Along much of the North Carolina coast, the first week of March was ushered in by intermittent rain and fog, with a stiff, offshore breeze. But on the other side of the world, in the Pacific Ocean, the trade winds were dying. When they revived, instead of blowing east to west, their usual direction, they reversed in strong bursts.

This about-face and a confluence of other meteorological events have triggered one of the strongest El Niños seasons since 1950. It is likely to peak in late fall and early winter before ending next spring. As a result, the Pacific has spawned eight hurricanes and 11 typhoons, while the Atlantic has experienced a quiet season. In fact, Currituck, Camden, Pasquotank and Perquimans counties are classified as abnormally dry by the N.C. Drought Monitor.

It’s unclear whether natural forces alone have contributed to the intensity of the 2015 El Niño. The atmosphere in the Pacific may naturally vary, or the system could be destabilized by other external forces. “There’s not a consensus on how human impacts affect an El Niño,” says Phil Klotzbach of the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University, who writes the seasonal hurricane forecasts. “That’s a huge question. We don’t fully understand the physics of what drives an El Niño.”

We do know they tend to occur every two to seven years, and last from nine to 12 months. An El Niño begins when trade winds, having weakened or reversed course, generate a Kelvin wave, a deep sloshing beneath the ocean’s surface. In the last nine months, three Kelvin waves have crossed the Pacific. Each one has lumbered eastward along the equator on a three-month journey from Indonesia to South America. It has dragged warm water with it, increasing sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific—as much as 3.6 degrees this year.

These warm waters release more heat into the atmosphere, causing the air to rise and sparking storms. Larger circulation patterns in the atmosphere alter the jet stream, calming the weather patterns in the Atlantic basin more than 5,000 miles away.

“When the air rises one place, it sinks in another,” Klotzbach says. “Rarely does the entire globe go crazy.”

In a typical Atlantic hurricane season, the 30-year average calls for 12 named storms, including six hurricanes, — two of them major—although these systems may not affect the U.S. mainland.

Historical data, though, points to a correlation between El Niño events and a lower number of Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms:

• In 1982, considered a strong El Niño year, meteorologists recorded less activity: just six tropical storms, two hurricanes and one major hurricane in the Atlantic.
• In 1997, also a strong El Niño season, there were eight tropical storms, three hurricanes and one major hurricane.
• The last El Niño, classified as moderate, occurred in 2009. There were nine tropical storms, three hurricanes and two major hurricanes.

So far, this year’s season has logged four tropical storms:

• Ana, which made landfall as a tropical storm near Myrtle Beach, S.C.;
• Bill, which came ashore in Texas, causing coastal and inland flooding;
• Claudette, which did not affected the United States and brought only showers and wind to eastern Nova Scotia and Newfoundland;
• and Erika, which dissipated before it reached Florida, where it dropped heavy rain.

As for hurricanes, strong wind shear quashed two storms before they approached the East Coast. A Category 1, Hurricane Fred died after moving through the Cape Verde Islands; and Hurricane Danny peaked at Category 3 before reaching the Leeward Islands.

“They died a glorious death in the middle of the ocean,” Klotzbach says.

This season, hurricane forecasters have estimated the chance for a hurricane to affect North Carolina at 14 percent, compared to the average probability of 28 percent. For a major hurricane, the chances drop to 3 percent, compared to the average of 8 percent.

Hurricane season officially ends Nov. 30.

However, just because chances are lower than average does not mean that a hurricane cannot strike North Carolina. State climatologist Ryan Boyles notes that 1992 was also an El Niño year, and only one hurricane hit the East Coast. That storm was Hurricane Andrew, which destroyed 63,000 homes and damaged more than 100,000 others in Miami-Dade County, Fla. At least 65 people died. At the time, Hurricane Andrew was the costliest in history, causing $2.6 billion in damage.

“Very few people make planning decisions based on seasonal forecasts,” Boyles says.

“It only takes one, and that’s what we prepare for,” says Julia Jarema, communications officer for N.C. Emergency Management.

Gabe Vecchi is the head of the Climate Variations and Predictability Group at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. He says several factors could influence an active El Niño season, and thus a calm Atlantic basin. “It’s hard to point to one thing,” he said. “There’s more than one actor involved.”

One factor is the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, the AMO for short. This circulation pattern runs in 25-to-30-year cycles, and affects sea surface temperatures and sea level pressure—and by extension, hurricane formation. From the 1960s to the first half of the 1990s, the AMO phase cooled the oceans, and there was comparatively less intense hurricane activity. Then in 1995, Boyles says, “things flipped” and we’ve had warmer ocean waters—and more hurricanes—since, although that pattern could be changing.

Scientists are still trying to understand how the AMO behaves. It appears to be linked to regional and global climate trends, according to NOAA. It is driven by swings in temperatures in the “Atlantic conveyer belt” or major ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, off the N.C. coast that move warm surface water north to higher latitudes or cold northern waters south.

The conveyor belt, though, is sensitive to salinity levels in the ocean, a NOAA study reports. Those salinity levels can vary depending on water evaporation—which increases the ocean’s saltiness—or “freshening,” which decreases it. Lower salinity equals cooler temperatures and less frequent hurricanes.

What causes the ocean to lose its salt? A melting of the ice pack, ocean circulation patterns and rain can all dilute salinity. This, what NOAA called the “Great Salinity Anomaly” occurred in the mid-1960s and lasted for roughly 25 to 30 years.

For the past 20 years until recently, the pattern seems to have reversed, and the waters near Greenland have become saltier. Salinity levels appear to be decreasing again. This contributes to a cooling of the waters in the North Atlantic and a warming in the South—a pattern that began last November.

That cooling, plus higher air pressure, stronger wind shear, volcanic ash and even dust blowing off Africa, dampens hurricane formation.

“We’re not sure the AMO is fully natural in its occurrence,” Vecchi says.

The strongest El Nino on record may be forming in the Pacific Ocean. A “Godzilla” El Nino, one forecaster called it. That, of course, set off the breathless reporting seen in this YouTube video compiled by SignsofThyComing, which we assume to be one of those END OF THE WORLD IS NEAR sort of places.

Over the last century, greenhouse gases have warmed the planet, which could affect the strength of the AMO. Deforestation and farming practices can produce more dust and pollution. “All these ingredients: how much does each one do?” Vecchi says.

An anomaly has also appeared in the Pacific Ocean that has contributed to a stormy Hawaiian summer. This is the second consecutive year that warmer waters have approached Hawaii, which usually is insulated from hurricanes by cooler waters around the island.  However, on July 12, satellite imagery showed five named tropical cyclones queued up from Mexico to Japan.

Scientists are studying an unusual formation—what Klotzbach calls a “previously unobserved” band of extremely warm water—north of the equator, stretching from western Mexico to near Hawaii.

El Niño conditions likely contributed to the band’s formation, but Vecchi says, “It’s not part of the El Niño; it’s a neighbor of El Niño. It’s not typical. This hasn’t occurred with other El Niños.”

By next March, the El Niño will likely begin to lose steam. Warmer waters, carried from the western Pacific, will spread east and toward the poles. When this happens, deeper, cooler ocean waters move closer to the surface.

However, it’s difficult to predict how the end of the El Niño will affect next summer’s Atlantic hurricane season. “There have been big advances, but there is always going to be inherent uncertainty,” Vecchi says.

Boyles, the state climatologist, says the science still needs better observation data and more powerful computers. “We still don’t understand how hurricanes develop and intensify,” he says. “We don’t know the state of the atmosphere.”

Reprinted from the Outer Banks Voice.

Although the 2015 hurricane season got off to an earlier than normal start with Tropical Storm Ana affecting North and South Carolina, forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, say overall tropical weather activity in the Atlantic will likely be below-normal.

For the hurricane season, which officially runs from June 1 – November 30, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center is predicting a 70 percent likelihood of 6 to 11 named storms, of which 3 to 6 could become hurricanes, including zero to 2 major hurricanes.

While a below-normal season is likely, there is also a 20 percent chance of a near-normal season, and a 10 percent chance of an above-normal season, the federal agency said in a news release Wednesday.

“A below-normal season doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. As we’ve seen before, below-normal seasons can still produce catastrophic impacts to communities,” said NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan, referring to the 1992 season in which only seven named storms formed, yet the first was category 5, major hurricane Andrew that devastated South Florida.

While forecasters called for a near-normal to below-normal season in 2014, Hurricane Arthur hit the Outer Banks on July 4 as a category two storm, becoming the earliest documented landfall in state history.

But the season finished with no other tropical systems hitting the United States.

“The main factor expected to suppress the hurricane season this year is El Niño, which is already affecting wind and pressure patterns, and is forecast to last through the hurricane season,” said Gerry Bell, lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

El Niño is defined by prolonged warming in the Pacific Ocean sea surface temperatures when compared with the average value. Typically, this anomaly happens at irregular intervals of two to seven years and lasts nine months to two years. Warm Pacific waters affect wind patterns around the globe. El Nino-induced winds in the western Atlantic tend shear tropical systems before than can develop into storm.

“El Niño may also intensify as the season progresses and is expected to have its greatest influence during the peak months of the season,” Bell said. “We also expect sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic to be close to normal, whereas warmer waters would have supported storm development.”

Included in the outlook is Tropical Storm Ana, but its pre-season development is not an indicator of the overall season strength.

Ana’s development was typical of pre-season named storms, which often form along frontal boundaries in association with a trough in the jet stream.

This method of formation differs from the named storms during the peak of the season, which originate mainly from low-pressure systems moving westward from Africa, and are independent of frontal boundaries and the jet stream.

With the new hurricane season comes a new prototype storm surge watch/warning graphic from NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, intended to highlight areas along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the United States that have a significant risk of life-threatening inundation by storm surge from a tropical cyclone.

The new graphic will introduce the concept of a watch or warning specific to the storm surge hazard. Storm surge is often the greatest threat to life and property from a tropical cyclone, and it can occur at different times and at different locations from a storm’s hazardous winds.

In addition, while most coastal residents can remain in their homes and be safe from a tropical cyclone’s winds, evacuations are often needed to keep people safe from storm surge.

Having separate warnings for these two hazards should provide emergency managers, the media and the general public better guidance on the hazards they face when tropical cyclones threaten.

Also new this season is a higher resolution version of NOAA’s Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting model, or HWRF, thanks to the upgrades to operational computing.

A new 40-member HWRF ensemble-based data assimilation system will also be implemented to make better use of aircraft reconnaissance-based Tail Doppler Radar data for improved intensity forecasts.

Retrospective testing of 2015 HWRF upgrades demonstrated a five percent improvement in the intensity forecasts compared to last year.

NOAA will issue an updated outlook for the Atlantic hurricane season in early August, just prior to the historical peak of the season.

Sixty years ago this week, the most powerful hurricane to strike North Carolina devastated much of our coastline. Hurricane Hazel remains one of the benchmark coastal storms against which all others in the state are measured. This is the last of three stories that relive Hazel with people who lived through it and examine the lessons it taught us. This article was first published in the autumn issue of Coastwatch magazine, a publication of North Carolina Sea Grant.

Steve Pfaff, warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service, says speed was the key to Hurricane Hazel’s sustained violence. The faster the storm moves over land, the less its wind can be disrupted, he says. Photo: Pam Smith

Most North Carolinians who lived through Hurricane Hazel — the only recorded Category 4 hurricane to make landfall in North Carolina — vividly recall the destructive force of the 1954 event as a major benchmark in their lives.

“People who were just four or five years old when Hazel struck seem to remember every detail of that awful day in their lives. Hazel was that terrible. She made a profound impact on their lives,” says Steve Pfaff, warning coordination meteorologist with theNational Weather Service in Wilmington.

Sixty years later, the National Weather Service still considers Hazel a meteorological anomaly — a destructive force that defied conventional wisdom and science. Born in the tropics, the storm struck the Carolina coast at 10 a.m. on Oct. 15, 1954. The storm reached the Canadian border at 10 p.m. and finally dissipated in the Arctic on Oct. 18.

Hazel defied expectations by holding her fury together long after initial landfall. National Weather Service experts say speed was the key to her sustained violence. Racing as fast as 50 miles an hour, she outran the normal weakening process. The faster the storm moves over land, the less its winds can be disrupted, Pfaff explains.

He points out that forecasting weather, communicating in formation to the public, emergency management and building codes for coastal areas all have changed exponentially in the past 60 years. These modifications were designed to save lives and property.

Back in 1954, volunteer observers such as the late Jessie S. Taylor of Southport, received, recorded and conveyed daily weather data from the U.S. Weather Bureau to the public. On Oct. 14, 1954, the then-75-year-old Taylor noticed Hazel’s unorthodox turn and hoisted storm flags to the top of the lighted waterfront signal tower to warn ships and local residents of the impending danger.

In those post-World War II years, the science and technology used in forecasting was rudimentary compared to what is available today. Reconnaissance aviation was just beginning to blossom, radar was in its infancy and communication was sparse.

“Today, forecasting tools are precise and immediate. And, we have multiple means of communicating reliable and useful information. The Weather Service partners with media professionals and emergency managers to help raise the public’s situational awareness — and save lives,” Pfaff says.

Twenty years ago when Pfaff began his National Weather Service career, it took five to seven minutes to gather information, type out the data and send reports to media outlets. Now, it takes a matter of seconds, he points out.

Much has changed since Hurricane Hazel, including state building codes for coastal construction, adds Spencer Rogers, North Carolina Sea Grant coastal construction and erosion specialist.

The widespread destruction of grade-level structures close to the ground was a wake-up call for North Carolina, Rogers explains. In the mid-1960s, following the lead of Florida’s Miami and Dade County, North Carolina adopted coastal building codes requiring elevated structures on open pilings to accommodate storm surge.

The code was updated again in 1986, with input from Rogers and Sea Grant researchers. The change required pilings to be buried 8 feet into the ground and rise 8 feet above ground to address erosion that could undermine pilings.

“If a storm like Hazel hit the coast today, there would be significantly less damage to buildings because of revised building codes,” Rogers points out.

“But, even the most sturdy and code-compliant building does not make it 100 percent hurricane proof. Coastal residents should heed messages from the weather service and local emergency managers,” he advises.

Have a Plan

Having a family evacuation plan in advance is essential, continues Jessica Whitehead, Sea Grant coastal community hazards adaptation specialist. She is working with stakeholders in Hyde County to identify and address coastal hazards threatening their community.

“Awareness is the best defense. Have a plan. Then get out of harm’s way. There is no such thing as ‘just’ where hurricanes are concerned. Even ‘just’ a Category 1 carries the threat of wind, surge and possible flooding,” Whitehead points out.

Burrell Montz, chair of the East Carolina University Department of Geology, agrees. “I would like to see the word ‘just’ erased from the public’s perception of weather-related hazards. Often people don’t take into account how large an area a storm may cover, or that a lingering system may cause widespread and dangerous flooding.”

Hurricanes also pose threats to people living along the sounds, as well as oceanfront residents.

Hurricane Hazel’s surge floods Morehead City. Sixty years later, the National Weather Service still considers Hazel a meteorological anomaly — a destructive force that defied conventional wisdom and science. Photo courtesy: Associated Press, East Carolina RENCI

Currently, Montz is conducting research that is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service and New York and New Jersey Sea Grant programs. She is working with National Weather Service and emergency management professionals to review and adapt forecasting products and messages that help people understand the information and make life-saving decisions.

She worries that new residents to coastal counties from areas that are not prone to tropical storms or nor’easters may be less likely to understand the seriousness of severe weather watches and warnings.

Montz has good advice to people in vulnerable areas that reiterates North Carolina Sea Grant research results: Know how to get reliable information and trust emergency managers’ expertise.

For example, emergency managers know that bridges, which are the main evacuation route for many coastal areas, are not safe at certain wind velocities. Managers need to get people out sooner rather than later — and preferably during daylight hours.

“If emergency managers say ‘go,’ do it,” Montz says.

Sea Grant is one of several organizations that is partnering with National Weather Service to recall the impact and legacy of Hurricane Hazel. Throughout hurricane season in 2014 — June 1 to Nov. 1 — workshops, conferences and town hall meetings are raising public awareness and prompting communities to be prepared long before a named storm is barreling toward the coast.

Like the names they are given, each hurricane is different, but preparations should be standard. It’s important for people to know how to take care of themselves should emergency responders or disaster-relief teams be delayed.

“We have not dealt with a storm like Hazel for six decades, but we can’t be lulled into complacency,” notes Pfaff. “It’s all about spreading the word, educating the public about the vulnerability of coastal communities.”

Sixty years ago this week, the most powerful hurricane to strike North Carolina devastated much of our coastline. Hurricane Hazel remains one of the benchmark coastal storms against which all others in the state are measured. This is the second of three stories that relive Hazel with people who lived through it and examine the lessons it taught us. This article was first published in the autumn issue of Coastwatch magazine, a publication of North Carolina Sea Grant.

Charles “Skeeter” Trott stands in front of the Southport home that sheltered his family during Hurricane Hazel. Photo: Pam Smith

It was Oct. 15, 1954, the day Hurricane Hazel devastated Long Beach in Brunswick County.

“It was the day before my 13th birthday. Not many of the families we knew were lucky enough to live year-round on Long Beach,” says Charles “Skeeter” Trott, whose late father, Charles Moore Trott, was a Long Beach real estate developer.

With news of the coming storm, the elder Trott sent his wife, Vida Hood Trott, and son to Southport with neighbors Charlotte and Robert Jones, and their young son, Butch. They were to stay with the Arrington family in what today is the Brunswick Inn, a bed and breakfast facing Water Street.

“My dad stayed behind, saying he needed to keep things safe on the island. He woke up before daylight on Friday with the house shaking,” Trott says.

The rising ocean washed away the family car and he was stranded.

Soon the Trotts’ home succumbed to forceful winds, and the two-story house next door blew — or floated — across the road. His dad found refuge in a house the wind had wedged into the woods across the island. There, he waited out the storm clinging to a mattress atop a refrigerator.

“After the storm passed and the tide ebbed, Dad began the 4-mile walk to the swing bridge that would take him to the mainland,” Trott adds.

Meanwhile in Southport, the storm raged. It was too dark to see anything. “When the eye passed over, Butch and I sneaked out to have a look,” he remembers.

The boys were stunned to see what the first wall of Hazel had done to Southport’s waterfront — fish houses, Harrelson’s grocery store and most waterside structures were gone. Boats were pushed up into yards and houses.

A view of Southport’s waterfront along Bay Street after Hurricane Hazel hit on Oct. 15, 1954. Photo: Star Newsarchives

“The second eye wall bashed what was left standing and water pushed up into Bay Street and along the boat basin,” he says. “The storm was scary, but not knowing what happened to my dad was terrifying.

Was he dead or alive? Southport was ravaged. What must have happened on the island? We feared the worst,” Trott recalls.

As soon as they were allowed, they headed to Long Beach. As they got to the bridge they saw a figure walking toward them. It was his father. Tears of relief flowed freely.

Like most residents on Long Beach, the Trott family lost most of their possessions. Remarkably, they discovered a corner china cabinet lying on its side at the tree line. Looters had taken the family silver, but the china was intact.

“Long Beach looked like a desert. The dunes were leveled and Hazel’s surge cut a temporary inlet through the island. Only five houses remained. We felt lucky, even though we lost so much. We came out of it alive,” he says.

Trott graduated from Southport High School in 1960 and soon began a 36-year career as an ammunition inspector at Sunny Point Military Depot. He married in 1962. “And, by the way,” Trott adds, “my wife’s name is Hazel.”

New Hanover Beaches Hit

More developed than Brunswick County beaches at the time, New Hanover County’s Wrightsville Beach and Carolina Beach homes and businesses were ripe for the taking by Hazel’s wind, surge and waves.

On Wrightsville Beach, Hazel wiped out oceanfront cottages, promoting second-row cottages to front-row properties. The iconic Ocean Terrace and Seashore hotels were destroyed and popular fishing piers washed away.

The causeway was littered with fishing boats that broke loose from their moorings and were driven inland by the relentless wind and waves.

Newspapers reported that 14 blocks of Carolina Beach were flooded during the storm, with 362 buildings destroyed and another 288 severely damaged.

Kure Beach Bashed

Jean and Andrew “Punkie” Kure, now 85 and 87 years old respectively, say the ferocity of Hurricane Hazel took many Kure Beach residents off guard.

“It had been wonderful summer and fall seasons. Up to the day before the storm, fish were biting two at a time at the pier,” Jean Kure recalls.

They found themselves in the thick of evacuation plans by mid-afternoon on Thursday. Andrew Kure, volunteer fire chief and emergency manager, received word that the storm was fast-moving, hard- hitting and aiming at the Carolina coast.

He hustled his wife and six-year-old daughter, Linda, across the swing bridge to stay with relatives on the mainland.

The year-round population of Kure Beach at the time was about 100. But there were more than double that number of cottages and apartments in the burgeoning seaside community.

A powerful wave surge hits the Kure Beach Pier House during Hurricane Hazel. Photo courtesy: Andrew Kure

What is left standing of the Kure Beach Pier after Hurricane Hazel. Photo:Island Gazette archives

“I called the troops together — six volunteer firemen and one police officer — to begin knocking on doors to get people off the island. The wind was howling long before Hazel made landfall,” he explains.

“We continued to knock on doors until we were satisfied that everyone had left or was in the process of leaving. We received little resistance, except for one group of visiting fishermen who were intent on riding out the storm. We warned them that they were in peril, that neither they nor the cottage were likely to survive the storm. They sobered up quickly, packed up and left,” he says.

With warnings complete, Kure fought his way against the wind to retrieve his cat, Tom. They hunkered down with the rest of the crew in the church shelter to wait out the storm, listening to the sound of buildings being ripped apart.

There were some close calls, Kure points out. The bridge tender at the bridge over Snow’s Cut — a manmade canal that connects the Cape Fear River to Myrtle Grove Sound — reported seeing a house break loose and wash through the canal. When the eye passed and winds shifted to the opposite direction, the same house rode the rushing water back through. Somehow, the bridge was unscathed.

Andrew and Jean Kure have not seen a storm like Hazel before or sine that event. Photo: Pam Smith

Hazel downed most oceanfront structures. The Kure Pier was destroyed and the pier house left on toothpick-like stilts. Five feet of sand covered U.S. 421 in most places.

The fishermen’s rental cottage? As Kure predicted, it did not survive Hazel’s fury — nor did the Kures’ own oceanfront rental properties.

“I had never seen anything like it before — or since,” Jean Kure says.

Her father, a lineman with the power company, worked day and night for weeks to reset power poles and lines downed by the storm.

“Everyone pulled together. The Red Cross and Salvation Army stayed for a long time with shelter, food and water. And the Health Department came to all affected communities to administer typhoid shots to prevent waterborne diseases,” she points out.

The day after Hazel, Andrew Kure, who had retired from the Marine Corps as a pilot not long before the storm hit, was asked to fly a plane for Jim Jeffries, a photographer with The Greensboro News and Record. They followed Hazel’s course along the southeast coast for an aerial survey of her destruction.

Sixty years later, Kure is still at a loss for words to describe what he saw. “It was hard to take in all that devastation,” he says shaking his head. “It was shocking.”

Carteret County on the Edge

Carteret County, some 120 miles north of Hazel’s landfall, was not spared the storm’s wrath. Surging waters flooded waterfront homes and businesses, including the landmark Sanitary Seafood Market and Restaurant, where John Tunnell, now 83, worked.

He remembers the early warning “of a big one coming our way,” heard through radio messages from ships at sea. Tunnell helped restaurant owner Tony Seamon Jr. prepare for the worst. “We lashed the building to pilings and cut holes in the floor to equalize pressure if the water came in. It came in all right,” he says.

After the storm, he helped the owners clean up. “We set up the Sanitary as a round-the-clock feeding center for work crews from as far away as Tennessee and Alabama doing cleanup in the area,” says Tunnell, who still reports for work at Sanitary.

Margaret Daniels of Williston, who lived with her family on Cedar Island in 1954, remembers Hazel very well.

“The wind was howling while we were eating breakfast. The house was shaking and the walls were swaying. Suddenly the chimney fell through the roof — right into my plate,” she says.

John Tunnell cut sections in the floor of the Sanitary Fish Market and Restaurant in Morehead City to equalize the water pressure of Hazel’s surge. Photo: Pam Smith

“In the middle of all this, a neighbor came by to ask if she could pick up the pears that blew off the tree in the high winds. Can you imagine that?” Daniels asks.Natalie Willett Johnson, of Harkers Island, will never forget her wedding day to her late husband, Reis.

They were supposed to be married on Oct. 15 at the home of the groom’s aunt. It had been a whirlwind romance. He was 25. She was 18, spending the summer on Harkers Island before she was to begin her freshman year at what was then East Carolina College.

“We fell madly in love and decided to marry before he entered the Coast Guard that fall,” Johnson relates. It would be a double wedding with Reis’ cousin Coreen and her fiancé Ronnie Chadwick.

On the day of the storm, the wedding party braved the treacherous wind to drive across the bridge to the aunt’s mainland brick home.

Of course, the preacher couldn’t make it. So, the couples married the next day. But when the storm washed out the North River Bridge, plans for a honeymoon in Beaufort or New Bern were dashed. Instead, the newlyweds — both the Johnsons and the Chadwicks — honeymooned at the Sea Level Inn.

After her husband’s Coast Guard career, the Johnsons returned to Harkers Island in 1969, where they resumed life as a commercial fishing family.

Down East fishing communities, including Sea Level and Atlantic, also suffered losses and close calls.

Mildred Willis Gilgo of Atlantic, who was eight years old at the time, recalls what happened to her father, Julian Willis. “My dad left the fishing grounds to get ahead of the storm. The current was cut off on shore early to prevent electrocution, and that meant there would be no lights on shore to guide him as he crossed the shoal. He would be in serious trouble,” she says.

The alert went out through the fishing community, and dozens of people lined up their vehicles along the shore, lights on, to guide him in safely.

“It’s the way we ‘neighbor up’ in a close community,” Gilgo observes. “If you choose a life on the water, you learn to be resilient.”

Sixty years ago this week, the most powerful hurricane to strike North Carolina devastated much of our coastline. Hurricane Hazel remains one of the benchmark coastal storms against which all others in the state are measured. We’ll take the next three days reliving Hazel with people who lived through it and examining the lessons it taught us. This article was first published in the autumn issue of Coastwatch magazine, a publication of North Carolina Sea Grant.

FRIDAY, OCT. 15, 1954. The date is seared into the psyche of those who lived through what many describe as the most destructive hurricane in N.C. history.

Hurricane Hazel made landfall on that fateful morning at the peak of the highest lunar tide as a Category 4 hurricane near Calabash, at the South Carolina line. With winds as high as 140 miles an hour and a storm surge of up to 18 feet, Hazel changed the face of the coast — leveling dune fields and cutting inlets on barrier islands — as well as perceptions about hurricanes being purely coastal events.

Hazel’s rampage lasted another three days, roaring as far inland as Raleigh and Chapel Hill, and as far north as Lake Ontario on the Canadian border, still packing speeds of 100 mph in some places. Torrential rains flooded streams and rivers, adding misery and loss to Hazel’s destructive path. The storm finally weakened as it arced across Canada, raining itself out in the Maritime Provinces.

Though a teen at the time, Southport’s Jim Harper says, “I recall the sound of the wind and broken glass until this day.”

Harper, former editor and publisher of The State Port Pilot, would remember Hazel in his paper’s 50-year retrospective as “the most transforming event of the 20th century for this community.”

Days before coming ashore in North Carolina, Hazel swept over Haiti, where heavy rains caused massive landslides — taking lives, homes, businesses and valuable sugarcane crops.

While the mountainous island tamped down Hazel’s fury temporarily, warm surrounding waters intensified the storm. Early forecasts had predicted that Hazel would track offshore along the U.S. East Coast. But, by Oct. 14, she shifted course and headed for the Carolinas.

The white line shows Hurricane Hazel’s path. On Oct. 15, 1954, Hazel made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane near Calabash. With winds as high as 140 miles an hour and a storm surge of up to 18 feet, Hazel changed the face of the coast — leveling dune fields and cutting inlets on barrier islands — as well as perceptions about hurricanes being purely coastal events. Map: NOAA Coastal Services Center

All told, Hazel claimed between 400 and 1,000 lives in Haiti; six in the Bahamas; 95 in the U.S., including 19 in North Carolina; and 81 in Canada. Its trail of destruction caused an estimated $350 million in property damage from the Caribbean to Canada. Those 1954 dollars translate to roughly $2.8 billion today.

Stories of death, destruction and survival emerged from a storm that took many in Hazel’s path off guard.

Calabash Resilience

Calabash, the small fishing village best known today for its distinctive seafood cuisine, first felt the effects of Hazel’s landfall. Residents there recall their losses, but also manage to count their blessings.

For William Dixon, 15 years old at the time, the day began with bad news.

“I had planned to go hunting that morning, but Mom came in to say there would be no hunting. A bad storm was coming. Fishermen already were bringing their boats up into the canal in advance of the storm, so I stayed put. By 9 o’clock, the winds were howling and we sat out the storm in our house in the Hickman’s Crossing area,” Dixon remembers.

“When it was over, the shrimp house was gone, a three-mast schooner was sitting in our front yard, and we began to hear horror stories of people who died out on Ocean Isle,” he says.

Hazel took lives, property and livelihoods. “After the storm, people grabbed a hammer and nails and did what they could to make a living. Dad helped tear down what was left of the motel in North Myrtle Beach. In return, the owner let him take pine paneling and hardwood flooring. We managed to pull a house out of a pile of rubble,” continues Dixon, who later owned and operated a restaurant in Calabash. He now is a member of the town commission.

Now-retired Calabash commercial fisherman Samuel “Shorty” Thomas worked on his father’s 40-foot boat, Louise B, at the time. “The tide was so high, the boat sank at the dock,” Thomas says. “After the storm, we hauled her out of the water, repaired her and went back to fishing. Oddly enough, shrimping was better than ever after the storm.”

Salt water runs in his veins, says Thomas, who operated tugboats for dredges up and down the Southeast coast before returning to Calabash to resume shrimping for 10 years. Now retired, he opts for a rod and reel, and meets old friends every morning at Capt. Nance’s Restaurant “to see who can tell the biggest lies.”

Count on Anthony Clemmons to be at the table.

“Most in Calabash had never experienced a hurricane. We just didn’t know what to expect,” says Clemmons, who was about 14 at the time Hazel hit.

“My family went inland, where houses may have been sturdier than the rickety houses in Calabash, mostly built in the 1920s and 1930s and of uncertain storm worthiness. Surprisingly, our house and some of the old shack houses withstood the wind force and tide,” he says.

Clemmons recalls one Calabash shrimper, Capt. “Kinky” Coleman, who rode out the storm on his boat. Coleman told Clemmons that the Shallotte River looked like the ocean.

“As the eye passed and all got calm and quiet, he thought the worst was over. He looked behind him, and here came a big wave — Hazel’s other side. Somehow, Kinky made it through safely,” Clemmons adds. “Fortunately, no lives were lost in Calabash.”

It took Calabash more than a year to get back to normal — a new shrimp house, a new restaurant and one surviving oak tree left standing testified to the resilience of nature and people, Clemmons says.

Clemmons and his wife, Frances, returned to Calabash after he retired from a career in the Navy. A former town mayor, he is writing a book on Calabash history.

A man reorients himself in Ocean Isle after Hurricane Hazel hit. The storm moved boats onto the streets and left only the bare bones of storefronts. Photo courtesy: the Family Collection of Bryant Spencer

Ocean Isle Tragedy

Brunswick County’s south-facing barrier islands, including Sunset Beach, Ocean Isle, Holden Beach, Long Beach and Caswell Beach, took the full brunt of Hazel’s winds, 18-foot storm surge and treacherous waves.

For Ocean Isle, the loss was staggering. In just one incident, eight of the state’s 19 victims perished on the small barrier island across the Intracoastal Waterway, or ICW, from Shallotte.

Southport’s The State Port Pilot reported the tragic story of Sherman and Madeline Register, their 10-year-old son, Buddy, and their daughter and son-in-law, Sonja and Bunky Bellamy. The family had gathered for Thursday evening dinner at the Registers’ Ocean Isle cottage.

By 6 a.m. Friday, Oct. 15, with Hazel’s winds pushing onshore, it was too late to return to the mainland. The two-car ferry had stopped operating once its pulley cables went under rising waters.

Within two hours, winds exceeded 100 mph and angry ocean waters were advancing across the low-lying beach. Three couples from High Point, also stranded on the island, made it to the Registers’ cottage seeking help. In a last-ditch effort, all 11 of them piled into Sherman Register’s work truck to attempt the drive to the highest point on the island.

With winds reaching peak force by 10 a.m., their efforts were no match for the deadly storm surge that washed over the truck, dumping all 11 into the roiling waters. Seven were lost. Somehow, Bunky Bellamy, barely conscious, landed on a road west of the ICW; an unconscious Sonja Bellamy floated ashore elsewhere; and one of the three High Point couples survived.

The Oct. 20 edition of The State Port Pilot editorialized that “by some miracle death was cheated” with their survival.

However, along with Sherman, Madeline and Buddy Register and the two High Point couples, death claimed one more life: Southport’s Joe Dock drowned during his heroic, but unsuccessful, attempt to rescue the stranded Ocean Isle people by rowboat, the paper reported.

Long Beach Succumbs

In the early 1950s, Long Beach was just becoming a destination for people who loved the beach, and good surf and pier fishing. With only a handful of pay phones on the island, it was a good place to “get away from it all.”

By October 1954, there were 357 houses on the beach. One of them was the newly completed “dream home” of now-deceased Sam and Mattie Carr and their 14-year-old son, Sam “Butch” Carr.

Butch Carr recalls, “We moved in just days before Hurricane Hazel struck.”

Long Beach, now part of Oak Island, was beach sand, dirt roads and lots of maritime woods.”

Sam ‘Butch’ Carr recalls how Hazel affected Long Beach. Photo: Pam Smith

Carr and his friend, Charles “Skeeter” Trott, learned of an approaching storm — and possible evacuation — after school on Thursday.

“Dad and my grandfather turned on the shortwave [radio] for a weather update. They were predicting that the storm would be 75 miles off shore. So, no one seemed fazed,” Carr remembers.

That is, until dawn on Friday when the family’s parakeet escaped its cage and woke Carr’s sleeping parents. By then, Hazel’s wind, waves and rain were pounding the shore.

“Our 1953 Buick wouldn’t start, so we drove our 1949 station wagon to my grandparents’ house. I kept watching the ocean rolling and churning toward the house. We heard the screen porch creak and begin to separate from the house.

We knew it was time to go,” Carr recalls. His grandparents, the late C.C. and Sadie Carr, built the first permanent residence on the island, part personal home and part boarding house.

“It was about 7 a.m. There were about four or five cars in our group — my grandparents, aunts, Ellen Gilmore (postmistress). The water was rising fast on the full-moon tide. We encountered standing water, but managed to get across the old swing bridge to the mainland,” Carr says. “We may have been the last people off the island before Hazel made landfall.”

They waited out the storm at Southport’s First Baptist Church, which had been turned into an American Red Cross shelter.

When Hazel passed, the family returned to Long Beach to search for remnants of their lives. “After the storm, everything was gone. We followed the debris field from where our house had been to the edge of the woods,” Carr says.

Looters had emptied one chest of drawers, but hadn’t discovered his mother’s cedar chest under a heap of rubble. Mattie Carr’s fur stole was inside — a bit damp, but not damaged. She hung it on a tree branch to air while the family continued searching for other possessions. When they returned, looters had stripped the fur stole from the tree.

The only clothes any of them had were on their backs, Carr says. “I wore the same clothes and my galoshes for a week until my cousins came from Goldsboro with clothes for us. My grandparents’ friend offered us an apartment.”

Carr’s parents, grandparents and aunts, now deceased, rebuilt their homes on Long Beach and moved back in 1955 — safely on the second row.

Carr graduated from Southport High School in 1959 and joined the Air Force. He and his wife, Susan, returned to the area in 1995 and reside in Boiling Springs.

Last of two parts

Hogs find refuge on a roof after Hurricane Floyd. Photo: AP

One of the more striking horrors of Hurricane Floyd’s insidious floodwaters was illustrated in graphic photographs of dead animals. Millions and millions of drowned turkeys, chickens and pigs littered the landscape of coastal North Carolina.

Bloated corpses lined riverbanks and floated on top of putrid stews of diluted pollutants that lingered for weeks after the storm.  One photograph reportedly showed a shark munching on a pig carcass, and there were unconfirmed reports of pig bodies bobbing in the ocean.

But it was the description of the overflowing hog lagoons – large open pits brimming with a thick slurry of pig manure – that many viewed as an especially offensive environmental disaster. National news reports detailed the dire consequences of tons of fecal matter flowing into waterways, seeping into surface and groundwater and polluting drinking water.

Responding to widespread public disgust, state officials promised to shut down the lagoons. Lawsuits were filed. An enormous scientific study was done on alternative ways to dispose of hog waste. A report filled with detailed recommendations and cost estimates was issued.

Fifteen years after dozens of hog lagoons spilled their noxious contents over thousands of acres of private and public lands and into the watersheds of four rivers that feed the second-largest estuary system in the nation, open lagoons filled with pig waste still sit exposed on acre after acre of flat lands in coastal North Carolina.

“You would think as a result of Floyd that major changes would have been made,” said Rick Dove, the retired Neuse Riverkeeper who is now an associate with the Waterkeeper Alliance and has remained a relentless watchdog of the swine industry for the last 20 years. “I regret to inform you, they have not.”

Dove has taken thousands of aerial photographs and videos over the years to document the practices and violations in the production farms.

Not only have few improvements been made, he said, there are now huge turkey and chicken operations built next to some of the hog farms. With about 2,300 industrial hog operations, North Carolina is one of the top producers of pigs in the world.

In the arcane but precise language of permits these places are known as “CAFOs” for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. A few were shut down after Floyd, Dove said. And new or expanded facilities are not permitted by law. But the technology used to dispose of the waste from the estimated 8 million hogs at N.C. facilities, he said, remains essentially what it was when Floyd flooded the lagoons.

Rick Dove

“It’s really this open cesspool,” he said. “Basically, it’s outhouse technology. That’s really the problem.”

The hog feces and urine drop through slats in the floor, where it is eventually flushed into open pits, euphemistically called lagoons. The untreated waste slurry is periodically pumped out and sprayed on fields.

Consumer and environmental groups contend that the practice pollutes the air and land to the point where nearby residents suffer health problems. Residue from the spray has coated grasses and trees in yards and permeates homes.

In an online video recorded in 2013, members of the Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help, or REACH, in Duplin County, the home of the largest number of hog operations in the state, described how people in the community have suffered burning eyes and respiratory sickness, and complain that they can’t go outside for cookouts or even hang their laundry because the odor and residue is so wretched.

Manure pits have been known to emit hydrogen sulfide, a gas that can lead to flu-like symptoms and even brain damage, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The pig waste also contains myriad toxins, viruses and bacteria.

According to information provided in an e-mail by N.C. Pork Council CEO Deborah Johnson, the industry produced $2.55 billion in farm income in 2012 – about 22 percent of all farm income in the state. The total economic impact of the pork industry in the state is estimated at $9 billion.

There are about 2,100 permitted farms in the state with more than 250 head of swine, the statement said. About 50 permitted hog farms in eastern North Carolina were flooded in Floyd, but about 98 percent of the others in operation did not flood.

The satellite photo shows the plumes of sediment flowing into Pamlico Sound after Hurricane Floyd, raising fears about what would happen to water quality and fisheries in the sound. Photo: NASA

“Of those impacted,” Johnson said, “the majority were cases in which the waters of the state inundated the lagoons on the farms.”

A Nov. 1999 conservation easement program to acquire swine operations in the flood plain resulted in the closure of 103 animal waste lagoons, the statement said.

Floyd killed 52 people in the state, most of them from drowning. It also caused $6 billion in property damage and about $1 billion in agricultural losses.

In a Jan. 2006 settlement between the Waterkeeper Alliance and Smithfield Foods – now owned by a Chinese corporation – the pork producer agreed to improve its waste-management systems at about 275 of its farms in North Carolina.

And six years before, then-North Carolina Attorney General Mike Easley reached an agreement with Smithfield Foods to eliminate open-air lagoons and spray field systems on about 170 company-owned farms within five years.

Under the agreement, Smithfield, then the largest hog producer in the world, was to provide $15 million to N.C. State University to fund a study of alternative waste treatments for commercial hog operations. After a suitable alternative that met environmental and economic standards was determined, the company would convert to the improved technology within three years.

Implementation and enforcement of the agreement, however, depended on follow-through by Easley’s successors.

“Things have not changed at all,” said Larry Baldwin, the Waterkeeper Alliance’s CAFO coordinator.

Joe Ramus

But Michael Williams, professor of poultry science at N.C. State, said that there have been improvements, most notably in management of the liquid levels in the lagoons.

Despite the perception that the waste lagoons are filled with raw fecal matter, he said that they are designed as biological systems that break down the waste. Even so, he said, they still hold exposed waste and are vulnerable to floods.

Williams was a lead scientist involved in the comprehensive 3- to 5-year study, which resulted in a several thousand-page report and about 100 different proposed alternatives. Eventually, the alternatives were narrowed down to about 15 that were tested on the ground and had acceptable environmental performance standards.

But the industry found the improvements too expensive to be feasible, he said.

Williams said that he is optimistic that some of the measures will be able to be incorporated in the near future, especially if the state’s renewable energy credits make it worthwhile for the industry to reuse the waste in environmentally sound ways.

“My hope is, in the future, an alternative can be developed where it makes good business sense,” Williams said. “This is a very complex issue, scientifically, politically and socially.”

Meanwhile, it is a mystery exactly what the impacts of Floyd were to the environment, especially the Pamlico Sound.

Another compelling aerial image of post-Floyd impacts was an enormous dark-colored plume of water that moved from the inland floods into the Pamlico Sound.

Many biologists and environmental scientists were worried that the massive volume of polluted freshwater would cause vast fish kills and ruin the commercial fishing industry.

But to the surprise of many, not only were there no fish kills, some fishing was the best in years, apparently because the fish fled ahead of the freshwater deluge.

Although the ominous plume was the right unhealthy color, it carried a lot more than hog manure, said Joseph S. Ramus, professor emeritus at Duke Marine Lab.

“It was coming out of the watersheds,” he said. “There was a lot of organic matter – the material that was deposited in the margins of the water systems.”

Ramus was one of the scientists who had been studying the Pamlico before the storm. He said that the chemical and phytoplankton environment in the sound recovered in about four months after the storm. The fisheries – which were studied by another scientist – took much longer.

“The system is quite resilient,” he said.

But no measurements were taken before or after the storm, Ramus said, so it’s impossible to really understand the environmental impact of Floyd. Simply put, he said, no one wants to provide funding for long-term environmental studies.

“There’s no data,” he said. “There’s a temporal mismatch between science funding and things that go on in natural systems.”

Hurricane Floyd remains the costliest storm in state history and North Carolina’s worst natural disaster. Flooding from the storm drove thousands from their home. Photo: LEARN NC, by Dave Gatley/FEMA News Photo

First of two parts

For nine days in the late summer of 1999, Tropical Storm Dennis tortured the N.C. coast. It sat offshore pounding the beaches, striking once and turning around to strike again, and soaking a wide swath of the coastal plain.

Exhausted and distracted, residents in the coastal counties were ill prepared for the abject devastation Hurricane Floyd would leave in its wake 11 days later on Sept. 16. Coming on the tailwind of Dennis, the storm was said to have flooded the already drenched inland counties with an amount of water that equaled 95 percent of the volume of Pamlico Sound. In some locations, it reportedly rained 60 hours straight.

To this day, 15 years later, Floyd, with $6 billion in damages, stands as the costliest storm in state history and North Carolina’s worst natural disaster.

“It produced the most significant flood events eastern North Carolina has ever seen,” Jim Merrell, a 31-year veteran forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Newport, said in a recent interview.

Rainfall records were shattered, riverbanks rose with terrifying speed and residents in some communities were forced onto their rooftops to escape the floods. Floodwaters crested as high as 24 feet above flood stage along the Tar River. The Neuse, Roanoke, Waccamaw and New rivers exceeded 500-year flood levels, although damage was lower in these areas than along the Tar because of lower population densities. Of the 52 fatalities in North Carolina, 36 were from drowning.

“It was something I thought I would never see,” Merrell said. “They had never seen water come up that high.”

Even Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which caused dramatic flooding along the coast, did not come close to the Floyd’s astounding destruction in North Carolina. And Floyd taught the state many lessons.

A massive, fast-moving storm that was about double the size of most Atlantic hurricanes, Floyd made landfall near Cape Fear as a strong Category 2 storm. It churned inland, dumping up to 20 inches of rain in 12 hours. For two weeks, rivers continued to rise. Contents of homes, businesses, fuel tanks, sewage treatment plants, storage sheds, barns, septic tanks and hog lagoons spilled into the floodwaters, transforming communities and their waterways into toxic, stinking cesspools. Livestock and pets drowned or were abandoned by the hundreds of thousands. Waterlogged soil could no longer hold up trees, which toppled in alarming numbers.

This graphic shows the total rainfall in inches from Hurricane Floyd. The areas near the Cape Fear and Tar rivers, colored in purple and pink, received the most. Graphic: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Jay Barnes, a hurricane historian and the co- author of Faces from the Flood: Hurricane Floyd Remembered, said that Floyd was initially a scary monster aiming for Florida – it was the first storm to close down Disney World. But then it weakened and set its sights on North Carolina.

Its remaining might struck in the middle of the night. One person he interviewed, Barnes said, told him that he wasn’t worried about the storm until he woke up in his bed and noticed that his back was wet.

“That gives you an idea of the shock,” Barnes said. “It was different than a lot of our hurricanes.”

Tarboro, Rocky Mount, Windsor and Wilson suffered more than most, with downtowns inundated. Historic Princeville, one of the oldest black communities in the state, was left completely under water. With remarkable determination, the townspeople have since rebuilt the entire town.

But despite Floyd’s biblical flooding, the state today is tougher and wiser, with better flood insurance coverage, less flood-vulnerable properties, updated flood and storm surge maps and improved emergency communication.

“North Carolina has a history of being very forward-thinking in the way it handles hurricanes,” said Jamie Kruse, director of the Center for Natural Hazards Research at East Carolina University. “I think Floyd gave everyone an appreciation that things can be done better.”
The center held a symposium on Floyd to mark the 10th anniversary of the storm, with numerous scientists giving presentations about issues. After that gathering, Kruse said, East Carolina University established a collaborative relationship with N.C. Emergency Management. The partners conduct a workshop together every May before the start of hurricane season.

“This workshop represents a really good intersection between the academics who study this stuff,” she said, “and the emergency managers who can utilize these findings to do a better job.”

Buster Leverette (left) organized volunteers to rescue hundreds of stranded animals in southeastern North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd. Photo courtesy of Jay Barnes

In recent years, social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, have become important tools in communicating with the public about storms, Kruse said. It can be a useful way for the public to tell emergency management what is going on, although the information still has to be verified. In the reverse, social media can provide real time updates for the connected public.

Kruse said public agencies recognize that even with the most modern communication tools, information about complex science that would help the public has to be understandable. When it comes down to it, what good will be new storm surge maps to property owners if no one can figure out what they mean?

The Weather Service, for instance, is working with meteorologists to help them improve as communicators, she said.

Other changes that were a direct outcome of Floyd stemmed from the realization that animals are also victims in storms. Many pet owners during Floyd refused or were reluctant to leave their beloved animals behind, creating unanticipated challenges for emergency personnel. There were also countless animals that needed care and homes after the storm. And one of the more horrifying images of Floyd were the bodies of animals that littered the landscape and waterways across the region.

Numerous vulnerable people – frail, ill or disabled – were also forgotten or endangered during Floyd’s chaos.

Now, emergency management agencies gather information before a storm of people who will need assistance, and storm shelters have been set up to make accommodations for pets.

According to a March 1, 2000 article in NASA Earth Observatory, more than 7,000 homes were destroyed by Floyd and 56,000 were damaged; more than 1,500 people had to be rescued and 10,000 were sheltered in emergency housing.

Many property owners had no flood insurance because they inaccurately believed that their homeowners insurance would cover floods.
Since Floyd, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, began buying up the most vulnerable flood-prone properties and established a program to raise other properties on pilings above flood level. With the massive flood damage from Floyd followed six years later by even worse flood damage in Hurricane Katrina, the entire federal flood program is currently being reevaluated and reformed.

The updated flood and surge maps that were spurred by Floyd provide other layers of proactive flood protection. Post-storm analysis by FEMA found that the majority of homes that were lost or suffered damages in Floyd were not correctly depicted in flood maps.

“One of the positive things as a result of that storm is the response of FEMA,” Barnes said. “We now undoubtedly have the best flood plain mapping in the nation.”

Barnes, who is also the director of development at the N.C. Aquarium Society, said that the description of Floyd as a 500-year storm is a term used by meteorologists based on data that can’t predict actual frequency, especially considering changing environmental conditions. But even climate change and sea-level rise – which so far appears to have minor effect on the number and intensity of storms — can’t explain the convergence of factors that make a Floyd.

“Given enough time,” he said, “we could have another storm emerge like Floyd.”

Thursday: Water quality and hog lagoons after Floyd

Portions of this story were taken from accounts that appeared in the Outer Banks Voice and the Island Free Press.

Hurricane Arthur caused flooding in Rodanthe on the Outer Banks. Photo: David Weydert, Petty Officer 3rd Class, Coast Guard

It shortened Fourth of July vacations from Calabash to Corolla. It postponed or cancelled firework celebrations all along the coast. It rattled windows in Beaufort when it came ashore to the east just shy of midnight on July 4. It downed trees and flooded some roads and houses on its fast-moving sprint up the coast. It was gone by the dawn’s early light.

When the sun rose for the holiday weekend, the N.C. coast was a bit bruised, but Hurricane Arthur, the season’s first named storm and the earliest hurricane to hit North Carolina, had been kind. It didn’t kill or injure anyone directly, and property damage was limited. Bogue Banks in Carteret County reported little beach erosion or structural damage, and losses in Dare County amounted to a little less than $2 million. Even the notoriously fragile N.C. 12 on Hatteras Island escaped a little buckled but intact.

Less potent storms on potentially less destructive tracks have done far more damage than did Arthur, the first Category 2 hurricane to hit the state since Isabel in 2003. It came ashore at Cape Lookout and moved northeast along Pamlico Sound before crossing the Outer Banks near Oregon Inlet and heading out to sea again. Most of the Outer Banks were on the storm’s more destructive east side.

Damage, though, was light. Even rainfall totals were far below hurricane standards. “I saw 2 to 4 inches, which for a hurricane is pretty wimpy,” noted Greg “Rudi” Rudolph, the Shore Protection manager for Carteret County.

Arthur’s race up the coast – moving as fast as 20 miles an hour early Friday – and its relatively small area of strong winds limited the damage, said David Glenn, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Newport.

“We knew the area where the winds are the strongest was only about 30 miles in diameter, so it was pretty small there right near the eye of the storm,” he explained “So it wasn’t a very large storm, it was a smaller storm. The winds were really confined in just a small area therefore the damage from the winds wasn’t as bad.”

Hurricane Irene by comparison was a Category 1 storm when it hit North Carolina in 2011 but was far more destructive than Arthur. “We had quite a bit of damage from hurricane Irene and that’s because it was a slower moving storm and it was a much larger storm,” Glenn said.

Sound-side flooding Friday morning on northern Hatteras Island, Roanoke Island and along portions of the mainland in Dare and Carteret counties was Arthur’s worst blow, but even that was glancing. Speed and size were again the reasons. Arthur formed off south Florida just a few days before striking the N.C. coast, and it reached Category 2 strength just before making landfall, Rudolph noted. Irene, on the other hand, formed far in the Atlantic and reached Category 5 status – the highest on the scale – before weakening. It pushed water ahead of it for seven days before hitting North Carolina on Aug. 27.

A Waves resident, Blake O’Sullivan, wades in the aftermath of Hurricane Arthur holding up a channel marker. Photo: Randi Machovec

“It’s different when you have a Category 1 hurricane that was a Category 5 hurricane heading right at us compared to a Category 2 hurricane that sped through us between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m.,” Rudolph said. “That’s really the difference.”

Arthur did push at least 4 feet of water onto Rodanthe, Waves and Salvo on Hatteras Island. Anywhere from 2 to 4 feet covered parts of Avon, also on Hatteras Island, and in Manteo on Roanoke Island and in Manns Harbor on the Dare County mainland. One to 3 feet of water covered parts of eastern Carteret County and 4 to 5 feet in the northern end of the county, Glenn said.

Greta Skeen, Dare County’s damage assessment officer, put reported losses at $1,962,050.

“Most damage reported was due to soundside flooding; winds causing shingle, siding and roof damage; and downed trees,” a Dare County statement said yesterday. “A total of 145 structures sustained minor damage; 16 had major damage; and none were destroyed.

At the height of the storm, more than 44,000 customers were in the dark in the state. By Sunday, power had been fully restored.

The worst damage to the electric grid was in Ocracoke, where 45 power poles had to be repaired or replaced. Power was restored Saturday night when the island was reopened to visitors. Ferries were running on normal schedules on Sunday, and businesses on the island, many of which were closed because they had no electricity, were open again.

Howard’s Pub, a famous eatery in Ocracoke, had generator power throughout the storm. Owner Ann Warner was busy Saturday greeting customers. The restaurant opened for lunch on July 4, she said. “Visitors and residents are pleased to have respite from their living quarters,” she said about the steady business.

The Pub was also a place where folks can charge their cell phones. “Every outlet—even in the kitchen–had something in it yesterday,” she said Saturday, pointing out several in use.

Elizabeth Hanrahan, Ocracoke’s island wildlife rehabilitation specialist, was busy tending stranded birds islanders had found — seven baby pelicans, five older pelicans, a cardinal, a blue jay and two ducks.

“We brought nine baby pelicans that had washed over from Beacon Island,” said Ruth Fordon, an islander who helped ferry them to Hanrahan’s after Serena Barry, co-owner of Lightkeeper’s Guest House, found the babies. “Serena’s the hero.”

Hanrahan said she will care for them for about six weeks. Then she will teach them how to fish and dive before they are released.

N.C. 12 at Mirlo Beach in south Rodanthe on July 4 was covered by sand . Photo: The Island Free Press

“They have to get their flight feathers in before they can be released,” she said as she cradled a juvenile and clamped her hand over its beak.

Elsewhere on the island Saturday, the sound of generators was punctuated by the sounds of chain saws cutting up the many downed trees.

“There are lots of fallen trees all over the island,” said Mia Huff, co-owner with her husband, Tim, of Island Property Care, as they cut up a tree along First Avenue.  Evidence of all the damaged trees can be seen along village roads where people were piling limbs and logs in anticipation of the chipper starting yesterday.

The Herbert C. Bonner Bridge and N.C. 12, the main lifelines to the Outer Banks, re-opened to all traffic in Dare County Saturday afternoon. Crews from the N.C. Department of Transportation worked Friday and Saturday to clear the road of sand. The road buckled near the temporary bridge that DOT built two years ago to span an inlet created by Hurricane Isabel. Traffic is routed into a single lane while the road is being repaired.

DOT’s scour survey and analysis determined that the Bonner Bridge is safe. However, there was some loss of sand around the pilings at several locations that will require additional monitoring.

Winds approached 100 miles an hour on Ocracoke and Hatteras islands, as Arthur passed to the west. The peak wind gust was 101 mph at Cape Lookout. The highest winds, Glenn said, were mainly across eastern Carteret County then over to the southern Outer Banks.

Inland, impacts from Hurricane Arthur were minimal. Tornado warnings were issued in several counties north of the Albemarle Sound just prior to the storm making landfall.

One home was damaged in Hertford County northwest of Ahoskie, possibly by a short-lived tornado. No other damage was reported to the National Weather Service.

This story was compiled from a series of stories about Hurricanes Emily and Isabel that appear in the Island Free Press. Irene Nolan, the Web site’s editor, is the primary author. You can read all the stories and view slide shows here.

HATTERAS — As we head into the middle of August and the period for the most intense hurricane activity in the eastern Atlantic, we pause to remember two catastrophic hurricanes a decade apart that have significant anniversaries this year.

Hurricane Emily “brushed” the Outer Banks on Aug. 31, 1993 – 20 years ago.  And Hurricane Isabel slammed Hatteras village and moved inland across North Carolina 10 years later on Sept. 18, 2003.

Theirs is the tale of two very different hurricanes, both of which had impacts that won’t be soon forgotten.

They were not particularly strong storms on the National Weather Service’s Saffir-Simpson Scale as they approached Hatteras, but they caused damage of historic proportions. And the damage was not caused only by wind in either case, but mostly by storm surge.

Hurricane Emily

A tornado spawned by Hurricane Emily is thought to have caused this damage to U.S. Coast Guard housing in Buxton. Photo: Island Free Press

Vehicles fell into sinkholes along N.C. 12 in Buxton after Hurricane Emily. Photo: Island Free Press

Hurricane Emily was not a really impressive storm as it moved through the Atlantic Ocean on a path that would take it very close to Hatteras Island.

The tropical wave that spawned Emily moved off the West Coast of Africa on Aug. 17, 1993, and into the Cape Verde Islands. After briefly becoming a hurricane on Aug. 26, the storm fluctuated in intensity between a hurricane and a tropical storm as it moved west-northwest. Intensification continued and by the time Emily came within 13 miles of Cape Hatteras on Aug. 31, it had become a Category 3 storm.

Luckily for the Outer Banks, the hurricane veered north just offshore of Hatteras, but the southern part of the island was in Emily’s western eyewall for an hour and a half.  This caused a terrific and destructive storm surge from the Pamlico Sound.

Wally DeMaurice, who was then director of the Weather Service office in Buxton, said the storm surge in Avon, Buxton, Frisco and Hatteras was the highest in living memory. At more than 10 feet, the surge, he said, was higher than in the hurricanes of 1933 and 1944 – and probably the highest since an 1846 storm opened Oregon and Hatteras inlets.

The wind instruments at the Weather Service office stopped functioning about 6 p.m. when flood waters from the Pamlico Sound got telephone lines wet.  The highest gust measured at the office before that time was 98 mph.

A wind gauge at Fox Watersports in Buxton, which DeMaurice said was “very reliable,” measured a gust of 107 at 6:12 p.m.  The winds at the Diamond Shoals tower, which was very close to the eye, were clocked at 142.

DeMaurice said he was “sweating buckshot” until Emily’s gaping eye, headed straight for Cape Hatteras, made a turn to the north, just a few miles off the coast.  If the hurricane had passed over the island and turned north up the sound, he emphasized, the devastation would have been unbelievably worse.

The devastation on the lower part of the island, he noted, was because of the duration of the storm.  While Gloria in 1985 moved over Hatteras at 28 mph, Emily poked along at eight to 13 miles per hour.  The persistent northwest winds drove a storm surge from the Pamlico Sound over the island up to 10.5 feet in places.

The storm surge brought up to five feet of water into the homes of island residents from Avon through Buxton and on to Frisco and Hatteras villages. Dare County officials later estimated the damage at $12.6 million, but most of it was limited to a 17-mile stretch of the island.

Early damage estimates indicated that 683 primary homes of residents were affected by the storm.  That included 168 homes destroyed, 216 uninhabitable because of major damage, and 144 uninhabitable because of minor damage.  It was estimated that 25 percent of the year-round, single-family homes were destroyed or uninhabitable.

There were no deaths and only one reported injury during the storm, but Emily brought devastating personal tragedy to the islanders.

Connie Farrow was living on Lester Farrow Road in Frisco during Hurricane Emily.  She and her toddler daughter, Tiffany, decided to stay with her brother for the duration of the storm in his two-story house.  As they were preparing to leave, a neighbor stopped by and commented, “Shouldn’t you get some of these things up higher?”

“I have lived in this area for most of 30 years,” Connie said.  “We have never had tide in the houses.”  She later returned home to 18 inches of standing water and numerous ruined photographs, clothes, toys, and other possessions.

While they were staying with her brother, water began flooding the downstairs of the house, forcing them to climb to the second floor.  Tiffany kept running to the doorway to watch the water creep up the stairs.  With a child’s innocence, she joyfully announced, “I’m going swimming!”

Edie Coulter and her husband, “Creature,” were under their house in Frisco, attempting to secure a few things when they saw the tide beginning to rise at the corner of their yard.  They decided to disconnect their propane tanks, but within minutes the water was up to their waists and climbing higher.  As they struggled with the tanks, Edie says they were pelted with pine cones shaken from the trees in the wind and rain.

They had previously parked their John Deere lawn tractor on top of their septic tank since that spot was the highest point in their yard.  “We stood at the upstairs window and watched the water rise right up over that old John Deere,” Edie remembers.  “There was just water everywhere.  So much water.  Water as far as the eye could see.”

These before and after composite photos compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey show the section of Hatteras Island that was punched through by Hurricane Isabel. Photo: USGS

Hurricane Isabel

Unlike Emily, Isabel was a monster of a storm as it moved across the Atlantic toward its rendezvous with Hatteras village on Sept. 18, 2003.

Hurricane Isabel began as a strong tropical wave off the coast of Africa in early September.  It became a tropical depression and then was christened Tropical Storm Isabel on Sept. 6.  By the next day, it was a minimal hurricane, but it rapidly progressed up the Saffir-Simpson scale.  A day later, on Sept. 8, Isabel was a Category 4 with winds of 135 mph.  The winds kept going up and on Sept. 11, it became a Category 5 with winds measuring 160 mph.  It maintained that strength for the better part of three days, but then started to weaken.

Isabel was downgraded to a Category 2 on Sept. 16 and stayed there until it made landfall two days later near Drum Inlet in Carteret County around 1 p.m. The storm moved northwest to Roanoke Rapids by 5 p.m. and accelerated to northeast West Virginia by 5 a.m. Sept. 19 as a tropical storm. Its remnants eventually moved northward into Canada.

N.C. 12 though Kill Devil Hills is a jumbled mess after Hurricane Isabel. Photo: Mark Wolf, FEMA

The wave energy that built up as the storm churned over the ocean as a Category 4 and 5 sealed the fate of Hatteras village.

“When it was a Category 5, it generated very high surf,” Dr. Steve Lyons, who in 2003 was the Weather Channel’s tropical weather expert, said in an interview the week after the storm.  “The high surf continued to move on shore and made the wave action on landfall much larger than would have been expected in a Category 2 storm.”

Lyons and others note that Hatteras village was in the right front quadrant of the storm as it came ashore to the south.  That’s the area that can expect the worst weather — the highest winds, waves, and storm surge.  Hatteras, Lyons said, had “the highest waves of any on the East Coast.”

He added that Isabel was a Category 2 storm in terms of its winds and storm surge, but he said it was a Category 5 for wave action.

Gene “Iceman” Chiellini, who in 2003 was a hydrometeorological technician at the Newport weather office, is even more emphatic that wave energy was the most destructive force in Isabel.

“Isabel, the Category 2 storm, didn’t do that damage that you see,” he said.  “The winds didn’t do this.  They did some of the damage.  But most of the damage you see was done by wave action.”

Marine forecasts just before the storms predicted wave heights of 30 to 35 feet, but Chiellini, an avid surfer with 27 years’ experience with the Weather Service, felt that estimate was conservative.

On the afternoon and evening of Sept. 17, the day before Isabel hit the coast, Chiellini said the NOAA buoy at Diamond Shoals, about 15 miles off Cape Hatteras, was registering waves of 16 to 18 feet.  By 9 p.m., the wave height was up to 21 feet.  At 2 a.m. it was 27 feet, and then an hour later, at 3 a.m., the buoy registered a 44.6-foot wave and stopped reporting.  He presumes the buoy has been blown to parts unknown.

Chiellini says the Weather Service estimates that the storm surge was 6 to 8 feet with 15- to 20-foot waves breaking onshore in Hatteras village.  That would have put the wall of water with tremendous energy hitting the shoreline in the range of 21 to 28 feet.   Lyons at the Weather Channel put the height at 20 to 26 feet.

A tree came down on a historic house in Edenton. Photo: Mark Wolfe, FEMA

The immense power of the storm surge plus the wave energy was apparent in Hatteras village.  Motels along the beach were destroyed, with buildings moved into or across N.C. 12.  Buildings, such as the Hatteras Cabanas, were moved across the highway and into the marsh.  Other buildings were washed off their pilings.  Houses sat in sink holes with only a few feet of the top floor and the roofs above water.  One house was washed out into the Pamlico Sound.  Buildings stood with only side cinder-block walls, the front and back walls blown out by the wave energy and the building swept clean of furnishings.  Cars and trucks were flipped and crushed, and many feet of sand filled the lower floors of many buildings.

Although most of Hatteras Island did not have soundside flooding, as it does in most hurricanes, even homes in Hatteras village that were not on the oceanfront were not immune from damage.  The surge with the waves on top washed over the eastern end of the village and into the sound near Sandy Bay.  The east wind blew the water around the back of the village and in through the creeks that run through it.  Homes were flooded, and debris from the oceanfront — refrigerators, air conditioners, beds, dressers, motel room doors with the numbers still on them — lined the back creeks into the village.

Isabel would become the deadliest and costliest storm of the 2003 hurricane season. It produced moderate to heavy damage across eastern North Carolina, totaling $450 million. Damage was heaviest in Dare County, where storm surge flooding and strong winds damaged thousands of houses. The storm surge cut a 2,000-foot wide inlet on Hatteras Island, unofficially known as Isabel Inlet, isolating Hatteras by road for two months.

Strong winds downed hundreds of trees of across the state, leaving up to 700,000 residents without power. Most areas with power outages had power restored within a few days.

The hurricane directly killed one person and indirectly killed two in the state.

Reprinted from the Island Free Press

Hurricane Sandy stripped away the the beach, leaving houses at the border of Rodanthe and the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge facing the ocean. Photo: Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, Western Carolina University

RODANTHE — Piles of debris lining N.C. 12 through Rodanthe will be carted off by Dare County, but county officials say that the remains of houses scattered up and down the beach must be removed by the property owners.

A house at the end of Dean Avenue fell into the ocean on Dec. 30 and was still sitting in the water days later, its interior exposed and the gaping contents pounded by surf. Some of the debris has now been washed as far south as Salvo.

The house, which had been damaged by Hurricane Sandy in October, will be removed by a contractor hired by the property owner Debbie Burns, said county manager Bobby Outten.

Outten said other people with damaged houses also are expected to remove any associated debris from the oceanfront.

“We are not allowed to clean up private property with tax dollars,” Outten said. “The property owners bring the debris to the curb. What we do on our end is push them to get that done quickly.”

Since there was not a presidential declaration related to Hurricane Sandy in Dare County, no federal emergency funds are available for clean-up costs, he said.  As a consequence, most of the debris removal is being done by county workers who have been diverted from their regular tasks.

“It’s going to take weeks,” Outten said. “We’re going as fast as we can.”

But with hot tubs, toilets, sinks, remnants of cabinets and the remains of stairs, walls and floors scattered over miles in the surf, the foreshore and the dry beach, the question of who is responsible for what debris is unclear.

Outten said that the National Park Service beach north of the Rodanthe pier has eroded away, but the dry sand is private property and the wet sand is still either federal or state property.

Debris piles litter the beach at Rodanthe. Photo: Don Bowers, Island Free Press

The Park Service’s  Solicitor General’s office issued an opinion a year or so ago that the foreshore area between the mean high water line and the mean low water line remains Park Service property, said Steve Thompson, NPS special park uses and lands coordinator.

“That area belongs to the Park Service no matter where it is located,” he said. “It’s our jurisdiction and it’s ocean beach for the public and it’s administered by the Park Service.”

But Thompson said that the park is not planning to clean the debris off the beach.

“The Park Service’s position is that it is the responsibility of the homeowner,” he said, “to the extent that we can identify it.”

With the beach along Mirlo Beach mostly eroded away, oceanfront homes and the highway are especially vulnerable to powerful storm-driven waves. In recent years, two houses on the north end of the subdivision have been lost, and another one is teetering in the surf.

The northern-most house had been issued a permit to move before Sandy hit, said Donna Creef, the county planning director.  But the owners did not have time to relocate the house before the storm.

As of last week, she said, there were 29 houses on the beachfront in Rodanthe that were still under “unsafe structure” notice by the county. Of them, 15 were in Mirlo Beach, on the north end of the village.

Workers with the state Department of Transportation are in the process of rebuilding gigantic sand dunes by the S-curves, an area on the south end of Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, just north of Mirlo. The road recently reopened there after being replaced.

Ocean overwash and sand on N.C. 12 has been a constant headache for DOT at the S-curves and Mirlo, with the road repeatedly damaged or destroyed by storms. After Hurricane Irene in August 2011, for instance, tide from the sound tore up the roadbed on N.C. 12 and portions of Mirlo’s private roads and driveways.

The N.C. Department of Transportation is building a wall of huge sand bags to try and protect storm-ravaged N.C. 12. Photo: DOT

The county and DOT are separately investigating the possibility of doing beach nourishment to widen the beach in the area.

Thompson said any nourishment project would be required to meet agency regulations, and the Park Service in the past has frowned on such projects.

“It’s not a matter of whether the Park Service is going to allow it or not,” he said. “It’s a permitting issue.”

Mirlo Beach homeowners have been pushing for beach nourishment as the best solution. In the meantime, they have been rebuilding the dunes in front of their houses that were flattened during Sandy, said Wes Hutchinson, vice-president of the Mirlo Beach Home Owners’ Association.

There has also been a side benefit of the dune construction.

“Right now there’s a lot of nourishment by default from the sand dunes they’re building,” he said.

Most of the damaged houses south of Blue Sea Road in Mirlo will be restored, he said. Property owners recently cleaned up storm debris that had collected in the subdivision’s wetland area on the west side of the highway.

Despite the continual challenges with erosion and transportation access at Mirlo, Hutchinson said that oceanfront houses are still being sold, at least some in foreclosure sales.

“They do rent fairly well,” he said, “as long as they keep standing.”

But the house that fell in the ocean last weekend was on the other end of Rodanthe near the pier. And it was a year-round residence the owners had purchased to live out their retirement years.

Creef said she has urged Burns, the owner, to “move as quickly as she can” to get her collapsed house off the beach, but she acknowledged that the county is limited in what it can do.

“A lot of people think ‘Oh, the county needs to get the beach cleaned up,’” she said. “But it’s easier said than done because a lot of that debris is in the water.”

Reprinted from the Island Free Press

BUXTON — Until recently, residents and visitors traveling to and from Hatteras Island in two-wheel drive vehicles had just one transportation option — ride the ferries.

For visitors, this tacks on three or four hours—sometimes many more—to an already time-consuming trip, and for residents, it made off-island travel for doctor appointments, work, school, or other errands extremely difficult.

But in early November, two-wheel drivers caught a break.

Jarvis Williams, who owns Cape Point Exxon in Buxton and who was contracted by the N.C. Department of Transportation to remove any vehicles that got stuck on the newly opened four-wheel-drive only access route, got the idea to start trailering two-wheel-drive cars and trucks across the sand road.

It’s a simple idea, really, and not surprisingly, it has been quite well received. When you’re in a hurry, a 15-minute ride over land beats a three-hour trip across the sound, and an on-demand sand taxi beats an hours-long ferry line any day of the week—even if you have to pay for the convenience.

In fact, the service has been so popular, that on a single day during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Williams and his crew towed 86 cars across the quarter-mile long sand road.

It wasn’t long before that kind of demand necessitated an increase in supply.

Scott Caldwell, who owns Island Convenience in Rodanthe, started towing cars over Thanksgiving weekend when he saw how many people wanted—and needed—to use the service.

“There were cars lined up from Hot Tuna to the [emergency] ferry dock,” he said, all of which were waiting to be towed across the sand.

Three businesses on Hatteras Island will load two-wheel-drive cars on trailers and tax them across the the broken up section of N.C. 12 that is now open to only four-wheel drives. Photo: Don Bowers, Island Free Press.

Eric Stump, who owns Island Cruisers, a four-by-four rentals operation in Rodanthe, also got in on the action, spurred on by phone calls from people who wanted to rent his four-wheel drive vehicles in order to cross the sand road.

All three have reputable, established and fully-insured towing businesses that have long operated on the island. And though traffic has decreased considerably since the holiday weekend, Williams, Caldwell, and Stump are still plenty busy.

And since N.C. 12 will not be repaired until at least Christmas, it seems likely that they will remain so.

All three charge $25 per trip, and all three operate seven days a week, from 5 a.m. until 10 p.m. — the only times during which the sand road is open.

In addition, all three offer both on-demand and reservation-style services.

So, you can give one of them a call when you’re ready to cross the road, or, if you know in advance when you’ll need to cross, you can arrange for someone to meet you on a specific date at a specific time.

All southbound travelers are picked up at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service parking lot, which is just south of the checkpoint and the temporary bridge over Pea Island Inlet.

Northbound travelers will be picked up at different places depending on which company is providing the service.

Caldwell will meet customers at Island Convenience, and Stump will pick up his customers at the Rodanthe-Waves-Salvo Community Building. Williams will meet his customers near the Midgett Realty building in Rodanthe, just south of the checkpoint station.

Caldwell can be reached at either 252- 216-5733 or 252- 987-2239. Stump can be reached at 252-987-2097 or 252-202-8399. Williams can be reached at 252-475-4285.

N.C. 12 north of Rodanthe looked like a crazy amusement park ride after Hurricane Sandy went by. Photo: NCDOT.

The story was compiled from previously published stories in the Outer Banks Voice and the Island Free Press, two online newspapers on the Outer Banks.

RODANTHE — It’s been more than a month since Hurricane Sandy passed hundreds of miles off the N.C. coast, but state transportation officials are still struggling to keep a passable road open on Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks.

When it went by on Oct. 28-29, Sandy flushed away protective dunes and sandbags and broke up about a half-mile of pavement on N.C. 12 at an area known as the S-curves near this island community. It’s a notorious trouble spot of frequent flooding on Hatteras Island’s only road to the mainland.

The aftermath was different this time.  “Much of our right of way is now in ocean,” an engineer for the state Department of Transportation said when the skies cleared… briefly.

Two nor’easters and generally foul weather after Sandy merely made a bad situation much worse. Hastily thrown up sand berms were flattened and the ocean washed over the buckled pavement with each high tide.

With nowhere to put a new section of road, DOT carved out and staked a temporary, rough sand path alongside the battered pavement.  It opened to four-wheel drive vehicles only on Nov. 21.

A few old-timers may have remembered the days when sand roads were the only routes on Hatteras Island and may have boasted that they got along just fine without fancy SUVs.

The drivers of those modern SUVs, however, weren’t faring as well. They were getting stuck. Routinely.  DOT reported on its Facebook page that 45 vehicles had to be towed on one Sunday.

After the ocean stopped regularly overwashing the route at high tide, the sand dried out and became soft and churned up, making the tire ruts deeper. Since the route is just a set of tire tracks in each direction, stuck vehicles hold up traffic in both directions.

Traffic, top, slowly makes its way along the sand route that bypasses bucked N.C. 12 in Rodanthe. Some vehicles towing boats got stuck, bottom, before state officials banned towed vehicles on the road. Photos: Don Bowers, Island Free Press.

In response, DOT officials put more restrictions on the route:  No trucks weighing more than a ton – about the size of a Ford F350 or a Chevrolet/Dodge 3500 – and no vehicles towing trailers.

Dare County Sheriff’s deputies at two checkpoints along the road enforce the restrictions.

The four-wheel-drive route is open from 5 a.m. until 10 p.m., but before dawn and after dusk, the Sheriff’s Office is providing a pilot car that leads traffic between Rodanthe to the Bonner Bridge.

As DOT struggles to keep the route passable, a decision on the long-term fix at the troublesome spot has been put off until late winter — more than a year later than originally expected.

Beth Smyre, a DOT project manager, said that with the challenges created by Sandy, the focus on a permanent solution has been at Pea Island, where a temporary bridge was built last year over a new inlet cut by Hurricane Irene last year.

The merger team —representatives of state and federal agencies —in early November officially signed off on building the replacement bridge in Pea Island within the existing easement, basically where the temporary bridge is situated, Smyre said.

“We’re trying to get the documentation done so we can award a contract,” she said.

After the contract is done for the 2.1-mile-long concrete bridge, hopefully in March, Smyre said, the department will announce the chosen alternative for the northern Rodanthe breach.

Alternative fixes for the road at the S-curves were narrowed down by DOT to two possibilities after a series of meetings last year. One proposed long-term solution would be to build a 2.5-mile-long bridge that would be 25-to 30-feet high and would go out into Pamlico Sound around the S-curves and tie into the highway south of Mirlo. The other alternative would be to build a bridge within the existing right-of-way.

Initially, the selection was supposed to be made in late 2011. The next preliminary deadline in spring 2012 came and went without a decision. All progress was halted when Hurricane Sandy blew through, and problems were exacerbated by the two northeasters that followed.

Smyre said that the driving surface of the Pea Island bridge will be 23 feet high and cost just under $100 million. Construction is expected to take about two to three years, and traffic will be maintained on the temporary bridge until the replacement is completed.

“The new bridge is going to be within the easement,” she said.  “The impact to the environment is really low.”

Bobby Outten

Allen Burrus

An environmental assessment providing details about the bridge will be issued for public review within weeks, she said, followed by a 30-day comment period and public meetings. The same will be done in the near future for the two alternatives at Rodanthe.

After the public process is complete on each project, she said, a final document will be issued for each one that provides details on the chosen alternative.

Meanwhile, Dare County is exploring the potential of doing beach nourishment at Rodanthe as part of the long-term solution, separate from DOT.  The transportation department had dropped plans last year to consider pumping sand on the beach, citing high costs and lack of available sand.

But county manager Bobby Outten said the discussion by the Dare County Board of Commissioners is at such an early stage, it’s not even known whether the National Park Service would challenge the county’s right to nourish at Mirlo, where the Park Service beach appears to have eroded away long ago.

Allen Burrus, a Dare County commissioner, said last week that high-level officials at DOT told him a deal has been worked out with the Army Corps of Engineers to place sand on the beach in front of the troubled S-curves.

According to Burrus, the Corps will receive money from the Federal Highway Administration. A large Army Corps dredge from Wilmington will be brought off Hatteras Island to pump sand onto the beach.

Burrus said details such as how much sand will be placed and where the sand will come from have yet to be worked out. He said Dare County commissioners are hoping the Corps will not only place sand on the beach from the S-curves south into Rodanthe itself, but also build a new dune line along the same route.

It is not known yet how much the project will cost.

The bottom line for Dare County is that access must be maintained for the long term to Hatteras Island, Outten said.

“There are lots of rationales for it,” Outten said, defending criticism of the costs.  “We are a donor county — we take in more tax revenue than we take from the state. We’ve got a population down there that we need to supply. We have a national park that needs to have access.”

Outten said it’s hard to imagine the state abandoning a road elsewhere in North Carolina that provides the only transportation route for 5,000 people and millions of tourists that the economy is dependent on.

“In other metropolitan areas, they spend $200 million for a road so people don’t have to sit in traffic,” he said. “We’re not talking about convenience. We’re talking about survival.”

Dennis Stewart, biologist with Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, said that the refuge is working closely with the DOT and supports both their short-term and long-term efforts to restore access.

But Stewart said the refuge is also waiting to learn what long-term alternative the DOT will choose in Rodanthe.  There’s no issue whatsoever if they build a bridge in the existing right-of-way, he said, but there could be concerns if the option chosen is the one that swings out over Pamlico Sound.

“We’re in a holding pattern until they send us the appropriate information,” he said.

Whether it’s for short-term or long -term purposes, Stewart said that any nourishment at Mirlo, which would include some refuge land, could be problematic if the sand was not compatible. He said he is skeptical that there is enough good sand available to nourish, but he said the refuge will not oppose nourishment outright.

“We have standards that have to be met to put sand on the refuge,” he said.

• N.C. 12 photo gallery at Island Free Press

This story was compiled from reports published in the Island Free Press and the Outer Banks Voice over the last several days. We thank them for their work in keeping us informed and for allowing us to reprint their stories.

This picture of N.C. 12 through Kitty Hawk was taken Monday. Photo: NCDOT

Waves pound the Avalon pier, which eventually succumbed. Photo: Rob Morris

NAGS HEAD — Sound-side storm surge, expected to be as high as six feet along the Outer Banks, was not as serious as forecast Monday night, when winds from Hurricane Sandy shifted and threatened the backsides of the barrier islands.

“We fared well with the sound-side flooding,” Dorothy Killingsworth, Dare County spokeswoman, told the Outer Banks Voice, yesterday.

High tide yesterday, however, brought more ocean overwash, especially in Kitty Hawk, which appears to have lost a section of N.C. 12. Traffic was still being rerouted on U.S. 158 near milepost 4, where overwash and flooded ditches have left the highway impassable.

“Hopefully after this one, it’ll start to subside some,” Killingsworth said.

Neighborhoods between the highways — U.S. 158 and N.C. 12 — were flooded throughout Kitty Hawk and northern Kill Devil Hills. Some flooding was also reported in Nags Head.

When winds die down to 30 mph or less, Killingsworth said, the state Department of Transportation will test the emergency ferry channel between Rodanthe and Stumpy Point.

Sandy has isolated Hatteras Island. Regular ferry service has been suspended, though emergency service from Stumpy Point will start today. High surf washed out at least two sections of N.C. 12 south of Oregon Inlet.  DOT cleared the road between Hatteras and Rodanthe late yesterday. A severed fiber optic cable interrupted cell and Internet service, which resumed last night.

The storm took out a large section of the Avalon Pier and reportedly at least one house on Hatteras Island.

Dare County Emergency Management planned to confer with town fire chiefs yesterday for a more detailed assessment, Killingworth said.

Along the Outer Banks, winds shifted to the southwest yesterday and were generally gusting at about 30 mph.

Killingworth said that sound-side flooding has caused no serious damage or road closings.

Bonner Bridge

The temporary bridge over the inlet that Hurricane Irene cut through Pea Island was covered by the water it was intended to span. Photo: NCDOT

N.C. 12 was impassable south of Oregon Inlet. Photo: NCDOT

Neither did the storm do any serious damage to the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge across Oregon Inlet. Closed as a precaution during Hurricane Sandy, the bridge has suffered no apparent damage to its structure, at least the part that is visible above water.

“The visual inspection was fine,” Jeff Odom, state Department of Transportation bridge inspection supervisor, told the Island Free Press after inspecting the Oregon Inlet bridge Monday afternoon.

A piece of aluminum fabric had come off a portion of the concrete rail, he said, but that is only a cosmetic concern.

Odom said that divers will use sonar to look for any scouring at the pilings underneath the bridge as well as other potential structural issues as soon as the weather allows.

But he said that type of inspection is nothing unusual. In fact, he said it is routine to check for scour — sand around piles scooped out by currents — under the Bonner Bridge after any significant storm because of its location in treacherous Oregon Inlet.

“That’s normal for that bridge,” Odom said. “It really hasn’t done anything abnormal at all.”

Piled-up sand on the road on the south end of the bridge, he said, prevented him from driving further south on N.C. 12 to inspect the temporary truss bridge over the new inlet in Pea Island that was opened up last August during Hurricane Irene.

A DOT road crew on Sunday had reported seeing scouring around the south end of the bridge, he said, but the extent of it could not be determined.

Odom said the truss bridge’s structure is not the concern — it’s built on concrete pilings – as much as the risk of it washing away if it is undermined.

As soon as a bulldozer can be driven over Bonner Bridge, Odom said, the sand will be cleared off the road so he can get to the temporary bridge to inspect it.

In a press release issued on Sunday, DOT announced that the Bonner Bridge was closed that evening after DOT inspectors determined that the bridge was “unsafe for traffic at this time.”

But Odom said there was no specific problem that prompted the closure, other than the reality of the storm’s destructive potential and the inlet’s powerful currents.

“We want to make sure that everything is alright before we let anybody cross,” he said.

Hatteras Island

A house on Hatteras Island totters before collapsing into the surf.

High winds and water buffeted Hatteras Island through Monday.  The rains stopped by late morning and temperatures dropped as Sandy tracked around the edge of the Outer Banks.

Flooding from both sides of the island was the biggest issue. The sound and ocean ran together between Frisco and Hatteras and also Rodanthe. Onlookers stood on the dunes Monday in awe of the huge waves and magnificent spray, which could be seen from far away.

The winds gradually shifted Monday afternoon more to the west and sound-side flooding became the main concern.

Anne Bowers, a reporter with the Island Free Press, caught a ride Monday with investigators from the Dare County Sheriff’s Department Monday in their behemoth 5-ton truck with six-wheel drive.

Bowers reported Monday that the ocean was flowing freely through the Buxton motels at high tide. N.C.12, the main road on the island, was heavily covered in sand, which made travel difficult even for the big truck. North of Buxton, travel was easy until the Haul-over area, or the Canadian Hole, which was picturesque with the sound waters throwing up huge sprays when it slammed into the bulkhead.

From there, N.C. 12 was covered over by sound water that was deeper in the south end of Avon. Cars were parked wherever there was high ground — Ace Hardware, the movie theatre, Avon Post Office and Spa Koru.

The old village in Avon had significantly more water with most streets covered in at least knee-high water. Several vehicles sat in engine-high water and several lower houses looked like they were on the brink of flooding.

The officers continued their patrol throughout Avon before heading back to Buxton. High water and sand made travel nearly impossible north of the Top Dog Café in Waves.

During the drive, the investigators answered distress calls from visitors asking for help, frightened by the rising waters. They told most callers to remain calm and that flooding was expected during storms. In Buxton, visitors called to report that the oceanfront house they were in felt like it was coming apart. Six people were removed from the house, which had suffered severe damage.

After the ride with the Sheriff’s Department, Bowers walked along the Buxton oceanfront. Streets off Old Lighthouse road were thigh deep with water, she reported Monday. Several cottages seemed to have sustained significant damage. One had water pouring out of it and another was missing its steps. Several had missing shingles and siding while another was missing its front deck.

The pool area at the Lighthouse View Motel was ripped apart, Bowers noted, and chunks of concrete were broken up and strewn about. The little building that stood next to the pool had been washed towards the motel building.  And there was the pool itself which had sustained a lot of damage.

Before leaving the Buxton oceanfront, Bowers saw a sad looking pelican sitting on a dune. Like many water birds during a long storm like Sandy, pelicans can’t forage and this one looked worn and exhausted. He was easy to catch and spent the remainder of Sandy resting comfortably in Bowers’ backyard with her pet ducks. He seemed happy. “When he is ready, he will fly away,” Bowers wrote.

The pier in Avon was still standing but the end is pretty much gone, the Avon Fishing Pier posted on its Facebook page. “Going to have a lot of work to do…going to post pictures as soon as possible…the end of the pier will no longer open.”

OCRACOKE

Beachcombers hunted for shelled treasurers after Sandy passed. Photo: Rob Morris.

Ocracoke was coming back to life yesterday. Several owners were getting their businesses open as flood waters receded, but some areas of standing water remained, which is typical after a storm.

Ferries to Swan Quarter and Cedar Island will run on the normal winter schedule for all starting today, but the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry is suspended until N.C. 12 on both Ocracoke and Hatteras Islands is cleared, said Justin Gibbs, Hyde County Emergency Management director.

Monday’s abbreviated ferry runs to Cedar Island and Swan Quarter were for Ocracoke residents, essential personnel and infrastructure workers only.

The north end of Ocracoke above the Pony Pen has sand on the road for about a 400-yard stretch from ocean overwash, he said, and sand-moving equipment was on its way to Ocracoke on the 4 p.m. ferry Tuesday.

“I expect one lane to be cleared by lunchtime Wednesday,” Gibbs told the Island Free Press yesterday. Until the lane is open, the road will be barricaded, he said.

Ocracoke residents uniformly felt lucky that monster storm Hurricane Sandy only grazed Ocracoke, and there was no major damage on the island.

Middle Road in Ocracoke was under water Monday. Photo: Connie Leinbach

“That wasn’t a hurricane,” said Tyke Ely, of the two-day storm. “The wind howls with hurricanes. This was like a really bad nor’easter.”

No large trees are down on the island and debris is at a minimum.

“It’s probably the cleanest I’ve seen it after a hurricane,” Sgt. Jason Daniels of the Hyde County Sheriff’s Department told the Free Press.

The Ocracoke Volunteer Fire Department did an assessment at 7 a.m. Tuesday and found a few areas where water was still a bit high, but no other damage.

Ed Fuller, Ocracoke district ranger for the National Park Service, said beach access for vehicles would open today at the earliest.  The beaches are open for pedestrians.

According to a late afternoon Monday press release from Hyde County, flood waters had receded to 6 to 10 inches throughout the village, down from 18- to 24 inches.

Numerous residents could be seen Monday slogging through the water in rain boots, hip waders and even bare feet, which dismayed Eric Godbey, lead paramedic on Ocracoke.

He said people should be careful of venturing into the water since it could contain contaminants.

Flood waters also pose a danger to residents with private wells, according to a Hyde County press release. Wesley Smith, Hyde County health director, said those with private wells must take steps to disinfect them.

Chip Stevens, who lives on Irvin Garrish Highway across from the harbor, reported that as water receded, “cars were everywhere” as people went about. Six inches pf water had covered the road Sunday.

As for provisions on the island, the Variety Store opened Monday and owner Tommy Hutcherson said he had plenty of stock for those still on the island.

Laura and Sean Death, who manage the Ocracoke Station at the Beachcomber Campground, opened for business and had made fried chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans for sale.

The Topless Oyster Restaurant, at Old Beach Road, was the only restaurant open Monday night and served a roomful of customers.  Other restaurants opened Tuesday.

Ocracoke School was closed Monday, but opened Tuesday afternoon.

The village had been flooded by sound-side storm surge  Sunday morning.

“I don’t think anyone was expecting this much water so soon,” Daniels told the Island Free Press.

Amy Howard, the new executive director of the Ocracoke Preservation Society, lives at Lawton Lane and Howard Street.  “We’re dry,” she told the Free Press Sunday, although she noted that water was just starting to show creep up historic Howard Street.

“I’ve renamed School Road, ‘School River,’” she said after posting photos of the street on a local blog.  You can see her photos and those taken by other islanders by clicking on “daily journal.”

Mazie Smith, the Hyde County manager, was on the island Sunday with Gibbs to set up their Emergency Operations Center at the Ocracoke Community Center. “The mainland is OK, but with the roads and the ferries, this is where I need to be to fight for the citizens and the county,” she said Sunday.

By that evening, Ocracoke Island businesses were all closed.

• Live updates
• Hatteras Island photos
• DOT photos
• TV video footage of N.C. 12

Reprinted from Susan’s Blogue

WILMINGTON — It was Aug. 28, 1998. On that night, the one following our latest hurricane, my then14-year-old daughter announced a sleepover at her best friend’s house. “It’s a tradition,” Catherine reminded me, simultaneously asking permission and packing her bag. “Remember,” she said, “I spent the night at Jill’s after Hurricane Bertha, and after Hurricane Fran, too.”

Jill, left and Catherine were so inseparable they were called “Foot-for-Foot.” Photo: Susan T. Block.

Being a native of Wilmington, I knew well that traditions are part of mammoth storms. Only on Christmas Eve is there such a feeling of family as there is when a hurricane nears the doorstep. On that uncertain Night of the Different, even Catherine and Jill knew not to mention spending it somewhere other than home – nor would they want to. But let the clouds clear the next day, and teenagers wanted to gather with their own friends.

Other traditions or simple chores included filling a bathtub with water, in case the usual supply was cut off or compromised; taping large windows, a chore that must be done early-on, lest person and plywood turn into a sail powered by early gusts; and, for me, picking up our large orange tabby cat, walking him over to the window, and whispering, “Kato, there’s gonna’ be storm.” I’m pretty sure Kato knew long before I told him.

Bonnie hit Wilmington, North Carolina on Aug. 27, 1998. My parents like most residents of nearby Wrightsville Beach, evacuated and came to stay with us in comparative safety, since we lived on the mainland. Their visit reminded me of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Death of the Hired Man.”  ”Home is the place where, when you have to go here, and they have to take you in.” Though a fiercely private and independent couple, they seemed truly happy and relaxed there on that dangerous night and we were pleased to give them safe harbor.

The wonder of the wind kept everyone spellbound until it reached a speed that frightened us away from the sliding glass doors. Still, we watched the shadows from across the room as an invisible and mighty power battered large oaks in our backyard like mastiffs shaking kittens. Smaller fruit trees and gardenia bushes looked like mixed greens in a Cuisinart.

The noise of it went from howl to roar and back to howl, over and over again. During Bonnie, we only lost branches and limbs, but often, as we discovered after Hurricane Fran departed in 1996, the wrenching sound of grand old trees splitting and falling on a thick bed of wet leaves is lost in the deafening din of a hurricane.

The electricity went out early. Justified by a cold stove, we ate sandwiches, snack food and a large loaf of homemade bread Mother had baked that morning. Long before dark, I lit scented candles all around the house, just as my grandmother lit a large old, and not so aromatic, kerosene lamp the night in 1960 when Hurricane Donna hit Wilmington. I feel sure Nana lit the same lamp Oct. 15, 1954 when Hurricane Hazel battered Wilmington. I don’t remember the storm, but I do remember my parents pointing to downed trees and talking about Hazel the next day, and I remember thinking that Hazel must be a very strong and mean woman.

A visit from Daddy and Mother on a sunnier day in 2004. Photo: Susan T. Block.

In 1998, the eye of Bonnie brought a lightened sky and a low steady moan. A couple jogged by our house wearing brightly colored clothing and sheepish grins. A relative who lives nearby sprung for a generator and dropped by to borrow some fresh videos. We all made furtive trips outside to check the damage and to feel daring. But the storm barely moved and the eye elongated, turning what usually is a brief respite into a long and boring wait.

We passed the time listening to television reports on a FM battery-powered radio. Though locally generated stories, delivered by Frances Weller and other members of the veteran hurricane team at WECT-TV, sounded accurate, a national newscast exaggerated a bit. Eventually, we all headed for bed as the tail end of Bonnie, or Pokey as we called her, brought more high wind.

After the storm moved away, weeks of debris removal work began. Bright blue tarps waved over many houses until roofing contractors could patch their way across town. Natives knew that patience pays, because we had seen prices go down by the week after other storms when both seasoned and instant tree workers arrived from neighboring states. Some slept in trucks and traveled in packs until the high-paying work was over. Whole trees, neatly chopped in six-foot lengths crowded the edges of our streets until debris removal trucks lumbered their way through New Hanover County.

Wild animal carnage and mold made pockets of unpleasantness that lasted for months. After hurricanes Bertha and Fran hit Wilmington in 1996, there were many places in town that called for new road signs: ones with a slash across a nose. Soap, bleach and gallons of water were used indoors to combat the combined effects of heat and the sort of humidity that swells doors shut.

Hurricane Bertha in 1996 beat up the boardwalk at the author’s Turtle Hall Harbor neighborhood and, after years of no hurricanes, pruned the whole neighborhood. Photo: Susan T. Block.

A sampling of what Hazel wrought at Wrightsville Beach. Photo: William J. Boney, courtesy of William J. Boney, Jr.

Hurricanes follow their own schedules and paths. Sometimes they avoid a locale for years, then Bam-Bam-Bam, you get hit multiple times within a decade. Sometimes a predicted hit turns into a brush-by and a field of beautiful whole conchs shows up on shore. And sometimes, even inland, wind takes a back seat to flooding.

Hurricane flooding takes many forms, the most famous being ocean storm surge, but rainwater holds many surprises. Some of my friends went to Raleigh to escape the effects of Hurricane Fran in 1996, only to be stranded there by floods after the storm blew inland. With power gone, they lived off vending machine food until they finally made it to a grocery store to buy enough food and wine to get them through.

Hurricane Fran played a water trick on our Turtle Hall neighborhood. Two days after she hit, pipe damage and clogged drains pooled three feet of water into the main street. Catherine, Jill, Freddy and I returned from a one-night trip to Charlotte to find that we had to abandon our car three blocks from the house and wade through murky water. Thoughts of snakes, eels, snapping turtles and errant electrical power dogged me all the way home.

Hurricane Floyd in 1999 was a good example of unpredicted storm flooding. Such rain I have never heard. It sounded like water from a hundred fire hoses aimed down at our roof. After our yard flooded, it just kept raining, but finally stopped before damaging our house. Most Wilmingtonians were fortunate that way, but an hour’s drive inland, folks weren’t so lucky. Lives and homes were lost.

Closing in on the active hurricane season, we always double-check our homeowners’ policies, think about stocking up on batteries and hope to heck Jim Cantore will visit us this year for sentimental reasons only.

So, why do we live in a city perched between the Atlantic Ocean and a river called Cape Fear? We live here because we are perched between the Atlantic Ocean and a river called Cape Fear.

It is the compass point of breathtaking arcs. The beauty and opportunities afforded by Wilmington’s location made it a seductive city 272 years ago, and make it so today.

The danger of Hurricanes Past, whose names become bold marks on our personal timelines, is tinged with curious excitement because we have weathered them. That a new one could hit us at high tide as a Category 5, or some new global-warmed number, is a thought devoid of excitement and something most of us choose not to consider. We just enjoy seeing sunlight’s diamonds dancing on the waters.

Last of three parts

Reprinted from the Island Free Press

RODANTHE — Images from those first few hours in Rodanthe, Waves and Salvo on Hatteras Island will stay with me forever. It was much different than Hatteras village after Hurricane Isabel in 2003 where buildings and belongings were simply eradicated — gone.

The three villages were still standing but brutalized in a more subtle manner that wasn’t always easily noticeable. Water from Pamlico Sound kept coming all Saturday night as residents climbed onto furniture, into attics or were rescued by personal watercraft in the black of night as houses filled with tide that was head-high by some reports. When the waters receded, most of the houses still stood, but many were ruined forever.

Our first drive to the small inlet at Mirlo Beach was intense. There was a boat sitting on top of a fence, perfectly balanced. Tombstones were knocked to the ground. Retail stores had their fronts and backs blown out and their merchandise strewn everywhere.

It was hot during this stretch of time, typical post-hurricane weather. The humidity levels were wicked and the mosquitoes unrelenting. For storm victims, there was no relief from either because there was no electricity and sometimes no home.

The most awful sight I remember was the people sitting on their front steps not knowing what to do. It was the second morning since the storm, and no one had yet come to help them. House after house, they just sat and stared, lost. It reminded me of some of the post-Katrina scenes. Donny (Anne’s husband, Don Bowers) wouldn’t take any photos; these were people whom he knew and had gone to school with. These people were proud but vulnerable.

We went as far north as the road would take us. The broken highway was barricaded and guarded, and the southbound lane sunk or missing. But just ahead, it all ended abruptly, stopped by an inlet that flowed from ocean to sound. Both of us sat in the back of the truck amazed at the amount of the destruction. The power poles were leaning badly and all the houses in this area had sustained massive damage. It was a mess, and it would take a tremendous amount of manpower and time to repair.

The National Guard escorted Donny past the barricade so he could photograph the area in the pink glow of sunrise. I spent this time talking with the manager of Kitty Hawk Kites in Rodanthe who rode out the storm in his apartment that was just down the street.

He had lots of stories to tell, and even though I wrote them all down, I never had time to publish them. His name was A. J. Jackson. We had never met before but our paths crossed several times over the next couple of weeks. However, our friendship would not last because he died a short time later kite surfing in the ocean.

Around the corner from the breach at Mirlo Beach, were the smoldering remains of the house built to look like a lighthouse. It was owned by Roger and Cecelia Meekins, the original owners of the famous Serendipity House that was used in the movie “Nights in Rodanthe.” They called it the Sentinel on the Pamlico.

This was another story that I never wrote. On the second night of the hurricane, the rising flood waters caused their generator to catch fire and quickly burned the house down around 9 p.m. The couple barely got out of the house in time. Roger escaped carrying his brief case and medicines, but neither wore shoes, only the clothes on their backs.

The water was over their heads. A neighbor and his wife, who was recovering from recent hip surgery, met them with life preservers and, together with their dogs, swam and bounced off the ground to a house on the other side of the street. The owner of that house and his son waved a lit lantern from the top deck to guide the two couples to safety. No one was hurt but there was nothing left of the beautiful house the Meekins had so lovingly designed and built.

Donny and I then drove over to the ocean side to check on Serendipity, which had been moved in 2009 from Mirlo Beach to save it from the encroaching Atlantic Ocean. There it stood, all strong and proud with those bright blue shutters. Over the railing appeared the smiling faces of Ben and Debbie Huss, owners of the house. They, too, had ridden out the vicious Hurricane Irene on Hatteras Island.

“She shook, she rattled, and she moved a lot,” Ben said about the house during the hurricane, “but she hung in there and we have very little damage.”

They did lose the six gallons of ice cream in the freezer.

The Salvo Volunteer Fire Department was a hub of activity after the storm.

Meals were served to residents and workers at the Rodanthe-Waves-Salvo Community Building. Photos:Don Bowers, Island Free Press

We moved around the island all morning talking to people and hearing their stories. Because our house phone worked, we collected phone numbers and messages from dozens of people asking us to contact their family and friends off-island to let them know they were safe. Apparently, we had one of the few working phones on the island that could call long distance.

Donny had arranged to take a flight to get his first aerial photographs of the inlets that day so our first trip was cut short by this opportunity. Coming back into Buxton that afternoon we saw lines of trucks and cars in both directions at two open gas stations. It was day three without electricity and residents needed gasoline to run their generators. It was a crazy scene and reminded me of the gas crunch in the ‘70s.

Donny barely made the flight with local pilot Dwight Burrus of Hatteras, and I used this time to catch up with Irene Nolan at her office – which, at the time, was her air-conditioned vehicle. There was so much going on and communications were hampered, yet the news had to get out. It was all so rudimentary but we managed. She edited my work on my laptop and I would run to the electric company to e-mail articles and photos to Donna, who continued to work from Raleigh.

Many readers may not remember this but it was 11 days before those who evacuated could return home. We were on lockdown until fundamental services, such as food, water, electricity and fuel could be established and maintained. The Coast Guard patrolled the waterways and marinas and the airport was watched by law enforcement to keep folks from flying in. Who was allowed to use the emergency ferries was tightly controlled. A curfew was also in affect from 9 p.m. until dawn, which made my late-night trips to use the electric company’s Wi-Fi rather nerve wracking. However, we never got stopped.

For nearly three weeks, Donny and I made daily trips up to the Rodanthe, Waves and Salvo. The amount of issues to be covered was endless. The Community Building, along with the local fire departments, became the central locations for everything. This is where people ate, where donations were dropped, where medical attention began, where housing problems were addressed, where meetings and church services were held and more. Most residents lost their cars in the flood and getting around was challenging, so these localized centers were incredibly helpful.

The temporary ferry dock that ran from Rodanthe to Stumpy Point, which was also devastated by Hurricane Irene, had its own set of problems. It was our vital connection to the mainland. Every piece of heavy equipment that was used to fix the road came by this ferry. All fuel came on this ferry. The steamy black asphalt had to travel to us by this ferry. Yet, the storm had caused shoaling in many areas of the channel, and ferry boats could run only at high tide most days. The channel leading into the Rodanthe dock was so narrow that only one ferry could be in it at a time, and the dock was only big enough for one ferry. Many times, the ferry would have to wait out in the sound until the channel was clear of boat traffic, which would take an hour or two.

Gov. Beverly Perdue, right, talks to volunteers in Waves after the storm.

The debris piles grew mountainous in size. Photos: Don Bowers, Island Free Press

Several ferry workers pulled long shifts without any days off only to get off work and spend the night on a neighbor’s couch because their own home was made uninhabitable by Hurricane Irene.

By Wednesday, Aug. 31, signs of recovery were beginning to show. Volunteers from the lower villages had mobilized and were helping the people of Avon, Waves, Rodanthe and Salvo clean up and protect their homes from mold. This was a horrible job – pulling out wet carpet and soaked insulation from underpinning, pulling out drywall, spraying Clorox, or just picking up huge amounts of debris which could be anything from trees to the neighbor’s dock.

All trash was required to be brought to the sides of N.C. 12 where it would be collected. By the last day of August, the piles were huge and growing. It looked awful and sad. Furniture, pianos, clothing, papers – it was all piled along the road.

Large dump trucks that pulled a huge trailer were brought in and funded by FEMA. The Salvo Day Use Area, located on the sound side just south of Salvo, became the temporary dumping ground. It was organized into metal, wood or other materials, and it grew into a monstrosity.

Entire houses were torn down and taken to the edge of the road. These super-sized dump trucks were equipped with yellow cranes that would scoop up everything and take it to the dumping area. By the next day, there would be more trash and debris along the road, which looked like it had never been touched.

People were often overcome with emotion when they saw the size of the temporary dumpsite. It continued to grow until N.C. 12 reopened on Oct. 10.

Also by the end of August, Donny and I had tested the power of the inlet at Mirlo Beach. We devised a plan to ride our bikes up to the big inlet on Pea Island which was about five miles north of Mirlo. We checked the tide charts and picked a time before low tide to carry our bikes across at Mirlo and ride north to take the first photos of the inlet on the ground on the south side.

In the early afternoon hours of Sept. 1, Donny and I discreetly took the bikes out of the back of the truck and made our way to the shallow part of the inlet, carrying the bikes high as we waded across. The road on the other side was like ribbon candy with dips and valleys that were chest high. On the dunes, we could see the high-water mark left by the sound water from the week before. To our surprise, it was over our heads all the way to the inlet.

It took some time to negotiate the broken surface, but we finally got to some smooth road and battled the 25-30 mph headwinds all the way to the Pea Island Inlet. Once there, we walked towards the ocean and through the fingers of the newly cut inlet. This wasn’t an easy walk.

The inlet was a sight to behold. There were multiple cuts with one major one that ran from sound to ocean. The fast moving water was clear and blue. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife buildings were severely damaged, with one of them draped on the edge and falling into the water. In time, all three buildings would be swallowed by the sea.

The electric linemen were working on the poles in an effort to straighten and repair. On the other side of the inlet, there seemed like there were lots of parked vehicles and dozens of people scurrying around. There were so many kinds of repair issues around this area — transportation, electricity, phone, and cable just to name the obvious. Recovery plans were still in the making at this point. We didn’t know yet how the road would be repaired, but it wasn’t going to be quick.

Hurricane Irene cut a new inlet at Mirlo Beach on Hatteras Island.

With the wind at our backs, the ride back to Mirlo Beach was much easier. This would be our only bike ride to the inlet. When the Mirlo Inlet became somewhat negotiable by truck, we started getting regular rides with the N.C. Department of Transportation road crews. We met some great guys that gave it their all to get that road repaired as quickly as humanly possible. Oh, did I mention that I accidentally dropped the bike in the inlet when crossing back? Oops.

Many readers may know that I have a real soft spot in my heart for animals. Driving home from Rodanthe one day, we saw a pelican, acting sickly and standing by the road. We caught it without much trouble. Donny tied a rubber band around the tip of its beak to keep it from biting, wrapped it in a towel to keep it still, and took it to Frisco where local wildlife rehabilitator, Lou Browning, could attend to him.

The bird was exhausted from the storm and unable to hunt. After much needed food and rest, it was released back into the wild. Lou’s rehab center had dozens of birds suffering as a result of the hurricane, mainly the ocean bird known as the shearwater. Many of these waterfowl were too far gone for Lou to save.

The morning following our bike ride to the inlet, I got a call that the house known as Tail Winds had collapsed. Tail Winds had become the first oceanfront house people saw after Serendipity was relocated. It was painted a beautiful shade of blue with lots of white trim. The windows had been boarded up for protection during the storm.

The house simply fell in on itself, according to witnesses. A surveyor heard a loud crack that caught his attention. He watched the house fall to the ground. We were surprised that this house collapsed because outwardly, it didn’t appear to be in peril, unlike several other houses that surrounded it.

The house and everything in it was smashed to pieces by the ocean that was churned up by Hurricane Katia, which passed offshore. The broken-up house and all of its contents covered the beach or washed into the inlet. A lot of this debris is buried under N.C. 12 today.

Our attention was quickly turned to Tail Winds neighbor, the Black Pearl. This oceanfront home was seriously listing. For days, we watched and photographed it as it continued to lean towards the ocean. But, the Black Pearl still had some life left in it and it held on. The owners were able to secure a permit to move the house back on that lot and save it. They are hopeful that it will be able to be rented by Labor Day weekend.

There were plenty of meetings to attend.

Warren Judge

County Commission Chairman Warren Judge traveled from Manteo to Hatteras Island often. He always parked his vehicle at Stumpy Point and walked onto the ferry, saving the valuable ferry space for someone who needed it. There was always someone to meet him and take him around. And the person was generally Allen Burrus, the commission’s vice chairman from Hatteras village. They were always around, meeting with the public and working hard for a quick recovery. One needs to keep in mind that Hatteras Island was only one of the areas in Dare County devastated by Hurricane Irene.

On Sept. 30, Gov. Beverly Perdue flew in to see the damage in the northern villages and talk with a few storm victims. Donny and I were lucky enough to ride around with her entourage and to have the opportunity to speak with her directly. She pledged her total support to put the island back to the way it was in spite of some of the opinions being talked about in the mainstream media that they shouldn’t build “the bridge to nowhere.” She was warm and approachable to the victims who wanted to speak with her.

The triumph of the human spirit is what powers people to do amazing things such as fixing what the storm ruined, and this needs to be the take-away from every article written about Hurricane Irene. Through it all, the island continues to recovers today. We still drive over a temporary bridge, and there are some people who still are waiting for their homes to be finished.

The seven weeks of isolation following the attack of Hurricane Irene was surreal and weird. We ate differently, our routines were disrupted, and clocks ran fast on generator power, gaining about a half hour per day. Light bulbs glowed and faded. Electronics worked most of the time but not always. It was January when the final repairs were completed on the electric lines that power the island.

In the end, my truck battery died prematurely probably from all those late nights working in front of the electric company with my laptop plugged into the cigarette lighter and air conditioning running on high. The bicycle that I dropped in the inlet at Mirlo Beach rusted pretty quickly from the salt water in spite of Donny’s efforts to clean it.

Unfortunately, the laptop didn’t make it. It held on until the bridge opened and with the job complete, it gave up and just wouldn’t turn on anymore. It had done its job well.

Second of three parts

Reprinted from the Island Free Press

Source: Weather.com

FRISCO — Even by Hatteras standards, Hurricane Irene, which hit the Outer Banks on Aug. 27 last year, was a real monster of a storm that even now continues to affect the island.

On first anniversary of the storm, I took a moment to reflect by reviewing notes I kept beginning with the evacuation and ending when the Pea Island Inlet Bridge opened about seven weeks later. It was an emotional read as I relived the memories of that time. There was a lot going on and so much to report that I had time only to write a part of what I reported or experienced.

Every aspect of Hurricane Irene took a long time.

When the storm finally started to impact the lower Outer Banks after dark on Friday, Aug. 26, residents had already had several days to prepare. An evacuation for tourists on Hatteras was ordered for Thursday, Aug. 25, and for residents on Friday morning, Aug. 26.

Those of us who stayed were calm but bored, waiting to get the storm over with. Donny, my husband and the Island Free Press photographer, and I drove around most of the afternoon looking for something to do — wind for windsurfing, waves for surfing, or even a story to report. Nothing much was happening.

We had electricity for much of the night and got to watch Island Free Press’ editor, Irene Nolan, get interviewed via phone by Greta Van Susteren on Fox News. Since Hurricane Katrina, there has been a lot of national media attention given to the folks who choose to not evacuate in the face of a hurricane, and Irene did a great job of explaining why we stay. The weather worsened overnight.

Gusty winds and driving rain can make for a fitful night’s sleep.

By Saturday morning, the electricity was long gone and it was time for camping coffee, which is made by slowly pouring boiling water over grounds in the coffeemaker. It takes a little patience, but it tastes unreal.

Strong northeast winds that preceded Irene blew water out of Buxton Harbor on Aug. 26. That’s never a good sign.

A gas station in Avon lost its canopy. Photos: Don Bowers, Island Free Press

With our personal gas-powered generator running to keep the refrigerator cold and a couple of lamps for our houseguests, Donny and I hit the road to do storm reconnaissance for the Island Free Press. At that point, there wasn’t a lot to report on. The winds were gusting off the ocean but not super strong yet. Rain came through in bands, which meant it either rained hard or not at all. The eye of the storm was getting closer but still not here.

We returned home for a while to wait some more and discovered our satellite TV worked, which enabled us to get some real-time hurricane updates. Forecasters were predicting the storm to impact the entire Atlantic seaboard from the Outer Banks all the way up to New England. All news stations had abandoned regular programming to bring millions of viewers the latest updates on the storm’s progress and evacuation orders were issued from several states. Intermingled with all the reports were newscasters demanding that everyone adhere to all evacuation orders, and they had unflattering opinions for those who would defy the orders.

Our next trip out, the winds had increased significantly but were still out of the east, which blew the Pamlico Sound dry. This is a huge concern for islanders because we typically get more flood damage from the sound, not the ocean. The easterly winds push the water west to the other side of the sound, which is more than 30 miles away. When the eye of the hurricane passes by, the wind usually shifts directions dramatically, which sends the piled-up water rushing quickly back across the sound and causes horrific flooding. This wasn’t a good sign.

In spite of this warning of things to come, islanders were out and about. People were snapping pictures and taking videos. There was some cell phone signal on the island, and folks were using their technology to upload images and information to Facebook to share. There were people shelling and scavenger hunting in the waterless sound bed.

Donny has experienced every storm since he moved here in 1966, and he kept watching the wind direction to judge the storm’s movement. It continued to stay easterly. As the day wore on, the skies got darker, the rains heavier and more frequent, and the winds got stronger. Before dark, we took one more trip staying away from areas prone to ocean overwash.

At this point, Hatteras had been in the hurricane for almost 24 hours and the worst was still ahead of us. Hurricane forecasters had delivered a troublesome forecast a couple of days earlier, predicting that this was the big one and to expect multiple inlets. Was this our last look at our island as we knew it? So far, the dunes had done their job and held most of the ocean back. But, the wind had started to switch more southerly. If the winds went due west quickly, we were in for some real trouble from the rapidly returning sound waters. But a slow shift in the wind direction might be our saving grace.

The ocean broke through the dunes in several places east of Hatteras village. Photo: Don Bowers, Island Free Press

The evening was rather pleasant as we rejoined our house guests who had evacuated to our home, which is high and dry by island standards. We enjoyed sandwiches and wine by the glow of the lamps, powered by the noisy generator that ran outside. On TV, weathermen continued to track the storm’s progress and we endured the newscasters who called us stupid for staying in the path of this powerful storm. I was able to get on Facebook with my cell phone and saw disturbing photos of the Colington Fire Department up the beach with its furniture floating inside the building. We then knew the soundside flooding had begun.

We charged our cells phones, laptop computer, flashlights, and camera batteries by the generator before we turned it off for a second night of restless sleep as our barricaded house kept us safe from the powerful tropical cyclone that churned loudly outside for most of the night.

Morning came early, and I made another delicious pot of camping coffee. It was still dark outside as we strained our eyes to see if our house was surrounded by water. Our canal had flooded 75 feet towards our house, but, basically, we were high and almost dry. The first light revealed a lot of tree debris but nothing catastrophic. The wind noise had stopped just an hour or two earlier. We took to the highway to see how the island had fared.

There really wasn’t much to report on in Buxton, Frisco and Hatteras. There was sound water on N.C.12 and there were indicators that the water levels in Frisco were about 2 to 3 feet high.

The high-water mark on my business building in Frisco was about the same as Hurricane Earl in 2011. Parts of Brigands’ Bay were still underwater and not passable. Further south, we traveled through the area where Hurricane Isabel had cut through Highway 12 in 2003, and the dunes didn’t completely hold. The road was passable with four-wheel drive, and as the road crews quickly worked to clear the sand, it was evident that the road surface was mostly unaffected.

Feeling like we had escaped the big one, we visited a friend in Hatteras who sat out in his yard reading his Bible and talking about the beautiful blue sky. In a moment of thankfulness, we reveled in our luck. With all the technology in the world, we sat alone on our island in bliss — unconnected, totally unaware how bad our neighbors in Avon, Waves, Salvo and Rodanthe had it.

We worked our way back to the north and saw that Buxton had its usual post hurricane problems and at first glance, the most noticeable damage in Avon was the blown over canopy at the BP Station at Askins Creek. However, news of the inlets was spreading and we wanted to investigate.

The National Guard arrived on Aug. 28 at the Hatteras Island Rescue Squad in Buxton. Photo: Don Bowers, Island Free Press

We drove a little north of Avon on a road that was too sandy and still underwater. Our gas tank was low, so we opted to go home and start fresh in the morning. At some point, we turned on the radio to a local station and learned lots from Dare County residents who called in with their eyewitness reports.

We were close to home when we saw something that stopped us in our tracks. The National Guard had arrived in great numbers and was unloading supplies at the Hatteras Island Rescue Squad in Buxton. Seeing the large group of men and women in military uniform moving large amounts of food and water, tarps, and medical supplies, was our first personal experience in how bad the situation was. A quick interview with incident commander Bob Helle confirmed it.

The northern villages were hardest hit and would receive the majority of the supplies. N.C. 2 was completely impassable and an emergency ferry would start bringing supplies from Stumpy Point into Rodanthe. Transportation on and off the island was not possible and an emergency medical team was flown in to help islanders since our local doctors were unable to get back on the island.

In that moment, everything changed as I realized again that this was no ordinary hurricane. It would be a long time before life would be back to normal. There would be no reason to reopen my business, even though there was very little damage done to the building.

Donny went home to work on his pictures with the help of our generator while I visited Irene Nolan at her house to report what I knew. We developed a plan to cover the storm. With no communications on the island, it was important to do our best to report what we knew. Without electricity, it may not be read by people who didn’t evacuate, but it was important for those who left to know how the island was doing from people who stayed.

I went home and my little laptop worked well off the generator. I wrote a short article about what I had seen during the day and what I heard from Bob Helle. We finished our work by midnight and drove to Buxton to the Cape Hatteras Electric Cooperative that miraculously had a working wi-fi signal. In the dark parking lot and in the cool comfort of my truck, I e-mailed my unedited story and Donny’s pictures to Donna Barnett, Island Free Press graphic designer and webmaster, who had evacuated to Raleigh, N.C., with her computer so she could keep the news going. This is how the newspaper published articles for the first few days directly following the storm.

At sunrise, Donny and I were standing by the breach at Mirlo Beach in Rodanthe. This is where we would spend the next few weeks.

• Island Free Press photo slideshow of Hurricane Irene

Reprinted from the Island Free Press

N.C. 12 near Rodanthe was a twisted mess after Irene.

RODANTHE — Transportation planners most likely will replace the temporary bridge over the N.C.12 breach on Pea Island with a permanent one at the same location, but it will still be months before the long-term fix is chosen for the highway breach in nearby Rodanthe.

Massive sound flooding from Hurricane Irene in August tore a jagged inlet through the road six miles south of Oregon Inlet and destroyed a huge section of N.C. 12 between south at the S-curves and Mirlo Beach.

After numerous meetings with teams of agency representatives and coastal scientists, the state Department of Transportation “conceptually” chose the alternative at Pea Island that will stay within the existing state road easement, Beth Smyre, a DOT project planning engineer, said recently.

The agency is still responding to some comments from the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies about the amount of analysis done at the site, Smyre said. She expects the alternative to be officially announced at the end of July.

The alternative in Rodanthe, however, won’t be decided until later this year, she said. “What we’re trying to do,” she said, “is move ahead with Pea Island first.”

The new bridge will be built adjacent to the temporary military bridge built after the storm. It will be longer and higher than originally proposed —- about 2 miles in length and 25 feet in the air — and will be designed similar to the replacement bridge planned over Oregon Inlet.

With a cost estimate of $100 million, DOT is in the process of incorporating the project proposal in the most recent Transportation Improvement Plan, Smyre said. The hope is to have a contract let by late December or early January.

As the second phase of the project to replace the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge over Oregon Inlet, the long-term solutions were pushed up in the plan because of the hurricane damage. Construction of a parallel bridge to replace Bonner Bridge, meanwhile, is expected to start by early January, Smyre said, depending on when the permits are issued.

Beach re-nourishment had originally been included in the proposed long-term alternatives at both breach locations, but was dropped by DOT in December because of the high cost, geological characteristics and lack of suitable sand sources.  Other alternatives at Pea Island that had been proposed were construction of a bridge to the west of the breach or moving the road to the west.

With beach re-nourishment eliminated, two options remain for Rodanthe: an elevated bridge within the existing right of way or a 2.5-mile span that curves out into Pamlico Sound and ties in south of Mirlo Beach.

But in a DOT report published, coastal experts take a dim view of the elevated bridge. The panel of eight coastal scientists and engineers met in October with 23 representatives of DOT and other agencies to discuss the proposed alternatives.

Irene blew a couple of new inlets into Pea Island. Photo: International Business Times

“The panel agreed that a bridge within the existing N.C. 12 easement/right of way is not the best long-term solution at the Rodanthe breach site because of the panel’s concerns that the high shoreline erosion rate in this area could be challenging,” the report said.  “The panel was concerned that the high erosion rate would ultimately result in the structure being in the ocean a notable distance from shore.”

But the panel agreed, the report continued, that a bridge built in the sound, west of the southern end of Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge and the northern end of Rodanthe “would be less vulnerable to potential future changes in Hatteras Island resulting from shoreline erosion and breach formation.”

The geology of the island between S-Curves and the Rodanthe pier makes the area one of the most vulnerable on the Outer Banks to future inlet formation, the panel said. If an inlet were created, either from storm-driven ocean waves or sound tide, it would tend to migrate south like Oregon Inlet.

Property owners in Mirlo Beach, a subdivision on the north end of Rodanthe, have mixed feelings about the sound bridge, said Wes Hutchinson, vice-president of the Mirlo Beach Homeowners’ Association, depending on whether they have soundfront or oceanfront property.  But still, no one is happy about the prospect of a bridge in the ocean, an inevitability of the right of way alternative.

“That bridge would be on the beach and in the surf rapidly,” he said. “That bridge I think would destroy Rodanthe.

“The 2.5-mile bridge that goes out into the sound — in some ways that may be better,” he said. “At least there will a beach there.”

Mirlo Beach was slammed by sound tide during Irene and suffered severe damage, partly because DOT’s sandbags along the ocean redirected the water.

The association and seven property owners who had damages ranging from $30,000 to $70,000 each — not including their interiors — have been considering taking legal action against DOT, said association president Jim Meyer.

But even if a lawyer agreed to do a lawsuit on a contingency basis, there would still be considerable cost, he said.

“It comes down to how much money do we want to continue to spend on this?” Meyer said. “I get the sense from some homeowners, ‘It’s done. Let’s move on.’”

Meyer said that the association spent about $180,000 to replace and repair damage to the road and other infrastructure, which was covered by homeowners’ fees and lot assessments. As a consequence, many feel tapped out.

“It’s probably not fair to put that burden on the homeowners’ association,” he said. “I hate to give up, but it’s like pouring money into a hole.”

Hutchinson said he understands why everyone in Mirlo feels exhausted, emotionally and financially. Yet, not taking action does not resolve anything.

“My concern is the next time there’s soundside flooding,” he said, “it’ll happen all over again.”

This story is provided courtesy of The Island Free Press, an online newspaper serving Hatteras and Ocracoke islands. Coastal Review Online is partnering with the Free Press to provide readers with more stories of coastal interest.