The North Carolina Division of Coastal Management has issued a permit for the proposed mid-Currituck bridge that would connect mainland Currituck County and its barrier island beaches.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality on Friday announced that the division had issued a Coastal Area Management Act dredge and fill law permit and that, in a separate action, the agency’s Division of Water Resources had issued a Clean Water Act Section 401 water quality certification for the toll road and 6.7-mile-long bridge.

The project will connect the mainland at U.S. Highway 158 near Aydlett to the Outer Banks near Corolla with two-lane bridges spanning the Currituck Sound and Maple Swamp.

As previously reported in Coastal Review, the project has received wide support from Dare and Currituck counties and most Dare towns, though residents of Currituck County communities on either side of the bridge have expressed concerns about the impacts of more traffic on the neighborhoods’ infrastructure, environment and quality of life.

The N.C. Department of Transportation/North Carolina Turnpike Authority submitted the CAMA permit application one year ago. The Division of Coastal Management accepted the application as complete early this year.

CAMA Major/dredge and fill law permits must be obtained for projects that cover more than 20 acres, include activities that require other state or federal permits, or for construction covering more than 60,000 square feet.

Clean Water Act Section 401 water quality certification determines whether a project complies with state water quality standards.

The Division of Water Resources issued a certification for the project with conditions, which include an agreement to offset unavoidable impacts to wetlands by creating, restoring or enhancing wetlands elsewhere from the construction area.

The applicants are also required to mitigate unavoidable impacts to submerged aquatic vegetation by monitoring for the effects of shading and replacing or restoring impacted vegetation as close to the area as possible.

“The certification also includes a condition that the applicant must submit an update to the project stormwater management plan prior to construction,” according to an NCDEQ release.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation is temporarily suspending the Currituck-Knotts Island ferry route over the next several days while the fender systems at both terminals are replaced and repaired.

The route is to resume service the weekend of June 28-29. Service is scheduled to fully resume July 3, the state agency’s Ferry Division announced Wednesday.

The fender system includes the rubber materials installed on terminal pilings to protect boats and pilings while vessels are docking.

For real-time text or email updates on weather or mechanical delays, sign up for the Ferry Information Notification System at www.ncdot.gov/fins. 

DUCK — Fifty years after the need for a bridge between mainland Currituck County and its barrier island beaches was first identified, and 30 years after a draft planning document for the proposed mid-Currituck bridge was first released, a recent public meeting revealed that the same issues are still being vigorously debated, costs have skyrocketed, and funding is still lacking.

Even with the green light in 2019 to finally begin the permitting process, the project continues to face considerable hurdles, including stark disagreement in the communities the bridge would connect.

Attendees at a recent hearing in Duck told state officials the bridge was needed to relieve the bumper-to-bumper traffic that clogs the only thoroughfare to the Currituck Outer Banks.

“Residents are literally trapped in their homes,” a woman from Southern Shores, a northern Dare County town, told state officials during the March 18 hearing held by the state Division of Coastal Management. “This is not just an annoyance. This is a safety risk. Getting people evacuated would be virtually impossible.”

The bridge project has received wide support from Dare and Currituck counties and most Dare towns.

But those who live in Currituck County communities on either side of the bridge — Corolla and Carova at the beach and Aydlett on the mainland — lamented the impacts of even more traffic on their neighborhoods’ infrastructure, environment and quality of life.

“Yes, we have a traffic problem,” commented Corolla resident Barbara Marzetti, a co-founder of the citizens group No Mid-Currituck Bridge, or NoMC, during the Duck meeting.

The bridge would make the situation worse, she added. If the bridge is built, the people will come. And then more people will come.

“It’ll bring more development,” Marzetti said. “Right now, we have an environmental disaster with the water and septic issues.”

Marzetti, who is also president of the Corolla Civic Association, said North Carolina’s northernmost barrier island communities can’t take “dumping all those people here.”

“We’re already overtaxed in terms of infrastructure here,” she told Coastal Review in a later interview. “There will be day trippers up the gazoo.”

Another public hearing on the proposal has been scheduled for 5-7 p.m. April 16 at the Currituck Extension Center, 120 Community Way in Barco, on the mainland side.

Although folks on the mainland are also worried about increased traffic, the Currituck Outer Banks is a more fragile environment that is home to a national wildlife refuge and wild mustangs. Even though the northern Outer Banks are less exposed than the southern communities on Hatteras and Ocracoke islands, the area is still vulnerable to intense tropical weather and coastal storms.

According to the North Carolina Department of Transportation, the proposed bridge is needed to provide an additional hurricane evacuation route to meet the state standards of 18 hours to evacuate an area. Once built, the bridge would offer a 40-mile shortcut to travelers, saving as much as two hours one-way during peak tourism months.

In 2022, the Currituck County Department of Travel and Tourism estimated that 500,000 travelers visited the county during the 10-week peak summer travel season each year. It would be a good bet that nearly all are heading to the Outer Banks, where they’ll end up on N.C. Highway 12 — also called Duck Road along this stretch — and likely stuck in gridlock.

NCDOT data shows the average summer weekend traffic in 2017 on two-lane N.C. 12 in Southern Shores was 22,236 vehicles. More recent DOT traffic counts were not readily available.

The proposed project includes a 4.66-mile-long bridge across Currituck Sound and a 1.5-mile-long bridge across Maple Swamp on the mainland side in Aydlett, about 25 miles south of the Virginia state line. On the Outer Banks side, the bridge would tie-in at Corolla, a popular upscale resort community renowned for its shopping, big houses, wide beaches and charming historic village. Just to its north, 11 miles of unpaved sand roads wind through the tiny community of Carova, where the wild mustangs famously roam free.

Currituck County records show 57 applications in Carova for new single-family dwellings since January 2015.

Although Currituck County Planning Director Bill Newns said he didn’t have the exact percentage of buildout in the completely off-road beach community, there were originally thousands of large lots, but there had been no new real subdivisions.

“Pretty much, it’s all been platted out … some of that stuff goes back to the ’90s, ’80s, and before then,  that were already platted out,” he told Coastal Review.

“Typically, all those roads are private,” Newns said, “The county doesn’t have control of them.”

Longtime Carova resident Jay Laughmiller, who owns a water-treatment business and is also the volunteer fire chief, said he has seen firsthand the wear and tear on the community from the thousands of summer visitors. He fears that the “already controlled chaos” would be exacerbated by the bridge.

“It would not be good for the area,” he told Coastal Review. “Yes, it would grow the economy, because it would bring more people here. But the infrastructure itself can’t handle too much more.”

In the last decade or so, Currituck County has successfully marketed tourism by featuring captivating photographs of the horses frolicking on Carova’s wide-open beaches. Consequently, wild horse tours are one of the most popular attractions for visitors. Tourists and property owners are also allowed to drive on beach corridors and the unpaved roads, which has inevitably created conflicts and hazards for both horses and people.

With Carova’s beaches becoming parking lots every summer, the county in recent years instituted a permit system to control the beach traffic.

Impacts from the crowds are seen not just in rutted roads or damaged dunes; the volume and intensity of such growth is overwhelming the environmental balance.

Unlike neighboring Corolla, Carova has no stores, restaurants, public water, visitor facilities or wastewater systems. But it does have numerous single-family homes, most small and modest but with a few of 20 or more bedrooms.

Laughmiller said that septic systems and water from private wells, both subject to state regulations, are increasingly being compromised. Local rules allow placement of wells on a site to be determined after, rather than before, the house and septic, he said. Although septic must be at least 50 feet from the well, he said, leaving the well selection last can limit the quality of the well water.

“There’s no aquifers  there — it’s all groundwater,” Laughmiller said.

Sometimes the water is too salty or has high levels of arsenic, iron, tannin or other unwanted stuff, or is stinky from sulfides, Laughmiller said.  But current regulations, he said, look only at certain levels of bacteria before permitting a well.

Climate change effects such as rain deluges and drought, as well as increased impermeable surface coverage resulting from development, make it harder to cope with the challenges. Already, floodwater has to be pumped off the roads after big storms. Without improvements, Laughmiller said, problems with septic intrusions into well water “is only going to worsen.”

Currituck Sound is also vulnerable to climate impacts.

Julie Youngman, attorney for the nonprofit Southern Environmental Law Center, speaking at the Duck hearing, said the proposed bridge location crosses environmentally sensitive areas.

“I tell you, the ends of the bridge are going to be under water because of sea level rise before they find the money to pay for it,” she said.

The law center has represented the No Mid-Currituck Bridge group in an unsuccessful federal lawsuit challenging the bridge construction. The court ruled last year that the NCDOT had followed the law in issuing its 2019 record of decision, but the legal group is keeping its eye on the project during the permitting process.

In 2012, the project was estimated to cost $660 million, and somehow went down to $489 million in 2018, then to as low as $440 million, until soaring up to its current estimate of $1 billion.

Private-public partnerships, managed by the North Carolina Turnpike Authority, part of the state Department of Transportation that manages toll roads, have been on, then off, then on again, with unconfirmed speculation that a proposed toll would be about $50 round trip.

Youngman, who noted that her family had long vacationed on the northern Outer Banks, said that there are other less expensive and less environmentally damaging alternatives that NCDOT has not pursued, including construction of a flyway at the intersection of the U.S. Highway 158 Bypass and N.C. 12 in Southern Shores.

Logen Hodges, director of marketing and communications at the North Carolina Turnpike Authority, said the latest finance plan had not been finalized, but it is likely to include federal and state funds and toll-backed debt.

After applying for a competitive $425 million federal grant to fund some bridge costs, the agency was informed last October that it was not chosen for the award.

“The team is still evaluating all potential funding sources to deliver the project,” he responded in an email. “The toll revenue projections will be updated over the course of the next year with updated traffic and revenue forecasts. That analysis would also inform potential toll rates. Actual toll rates would not be set until much closer to the project opening.”

Comparative analysis is ongoing to evaluate whether to deliver the project as a “a traditional toll project,” or as a public-private-partnership toll project, he said.

The Albemarle Rural Planning Organization in August 2024 gave its approval to the Turnpike Authority and NCDOT to continue development of a potential private-public partnership, which was initially authorized only from 2009 to 2014.

In addition to a Coastal Area Management Act, or CAMA, permit, various other permits are required, including from the state Division of Water Resources, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Coast Guard.

“We will be in a better position to provide an updated project schedule after all environmental permits are received,” Hodges wrote. He added that all right of way parcels have not yet been purchased.

Newns, Currituck’s planning director, said the county has not yet done a detailed plan to address the projected boom in growth if the bridge is actually built. And after hearing talk about it since the 1980s, he wasn’t going to speculate on the chances of construction.

“I don’t have an idea, because every time you think you’re a little closer to it, it takes a step back,” Newns said. “So yeah, I couldn’t honestly answer that question.”

A public hearing on the Coastal Area Management Act application for the proposed mid-Currituck Bridge project is scheduled for next week.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management has set the hearing for 5-7 p.m. March 18 at Duck Town Hall, 1200 Duck Road.

The application was submitted to the division Jan. 7 by the N.C. Department of Transportation and N.C. Turnpike Authority. A copy of the application may be viewed at the division’s office at 400 Commerce Ave., Morehead City during normal business hours or online.

The proposed bridge would span over Currituck Sound from Aydlett to south of Corolla. The project includes roadway improvements in Currituck and Dare counties.

Speaker registration will open one hour before the March 18 hearing. Depending on the number of registered speakers, comments may be limited in time at the discretion of the hearing officer.

Written comments may be mailed to Tancred Miller, Director, Division of Coastal Management, 400 Commerce Avenue, Morehead City, NC 28557 or emailed with the subject line “Mid-Currituck CAMA application” to DCMcomments@deq.nc.gov.

The public comment period closes April 17.

The division said it will consider all comments when making its final permit decision, which, once made, will be provided upon written request.

COROLLA — Officials with the Donal C. O’Brien Sanctuary and Audubon Center at Pine Island hope to add to their toolkit for mitigating the effects of sea level rise on marsh environments with help from a recent $3.05 million grant.

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation awarded the money to the sanctuary in Currituck County in late 2024, “to fund innovative marsh restoration pilot projects.”

Marsh islands that once protected Currituck Sound shorelines along the Outer Banks and in mainland Currituck County are disappearing. The marsh itself is retreating, and slowly, incrementally, Currituck Banks are becoming narrower.

The marsh, in order to grow as water levels change, needs a steady supply of sediment, but the main source of that supply has been choked off by efforts to control ocean beach erosion.

“By fixing the (Outer Banks) in position, we are limiting these over water dynamics,” Dr. Sid Narayan, assistant professor in the East Carolina University Department of Coastal Studies, told Coastal Review recently. There is still sediment that comes from rivers, but, he explained, “that’s more limited.”

Pine Island Audubon Center Director Robbie Fearn has spent more than 10 years on Currituck Sound, and he has seen the effects Narayan described.

“You don’t get the overwash anymore,” Fearn said. “A lot of what we’re struggling with out here is that we don’t have much sand. It used to be, with barrier islands all being barren, the sand would just blow in. Now it doesn’t blow in, so there’s no sand source from here, either overwash or blown sand. It’s a real challenge.”

Narayan said the situation is not hopeless, but it does require new ways of thinking. Fearn agreed.

“I  think what we need to get creative with is to find ways in which we can start to introduce as much of these ocean-to-sound dynamics as possible,” Fearn said, retrieving a U.S. Geological Survey map from a drawer, spreading it across a table and pointing to a series of small islands of the Currituck Sound marsh called Shoe Hole Bay.

“All of this area out here is falling apart. It’s not much of a bay anymore,” Fearn said.  “Once we lose those, then all of this inner marsh complex gets exposed to that high fetch, and this is where the marsh birds like to nest, in protected high marsh.”

Fearn then moved his finger across the map, pointing to an island opposite from Shoe Hole Bay that forms the eastern boundary of Poplar Branch Bay and the community of Walnut Island that borders it.

“This island, Marsh Island, actually protects all of Walnut Island from storm surge,” Fearn said, noting that on the north end of the island the waters of Currituck Sound are “trying to break through.”

‘Years of hard work’

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, or NFWF, is a nonprofit conservation organization that Congress created in 1984. A 30-member board of directors approved by the Secretary of the Interior governs the private organization.

The NFWF grant is the latest in a series of grants awarded to the Pine Island site for restoration. In 2019, the North Carolina Attorney General’s office awarded an Environmental Enhancement Grant to the Audubon Society that created the framework for the NFWF grant.

“This is the culmination of many years of hard work and partnership across many different organizations and engineering firms and researchers,” said National Audubon Society Senior Coastal Resilience Program Manager Cat Bowler.

Those organizations will be invaluable in moving a project forward that will look to new ways to approach restoring the marsh.

“These projects are some of the first of their kind in Currituck Sound and in some cases, in the state of North Carolina. We want to do everything that we can to learn as much as we can about these marsh restoration techniques so that we can share what works well and what doesn’t work well,” Bowler said.

One of the issues confronting marsh restoration in Currituck Sound is that it is an environment unlike almost any other. Techniques that may have been successful in the Pamlico or Albemarle sounds often will not work at Pine Island.

“The majority of these coastal restoration projects, particularly in North Carolina, have been done in saltier-water environments, so they tend to depend heavily on oyster reefs and that sort of thing. In this very low-salt environment (at Pine Island), nobody really knows what works,” Fearn said.

The grant calls for Audubon to test and evaluate three different approaches. Two of the methods that will be tested are deemed low-tech and inexpensive. For Fearn, that is particularly important. He said that, although the testing will be done at the Pine Island marsh islands, if successful, they could offer less-costly restoration alternatives to surrounding areas.

“We really wanted to pilot some techniques that perhaps a farmer could use to protect their fields or some other landowner could utilize to protect their property that was not at that high price point of a living shoreline,” he said. “If you’re putting in rock or you’re putting in those vinyl breakwaters, the vinyl breakwaters are probably $125 to $250 a linear foot (to build). Well, if you got a lot of shoreline, you’re talking $100,000.”

The two less expensive systems that are being used are, according to information from Audubon, “coir logs, which are made of woven, biodegradable material and are placed on bare mud in front of a marsh to help dampen the force of waves,” and “pine tree breakwater(s) will be created by laying recycled trees between pilings in front of marsh islands.”

The coir logs are a coconut fiber log, and if the technique works, could be a simple method to rebuild the marsh in the right circumstances.

“We are looking at things like the coconut fiber log, because that can be installed, once you have the permit, by anybody,” Fearn said.

The pine tree breakwaters are a more complex installation, but still relatively low cost, especially compared to a living shoreline.

“The Christmas tree breakwater is a little more advanced, but once again, it’s low-tech installation,” Fearn said, explaining that after pilings are in place, “you place the Christmas trees.”

But, he added, there is research that has to be done.

“Does having that much pine in one area create a change in the water chemistry in that area?” was a question Fearn posed.

Perhaps the most ambitious — and expensive — method funded is thin-layer placement.

Thin-layer placement is a “novel technique,” Bowler said, “which has been used successfully in other coastal states, but is still very new in North Carolina.”

Audubon describes the technique as applying dredged sediment in thin layers on the marsh surface. This has been successful in Louisiana and other coastal states, but has not been tested at scale in North Carolina. The process, which requires dredging silt and placing it in the marsh environment, is significantly more expensive and requires far more technical expertise than either coir logs or pine tree breakwaters.

Marsh Island, where it borders Walnut Island and Poplar Branch Bay, was identified as the site to test the thin-layer component. When first conceived, planners looked at Oregon Inlet as a source for silt, but “it was just terrible for the ecology and the cost for moving all that sand up here was ridiculous,” Fearn said.

Instead, the dredging will happen at two locations much closer to the marsh and will have added benefits, Fearn explained.

“We wanted to have community benefits as well. We’re in a place with lots of channels, (and) we found just north of the Poplar Branch boat ramp is a shoal area. In fact, they’ve got markers to warn people,” he said. “If we can lower these shoals, we have a navigational benefit and the Walnut Island community has these channels that are silting in cleared.”

The grant project is still in its initial stages. Permits are still needed and it may take longer than usual because of the experimental nature and because regulators and Audubon want to be sure it is be done correctly.

“The regulators are very much interested in these projects, because they are groundbreaking in many ways, and we need as many tools in the toolbox as we can get to address these changes that are happening to our coast,” Fearn said.

“We’re very much committed to working in partnership with the regulatory community to make sure that we get these projects right, and that we learn as much as we can from these pilot techniques,” Bowler added. “We are planning to have those permits in hand by summer. That’s our goal.”

State transportation officials are asking permission to disturb wetlands in Currituck Sound associated with construction of the proposed mid-Currituck bridge project.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation and the North Carolina Turnpike Authority are proposing the 7-mile project to connect U.S. Route 158 on the mainland and N.C. Highway 12 near Corolla on the Outer Banks.

Work on the project to build the controlled-access toll road and two bridges is proposed to begin in June 2026 and is expected to disturb wetlands and submerged aquatic vegetation, according to the application.

NCDOT and the turnpike authority submitted to North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Resources in September 2024 the state 401 water quality certifications under the federal Clean Water Act.

The certification is required for federally permitted or licensed activities, including construction or operations of facilities that could result in a discharge to navigable waters.  

“The proposed project’s water quality impacts include fill material placed in and along the west bank of the Currituck Sound to stabilize the shoreline in the area of the bridge, as well as fill material in jurisdictional wetlands in Maple Swamp or Great Swamp,” the division said in a release.

The project is expected to permanently impact 1.21 acres of wetlands, more than 17 acres are expected to be temporarily disturbed, and there are predicted impacts to submerged aquatic vegetation, the division continued.

As part of the approval process, the division is holding a public comment period with a deadline of 5 p.m. March 31. A public hearing is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. Feb. 27 in the Currituck County Center in Barco.

The public can submit written comments until 5 p.m. Monday, March 31.

Comments may be sent by email to publiccomments@deq.nc.gov, with “Mid-Currituck Bridge” written in the subject line.

Comments submitted by mail should be addressed to Garcy Ward, Division of Water Resources, 943 Washington Square Mall, Washington, NC 27889.

NCDOT’s application and the public notice from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Wilmington District are available online.

Undergraduate students who spent their fall semester studying Currituck Sound may have broken new ground in understanding the effects of controlled burns on a marsh island.

For the project, students compared vegetative changes to the marsh islands with the Audubon Pine Island Sanctuary and Center in Currituck County that have no history of recent fire, islands that are occasionally burned, and islands that have had frequent controlled burns.

The students presented their findings “The Sound of Change: Responses to Controlled Burning and Other Changes in the Currituck Sound,” Dec. 12 as part of the monthly Science on the Sound lecture series at the Coastal Studies Institute, or CSI, on East Carolina University’s Outer Banks Campus.

The students conducted the research project as part of the Outer Banks Field Site, or OBXFS, a semester-long, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill undergraduate program hosted each fall by CSI.

Controlled burns are part of a fall tradition that existed well before the first European set foot upon the North American continent and “has deep historical roots in the South, where the practice was quickly adopted from the Indians by early European settlers,” according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service research.

While there have been a number of studies examining how a controlled burn effects a marsh, delving into a fire’s impact on invasive species, soil accretion, plant diversity and potential of endangering some animal species, this research takes a different approach.

The study “was one of the few that worked in brackish marshes, and the students talking to stakeholders and users of the marsh about the changes they perceived is also something that’s, I think, unique to the study,” Outer Banks Field Site Director Lindsay Dubbs said during the presentation.

The students included a human dimension and interviewed people who use the Currituck Sound frequently about the environmental changes they feel have taken place.

For their field work, the students traveled to marsh islands within the boundaries of the Pine Island site and compared the effects of controlled burning on marsh vegetation.

The islands were divided into three groups. The control islands had “no historical data of any burns happening,” explained sophomore Lily Bertlshofer. “Our occasional sites were last burned in 2021 and our frequent sites have data being burned every year.”

The study was designed “to look at how controlled burns impact the allocation resources within marsh plants and soils, the impacts of controlled burning on the vegetation community of marsh and what the implications for marsh resilience are,” Berlshofer said.

The study confirmed that the long-established practice of prescribed burns benefit vegetative diversity in marsh inlands.

At first glance there does not appear to be a significant difference in plant diversity among the three areas.

“We found that there was no statistically significant relationship between species richness and burn frequency,” said Veronica Cheaz, a sophomore.

That finding was expected. Because the number of plants that can live in a salt-to-brackish environment is limited, diversity is relatively low.

“Generally, we found low species richness at all of our plots, which is not very surprising,” Cheaz said. “We have a brackish marsh in the Currituck Sound, and there’s not going to be very many species.”

What the study did identify, though, was how effective controlled burning of a brackish marsh could be in maintaining the habitat.

“We also looked at salinity tolerance,” Chaez said, which “is going to be influential in determining how effective these sites are at adapting to environmental stressors like sea level rise and a rise in salinity. We found that occasionally burned sites had the highest scores compared to our control sites, and we hypothesized that this is because occasionally burned sites have a balance of the disturbance periods and restoration periods that allows salt water species to move in.”

There was at least one surprising finding. When the living root systems, or the biomass, of the three sites were compared, the frequently burned areas have statistically greater biomass than either the control or occasional burn areas.

Pointing to a graph showing more than double the biomass of an occasional site, senior Katelin Harmon, majoring in environmental studies and political science, described the finding that “frequently burn sites were much higher,” as “one of our most interesting findings…There’s much stronger root systems in our frequently sites.”

Verdant and complex, the Currituck Sound marsh is somewhat unique. The nearest saltwater source is Oregon Inlet some 55 miles to the south of the study area at the Pine Island Audubon site. The salinity there is typically under 3 parts per thousand, or ppt, and at times lower.

“The low salinity makes these places special, and we refer to that as an oligohaline environment,” junior Thomas Ferguson said during the presentation.

Currituck Sound has not always been an oligohaline, or a low-salinity, environment. Throughout the colonial period and into the early 19th century, there were two inlets on the north end of the sound. Currituck Inlet across from Knotts Island was open until the 1730s. New Currituck Inlet just to the south, opened soon after that, closing in 1828. Until New Currituck Inlet closed, the north end of the sound was a high-saline brackish marsh.

With the closing of the inlets, Currituck Sound transitioned to an oligohaline marsh and migratory waterfowl began arriving by the hundreds of thousands, creating a hunter’s paradise.

“In 1828 the Currituck Inlet, at that time composed of salt water, was closed by a storm and the vicinity gradually became fresh water. This change allowed vegetation such as wild celery and eel grass to grow on the marsh bottom and this new vegetation attracted wintering fowl in greater quantities than before,” The National Register of Historic Places noted in its assessment of the Currituck Shooting Club.

The Currituck Shooting Club, founded in 1857 “by a group of business men in New York City,” the assessment wrote, was the first of numerous hunting clubs that lined the shores of Currituck Sound. The building was completely destroyed by fire in 2003.

The Pine Island Club was formed in 1910. In 1979 the last private owner of the club, Earl Slick, a Winston-Salem developer, donated 2600 acres of marsh and uplands to the National Audubon Society. In 2009 Audubon North Carolina assumed full-time responsibility for the managing the club.

Hunting is still allowed on the property, but according to at least one of the hunters the student researchers interviewed, it falls well short of what it had once been like.

“It really doesn’t have any ducks compared to when I was young, when I was your age, this place had ducks. This place doesn’t have anything anymore,” the researchers were told.

In a question-and-answer session following the presentation, Pine Island Site Manager Robbie Fearn noted that the statistical biomass findings at the frequently burned areas was inconsistent with what was visually happening.

“I’m at the Pine Island Sanctuary,” he said. “The areas that are frequently burned from my lived experiences are falling apart, and yet the data says that for longer term management, frequent burning may be better… Is it a question of the plants are responding to the frequent burn by trying to survive and creating more below-ground biomass.”

For Fearn, who was very complimentary of the work the students did, the inconsistency between what he has observed and what the statistics say is a jumping off point for much needed further research.

“The work that these students have done have really set us up to dig in and figure out how best to manage these marshes in the sound and I’m very thankful for their work,” he said.

Coastal Review will not publish Jan. 1 in observance of New Year’s Day.

The last “Science on the Sound” for 2024 will give the public an opportunity to learn more about an undergraduate research project on elements of the Currituck Sound.

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute for the Environment’s Outer Banks Field Site students are scheduled to present their findings at 4 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 12, in the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus.

Science on the Sound is an in-person lecture series that brings perspectives from all over the state and highlights coastal topics in northeastern North Carolina. The public is welcome to attend the about 90-minute program at no charge. It will also be live-streamed on the CSI YouTube channel.

Outer Banks Field Site program is a semester-long, interdisciplinary residential learning experience for undergraduate students hosted by the Coastal Studies Institute. Each fall since 2001, the students have spent the semester taking classes, engaging in internships with local organizations, and completing a Capstone research project as a group.

This year, the students addressed for their Capstone research project the elements of the Currituck Sound, including how prescribed fire is used as a management tool in marshes and how different stakeholders think about Currituck Sound and their place in it, including the changes they have observed and experienced.

Last in a series.

Stretching north from the Wright Memorial Bridge at Kitty Hawk to the Back Bay of Virginia Beach, Currituck Sound was, at one time, the crown jewel of the Atlantic Flyway.

A large, freshwater estuary teeming with subaquatic vegetation and dotted with innumerable low-lying islands and marsh habitat for ducks, geese and swans, migratory waterfowl by the hundreds of thousands flocked to its waters every fall and winter.

By the early 20th century, market hunting and dozens of hunt clubs that placed no limit on the number of birds that could be taken sprang up and wiped out the population of waterfowl that migrated to the sound’s waters.

Those days are now the stuff of history and legend. Migratory waterfowl counts have plummeted. But now, researchers and conservationists from different organizations and fields are working together with a plan to restore the marsh habitat and make it more resilient – a blueprint that resulted from several years’ worth of pilot projects.

Audubon North Carolina, the state affiliate of the National Audubon Society, notes that at the Donal C. O’Brien Jr. Sanctuary at Pine Island, “waterfowl populations in the 1970s were around 300,000, recent surveys in Currituck Sound have counted only around 30,000 birds.”

Although bag limits have been in place for some time, balancing the take of hunters with the ability of waterfowl to repopulate, migratory waterfowl have not returned to their historic numbers. The reasons are complex, intertwined with an ecosystem that is unlike almost any other estuarine system anywhere.

Robbie Fearn, director of the Pine Island Sanctuary, recently described Currituck Sound for Coastal Review, noting how different it is from other estuarine systems.

“I don’t like to use the word unique, but it’s an unusual system in that it’s primarily freshwater,” he said, adding that the nearest ocean outlet for the sound’s waters is some 25 miles south at Oregon Inlet.

“The dynamics of the system are very unusual in that it is a giant shallow bathtub. And the water is sloshing around in it all the time. Most marsh systems don’t have this level of dynamism,” Fearn said, adding that it is “a really unusual system to be working in and exciting because every question is still ready to be answered.”

The environment, however, is not the only complex system to navigate in addressing how restore Currituck Sound’s restoration. Its shores include lands that are parts of Currituck County, the town of Duck and those managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the North Carolina Wildlife Commission.

To navigate the issues involved among multiple entities, Audubon in 2019 formed the Currituck Sound Coalition, a partnership that includes 14 members representing local governments, state and federal agencies, and research and educational institutions. The North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, is part of the coalition.

In 2020, the North Carolina Attorney General’s office awarded Audubon North Carolina a $98,000 Environmental Enhancement Grant, or EEG. The work on the grant has been completed, but the grant was invaluable in creating a framework for marsh restoration and resilience, said Audubon Senior Coastal Resilience Program Manager Cat Bowler.

“The EEG funds allowed us to work with the Currituck Sound Coalition to develop the Marsh Conservation Plan for Currituck Sound. It also helped us to conduct a site analysis at Pine Island Sanctuary and start to develop the project concept for the marsh restoration pilot projects that Audubon is still working on with partners to this day,” Bowler said. “It really laid the groundwork for us to launch this work.”

The Currituck Sound Coalition Marsh Conservation Plan is a working publication that outlines how the group will work together to restore the waters of the sound. In the document’s “process overview,” the role the EEG played is specifically cited.

“In 2019, Audubon received funding from the North Carolina Environmental Enhancement Grant Program to support the coalition in developing a marsh conservation plan for Currituck Sound. A working group was formed to lead the planning process with partner members,” the plan’s authors wrote.

The plan outlines a wide scope of objectives to address sea level rise, erosion, invasive species, declining water quality, and loss of biodiversity — some of the issues listed that are known to affect Currituck Sound marshes.

“The beauty of the EEG funding was that it allowed us all to work together to share the knowledge we’re all developing separately and come together,” Fearn said. “I think it creates shared understanding. It created this connective tissue.”

The grant funding did more than create a communication network. The Audubon Society was also able to examine and compare different methods of marsh rehabilitation.

“The EEG actually funded a series of four pilot projects,” Bowler said. “Pilot marsh restoration projects looking at different types of living shoreline techniques, but also looking at more innovative restoration techniques like thin layer placement, where you take sediment and put it in thin layers on the surface of the marsh to help it accrete with sea level rise over time.”

Those research projects may prove to be critical in how much funding Currituck Sound restoration and resilience projects will be able to access. One of the partner organizations of the Coalition is Dr. Reide Corbett and the Coastal Studies Institute.  Corbett, the institute’s executive director, explained the significance the research that is now being done will have in the future.

“When it comes to any sort of resilience, some of it’s education, but a lot of it’s going to come down to funds, (and) the fact is, you can’t get those funds until you really understand what the problems are and where the problems really need to be addressed,” Corbett said.

The EEG projects, though, are not close-ended programs, rather the nature of the projects and the way in which the money has been administered has created additional opportunities to develop strategies for marsh restoration.

Bowler said the EEG funds in combination with money from other state sources, the North Carolina Land and Water Fund and the Clean Water Management Trust Fund, as well as from Northwest National Coastal Resilience Fund, “and all three of those grants supported different elements of this project,” Bowler said. “To be able to bring the three different funding sources together to help enhance our partnerships in the region and also get some of this work planned and designed on the ground, I think that’s been a huge success.”

DUCK   — North Carolina’s jutting elbow coastline is a distinctive feature on maps of the U.S. Atlantic coast. What is less obvious is that the vast amount of water behind those skinny barrier islands is the second-largest estuary in the lower 48 states.  But somehow, comprehensive scientific analysis into the impacts of sea-level rise on that enormous system does not exist.

The Army Corps of Engineers has launched a $1.3 million research project  in Currituck Sound to address the deficit of long-term data in understanding not only impacts of climate change on the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary, but also the multitude of environmental stresses compounding the estuary.  The shallow, wind-driven Currituck Sound in the northeast corner of the coast flows into Albemarle Sound.

The corps installed five large monitoring platforms holding a range of instruments, including video cameras, in different locations in the sound to collect data on hydrodynamics, contaminants, nutrients, sediments, salinity, algae content, pH levels, wind and water temperature. Changes in seabed elevation and dimming of light as it moves through water – called “attenuation,” by scientists – will also be measured.

“The idea is to measure all kinds of physical and biological processes that go along the axis of the sound,” said Heidi Wadman, a research oceanographer at the corps’ Field Research Facility in Duck on the Currituck Banks.  “It’s pretty unique. There’s no monitoring network like this in an estuary, in terms of scope, amount of data and the spatial set-up.”

The project, one of the largest single estuarine monitoring efforts in the nation, is seeking to fill gaps in data that was often inconsistently collected during numerous studies and research projects on the sound. Eventually, data trends will fill in blanks and answer questions.

A big impetus for the project, Wadman said, was the need to understand how to predict and mitigate the effects of rising seas and increasing storm surge on wetlands and sounds, where saltwater intrusion and shoreline erosion are already altering the ecosystem. There has also been increased turbidity and pollution that are changing the ecosystem.

“There’s no regular monitoring of shoreline position in Currituck Sound – or anything physical,” she said.

Little is understood about how sediment and water move through the sound and how the estuarine responds. “What are the waves doing? Are the contaminants coming downstream? What are the phytoplankton pollutants? How much and why?” Wadman asked.

A 2014 report by the U.S. Geological Survey, found numerous examples of gaps in data collection in the estuary related to water quality, submerged aquatic plants and physical factors. Politics, staff changes and budget cuts have conspired to limit the amount of information, the study noted.

“The negative impacts of sea-level rise may intensify other coastal hazards, such as flooding, storm surge, shoreline erosion, eutrophication, and shoreline recession, especially during extreme climatic events,” the report said.  “Coastal managers need accurate information about the potential effects . . . to help plan and prepare for them.”

Wadman said that information collected from the platforms will be helpful immediately in understanding storm surge. But it will take 30 years, she said, to see trends that confirm accelerated sea-level rise.

A corps draft study of Currituck Sound in 2011 found worrying changes in salinity and water quality that had diminished the amount of submerged plants. After the last inlet in the banks closed in 1828, the sound became mostly freshwater, but polluted stormwater runoff has adversely affected wildlife and the ecosystem, the report notes. Though it was never made final, the report warned that without action there would be large losses of marshland, increased erosion, impaired water quality, decreased water clarity, increased algal blooms, wildlife habitat losses and greater amounts of invasive species.

The corps’ Duck pier station, on the Currituck Sound north of Duck, has conducted the longest-running coastal monitoring program anywhere in the world, Wadman said, but it focused on the ocean. The new monitoring platforms are designed to collect the same level of data on the sound.

“We’ve got the expertise,” she said. “There’s a need and there’s a gorgeous estuary right out our back door.”

Unlike previous studies of Currituck, this one will have longevity, Wadman said, because the corps intends to seek continued funding.

It also plans to make real-time data available to everyone, she said. Analyzed data will be posted hourly, probably starting in the summer, on the corps’ Duck pier website. The raw numbers will also be available by request, Wadman said.

“This is going to attract researchers from all over the world,” Wadman said. “Oh, yeah. An estuary like this? Definitely. The tricky thing is you have to measure it a long time to start to see the trends.”

Monitoring has been done for years by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency in the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary, but the Corps’ project, Wadman said, will use higher-resolution equipment, have more stations and collect more data.  The goal is to install five more stations beyond Currituck Sound when money is available.

The five platforms – pilings, deck, solar panels and boxes containing the “brains” – have all been installed. Arms that extend up to 12 feet beyond the platforms will be added to hold the instruments. In the near future, Wadman said, cutting-edge instruments like a water level sensor that use microwaves and an acoustic fish tracker, will likely be added to platforms.

Robbie Fearn, director of the Donal C. O’Brien Jr. Audubon Sanctuary and Center in Corolla, helped organize in 2014 the Alliance to Restore Currituck Sound. A steering committee has held monthly meetings, and a community-wide session will be scheduled in the spring.

“I think it’s critically important to understanding the dynamics of the sound,” Fearn said of the corps’ project.

Fearn said that the data collected will be useful to nonprofit organization, government agencies and homeowners who live along the sound.  “It will give us a full picture of the dynamics of that environment and what we need to do to care for it,” he said.

The Albermarle-Pamlico National Estuarine Project, funded by grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has created a map of submerged plants in Currituck Sound and conducts diving surveys of the beds on a regular basis, said Director Bill Crowell.

Crowell said one of the goals of the partnership, of which the corps’ Duck Pier is a member, is to increase the research and study of the estuary, and he welcomes the corps monitoring project.

“We have a much greater need for data than exists right now,” he said. “The more they can gather, the better.”

Learn More

• USGS report
• Army Corps of Engineers 2011 study
• Duck Pier Facilities Research Center
• Alliance to Restore Currituck Sound