change.

Florence took my house away, just as many storms have done to many people before, but if we don’t act to undo our part in these worsening disasters then we might end up losing entire communities.

A Life-Changing Event

By Bella Digiacomo

Webster’s definition of a hurricane is, “a tropical cyclone with winds of 74 mph or greater that is usually accompanied by rain, thunder and lightning and that sometimes moves into temperate latitudes.” I believe this is correct, but does not include any of the emotions people feel during a hurricane, or details about the effects and damages of a hurricane.

Hurricane Florence was a life-changing event that really opened my eyes toward reality. Florence, although devastating has taught me many life lessons, it showed me the good and the bad of situations. How did one event cause a whole chain reaction in my life? In sum, it all started when my Mom had called a family meeting deciding if we should evacuate or stay put, the vote came to an even split. We ended up evacuating to Winston-Salem where it was so peaceful, it was as if no one knew there was a hurricane. Seeing how peaceful Winston-Salem was, we made plans with our family that was going to get hit by Florence to meet up at our hotel. We all met up for dinner at Five Guys, and honestly it was such a great way to end a stressful day. After a few days of stressing and exploring Winston-Salem, mom decided to finally go back home, but once we got there we realized it was not such a great idea.

Our whole street was flooded with muddy water, it was up to my aunt’s hips, so around 5 feet of water, and it was only going to rise over time. After continuous warnings to not drive through the muddy water, mom thought she could do it, but halfway there the car began to sink and water began to rise. My siblings rapidly grabbed their life jackets as my grandpa began to jump out of the window to push the car out, he tried but didn’t succeed until our neighbors walked into the water to help.

The engine gave out so the only thing mom could do was steer the wheels to face straight ahead. The struggle continued after we got out. People were crying about such little things, everyone was so emotional. The next mission was to get out of our house due to the muddy water still rising, luckily our grandmother lived down the road at a higher platform, so the water would take longer to reach us. Days later, the whole neighborhood was evacuated, people were standing on the roofs of their homes to avoid the water from getting to them. We all had to squeeze into small trucks, and boats to get passed the flooded highway, but once we finally got settled in and it all ended, we were forced to fix our homes and sell them. This should have taken about a year, but with everyone’s help it only took months. This taught me that sometimes the people you would think would be there for you won’t be there in your most desperate times. It also showed people come together in a state of emergency and will try to help in any way.

Climate change was such a large factor in this hurricane, and according to Science Daily, “They predicted Hurricane Florence would be slightly more intense for a longer portion of the forecast period, rainfall amounts over the Carolinas would be increased by 50 percent due to climate change and warmer water temperatures, and the hurricane would be approximately 80 kilometers larger due to the effect of climate change on the large-scale environment around the storm.”

Climate change made an increase in flooding, and instead of just wind damage it became water damage as well. If climate change continues in the future, a normal rainy day could become another flood warning and hurricanes would be a constant unavoidable loop.

Still Feeling the Effects

By Lindsey Clark 

In the late summer of 2018, Hurricane Florence ripped through the Carolinas and devastated many homes, including my own.

There was 7 feet of water on the inside and 14 feet of water on the outside.

It has almost been a year and a half since it has happened, and we still feel the effects of it today. It hurt each part of the family differently and was so heartbreaking. We lost all of our old family photos, clothes and our home. It was difficult to build back up again and to try to get back on our feet. We felt stuck and felt like we had nowhere to go and did not know where to turn.

You really do not realize how much you have until it is taken away from you. Thankfully a family friend allowed us to stay at their house until we got back on our feet, which took months. It was crazy to see the people taking advantage of the ones that were without homes; because while we were searching for houses to rent, the prices were extremely outrageous. Even though some were taking advantage of others, there were many who donated and helped out ones who lost their homes.

My sister school, Bolivia Elementary set up these stations for people to go into the school and get cleaning supplies, food and clothes and it really helped us out. It was just amazing for them to do that! It is very nerve racking for me when there is a bad storm or another hurricane because I always think that there is going to be some freak accident where my house gets damaged again and we will have to start all over again. On top of that, my dad is in law enforcement — so when there is a storm he has to stay and wait it out with the rest of his team. That is scary because he is out in horrible conditions and something could happen.

In these past years I have been able to see a difference in the amount and strength of the hurricanes. They are happening more and more, and they are becoming more powerful due to the rising temperature of the ocean due to climate change. They are coming in one after the other, causing major damage to our infrastructure and it cost so much to fix these issues. During Hurricane Florence, the rain washed out many of our roads, and Highway 17 still has damage to it. There are still roads that we cannot go through because they are so damaged.

We need to do something about this before it is truly too late, because it is only going to get worse from here. This is especially important to people who live on the coast because it is our way of life and hurricanes disrupt that. Hurricanes cause erosion of the beaches which is not good for the sea life as well. We need to take care of what we have before it is gone.

Florence Shook Me Mentally

By Corban Cardenas

In August through September 2018 came catastrophic Hurricane Florence. The hurricane caused over 23 billion dollars in damage with a little over 50 fatalities. The hurricane flooded many parts of the Carolinas including a town in North Carolina, Leland. This was where I was when the major flooding and strong winds were taking effect. Florence not only completely destroyed my first home in North Carolina but it also shook me mentally.

Florence poured into a small community called Stoney Creek and with the strong winds combined with the powerful rain, it destroyed the septic tank in the community and flooded the community with a mixture of sewage and rainwater. Over the course of five days, through my bedroom window I watched as Florence tortured my mind by slowly filling the neighborhood with water. It started as puddle to lake-deep water that drifted my car off.

After the water, the power had finally gone out when we ran out of gas for the generator, my family decided to leave to my grandma’s house a couple streets down. Overnight, out of curiosity, I left to check on the house and soon found myself staring at my house completely underwater. This destroyed me because this was my first house in North Carolina, so many memories were formed and saved here. All the Christmases and birthdays now gone in 24 hours. My mission was to keep my family happy and smiling so I did everything in my power to make them laugh, from filming dumb videos to doing mini stand up. My mother however did not like this and we would argue because she saw me as heartless for not showing any remorse for what was reality. I still pushed through the pain and kept my reasons to myself. I stuffed all the sadness and confusion down and continued my mission to make them happy. After one week and a half of missions to spark smiles and in return receiving arguments, the water was completely gone. I could finally stop thinking about how the house could be and actually find out myself.

I ran to my street only to find myself in a post-apocalyptic wasteland; cars flipped in the street, broken windows and torn walls, papers flying everywhere. While walking through the silence, I stumbled across a notebook. The notebook was mine, the book contained all the songs I have ever written. It was drenched and torn up. This shattered my heart, this notebook had years of memories, now gone. I kept it and searched for my house.

I found my home, the front door was wide open, the fridge was in the living room. Picture frames shattered on the floor and tables flipped. Luckily, the water did not reach the upper floor, but the first floor was destroyed. I went upstairs and thought to myself about what had happened and everything I saw and took in. I thought to myself, everything and anything will come to an end eventually. The smiles I was creating on my little sisters faces had a beginning and an end. I was yelled at and argued with my mother who I worked hardest to make happy. Those arguments came to an end. A building that I called home, came to an end. I tried so hard to keep the smiles alive, that when the fell to a frown it hurt worse. The more arguments I tried to end quicker the more took place. Finally, the home I kept telling myself would be okay, was demolished from the inside.

I realized that the most important thing to understand in life is that you should not go through so much pain to keep things alive before the end, you should appreciate and enjoy every moment while it is still alive. The notebook served as a realization that memories are a past and not present. I should work on the present and enjoy every moment. Ever since Florence, I have been enjoying every moment with everyone and everything. I have been writing, producing, and helping people produce music. Florence had such an impact on my mentality, I have changed how I view the world and how I should live my life. Life is short, time is fast, there is no replay or rewind. Enjoy every moment as it comes.

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