This is another in a series of reports on coastal resilience.

CURRITUCK COUNTY — For more than 100 years, the Pine Island Hunt Club was one of the premier hunting lodges on Currituck Sound. It’s now the Donal C. O’Brien Jr Sanctuary and Audubon Center, the first Audubon Center in the state, thanks to the 1979 land donation to the National Audubon Society from the last private owners of the club, the family of Winston-Salem developer and avid duck hunter Earl Slick.

The family managed the property until 2009 when Audubon North Carolina assumed responsibility. The 2,600-acre sanctuary that straddles the beach, marsh and wetlands of Currituck Banks is home to 170 bird species, seven amphibian species, 17 reptile species, 19 mammal species, more than 350 species of plants and a two-story hunting lodge built in 1913, according to Audubon.

There is a wide, tamped-earth trail along the sound that was once the road to Corolla. The guardhouse is still there, just north of the Sanderling Resort in Duck. At one time its guards decided who would get to drive the sand road to the village.

The sanctuary is a place where the wind paints waves of color in the marsh grass. In the maritime forests, the gnarled live oak creates a dense canopy where sunlight dapples the ground in shades of yellow. It’s also ground zero in North Carolina for the effects of climate change, a vulnerable barrier island where work is underway to adapt the infrastructure to the changing climate and create a hub of conservation, restoration, scientific research and resilience planning.

Conservation group Audubon North Carolina hosted an open house and tour of the hunting lodge and grounds Friday to highlight how climate change is affecting Currituck Sound and the Outer Banks and the ongoing work to adapt as part of its resilience initiative. Officials on hand stressed the urgency and the need to work together.

“I think deep down in the inner side of all of us we all have a great appreciation and love for nature. But we just don’t take the time. It’s something we’re going to get to. We take it for granted. And that is dangerous,” said Sen. Bob Steinburg, a Republican whose district includes Currituck County, during his remarks at the event.

Steinburg was joined by North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Michael Regan, numerous northeastern North Carolina elected officials and Audubon representatives.

As part of the event, state and local officials participated in a ceremonial purple martin house raising near the impoundment pond west of the hunting lodge. Heavy rains the night before and a strong southwest wind had raised the water table almost to the surface, making the ground spongy, with water seeping out under participants’ every step. The pond’s surface was inches from the top of the impoundment.

Sanctuary Manager Robbie Fearn explained what was happening.

“These soils are getting softer and softer,” he said. “One of the big challenges that has really not been addressed about barrier islands is that you have the ocean coming up on one side and the sound on the other side. The water table sits on this pocket of saltwater underneath. As that come up, every time it rains, like it did buckets last night, that water has no place to go.”

Earlier in the day, those who spoke highlighted the need to work together to mitigate the effects of climate change.

“The marshes are critical habitat for thousands of wintering waterfowl and other wildlife,” said Andrew Hudson, executive director of Audubon North Carolina. “Audubon scientists have identified this place as in the top 2% of places in the hemisphere to protect for birds.”

He went on to explain how he felt Audubon North Carolina could protect the sanctuary and its neighbors from what’s happening along the coast.

“Through a combination of practical research, new hires and staff, on the ground conservation, restoration work and resilience planning, all made possible through the deep cooperation with our partners here. Our goal is to secure a bright future for the birds and the communities here,” he said.

DEQ Secretary Regan agreed. “Scientists have marked Currituck Sound as one of the most important points we have left for the study and preservation of many species of birds.”

Reagan also offered a cautionary message.

“These places remind us all of what an important job we all have to protect them. It’s easy to forget about the sacred trust of ours when we are sitting in an office or when we’re preoccupied in Raleigh,” he said.

In Steinburg’s call for greater cooperation, the senator noted that the lack of cooperation in the past had led to many problems that exist today.

“There has really been an ignorance and a failure on the part of a lot of folks to work together as stakeholders to try and address the many concerns we have in preserving what we know is beautiful and satisfying,” Steinburg said.

Hudson of Audubon North Carolina pointed to a large living shoreline project on the property south of the dock on Currituck Sound. A state Clean Water Management Trust Fund grant provided much of the funding for the project.

“We’re grateful for lawmakers continuing to support the trust fund. We think it is one of the most powerful tools we have,” Hudson said.

Numerous ongoing projects at Pine Island were designed to offset the effects of sea level rise.

“On the north end of the property, the gathering pavilion is being placed on a 4-foot dune,” Fearn said, adding that over time, the 4-foot elevation would be inadequate to stave off rising waters.

Fearn then pointed to where a new building would be placed. At one time, guides and employees were housed where there is now bare ground. The new building, once built, and the hunting lodge are to be designed for a much longer life.

“This beautiful 1913 building, the clubhouse … will go up on pilings. They (the two buildings) will go up 7 feet,” he said. “Sixty years from now this will all be salt marsh.”

The buildings, though, are designed to remain accessible with a boardwalk connecting them.

The vision of creating a resilient place for education and research is consistent with what Regan said he saw as the future for Pine Island.

“This sanctuary has over 2,000 acres … that serve as a living classroom for both current and future generations,” he said. “Both students and educators can come here and see hundreds of species of birds, plants, and it is at those moments that we either affirm or we spark an interest in science and discovery inspiring a lifetime of learning.”

This is another in a series of reports on coastal resilience.

HAVELOCK – In the bigger picture, the most resilient communities are those that forge a connection with the water, Hunter Freeman told a crowd of nearly 300 Wednesday during the two-day North Carolina Coastal Resilience Summit.

Freeman, who leads sustainable stormwater management planning and implementation projects for civil and environmental engineering firm WithersRavenel, and three others were on the panel, Helping Nature Help Us: Co-Benefits of Environmental Solutions, that focused on using natural solutions.

The state Division of Coastal Management and the North Carolina Coastal Federation organized the summit held Tuesday and Wednesday in the Havelock Tourist and Event Center in response to Gov. Roy Cooper’s Executive Order 80. Cooper signed the executive order last fall directing his cabinet agencies to prepare a state climate risk assessment and resiliency plan by March 1, 2020.

The personal connection to water that Freeman sees in coastal and mountain communities is “what drives the resiliency,” he told the roomful during the summit, adding that there has to be a will to recover or a need, or both, “and where both of those exist are those areas that have that connection.”

He used downtown Wilmington’s Water Street as an example and showed a photo of the flooded street that runs along the Cape Fear River.

“This is one of the most at-risk areas for flooding but yet it continually rebounds from flooding,” which he said could be because of business, tourism, development and that connection to the community driving the recovery effort.

Freeman emphasized that the public should be included in projects that promote natural solutions and conservation to demonstrate the value and forge that connection with water. Freeman said this can be done in a number of ways, such as designing a man-made pond as a destination that adds value to a facility, rather than simply fulfilling a permitting requirement.

“That’s the approach that most developers take … there’s almost a hesitancy to allow people to connect to water because it’s viewed as a risk instead of an asset,” he said. Sites need to be designed to treat water as the asset it is, and part of that process to connect communities with water is making the language used in design more accessible.

Forty Years of Flooding

While Freeman is looking ahead, Brian Kramer, Pine Knoll Shores town manager, is working to remediate “horrible drainage plans” that have caused flooding in the Bogue Banks town for decades.

He said that the first area that was developed in Pine Knoll Shores in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the part of town closest to Atlantic Beach, is “a stormwater and flooding nightmare.”

“It’s been going on for 40 years, and what we’ve been doing for 40 years is pumping raw stormwater coming off state highways … inundating septic fields and properties, we’ve been pumping it into the Atlantic Ocean, the Pine Knoll Shores canal and the sound. We’ve been doing that for 40 years,” Kramer said.

The town has been trying to find ways to manage stormwater for some time, but Hurricane Florence in September gave the town a sense of urgency, he said. The town has worked with the Coastal Federation on mitigation projects and trying to infiltrate stormwater where possible.

Pine Knoll Shores plans to apply next year for funding under a federal Clean Water Act program to address flooding in the eastern areas of the town. Officials have also applied to the state Clean Water Management Trust Fund to treat stormwater before it is released into the surrounding bodies of water, he said.

The town also encourages its homeowners to keep a tree canopy, rather than remove trees from the property.

“Trees help protect your house,” Kramer explained.

Kramer said that he drives through Emerald Isle to work every day and through Atlantic Beach often, noting that Pine Knoll Shores has fewer blue tarps covering damaged roofs on houses than any other town on the island. “And I believe that’s because of the tree cover,” he added.

“We have tree-density requirements. We have (homeowners) tell us what they’re going to remove and what they’re going to keep,” he said, adding that the town wants all homes to have as much tree coverage as possible. “Even the smaller homes in the older areas are tree covered and we want to keep it that way.”

Green Solutions

Burrows Smith, managing partner of the 300-acre River Bluffs residential development in Castle Hayne, used trees for a different natural solution. When he and his partners began developing the property near Wilmington, Smith said he pushed to use the state’s low-impact development guidelines issued in 2010. He decided on putting in the center of the development a park that retains stormwater and allows it to infiltrate, or soak into the ground.

“Our infiltration basins are parks,” he said, where people utilize the 2 acres 99% of the time as a park, except for the about 1% of the time when it rains.

Smith said it’s not a typical infiltration basin because he said regulatory agencies don’t want trees in basins, but he found that the trees help improve infiltration.

Smith said he also had built a living shoreline, a more natural alternative to erosion control than bulkheads, on a part of the development’s 3,000 feet of riverbank. Although there was a bit of trial and error with the plants, he did see some success with the living shoreline once completed. The rock sill held and gained material during severe weather and, even though the plants died, Smith said it held up better than another section of the river where there was no living shoreline. There, the bulkhead built by a previous owner caved in.

Smith suggested that the regulatory agencies be more flexible to allow experimentation. He said agencies should provide resources and advice to developers and property owners on low-impact development, such as how to properly create a living shoreline.

Tools for the Public

There is support for waterfront homeowners in Carteret and Onslow counties who are looking to build a living shoreline but are unsure if the location is suitable: There’s an app for that.

Lora Eddy, coastal engagement coordinator with The Nature Conservancy in North Carolina, said the Natural Solutions Toolkit, part of the Coastal Resilience program that examines nature’s role in reducing coastal flood risk, is designed to help communities plan for coastal hazard risks and determine the best natural solutions. This includes an online Living Shorelines app for the Onslow and Carteret counties showing where conditions are best suited for a living shoreline.

“To enable communities to tap into some of our experience, we developed our Coastal Resilience program and our Coastal Resilience tools,” Eddy said.

In addition to the online toolkit and contributions of international experts, the Coastal Resilience program consists of a four-step approach: assess hazard risk and community vulnerability, identify nature-based solutions, take conservation and restoration action, and measure the effectiveness of actions to reduce flood risk.

Eddy added that the Coastal Flood and Sea Level Rise app allows for individuals to help identify areas in communities most at risk to coastal flooding from storm surge now and into the future, Eddy said. Communities can use this information to modify their floodplain management standards, for example, or start a discussion at the state level. Other tools include the Restoration Explorer to help identify the best places to build oyster reefs.

This is another in a series of reports on coastal resilience.

HAVELOCK – Adapting to living with rising seas, larger, slower, rain-dumping coastal storms, flooding and extreme heat is going to take forward thinking, collaboration and money.

“The planning for resilience, there’s no right way to do it,” said Jessica Whitehead, chief resilience officer of the recently formed North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resilience.

Whitehead moderated the first in a series of panel discussions held Tuesday, which kicked off the two-day North Carolina Coastal Resilience Summit in Havelock.

The summit drew some 270 participants, who listened as national, state and local officials discussed the realities of the changing climate and how to effectively build a resilient North Carolina in the face of climate change.

“Climate change is not just about the water,” Whitehead said. “It’s about heat. It’s about rainfall. Climate is changing as we increase greenhouse gases, period. It’s happening.”

As a result, the risks of flooding, drought and extreme heat events are on the rise and their impacts are likely to be far reaching.

“This has a potential impact on even labor in our country,” Whitehead said.

Working hours for outdoor laborers in the agriculture, forestry and construction businesses may have to be cut back to ensure safe working conditions.

Higher-than-normal bouts of hot days like the ones the state recently experienced where spring temperatures topped above 95 degrees will impact hundreds of North Carolinians on fixed incomes.

Scorching temperatures boost demand on air conditioning units, which equates to higher electric bills.

Nights when temperatures do not dip below 75 degrees affect certain crops.

“Resilience needs to be equitable and inclusive, especially for those who are the most vulnerable.”

Jessica Whitehead, N.C. Office of Recovery and Resilience

“So, it’s not just ecosystems,” Whitehead said. “It’s impact on people. It’s impact on our economy. Resilience needs to be equitable and inclusive, especially for those who are the most vulnerable.”

Resilience about more than bouncing back from a storm or other weather-related disaster, she said.

“It’s also about building beyond and becoming stronger,” Whitehead said. “It’s actually thinking about planning and building and responding and managing adaptively. There are going to be things that we as a state need to innovate.”

Statewide Effort

Gov. Roy Cooper’s establishment of the Office of Recovery and Resiliency under the Department of Public Safety is among the state’s latest climate adaptation initiatives. The office was created to oversee the recovery and rebuilding from past and future natural disasters and to administer federally funded grants for victims of Hurricanes Matthew and Florence.

Last October, the governor signed Executive Order No. 80, a comprehensive statewide effort to address greenhouse gas emissions, mitigation, adaptation and resiliency programs.

Florence was a Category 1 hurricane when it came ashore near Wrightsville Beach Sept. 14, 2018. The storm lingered for four days, dumping more than 35 inches of rain in some areas, claiming dozens of lives and leaving behind an estimated $17 billion in destruction in the state.

North Carolina, like many other states, is becoming more vulnerable by the day to extreme storms, said N.C. Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Michael Regan.

“Folks, this is personal for us,” he said.

DEQ is to submit a coastal resiliency and climate risk plan that lay out ways to rebuild smarter and stronger to the governor by next March.

“To do that we need your ideas,” Regan said. “Folks, we’re creating a strategic road map so we’re not putting Humpty Dumpty back together the same every time.”

To achieve this, DEQ officials are looking at what other states and countries are doing to adapt to climate change.

“We don’t try to reinvent the wheel,” said Tancred Miller, coastal and ocean policy manager with the state Division of Coastal Management. “We try to learn best practices from around the country.”

He shared three key messages:

• Focus on finding solutions to the problems climate change pose to the state’s coastal areas.
• Plan for tomorrow’s storms, not the storms of yesterday.
• Think about what and where we are building and how we are building it.

Rebuilding Smarter, Stronger

Building infrastructure designed to adapt with climate change decades out, moving existing infrastructure, relocating and, even the highly unpopular topic of retreating, need to be part of the discussion to rebuilding smarter and stronger, some argue.

Managed retreat allows the shoreline to move inland rather than using structural engineering to hold the shoreline in place. In order for this to happen on developed shorelines, some structures would have to be removed.

Rob Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, said one sensible alternative to consider is buyouts.

“In some places not only is it practical, it is the best option in the long run,” Young said.

“(The buyout of vulnerable properties) is not abandoning the coast. It’s preserving the coast.”

Rob Young, Western Carolina University

Young announced Tuesday the program he heads will release a study in the coming days that explores the benefits of targeted buyouts in erosion hot spots in coastal North Carolina.

“It’s not abandoning the coast,” he said. “It’s preserving the coast.”

Under a buyout program, willing buyers pay fair market value for the property then demolish the structure. The newly vacant land would then be preserved as a protected public area.

“The idea is that hopefully these are voluntary,” Young said. “This can’t really work where you’re condemning properties. It has to be something that benefits everybody at the end of the day. That’s just the way the world works right now.”

Front page featured photo: A Marine assigned to Combat Logistics Group 8 drives past a church to a fire station to evacuate civilians in Jacksonville Sept. 15, 2018, after Hurricane Florence. Marine Corps photo: Pfc. Nello Miele

This is another in a series of reports on coastal resilience.

WILMINGTON – Coastal towns and counties can now access an online tool that pinpoints areas where resiliency projects would best help communities in the face of storms, floodwaters and rising seas.

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation earlier this month released its Regional Coastal Resilience Assessment along with a new Coastal Resilience Evaluation and Siting Tool, or CREST, that identify and rank potential project sites along the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Pacific coastlines in the lower 48 states.

The assessment uses standardized, nationwide data that establishes an apples-to-apples comparison when it comes to evaluating potential resiliency projects, explained Mandy Chesnutt, NFWF’s director of program operations.

CREST takes the initial guesswork out of potential project areas by identifying so-called “resilience hubs.”

These hubs are areas of open space that surround dense population centers, are immediately accessible to infrastructure and host natural resources and habitats that provide protection to humans. They are also areas that are at the highest risk of flooding from coastal storms and sea level rise.

“It is one tool in our arsenal,” Chesnutt said. “The assessment is a starting point. It can give you a few of these hubs that you can go and check out. What we’re saying is, ‘use this tool as a starting point. You need to go out and investigate these places.’”

What makes NFWF’s assessment unique is that it targets areas where both humans and wildlife would receive the most benefit from natural resiliency projects, such as living shorelines and wetlands restoration.

Researchers, including those with the University of North Carolina Asheville’s National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NatureServe, delved even deeper to identify potential project sites through targeted watershed assessments.

North Carolina’s Cape Fear watershed is among eight coastal watersheds from Maine to Florida and California included in the targeted assessment.

The Cape Fear watershed in 2015 was the first to be evaluated.

This watershed supports more than a third of the state’s population – more than 2 million people – and stretches through nearly 30 counties and 114 municipalities, including Greensboro, Fayetteville, Durham, Chapel Hill and Wilmington.

The Cape Fear watershed is home to a wide array of habitat that supports juvenile fish, crabs, shrimp and a host of migratory fish as well as some of the oldest cypress trees in the world.

This was the testing ground on how to develop resilience assessment models, identify resilience hubs and rank those hubs.

One of the areas identified within the watershed is a patch of wetlands west of Wilmington International Airport.

Chesnutt said the wetlands’ proximity to a densely populated area paired with the fact it is host to a number of species, makes it a good spot for a restoration project that would create protection from storm surge and, at the same time, providing important wildlife habitat.

The idea behind identifying such sites is to give communities a starting point as to where to look for areas that would most benefit people and wildlife, said Dawn York, senior coastal scientist with Moffatt & Nichol and Cape Fear River Partnership coordinator.

“It’s work that’s already been done, so coastal communities can move beyond that first stage,” she said.

NFWF will use the assessment tool to evaluate proposed projects submitted annually from communities throughout the country for a piece of the National Coastal Resilience Fund, Chesnutt said, but towns and counties are by no means restricted from working outside of the areas identified in the assessment.

Each year, NFWF evaluates dozens of project ideas from communities vying for grant money from the $30 million fund.

“We have a really good sense of what we’re looking for,” Chesnutt said. “The competition is really fierce. We do try to distribute it evenly around the country.”

The foundation is not interested in projects that would include sea walls, jetties or other hardened structures, she said.

“It’s really focusing on those green solutions,” she said. “I think, in general, we are seeing a greater willingness to look at those natural solutions and not just hardened structures.”

Take the project initiated by Battleship North Carolina executive director, retired Capt. Terry Bragg.

The project known as Living With Water entails creating space for water pushed up the Cape Fear River by coastal storms and rising seas.

“They are taking action and that’s what we need to do,” York said.

The Cape Fear River Assembly has submitted a preproposal grant application for $125,000 from the National Coastal Resilience Fund for Creating a Resilient Wilmington planning project.

This is a stakeholder engagement project that will include Cape Fear River Assembly, the city of Wilmington, civil engineering firm Moffatt & Nichol and New Hanover County to “prepare for Wilmington’s next steps in the creation of its resilience strategy by improving upon its nature-based infrastructure including its wetlands, rivers and coasts.”

“We want to bring this urban planning effort to the city, but utilize that NFWF CREST tool,” York said.

This is another in a series of reports on coastal resilience.

ALLIGATOR — It was a full house at the Alligator Community Building, where folks came out on a late October evening because they were sick to death of floodwaters sitting for months in their yards.

Alligator, a speck of a community in the Tyrrell County swamplands, is no stranger to flooding. But their land doesn’t drain like before, residents told public officials. Ditches are clogged, and water seems to be coming more than it’s going.

“What happens to the landowner who is flooded out and doesn’t have a pump?” a lifelong Alligator resident asked officials with the state forestry service, state coastal management, the U.S. Corps of Engineers and the county who were in attendance.

Suggestions and promises were made, and some people from the agencies came back later and drove around to look at problem areas.

More than six months later, with the storm season looming, nothing appears to have changed, except that the land has finally dried out, said Michael Combs, one of the meeting organizers.

“We really would like to know what can be done,” Combs said in a recent interview. “I can’t say it will be (ditch) cleaning alone. There really needs to be extensive work done, elevating the roads and probably elevating the homes.”

But Combs, 55, who serves as associate minister at Alligator Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, worries that Alligator is too small – 70 or so people, he guessed – and too poor to even get attention, no less the help it needs.

“There’s not many resources at all,” Combs said. “We strive to get things done, but we can only do so much.”

Resilience in Tyrrell County is a built-in character trait of people in this rural county, but that term in the context of climate change is not common talk here. Sea level rise was part of a presentation at the beginning of the community meeting, but that was the only mention. The concern, simply, was flooding.

“When I was a child, I rode bicycles all over this land,” one older man said. Then there was his neighbor, he recalled, who had “kept his yard like a golf green. And now you can’t walk on it.”

As one of the state’s poorest counties, and its least populated, Tyrrell is already disadvantaged. But according to a 2016 report in the journal Nature Climate Change, Tyrrell has earned another unfortunate ranking: It is the No. 1 county among 319 U.S. coastal counties facing long-term risks from sea level rise.

By 2100, the report said, 94 percent of the Tyrrell’s projected population is expected to be vulnerable to inundation. The study, led by Mathew Hauer at the University of Georgia, was unique for looking at a combination of projected sea level rise and projected population.

And the Alligator Peninsula, which encompasses the communities of Alligator, Fort Landing, Goat Neck and Pledger Landing, is the most vulnerable area in the county.

Tucked in the northeast corner of Tyrrell between U.S. 64 and the Albemarle Sound and intersected by the Little Alligator River, the peninsula, at only about 1 foot above sea level, depends on an old and barely maintained network of ditches and canals for drainage. Gravity is useless; any water movement is wind-driven.

“We are dealing with sustainability issues at all levels here and climate is just one part of it,” David Clegg, the county manager, said in an interview after the study was released. “Places like Tyrrell County need to exist and we need to build economic development that celebrates what we are.”

Tyrrell’s 600 square miles is about 50 percent public land, including Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge and Pettigrew State Park, making its tax revenue paltry at best, Clegg said. Many of the county’s 3,600 residents – only 1,900 of whom pay taxes – work in farming, timber and fishing, all industries with decreasing opportunity. The average annual salary in the county is about $30,000, the state’s lowest. Young people routinely leave and rarely return, diminishing its population.

But public land means more to the county than decreased tax revenue, the manager added. It also means the county has no control over that land – or its drainage. In the Alligator area alone, the state owns the 10,000-acre Palmetto-Peartree Preserve, the 14,178-acre Alligator River Game Lands, the 1,441-acre Texas Plantation Game Land water impoundments and the 2,100-acre J. Morgan Futch Game Land. Elsewhere in the county off Highway 94, there are state-owned Buck Ridge, privately-owned Cherry Farms and the federally-owned Pocosin Lakes.

“You’ve got competing interests, literally looking at each other,” Clegg said. On one side of the road, water may be drained, which ends up flooding the other side, or one entity is trying to lower the water table, he said, while the entity across the road is rewetting the land.

“Then you’ve got 12,000 bears galloping all over it. Then you’ve got the wolves. Then you’ve got the foxes and the alligators,” Clegg said. Hunters, conservationists, government officials, farmers, private property owners, he said, all “earnestly” believe they’re doing the right thing.

“I’m in the middle of it, saying I want economic development,” Clegg said.

Still furious over the state wind moratorium that killed a wind project that would have provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax revenue to the county, Clegg said he is proud of the “innovative” agricultural technologies used by the county’s farms that produce potatoes, corn, canola, lavender, timber and soybeans at high per-acre production levels. But until the tax base increases, he said the county cannot afford to provide the services they want to provide.

Clegg, who was Tyrrell’s first-ever county manager, had served 20 years in the Commerce Department under former governors, Hunt, Easley and Perdue. Tyrrell is so small, it is a statistical anomaly in the state – “significantly insignificant,” as Clegg put it. It is even too small, he said, to fit the state’s small school model.

“If something other than aquaculture or agriculture is going to move the needle, it’s going to have to be ecotourism,” he said.

Clegg adamantly objects to offhanded suggestions that people “should just leave.” Not only does he support people’s desire to stay in Tyrrell County, he insists that the county deserves help from the government to raise their houses or improve their drainage systems and infrastructure. But he acknowledges that there are many pressures and competing forces that may defeat even the best of intentions.

“It all comes down to economics – is it economically feasible to do it?” he asked. “At some point, I think you reach a point where you’ve gone as far as you can go.”

And finding solutions will take persistence, Nathan “Tommy” Everett, chair of the Tyrrell County Board of Commissioners, told community members at the October meeting.

“What we’ve got to do is find out what the problem is, “ he said. “We’ve got to document it. I can tell you, it ain’t going to happen overnight.”

This past winter, some people were walking through sewage in their yards, Everett said in a recent interview. And he confirmed that the ditch systems are overgrown with weeds and filled with sediment and debris.

“My guess is they haven’t been maintained since Jim Hunt went out of office,” he said, referring to Gov. Hunt, who left in 2001. And since then, more farmland has been developed, he said, meaning more water is being pumped off the land rather than draining on the land.

Plus, flooding has been exacerbated in recent years by more intense rainfall.

The county, with the help of various grants, has already replaced well water with a municipal water system, and is in the process of hooking up Alligator and other communities to its new municipal sewer system, Everett said, adding that the county’s goal is to eventually extend the system to all areas.

Everett, 67, who has lived his entire life in the county, agreed that people are noticing a change in flooding. But he said it’s hard to pinpoint the reason.

“I think almost everyone realizes that for some reason tides are higher and that flooding is more prevalent during storms,” he said, adding, “Only the strong survive here.”

Some people do blame climate change, he said, but many believe that “it has a great deal to do with Oregon Inlet” because the Albemarle Sound goes out through the inlet. And it seems that work on U.S. 64 by the state Department of Transportation may have altered the hydraulics in Piney Marsh west of the Scuppernong River bridge, he said. Before, floodwater would go through the marsh. Now it to go around it, and the highway acts like a dike. As a result, flooding has gotten worse in Columbia, the county seat.

Everett said that the folks in Alligator see a stormwater management district as their salvation, but he said that the community does not have the finances to maintain such a costly dike and pump system. And being bordered by the Albemarle Sound and Alligator Creek might make it impractical.

“You pump one place and it comes in from somewhere else,” he said.

Ty Fleming, the county soil and water conservation district manager, said that he has lived in Tyrrell “forever” and he has observed that there’s more water and it’s standing for longer periods, especially in Alligator.

“There’s some really old folks down there – in their 80s – and they say ‘It used to not be like this’,” he said. “And I just don’t have an answer for them.”

Alligator’s drainage is worsened by a layer of clay about 15 inches below the sandy surface, Fleming said. In 2007, he said the county installed floodgates in some canals and replaced 30 drainage pipes under driveways. But maintenance of the county’s ditches – some of which may be centuries old – is complicated by jurisdictional issues. The DOT, for instance, claim that some of the roadside ditches are not within its right of way, he said. Ditches may be on private property, or on property managed by a nonprofit, or an unknown entity, or inaccessible.

“Really, the only thing the county is able to do is we’re spraying the ditches to kill the invasive aquatic weeds,” Fleming said.

Combs said the more frequent and long-lasting flooding has put even more stress on Alligator. “There’s been times we can’t even get to the cemetery to a have a funeral,” he said. “During the winter months, my yard never dried out.”

Economic stress, he said, has hollowed out what is one of the state’s oldest historically black communities. Today, Alligator is a mix of black, white and Hispanic residents, many of whom fish or farm for a living. With young people leaving for better jobs and education, Combs said, the elders left behind no longer have the tight family connections.

Combs said he’s still optimistic that things will improve for his community, and that Tyrrell will have development that helps the economy. If not, he fears that Alligator won’t be able to survive, and “everyone just goes their different ways.”

But East Carolina University coastal geologist Stan Riggs, however, sees a flip side to the gloomy prospects. Tyrrell County, in fact, is blessed with some of the most “spectacular” blackwater bodies and wild lands in the country, said Riggs, who has recently released two studies on ecotourism in the Albemarle Peninsula and the Scuppernong region.

Riggs has studied the Outer Banks and northeastern North Carolina since the 1970s, and to him, resilience for Tyrrell communities means making water work for them, and looking at their resources as golden opportunities.

“You have to learn to live with the dynamics of the system,” he said in an interview. “If the dynamics are changing, then we have to change with them.”

Sometimes people will have to relocate, he said, but if people plan ahead, they may open up more options. Young people need to learn to be comfortable on the water like the older generations, and to appreciate the value of the richness that’s surrounding them.

Take blackwater, the somewhat sinister-sounding name for its coffee or tea color. The water takes on its various dark shades from draining through the vast swamp forests, marshes and pocosin lands. Although it’s dark, it’s sediment-free and clear.

Indeed, the region, with its abundant wildlife, expansive lands and vast estuarine waters,  has been referred to by some as the “Yellowstone of the East,” Riggs said.

“All these economic councils, everybody’s looking for an IBM or a Weyerhaeuser,” Riggs said. “The whole point here is they have natural resources that can represent an economy. They have this incredible resource.”

This is another in a series of reports on coastal resilience.

HAVELOCK – Hurricane Florence, which made landfall Sept. 14 near Wrightsville Beach as a Category 1 storm, directly caused 22 deaths and was a factor in 30 others, according to the National Hurricane Center Tropical Cyclone Report on Hurricane Florence released Friday.

Of those 22 deaths, 15 were in North Carolina, four in South Carolina and three in Virginia, with freshwater flooding causing 17 of those deaths, four by wind and one from a tornado, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Wind and water damage caused by Florence totaled about $24 billion, with freshwater flooding causing the most damage to homes and commercial buildings. Most major roads and highways in the southeastern part of the state were left impassable for days.

Storm surge and exceptionally high rainfall totals produced catastrophic flooding across much of southeastern and eastern North Carolina. The hardest hit areas included New Bern, Newport, Belhaven, Oriental, North Topsail Beach and Jacksonville, along with portions of Carteret County, according to the report, which also details the extensive wind damage from Cape Lookout through New Hanover County and widespread power outages.

NOAA scientists have said in previous reports that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere prevents heat from Earth’s surface from escaping into space like it used to, and since the ocean absorbs most of that excess heat, upper ocean temperatures have risen dramatically during the past two decades. Warm ocean surface temperatures are the key ingredient in the recipe for hurricanes.

Advancing Preparedness

Researchers, nonprofit environmental groups, state agencies and others are set to meet for two days next month to discuss coastal climate risks and management strategies to better prepare for storms like Florence. Registration is open for the North Carolina Coastal Resilience Summit, June 11-12 at the Havelock Tourist and Event Center. Cost to attend is $45.

The state Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management has partnered with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, co-host of the summit, in coordination with the Eastern Carolina Council, Cape Fear Public Utilities Authority, Albemarle Commission, Mid-East Commission, The Nature Conservancy, North Carolina Sea Grant, University of North Carolina School of Government and Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership.

The summit is being held in response to Gov. Roy Cooper’s Executive Order 80 signed last fall and directing his cabinet agencies to prepare a state Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan by March 1, 2020.

“A strong clean energy economy combats climate change while creating good jobs and a healthy environment. With historic storms lashing our state, we must combat climate change, make our state more resilient and lessen the impact of future natural disasters,” Cooper said in a news release about the executive order.

According to the Coastal Federation, the summit will provide information on developing the North Carolina Coastal Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, “so as to propel the coastal region’s preparedness for the effects of climate changes including rising sea levels, increased frequency and severity of coastal and riverine flooding, increasing extreme weather, changing groundwater conditions and other shifting natural conditions. The summit will also showcase a gamut of existing solutions to address the identified challenges.”

The agenda includes panels that are to address a range of topics such as state support for developing a resilience plan, transitioning coastal communities toward resilience, climate change in relation to coastal hazard risk, maintaining climate-ready and productive estuaries, environmental justice and other climate-related issues.

Coastal Federation Senior Policy Analyst Ana Zivanovic-Nenadovic explained that the state Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan “is intended to guide state agency actions, and help local communities address the consequences of climate change. The goal of the plan is to identify cost-effective strategies to protect human life and health, property, natural and built infrastructure, cultural resources, and other public and private assets of value to North Carolinians.”

Zivanovic-Nenadovic said that the federation is partnering with the diverse group of coastal community stakeholders to coordinate the summit to highlight and evaluate the utility of potential strategies that could be included in the state’s plan, especially as it applies to the coast of North Carolina.

“The DCM is providing funding and we are organizing, coordinating the agenda, speakers and planning the entire event,” Zivanovic-Nenadovic said.

During the summit, attendees will discuss prioritizing current and anticipated climate risks to the coast that will need to be addressed in the resiliency plan; Lessons from recent extreme weather; evaluating existing and potential policies and management measures that address climate risks to coastal communities and the environment; identifying the cost-effectiveness of potential mitigation and adaptation strategies and practices that the plan might include; and determining research and policy gaps that need review and analysis, according to the federation.

Patricia Smith, public information officer for divisions of Coastal Management and Marine Fisheries under the state Department of Environmental Quality, told Coastal Review Online that the North Carolina Coastal Federation approached the Division of Coastal Management in November 2018 with the idea of holding a summit on coastal climate risks.

“Division staff thought that this idea fit well with Gov. Cooper’s Executive Order 80, which had been issued in late October, and that such a meeting would be a great outreach tool for reaching coastal stakeholders,” she said. “Part of the EO80 requires the Department of Environmental Quality to include stakeholder engagement in preparing a North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan to be submitted to the governor by March 1, 2020.”

Smith added that staff had already been in contact with representatives of coastal towns and counties wanting the division to hold regional workshops to help with land-use planning.

“Division staff decided to meet first with local government, managers, planners and emergency management coordinators to discuss the resiliency challenges they are facing and ideas they have for the future. These ideas will be discussed at the June summit, and stakeholder may give their input on them and bring up other ideas they have for resiliency planning,” she said.

Greg “Rudi” Rudolph, with the Carteret County Shore Protection Office, will be on the “Resilient Coastal Tourist Communities: Climate Ready Infrastructure and Land and Water Uses” panel along with Plymouth Mayor Brian Roth; Dawn York, Moffatt & Nichol; and Eugene Foxworth, Carteret County’s planning director.

Rudolph said that the term “resiliency” had been in the coastal lexicon for some time, “but it’s only been recently a base understanding of what this term means for coastal communities and businesses has really begun to crystallize. The adaptation component is also resonating as evidenced by the reception the North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan has received, and the governor’s executive order as a whole,” he said.

“Understanding the impacts of climate change with respect to the stresses it is placing on the environment, and therefore to the fabric of our coastal community is a key component in developing a path forward, and I‘m looking forward to participating in the summit in all of these regards.”

Jessica Whitehead, North Carolina Sea Grant’s coastal communities hazards adaption specialist and a member of the state’s coastal resiliency work group, told Coastal Review Online the summit will “Be a great overview course on the topic of resiliency for coastal communities, with a focus on case studies and options that are being implemented.”

Whitehead is to participate during both days of the summit, including as moderator for a discussion on climate change and coastal hazard risk and on a “next-steps” panel.

“While earlier meetings have focused on technical audiences, the June summit will provide information in formats that will be accessible for local elected and appointed officials, residents and business representatives, and others interested in the topics,” she said.

Whitehead and other Sea Grant staff regularly work with communities facing challenges related to adaptations for a range of climate impacts, “from today’s flood to tomorrow’s high tide.”

For more information about the summit, contact Zivanovic-Nenadovic at anaz@nccoast.org or 252-393-8185.

The front page featured image for this story is from the cover of the NOAA report and is a panoramic view of Florence Sept. 10, 2018, when the hurricane was at Category 4 strength, as captured by International Space Station Astronaut Alexander Gerst.

This is the second installment in a special reporting series on coastal resiliency. Read Part 1.

As Category 4 Hurricane Florence plowed toward the North Carolina coast last September, an all-hands weather code red reverberated throughout the eastern part of the state.

Mandatory evacuations ensued. Universities closed. National news reports warned travelers to steer clear of driving through the state’s I-95 corridor. Administrators and emergency personnel of towns on barrier islands braced for the worst as they moved inland to ride out the storm, one that as of Sept. 10, 2018, packed winds of 140 mph.

Three days later, Florence was downgraded to a Category 1, a storm that, according to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, would bring dangerous winds likely to damage roofs, shingles, vinyl siding and gutters, snap large branches and topple shallow-rooted trees, and cause power outages.

Moving at a snail’s pace, moisture-packed Florence did much more after coming ashore near Wrightsville Beach Sept. 14, 2018.

Over the course of four days, Hurricane Florence’s record-breaking storm surge – 9 to 13 feet – and rainfall amounts that exceeded 35 inches left a wake of devastation that included dozens of deaths and an estimated $17 billion in destruction in the state.

Say hello to the poster child of what a newly released Zurich North America study calls the “new normal” of hurricanes, storms that researchers say require bucking current storm preparedness methods, taking a holistic approach to addressing risks and changing the terminology we use to communicate possible post-storm consequences.

Florence and the 2016 Hurricane Matthew, researchers warn, are not anomalies.

Large, slow-moving, catastrophic flood-causing rainfall – these are the ingredients of a new recipe of hurricanes coastal residents, policy makers and governments can expect in our changing climate.

Unveiling Weaknesses

With each hurricane comes a series of lessons.

“Every disaster provides ample learning,” said Michael Szönyi, flood resilience program lead for Zurich and one of the authors of the study, “Hurricane Florence: Building resilience for the new normal.”

Included in the study, a collaborative work of Zurich North America, the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, and the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition-International that was published in April, are highlights of real-life experiences and some of the lessons taken from Hurricane Florence.

After a new generator failed three times during the storm, New Hanover County emergency management personnel were forced to switch to a backup generator and move the emergency operations center to the other side of the building.

The 911 call center was offline for eight hours during the move.

In New Bern, a man confident he had prepared well to ride out the storm in his home was getting to ready to escape rising floodwaters and hunker down on the second floor of his house when firefighters knocked on his door.

The house adjacent to his was in flames, set ablaze by a generator that caught fire, and firefighters could not guarantee his safety.

The man told researchers the experience taught him to heed future evacuation notices.

These are just some of the stories the study’s authors collected during interviews with local and state government officials, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, business owners, nonprofits, academics and private property owners.

Hurricane Florence further served as a reminder the ongoing risks posed by coal ash ponds and large-scale hog farm waste storage facilities in flood-vulnerable areas, according to the study.

More than 39 million gallons of raw or partially treated human sewage from inundated wastewater treatment systems and other sources spilled into the Cape Fear River from Greensboro to New Hanover County.

“Hog and poultry waste, fertilizers, and pesticides were flushed from thousands of acres of land,” according to the study.

On the socioeconomic side, Florence is a testament to an imbalance in storm recovery between the haves and have-nots.

Home and business owners with the assets and insurance are generally recovering better than those without, the study found.

Smaller communities with higher poverty rates in North Carolina’s coastal plain were still recovering from Hurricane Matthew when Florence struck the coast.

“This pattern of shortened recovery time and limited recovery support from various authorities exacerbates existing disparities in recovery,” the study states. “Higher income, better resourced and insured communities recover and rebuild faster, and more likely in time for the next storm, than their lower-income, resource scarce neighbors.”

That evidence, those stories – they help researchers identify the lessons learned from Hurricane Florence, use them to come up with recommendations to enhance flood resilience plans and share those recommendations to flood-risk prone communities around the world.

The idea, Szönyi said, is to shift the needle for communities to move from being less reactive to putting more preventive measures in place so they are best prepared for future storms.

Getting Ready for the Worst

ISET-International research associate and fellow author Rachel Norton said North Carolina put into practice some of the lessons learned after Hurricane Matthew.

“The state and local governments had learned from that event and they did collaborate and put in best practices from what they saw,” Norton said. “I think it’s a process to build those relationships ahead of time. It’s something that we see as important and needs to be worked on.”

Working together to address systemic risks is one of the recommendations made in the Zurich study and will likely be discussed at next month’s North Carolina Coastal Resilience Summit in Havelock.

.@battleshipnc is facing its next challenge head-on. Check out our report on #HurricaneFlorence to learn about the measures in innovation and #resilience to preserve the #WWII battleship. #HurricaneSeason @ISETInt https://t.co/ilqssMZe9U pic.twitter.com/Biuq2sQgeT

— Zurich (@ZurichNA) May 2, 2019

“We came up with these recommendations through talking with people,” Norton said. “It’s not that we magically came up with these. There is a way forward. It can seem challenging.”

Norton is in the lineup of speakers at the June 11-12 summit.

Participants of the event, hosted by the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management and North Carolina Coastal Federation, will learn about and discuss the development of the state’s Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan. The plan is being designed to boost the coastal region’s preparedness for everything from sea level rise and coastal and riverine flooding to increasing extreme weather and changing groundwater conditions.

Christian Kamrath, a coastal resilience specialist with the division, said that getting people to think clearly about long-term preparations is difficult when they’re in midst of a slow recovery.

“Some places are in a constant state of recovery,” he said. “There’s a lot of stress on everyone, particularly staff at the local level.”

But Kamrath said there is a shift in thinking and more is being done in pre-disaster mitigation planning.

It’s going to take working outside of the normal silos of work state and local governments have done in the past and addressing difficult topics, including critically assessing building in high-risk areas and discouraging development in those areas.

“Acknowledging this, communities should plan for the impacts of eroding shorelines, disincentivize development in areas of risk, and plan in advance so that if state or federal buy-outs are offered in the future they have already begun the discussions necessary to inform decisions,” according to the study.

Retreating is one of the least popular options discussed in coastal communities, particularly those dealing chronic erosion at inlets.

“There’s a lot that goes into thinking about where we build,” Norton said. “I think that one, yes, it’s a recommendation, but it is going to take a lot of thinking about how we take that recommendation and put in on the ground.”

Szönyi said that, big picture, looking at further coastal expansion raises questions about financing constant beach repair and recovery, if there is a limit to that and, if so, what that limit is.

Another way in which communities can help private property owners and business owners prepare is by helping them understand which insurance is best for them.

And, there is a better way in which to communicate storm threats, according to the study.

In other words, hurricanes can no longer be judged alone by the Saffir-Simpson scale, which was introduced in 1973.

“Trying to explain a natural event with one parameter or one number is generally challenging,” Szönyi said. “We’ve seen this not just in hurricanes. It also happens, for example, with earthquakes. I think we need to look at how to communicate all the components of the hazards. It’s changing and it’s going to be more frequent and it’s going to be more severe.”

Kamrath agrees that more effectively communicating the risks is a challenge.

Weighing storm risks primarily on the Saffir-Simpson scale has “been ingrained in our culture for decades,” he said.

North Carolina now has the online Flood Inundation Mapping Alert Network, or FIMAN, that monitors weather radar and stream, sound and river gauges. FIMAN predicts floods and breaks down different scenarios of flood severity and projected community impacts.

“Seeing is really telling a story,” Kamrath said. “There’s some great visualization tools coming out. I have hope in the promise of certain technology being able to communicate that risk.”

This is the first installment in a special reporting series on coastal resiliency.

MANTEO – Resilience, mitigation and adaptation are trending terms that have recently migrated into state policy discussions in a big way through the North Carolina Climate Change Interagency Council, which is set to hold its third meeting Friday in Raleigh. A focus of the agenda will be a state climate assessment, a critical part of building resiliency to the effects of climate change.

To some extent, the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission had stolen the new panel’s thunder with presentations and discussion on sea level rise and coastal resiliency during its meeting April 17-18 in Manteo. Still, it was the CRC’s baby to begin with, going back to its pained early efforts in 2010 to address rising seas and other effects of global warming by requesting a study from its science advisory panel.

But the CRC report that year predicting a 39-inch sea level rise by 2100 was rejected by the North Carolina General Assembly, and progress on climate change policy in North Carolina essentially took a long, politically induced nap.

Since then, with record rainfall, dramatic increases in flooding and increasingly vicious storms besetting the coast as well as the rest of the state, the new climate change council and the well-established Coastal Resources Commission not only have overlapping missions, they are on the front lines of a profound challenge to confront the future North Carolina is just starting to see: ghost forests; drowned farmland; inundated drainage systems, roads, streets and parking lots; eroded shorelines; an overheated ocean; and algae-fouled waterways.

In a state with more than 10 million people living in 100 counties divided into more than 550 incorporated cities and towns and split between urban and rural divides and conservative and liberal politics, it was apparent at just the second climate council meeting in February that the state has a formidable task, which Gov. Roy Cooper set out in the executive order he issued last fall.

“We need to plan for tomorrow’s planet, not yesterday’s planet,” said Tancred Miller, coastal and ocean policy manager with the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management during the climate council’s meeting Feb. 19 in Elizabeth City. “We need to be inclusive and transparent.”

The Department of Environmental Quality is leading the development of the state’s climate science assessment, which will include identifying risks and creating a resiliency plan to guide agencies and local governments. The assessment is to encompass guidance from recent reports, including the Independent Advisory Committee for Applied Climate Assessment, or IAC, report and the National Climate Assessment.

And proponents say the public needs to get on board, not only by acknowledging that there is a problem, but also by buying in to the proposed solutions.

“These local communities are really in need for help from the state to really understand their risks,” said Brian Boutin, director of The Nature Conservancy’s Albemarle-Pamlico Sounds Program, who spoke at the meeting in February.

In addition to Boutin, panelists at the meeting discussed the myriad effects on communities, ecosystems, infrastructure and businesses that threaten regions of the state and suggested remedies and strategies to begin to address them.

“We need to have a long enough planning horizon where the investments we make are … enduring,” Boutin said. The council can serve an important leadership role in bringing partners together and finding funds, he added. “It will require investment from all of us to be able to accomplish these goals.”

Cooper’s executive order directed each state agency to assess its energy use and find ways to increase efficiency, but reports from four agencies only served to illustrate the massive scale of the adaptation the notoriously clunky bureaucracy must make. For instance, the state Department of Transportation is analyzing use of electric vehicles in the state’s motor vehicle fleet, as well as the efficiency of its buildings and equipment and emissions from the ferries.

“What we’re doing here is extremely important,” said Colin Mellor of NCDOT’s environmental policy unit. “It’s complex and it’s far-reaching. And it’s worthwhile.”

Holly White, principal town planner with Nags Head, said that although her community has begun to address the significant issues that rising seas and climate change have created, “water doesn’t understand municipal boundaries.”

“There needs to be ongoing dialogue between agencies, governments and communities,” she added. “And financial assistance is needed for data collection and research.”

But so far, each community and state agency in North Carolina is scraping together money for projects from wherever they can. There is no plan yet for a dedicated budget or to create a funding stream, Miller said, although there are some federal and state sources that he said could be tapped. Also, a risk-benefit cost analysis is to be part of the state climate assessment.

As the state’s regulatory body over North Carolina coastal policy, the CRC has been dealing for years with climate change-related issues and their multifaceted effects and connections.

With the Climate Change Interagency Council’s focus on four strategies, avoidance, defense, accommodation and relocation, there is an organic relationship to coastal policies, Miller told the CRC during its meeting last week.

“There are many ways where the CRC rules touch on these policies,” he said.

But Miller suggested that it would be beneficial for the commission to change its regulatory perspective to allow for “mainstreaming” of adaptive and resiliency management strategies.

“Rules tend to look backward at what has been,” he said.

Indeed, the immensity of the challenges demand fresh approaches, said Skip Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch in Norfolk, Virginia, during a presentation to the CRC. For instance, Stiles said, combining forces across state lines and with nonprofits and government at every level would be a practical way to pool resources.

The lack of resources, especially financial resources, is a huge hindrance for every community that is trying to cope with climate change on multiple fronts, he said. It would behoove states like North Carolina and Virginia with flat coastal plains to regularly share data and information, Styles said. Virginia Beach already has issues with flooding from bodies of water in North Carolina.

Both states are today seeing effects from sea level rise, from saltwater intrusion on farm fields and in private wells to failing septic systems. Roadways, the “skeletons of our public body,” are flooding more frequently, and more severely, Styles said.

“I think one of the issues is the retrospective nature of our policies and our professions,” he said, referring to engineering and science. “The problem is the extremes we threw out is what we now need to build to.”

“You have a box with all these jigsaw pieces. You need a box top to tell you how to put it all together.”

Skip Stiles, director, Wetlands Watch

Virginia is also late to the party in establishing a statewide climate change plan, although its draft plan is expected to be finalized this year. But Styles said efforts such as North Carolina’s climate change council are important for coordination and implementation of strategic plans.

“You have a box with all these jigsaw pieces,” he said. “You need a box top to tell you how to put it all together.”

Jessica Whitehead, coastal communities hazards adaptation specialist with North Carolina Sea Grant, is one of the scientists working on the North Carolina climate assessment. She described the timeline for such complex work, which pulls together large amounts of data and hundreds of scientific reports, as ambitious. The hardest part was getting everybody on the same page, but Whitehead was optimistic that everyone is now focused on reaching the March 2020 deadline.

“I think it’s coming out of a sense of urgency,” she said. “I’m really pleased with the progress we’ve made so far. I’m very glad to see there’s an enthusiasm and a real desire to do it right.”

The tide has turned, so to speak, on the public’s recognition that climate change is affecting their lives already, and their concerns are being conveyed to their elected local officials.

“We’re hearing a lot more from communities who want to do this,” Whitehead said. “Our hope is the state-level assessment will help them.”

Members of the Coastal Resources Commission said they support the Climate Change Council’s efforts.

“The question becomes, are we proactive, reactive or inactive?” said Jamin Simmons, a CRC member from Hyde County, to his commission colleagues. “People say, ‘We can’t afford it.’ We have to afford it. The economic loss is too great. We keep kicking the can.”

Next: New Normal Demands New Approach