Last in a series

JACKSONVILLE – After seven major hurricanes affected North Carolina’s coast during the 1950s, the state responded by tightening coastal building regulations.

It was a decade of storms the likes of which included Hurricane Hazel that hit the North Carolina coast in October 1954, churning up a storm surge recorded at 18 feet at Calabash and packing wind speeds of 150 mph on Holden Beach.

Hazel was a reminder of how vulnerable coastal structures on barrier islands are during storms and, in the mid-1960s, the North Carolina Building Code Council adopted specific hurricane-resistant rules for small residential buildings on the state’s barrier islands.

It’s still too soon to know what, if any, regulatory changes may come of the lessons learned from Hurricane Matthew in October, but the implementation of more stringent building codes for coastal structures is just one example of post-hurricane-related actions taken by government in the past to minimize destruction along North Carolina’s 300 miles of coast.

Over the years, some beach towns have amended their local ordinances that require setbacks farther than state rules pertaining to frontal dune systems. Some, like Topsail Beach, have restricted the amount of sand that may be moved from secondary, or farther inland, dune systems. Many coastal towns that have incorporated routine beach nourishment programs are touting the benefits sand reinforcement has in protecting landward structures against storms.

Coastal planning experts say that great strides have been made in reducing storm risks, but there’s still a way to go.

“I think there are a number of things that communities have been learning,” said Jim Schwab, manager of the American Planning Association’s Hazards Planning Center. “Hurricane Sandy certainly revealed a lot of things to us.”

Hurricane Sandy made landfall north of Cape Hatteras on Oct. 29, 2012, and barreled up the East Coast, pummeling heavily populated, urban areas in the north.

Since then New York City, with its densely developed waterfront areas, has taken on the challenge of redesigning buildings that meet zoning height restrictions while, at the same time, elevating those buildings to comply with national flood insurance program rules.

“There are design solutions for all of that,” Schwab said.

North Carolina’s coastal communities do not have the same population, but the state’s coastal communities can learn from the planning practices New York City is putting into play.

One of the ways beach counties and towns are doing that is by tapping into a resource designed to aid in storm mitigation planning.

Digital Coast, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-sponsored website, has become a popular coastal management tool among coastal counties and towns throughout the country.

“Among the things available in there are a number of mapping tools to help communities identify things like coastal habitat areas, sea level rise and visualization tools so you can look at projected sea level rise,” Schwab said.

The idea is to make the job of planners in coastal areas easier.

In anticipation of rising sea levels as a result of climate change, some coastal communities have chosen to respond to post-hurricane lessons by taking steps including acquiring flood-prone properties and adopting freeboard requirements, Schwab said.

Freeboard is a margin of safety from elevating a building above the National Flood Insurance Program’s minimum height requirements set by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

There are multiple benefits for towns that adopt a foot or more of freeboard, including flood insurance discounts for the homeowner, greater protection against sea level rise, and decreasing the chances of flood damage in a storm.

Beach communities in North Carolina, including Topsail Beach and Ocean Isle Beach, have in recent years adopted a 3-foot freeboard requirement. About half of the coastal communities in the state have adopted at least 2 feet of freeboard.

The benefits of raising homes on barrier islands have been documented since the state’s building codes for beach structures were added in the 1960s.

Topsail Island was left in shambles in 1996 when Hurricanes Bertha and Fran delivered a one-two punch.

More than 100 homes with shallow piling foundation systems collapsed along the 26-mile-long island, according to a 1997 FEMA Building Performance Assessment.

Despite the massive destruction left in the wake of Hurricane Fran, the FEMA report found that the state’s tighter building codes on barrier islands had made a difference.

FEMA’s assessment concluded that of 205 oceanfront structures built on Topsail Island after 1986, more than 90 percent sustained no significant foundation damage.

“The shift in State Building Code to require longer pilings for erosion-prone buildings along the ocean was generally successful,” according to the report.

Another success borne from post-hurricane lessons is the state’s floodplain mapping program, Schwab said.

The state in 2000 undertook a nearly decade-long process of remapping the state’s floodplain areas in the wake of Hurricane Floyd. The mapping system is available to the public in digital form and it provides an array of information that includes flood forecasts for land, roads and bridges.

“It’s certainly one of the best in the country,” Schwab said. “In a way it does help provide and disclose the vulnerability of different coastal structures in communities. “

Gavin Smith, a research professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s department of city and regional planning, agrees, saying that the state’s floodplain mapping program is an “amazing tool” created, in essence, as an outgrowth of Hurricane Floyd.

“On the other hand, there’s intensive growth pressures in the coastal zone,” said Smith, who is also director of UNC’s Coastal Resilience Center, one of 11 Department of Homeland Security centers of excellence, and a member of the APA’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division.

“There has been a push in the past four or five years to downplay the changing climate,” he said. “As we move into an era of climate change that is a real problem.”

Local governments are required to provide hazard mitigation plans, but few of them look at land-use rules as a tool to limit future risks, Smith said. And, few of those plans address climate change, he said.

“I think there’s some real progress, but we still have some real challenges of local governments making strides in hazard mitigation,” he said. “We still have a lot of work to be done.”

Learn More

• Visit NOAA’s Digital Coast
• UNC Department of City and Regional Planning
• UNC Coastal Resiliency Center

Third in a multi-part series

HOLLY RIDGE – When Hurricane Matthew approached North Carolina in October, many in the state – from scientists to casual observers – watched to see the effects on shorelines. Storm surge and increased wave action can visibly wear away the coast. How would properties with bulkheads fare? Or, for those with wetlands conservation in mind, would living shorelines deliver what they promised?

Living shorelines are designed to protect vulnerable marsh habitats. In the case of hurricanes, though, living shorelines are also meant to be filters of stormwater runoff and to mitigate the erosion caused by the water that inevitably comes with the storms.

Larry Jansen chose his home in Holly Ridge’s Preserve at Morris Landing in part because of water and coastal access. As a volunteer with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, he’s been watching the 310-foot living shoreline completed there in July as the fifth phase of an ongoing restoration project, and he returned to the site soon after the hurricane passed through.

“I couldn’t really see any impact at all,” Jansen said.

Living shoreline proponents say that’s no surprise.

“For the most part, these shorelines are behaving exactly the way we expect them to,” said Tracy Skrabal, a coastal scientist with the federation.

Living shorelines are generally made with a permeable sill, such as bagged oyster shells or rock, that follows the natural slope of the land, with marsh grasses and other wetland plants behind.

“When the water rushes up, there’s nothing impeding the flow,” Skrabal said. So, they are designed for the water to come in and go back out.

Although these observations are a good sign, there is more meticulous work being done in the aftermath of the hurricane. Carter Smith is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City.

“It started about a year and a half ago, with the goal of comparing how bulkheads, living shorelines and natural shorelines perform in major storm events,” Smith said of the research.

In the weeks since the hurricane, Smith has visited the project’s 30 study sites from Southport to Manteo.

At each, there are comparable shoreline structures that will face similar storm surge and wave energy. For the purposes of the study, living shorelines are those that have had some type of restoration work, such as the addition of marsh sills and aquatic plantings, and natural shorelines are unmodified. Both are compared to the hardened bulkhead type structures that are common along the coast. In the coming months, Smith will work on assessing the post-storm effects. Right now, though, she has made some preliminary findings.

“For the living shorelines, I would say there are no detectable instances of damage,” Smith said. For natural shorelines, there was measurable marsh erosion. “In some cases, a loss of over five meters (about 16.4 feet) from last year.”

Some bulkheads remained intact, but there are some stretches where bulkheads were damaged. Hardened structures such as bulkheads can fail in a number of ways during storms and the damage is often obvious.

“What we see is that the vertical surface of bulkheads is more susceptible to high-energy events,” Skrabal said. “And storm waves can scour away what’s in front of them.”

The same can happen behind the bulkhead, when saltwater overlaps the structure and weakens it, causing structural damage or collapse.

Smith’s project also includes conducting boat surveys along 100 kilometers, or about 62 miles, of North Carolina shorelines, taking photos and noting the location coordinates of damaged structures.

“I would say that at least 50 percent of the bulkheads we surveyed were damaged, from minor damage to full-on collapse,” Smith said.

A post-storm assessment is also expected to be released by the Division of Coastal Management, analyzing how sills, marshes and bulkheads fared during the storm.

For years, coastal conservationists have been championing living shorelines for protection of marsh habitat.

“When you look at bulkheads, they ecologically bisect the habitat,” Skrabal said. “Marsh needs sediment, and they (bulkheads) tend to starve them of that with erosion and wave energy.”

Conservationists also have been encouraging property owners to consider living shorelines for better, more sustainable protection of their property. But bulkheads are by far the most popular choice for property owners. A previous study from the Institute of Marine Sciences estimates that as much as 9 to 16 percent of the coast is protected with bulkheads, and permits for bulkheads are easier to obtain. Whereas, it can be more difficult, months-long process to get permits needed to install a living shoreline. Bulkheads are more expensive, though, and can cost thousands of dollars, depending on the length of the shoreline.

“And the cost of repairing bulkheads after storms is considerable, too,” Skrabal said. It is her hope that the example of how well living shorelines did during the storm will convince more homeowners to consider them rather than repairing or replacing bulkheads.

“One of our projects, Morris Landing, seemed untouched by the hurricane; the sill structure looked as it did before and that’s the point of them,” Skrabal said.

This resiliency is something Erin Fleckenstein, a coastal scientist with the federation’s northeast office, has noticed, too. She cited a homeowner at Silver Lake Harbor on Ocracoke Island who had a living shoreline built there this past summer.

“Before, they were facing considerable erosion, mostly due to ferry traffic,” Fleckenstein said. But the owner reached out to Fleckenstein after the hurricane and made a point of saying how pleased they were with the erosion control and how well the shoreline did.

Friday: Planning in the wake of hurricanes

Read the first and second installments in the series

Learn More

• Morris Landing Clean Water Preserve Project
• Previous living shoreline research

Second in a multi-part series

As Hurricane Matthew quickly turned away from the North Carolina coast on Oct. 9, it was clear that most of the storm’s damage was yet to come.

The storm had scoured beaches, raked the coast with winds, rain and high water, but farther inland areas already saturated by almost two weeks of wet weather saw heavy, sometimes, record rainfall. Flash flood warnings blanketed eastern North Carolina from the immediate rainfall as a massive surge of water began making its way downriver from the Piedmont.

The storm was quickly compared to the heavy rains and flooding during 1999‘s Hurricane Floyd and, like that disaster, the prospect of widespread environmental damage rose along with the rivers.

As the floodwaters pushed through cities and towns along the river systems they inundated, stormwater and sanitary sewer systems and waste treatment plants gathered more debris and contaminants along the way. In some places, the floodwaters turned into a toxic stew that local and state public health officials warned residents to avoid.

In the farmlands of eastern North Carolina, the floods killed livestock and swept away feed, fuel, animal waste and fertilizer. Transportation was especially difficult in rural areas and made it difficult to get feed to stranded herds.

As bad as the floods were the sheer volume of water may prove to be their saving grace.

Department of Environmental Quality Assistant Secretary Tom Reeder, said DEQ’s Intensive Survey Unit has been collecting data throughout the region to determine the extent of lasting environmental issues.

“They began conducting (the survey) immediately after the hurricane subsided and they really haven’t found anything to speak of,” Reeder said. “Of course, you would expect that, the dilution was just so incredible from the storm event that any kind of SSOs (sanitary sewer overflows) or anything we would have had would be purely temporal in nature and quickly washed out into the ocean.”

During the period of Oct. 8-17, there were 270 sewer overflows associated with Matthew, a total of 183.94 million gallons spilled, according to DEQ data. Of the total spilled, 144.03 million gallons reached surface waters.

A full report of the survey of the region should be wrapped up within the month, Reeder said. “The preliminary data says that there’s nothing to be alarmed about in terms of water quality issues, post-Hurricane Matthew.”

Upper Neuse Riverkeeper Matthew Starr said he agrees about the intensity of the floodwaters, but he’s critical of the idea that things will be fine because of the contaminants were diluted.

“To me the dilution is not the important aspect of this. The important aspect of this is that we had a large amount of different types of pollution being spilled into public waterways,” he said. “We had coal ash spills. We had hog waste spills. We had inundated poultry facilities. We had municipal wastewater spills.”

Those spills will continue, Starr said, as long as the state continues policies that allow sources of pollution to be sited in floodplains and floodways.

Reeder said that, going forward, the department is trying to improve the resiliency of the state’s water and sewer infrastructure. In addition to requests for money for plant improvements and repairs in a proposed federal aid package, DEQ officials are also seeking funding for more generators and emergency equipment.

Power failures and the loss of pumping capacity led to many of the 270 reported wastewater spills during Matthew. After prompting by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Reeder said the state recently sent in a request for federal funding for more emergency generators and infrastructure improvements for public water systems.

Agriculture: Successes and Challenges

Although there are many similarities, one of the major differences between hurricanes Floyd and Matthew was in what happened when floodwaters moved through North Carolina’s “hog country,” the belt of southeastern counties that are home to massive swine operations.

Six hog lagoons had major breaches during Floyd and 55 were flooded. About 30,000 hogs drowned. The devastation from the breaches and concerns about the safe disposal of massive numbers of animals led to a change in state policy, including a $19 million buyout program under the Clean Water Management Trust Fund to move as many hog operations as possible out of the 100-year floodplain.

The numbers for Matthew, which drove floods in Lenoir, Duplin and Wayne counties of equal or greater magnitude as Floyd, showed a fraction of the damage reported in 1999. There were breaches at two hog waste ponds and another 14 were flooded. Fewer than 3,000 hogs were lost, and those were mostly at one location.

Brian Long, spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, said the buyout, which took about 40 farms and 100 lagoons out of operation, was the main reason for the difference. Better forecasting also played a role, he said, giving farmers time to move hogs to other areas or to market.

“We heard about numerous instances of swine or birds that were near market age that were moved to market ahead of the storm, so that if the houses were later endangered from the flooding there were no animals in them.”

Feed and fuel supplies were also pre-positioned, Long said.

“Those were some of the big things that helped this time around,” he said. “I think there were a lot of lessons learned after Floyd across industry, government and a lot of organizations as well.”

The numbers on the poultry side, which did not see the same sort of regulations after Floyd, were closer to the 1999 numbers. About 1.8 million chickens and roughly 100,000 turkeys drowned. In 1999, the estimate was close to 3 million birds lost.

Long said most of the chickens will be composted on site rather than transported to landfills. During the storm, DEQ lifted some of the state restrictions on landfills, allowing transport of dead animals to lined landfills, but most, Long said, would stay on the farms.

The composting operations, windrows of sawdust piled over the chicken carcasses, are another offshoot of lessons learned after Floyd, Long said.

“I think Floyd was a signal that in these types of situations, burial of an animal is not an option because of the location and water levels,” he said. “This way gives you a much better option.”

DEQ’s Reeder said that in dealing with the poultry deaths, the state was able to use elements of a plan drawn up last year when there was potential of an even greater number of poultry deaths from avian flu.

“We had those plans on the books, so Ag was able to go ahead and execute what they’d planned for,” Reeder said.

Legislative Steps

Reeder said the policy steps taken after Floyd clearly helped when another massive storm came along, particularly moving the hog operations away from the floodplain.

“That really paid dividends during Hurricane Matthew, even though we had precipitation levels and flood levels that exceeded Floyd in some cases, we had less pork incidents because they moved those operations out of the floodplain,” he said. “That’s the lesson to me: Don’t build in the floodplain.”

But Reeder said he is uncertain what the legislature might do in the way of policy in response to what was seen during Matthew, including extending the floodplain strategy to the state’s growing poultry industry.

“There’s always talk about regulating poultry more akin to the way we regulate pork,” he said. But for now, he said, it’s not clear where the General Assembly is on the idea.

Cassie Gavin, Director of Government Relations with the North Carolina Sierra Club, said she’s also uncertain if there’s an interest on the part of legislators to take up further regulations.

But Gavin agrees that there’s a need for more information.

One important step, she said, would be to at least know the location and size of the growing number of poultry operations.

There’s been good progress on the hog issues since the steps taken during Floyd, she said.

“The poultry farms in the floodplains haven’t even been mapped,” she said. “Those need to be mapped and addressed as well.”

Read Part 1: Matthew Relief Funding Remains in Limbo

Read Part 3: Living Shorelines Withstand Matthew’s Force

First of a multi-part series

Although floodwaters from Hurricane Matthew receded a little more than a month ago, the storm’s effects will linger for years. And if past is prologue, experiences from the disaster will reshape planning and practices at all levels of government.

In North Carolina, policy changes large and small tend to follow major storms and Matthew and the extensive inland floods that followed certainly qualify, with 29 storm-related deaths and damage estimates climbing above the $2 billion mark.

This week, the Hurricane Matthew Recovery Committee finishes its initial round of community meetings. McCrory announced the committee’s formation in late October and convened the first meeting in Raleigh on Nov. 1. The committee has been trying to gauge local needs above what’s likely to be funded through state and federal disaster aid.

Meanwhile, additional federal aid is in the works on top of what is already flowing. A running tally kept by State Emergency Management put the total in direct aid to victims of the hurricane at $79.6 million.

Since the 48 counties affected by Matthew have been officially declared federal disaster areas, the federal government will pay for the bulk of disaster relief, but the size and scope of the storm, already among the costliest in state history, will require substantial funds from state and local coffers.

The McCrory administration submitted to Congress on Nov. 14 its updated estimate of the cost of the storm, asking for more than $1 billion in federal support. The request includes more than $810 million for community block grant disaster assistance; $40 million for the Army Corps of Engineers to restore federally authorized navigational channels; $41.6 million for dam safety; $22 million in highway funding; and $111 million for farm conservation and watershed-protection projects.

The request is being combined with requests for disaster aid from West Virginia and Louisiana for floods earlier in the year and from other states affected by Matthew.

Right now, the status of federal disaster aid is in a kind of end-of-session limbo. While Congress is likely to pass a continuing resolution on or before its scheduled departure date of Dec. 16, there’s no guarantee that the aid proposals will be included in the bill. Congressional leaders have yet to decide on whether to allow the aid package and other spending to be added or pass a “clean” continuing resolution, which would shift the proposal to the next Congress.

The timing of federal aid could affect what steps North Carolina takes in adopting its own recovery package. Although the governor had previously said he’d prefer to call a special session of the General Assembly after knowing what steps Congress might take, McCrory said this week he intends to call a special session next week regardless.

“We’re waiting on Washington,” Rep. Pat McElraft, R-Carteret, said. While a session seems probable, she said, the date is still a question mark. “I wish they’d set a date if we’re going to do it.”

Sen. Bill Cook, R-Beaufort, said he’s still skeptical that a session will happen. “I’m not sure we’re going to have a session,” he said after a committee hearing Tuesday. “We might, but right now I don’t know.”

Cook said whatever funding comes will be focused on getting roads repaired and finding ways to make recovery efforts move more quickly.

“I’m going to make sure the infrastructure primarily is repaired as quickly as possible and the lives of my constituents are not impacted to this extent in the future,” Cook said.

The state has funded extra material and personnel costs through its two main emergency funds, but has yet to tap into the state’s Savings Reserve Account, the so-called “rainy day fund.” To do that, McCrory needs to get legislative approval.

In advance of the special session, state agencies are preparing cost estimates and strategies for moving ahead once the state and federal funding are settled.

The state budget office has estimated that the state has enough in its emergency funds to last through mid-February. The next legislative session begins the two-year budget cycle, but a final plan isn’t expected until long after the funds are exhausted.

Call For Policy Changes

As with previous responses to major storms, what happens after Matthew is destined to be far more than just providing funds to rebuild.

Throughout the storm, the similarities between Matthew and Hurricane Floyd in 1999 were apparent. Both will be remembered for the intensity of inland flooding, with some areas hit in 1999 again underwater. But in some instances, changes put in place since Floyd made significant difference in the extent of the damage.

One standout difference was the reduction in the number of hog operations that were affected by the floods, the result of both better forecasting and a state buyout program under the Clean Water Management Trust Fund. The buyout moved dozens of operations out of the 100-year floodplain.

The most noticeable difference between the two storms was technology driven.

Through the storm, emergency workers repeatedly credited the state’s Flood Inundation Mapping Program and Alert Network with saving lives by predicting in real time and with improved accuracy where and when waters would rise.

The network proved essential given how difficult it was to predict the storm’s exact path. Tracking rainfall and river and stream gauges, the new software helped the state better deploy swift water rescue teams and stockpile supplies closest to the areas hardest hit.

Improving the network and using improvements in technology for better analysis for floodplain mapping and flood prediction is one of the key recommendations being proposed by a coalition of environmental organizations as part of a new “Build Better” plan that outlines a number of steps based on experiences during Matthew, including the effectiveness of policy changes implemented after Floyd.

Grady McCallie, policy director for the North Carolina Conservation Network and one of the main authors of the recommendations, said the working document is intended to get policymakers thinking about future innovations that could reduce damage from another major storm. Utilizing improvements in floodplain mapping, such as the mapping network, is a key theme, he said.

“North Carolina has done an amazing job of investing in our data infrastructure to understand our floodplains and the danger of the water,” McCallie said. “What we haven’t done is connect that to the forward-looking decisions we make. So, when the state’s investing in infrastructure or local governments are permitting land use, those decisions ought to be informed by that information.”

Right now, McCallie said, public policy looks backward. Insurance costs and land use rules make it hard to build in places that have flooded in the past, he said. “Using those (mapping) systems, we can predict what will be flooding in the future and we’re not doing that.”

Other proposals in the Build Better plan include bolstering current programs, such as increasing buyout programs for properties in the floodplains and a substantial increase for the Clean Water Management Trust Fund to improve water and sewer infrastructure. The plan also advocates exploring major policy changes. One idea is to create a legal framework for providing coastal property owners facing an inevitable loss from erosion some form of property tax relief through coastal retreat easements, which would set parameters for the orderly removal infrastructure such as storage tanks and septic systems.

A draft of the document, which includes about 20 separate proposals, will go out to policymakers ahead of the special session, but McCallie said he doesn’t expect to see much action in the short run.

“It would be great if some of the proposals could be dealt with as part of a recovery package, but most are more likely to be dealt with over a longer term.”

Friday: Matthew’s environmental effects

Learn More

• Gov. Pat McCrory’s letter to the North Carolina congressional delegation
• The North Carolina Flood Inundation Mapping and Alert Network