As North Carolina’s population grows, local and state governments, elected officials, educators and nonprofit groups are bracing for the demands more residents will put on the state’s already taxed and aging water infrastructure.

The 2026 Emerging Issues Forum: Future Forward Water held Feb. 25 brought together these decision-makers and advocates to forums in Morehead City, Winston-Salem and Asheville, where they could share their challenges, ideas and solutions regarding the often-unnoticed necessity.

The forum featured several speakers, including Gov. Josh Stein, and group discussions that focused on four main challenges: aging infrastructure, resiliency, the water workforce crisis, and maintaining safe and reliable water systems.  

In a video message, Stein said that North Carolina’s water infrastructure faces serious challenges. The American Society of Civil Engineers recently graded the state, giving it a C-plus on drinking water, C-minus on stormwater, and a D-minus on dams and on wastewater.

“Storms like Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Matthew, Hurricane Florence and tropical Storm Chantal damaged wells and water systems across the state, leaving many communities without clean water,” he continued. “At the same time, continued population growth in some of our areas require expanded service and new infrastructure. Life sciences, companies, data centers coming to North Carolina also require large amounts of water to operate, further straining our infrastructure. Many rural communities struggle in aging systems and limited financial capacity. Contaminants such as PFAS further poison our water supply. We must take all of these challenges on as a clarion call.” 

Usually held in Raleigh, this year’s forum was hosted in the three locations to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Emerging Issues Forum, the idea of the late Gov. Jim Hunt, who died in December. Institute for Emerging Issues, established in 2002 at North Carolina State University, hosts the forum. The institute “is a nonpartisan connector, bringing North Carolinians together across sectors, regions and perspectives to address the state’s most significant challenges while advancing its economic competitiveness.”

Sandra Merkel DeJames, who is a member of the Institute for Emerging Issues National Advisory Board, explained to the more than 100 attending the Morehead City forum that the challenge being addressed that day is how to keep up with the unprecedented population growth facing the state. Population growth is the topic of the three-year Emerging Issues Forum series that kicked off in 2025, and focused on energy infrastructure. Next year the event will address housing.

“Last year, the state added an average of 400 new residents every day. That’s over 145,000 people by 2050. Some 14 million residents will call our state home, compared to the 11.2 million today,” said DeJames, who is president and CEO of Harmonize Strategy Group.

“People are moving to North Carolina for work, education, our climate and a host of other reasons,” she continued. All of these “new residents will need access to housing, energy and water that’s safe and affordable. They’ll need transportation and broadband and all of the other critical infrastructure needed to support a thriving economy, like childcare, healthcare, public safety and education.”

Companies are moving to the state as well, she continued.

“We’ve been named the best state for business in three of the past four years by CNBC. Once here, they too need infrastructure to support their operations,” DeJames said. “As to those businesses already here, this population and business growth will not be even across the state, or even within this region, but all areas have infrastructure needs, and we must now meet them.”

DeJames continued that forum organizers spent the last year learning more about the state’s water issues, “and we’ve learned the following: Water is a truly hidden infrastructure.” But, it is also the “most local form of infrastructure.”

The state is one of 10 with more than 5,000 public water systems – it is closer to 6,000 — and that number does not include the more than 2 million people who use privately owned wells and septic systems.

While water issues vary by region, there are common themes.

“First, our water infrastructure is aging,” DeJames said, despite some of the largest increases in water infrastructure spending in recent years.

“One conservative estimate is that we need $20 billion in new investments for drinking water and $21 billion in new investments for wastewater treatment and sanitary sewers in the coming decades, left unaddressed, our state’s economic vitality and public health are at risk.”

Next is the need to treat water for new contaminants.

“The emergence of new contaminants that can impact our health, such as PFAS, and the additional billions of dollars in cost to treat them will further compound financial pressures on our water systems and our customers,” DeJames said. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are long-lasting chemicals found in water, air and soil that are linked to harmful health effects.

Third, the state’s water infrastructure is too vulnerable.

“The damage done to wells and water systems from Hurricane Helene, Tropical Storm Chantal and other storms add to longer-term challenges to water and wastewater systems across the state. We need to increase our infrastructure’s resiliency,” she said.

“And finally, we need more workers in the water sector. There is significant shortage of qualified workers as the current workforce ages out, and not enough new workers to enter these fields.”

N.C. State’s Peter A. Pappas Real Estate Development Program Director Chuck Flink expressed similar points in a message delivered to all three forum locations via video.

The state’s population is expected to grow by between 3 and 3.5 million people in the next 25 years, and the growth is not going to hit North Carolina in a uniform manner. “A lot of it’s going to congregate in our two metro areas, which we expect to grow by more than a million people each in this 25-year period,” Flink said.

Wake County currently is the third fastest growing county in the country, averaging around 65 to 75 people moving there each day. It is the most populated county in the state. Charlotte is currently the sixth fastest growing city in America, averaging around 65 residents a day, and it’s the 15th most populated city in the country today, Flink continued.

By the year 2050, 75% of all residents will live in cities, and that’s a new phenomenon for the state, and at the same time, while we have this population growing, the state is experiencing population loss, with 41% of North Carolina’s municipalities in decline.

“We have vast swaths of our eastern part of our state and some portions of our western counties that are losing population,” Flink said. “In fact, we have a band of counties that stretches from the Virginia border to the South Carolina border, where we need more population, we need more economic opportunity. So it’s not a real simple picture there.”

He paused to say that he loves that the state is a collection of small communities, “and yet some of these small communities, especially in the eastern part of the state, are literally being abandoned due to population loss.”

“In North Carolina, 50% of us derive our drinking water from underground reservoirs, aquifers, and when we look at other elements of our water infrastructure, our water and wastewater systems are antiquated and they’re failing,” he said.

In some cases, there has been an overall decline in water quality across the state because of drought, overconsumption, and pollution, including forever chemicals.

The people that manage water infrastructure are aging as well. More education and training is needed for a new workforce to manage the infrastructure going forward.

However, Flink said he’s optimistic about where the state can go.

“It really begins with planning. Planning for growth. How do we want to grow? I think that’s the ace of spades that we control,” Flink said, adding that growth can be controlled and that’s how these challenges will be met.

There were four panel discussions throughout the day. The panels each had participants represented different sectors who shared the hurdles they’re facing, their frustrations and ways they’re navigating these challenges.

Martin Doyle, professor of River Systems Science and Policy at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, explained that water systems are not supported by general tax revenue, but are covered by the funds generated by billing its customers.

The UNC School of Government surveyed water systems around the state, and found that less than a quarter of those water systems actually collected sufficient revenue to be considered economically viable.

“They’re not collecting sufficient revenue to cover their costs as well as to cover the cost of preventative maintenance,” Doyle said. “The challenge for this is that we have a large number of water systems that are operating right at the financial threshold. They’re just getting by” and unable to keep up with preventative maintenance.

East Carolina University Water Resources Center Associate Director Samantha Mosier said that there are a number of ways to solve some of the state’s problems. She encouraged raising awareness about infrastructure needs, but the “real solution” is to help municipalities establish or join a regional authority.

“Most small local governments in North Carolina have their own water and wastewater system because that was part of becoming a town, years and years ago when we had lots of population,” Mosier said. “But in the eastern part of the state, we’re seeing that loss of the population.”

With the population dwindling, utilities are losing their customer base, making it no longer feasible for every small town to maintain a water system. Encouraging regionalization brings folks together to have those conversations. 

“To me is that next critical strategy we’ve got to embrace as a local, regional and state level,” she said.

Belhaven Town Manager Lynn Davis said that Beaufort County town’s obstacles are many, including a limited budget. “How do we not just look at the day to day, not just look at the infrastructure that we have, but how do we plan for if something breaks and that’s a challenge that faces us.”

She said staffing is another challenge. Half of the town’s staff could retire right now, and it won’t be easy to replace those workers. “You just don’t find people that have the knowledge and the skills.”

Cape Fear Public Utility Authority Security and Emergency Manager Craig Malone said when it comes to tackling these issues, “it’s not the plan itself that we need to focus on, it’s the process of planning. It helps us look at these contingencies, look at these risks, and our options to address these emergencies.”

He incorporates resiliency planning into his capital improvement plan. “Now you don’t have to stop and plan for emergency. Now you don’t have to stop and plan for that resiliency action or that upgrade to your facility.”

Nags Head Mayor Ben Cahoon said the town has 3,000 year-round residents, and around 45,000 in the summer time, and 80% of the properties have on-site septic systems. On a summer day, millions of gallons of water goes through the houses and into the septic systems.

“At the same time we have sea level rise, which is bringing the water table up under those wastewater systems, causing them to perhaps function less effectively. And then we get a storm, and you get a lot of water in those ditches and in the ground, and you can imagine the dynamics of what’s happening in the ground.”

Cahoon said the town has to plan for these issues.

“We do integrate drinking water, wastewater, stormwater, capacity into our zoning, development/redevelopment decisions. We do that by tying our infrastructure capacity directly to our long-range planning and adopted master plans and our resilience strategies, rather than treating any of these separately. So in Nags Head, our land use and development decisions are guided by the town’s comp plan.”

To address the retiring workforce that most local governments seem to be facing, some town leaders are changing how they recruit. For example, Maysville Town Manager Shcumata Brown said they’re looking for employees who have the aptitude to learn and not focus on certain certifications.

Perry Harker, vice president of Workforce Continuing Education at Carteret Community College, said that students aren’t hearing about this type of career, and the college is trying to introduce students to water and wastewater industry opportunities.

Compounding these issues is water quality.

Ben Farmer, planning and development services director for Upper Coastal Plain Council of Government, said raw water is pumped to a treatment plant, and that water has to fall within certain threshold or maximum containment levels. The systems, regardless of the town or city’s size, have to make sure that drinking water is up to that very extreme standard to keep the water safe.

Cape Fear Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette told the attendees that many residents get their drinking water from rivers — the Cape Fear River basin provides about one in five residents with the drinking water – and “protecting rivers is the single most effective way of protecting drinking water supply and reducing infrastructure costs for communities, period.”

Jacksonville Stormwater Manager Pat Donovan-Brandenburg said that we all need to be part of the solution.

“Each one of us impact stormwater. Meaning we have a home, we have a car, we have a road to get to and from work. I challenge all of us to look at our individual yards, our individual businesses,” she said.

“What can we do to disconnect our stormwater runoff from ever making it out to the storm drain in the road and out to a stream? Can we get it to infiltrate instead of making it to our surface waters? Making it to our surface waters does not recharge our aquifers, and we need to recharge aquifers in order to have the drinking water,” she said. “There’s the connection. So can you disconnect your storm drains or your gutters and put it into your landscape beds? Can you put in an infiltration trench? Can you put in a rain garden or rain barrel? Everybody’s yard, everybody’s business counts toward stormwater runoff, so we can all be part of the solution,” she reiterated.

There’s so much technology out there, so ask your engineer to think outside of the box. “Yes, it may cost a little bit more, but if you’re building there for the rest of your life, invest in your community. Because that’s what it is. We’ve got to invest in our neighborhoods, invest in our communities. So my message is very simple, reduce the storm water that you’re creating individually off your own property, and collectively, we will make a difference.”

North Carolina State Continuing and Lifelong Education is readying for the 72nd annual Sport Fishing School in Hatteras this June.

Founded in 1952 as a collaboration between N.C. State’s Department of Zoology and the College Extension Division, the immersive five-day experience combines classroom instruction with hands-on training, offering participants ages 18 and older the opportunity to study under some of the most experienced captains on the Carolina coast.

Two days of classroom instruction cover equipment, technique and the ecological dynamics of North Carolina’s coastal waters, followed by two days of Gulf Stream fishing excursions and a half-day inshore fishing excursion.

This year’s instructional team included captains Rom Whitaker and Brian Taylor, both seasoned captains and longtime mentors.

“Every year, we see people come in as hobbyists and leave as part of a tradition,” Whitaker, who has been part of the Sport Fishing School for more than three decades, said in a release. “This program connects people not just to fishing, but to the history and rhythm of the Carolina coast.”

Taylor, who joined the program as an instructor in recent years, said its about more than catching fish. “It’s about understanding the environment, the teamwork on the boat and the responsibility that comes with being out on the water.”

For registration details, program schedule and instructor bios, visit lifelonglearning.ncsu.edu/sport-fishing-school.

County Soil and Water Conservation Districts are accepting applications from high school students for a scholarship to attend the 2026 Resource Conservation Workshop, June 14-19 at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

The Resource Conservation Workshop is a weeklong intensive study for students to learn about natural resources and their management in today’s environment. Students participate in field study, tours, hands-on sessions, and activities that focus on college-decision making and career decisions, according to the workshop’s website.

Workshop students stay on N.C. State’s campus in dormitories and attend workshop sessions in Williams Hall, Lake Wheeler Soils Field Lab as well as field studies at Falls Lake State Recreation Area and Clemmons State Educational Forest in Clayton.

Rising 10th through 12th graders interested in the workshop should contact their county’s Soil and Water Conservation District representative for an application, which should be submitted no later than March 31.

The Resource Conservation Workshop is sponsored by the Division of Soil and Water Conservation of the NC Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the Crop and Soil Sciences Department of N.C. State University, and the N.C. Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts in conjunction with the Hugh Hammond Bennett Chapter – Soil and Water Conservation Society of America, N.C. Soil and Water Conservation Commission.

A powerhouse in the marine science and coastal management community, Dr. B.J. Copeland, 89, died Wednesday, Jan. 14.

Copeland left a lasting impact on the state as the director of North Carolina Sea Grant, a N.C. State University professor, and through his work with the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership. He served on the Marine Fisheries Commission, and was on the committee that drafted what is now the Fisheries Reform Act of 1997.

Copeland spent his childhood, along with his three siblings, on the family farm in rural Oklahoma. He earned his master’s and doctorate at Oklahoma State University, where he met his wife of more than 60 years, Jean Van Nortwick. They married Jan. 26, 1963.

He relocated to Texas in 1962 where he was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Texas Marine Science Laboratory at Port Aransas.

In a 2016 interview for the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center’s Coastal Voices Project, Copeland said his “Ph.D. degree is in Limnology, the study of fresh water. So, I went to the University of Texas to see if salt water was the same as fresh water and indeed it is, except for a little bit of salt!”

He moved to Raleigh in 1970 for an associate professor position at N.C. State. Copeland said in the Q&A that he moved to North Carolina mainly because of the beginning of a marine science program jointly between N.C. State, the universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wilmington, and Duke University.

“We were trying to start a graduate program in Marine Science and so I was a researcher and a professor in the Zoology Department, Botany Department, and the new Marine Sciences program,” he said, adding that the new marine sciences program eventually became the Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at N.C. State. 

In 1973, he took on a new role as the director for what was then the North Carolina Sea Grant institutional program, explains an article on the 25^th anniversary of the program in the October 2001 issue of N.C. Sea Grant’s Coastwatch magazine.

Congress established the program in 1966, and began awarding grants in 1968. Sea Grant then became part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, that was formed in 1970. UNC Chapel Hill administered the Sea Grant institutional program from 1970 to when Copeland took over and relocated the program to Raleigh.

“In truth, if Sea Grant wasn’t invented in 1966, someone would invent it today. People depend on Sea Grant for good information and to help them survive,” Copeland said in the 2001 article. “You can’t argue with priorities when they are to improve the quality of life and enhance economic opportunities. That’s what Sea Grant is all about.”

Copeland said that in the early days of trying to gather input on research and extensions needs, he talked with a man who working his eel pots and crab pots. Copeland said he asked the waterman what the program could do for him and the man responded, “’Sounds like you guys are just looking for something to do.’”

Copeland got the message, though. For Sea Grant to be accepted, the program would need to be relevant and deliver good information, he said in the article.

He began hiring staff who brought in their own experiences, leading the program to marine advisory work, promoting shellfish culture, addressing seafood processing issues, developing seafood recipes, outreach efforts, and research.

When Copeland took over the program in 1973, his goal was to elevate N.C. Sea Grant from an institutional program to be designated a Sea Grant College Program, which happened in July 1976. The program also got a budget of $1 million.

The federal-state partnership was supported with $2 in federal funds for each $1 in state funding, but in 1980, Sea Grant was zeroed out of the federal budget, leading to Copeland spending many days in Washington getting the Sea Grant message out, according to the 2001 article.

He said at the time that it wasn’t a stretch to show that Sea Grant was worth something and worth keeping.

“The direct impact was evident in the growth of the extension program. Initial work in fisheries and marine education were soon joined by aquaculture and mariculture. Coastal processes work increased, as did coastal law and policy efforts,” the article explains.

Copeland left Sea Grant in 1996 and began serving as graduate administrator for the Zoology Department at N.C. State. He retired from the university in 2002.

Current N.C. Sea Grant Executive Director Susan White told Coastal Review that she was fortunate have had Copeland as an early and regular mentor when she joined the North Carolina Sea Grant program as director in 2012.

“We had great lunches together, sometimes here in Raleigh sometimes closer to his home, and his knowledge of the intricacies of a statewide program that evolves regularly with the pressing needs of the times was relevant and timely as I was still learning the many paths for NC Sea Grant,” White said.

“B.J. always had great stories to tell about his time with NC Sea Grant, the challenges of federal funding support ebbing and flowing, the great characters of each of the team members, and his enjoyment of his time with the program. B.J. joined us for retirement parties and program reviews throughout the past decade, keeping his finger on the pulse. His practical advice, and huge laughs, were wonderful to be on the receiving end of,” she continued.

Copeland’s work with what is now Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuarine Program predates his time with Sea Grant and, once he began directing Sea Grant, his partnership with APNEP grew.

Copeland said in a Q&A with the program that he “was involved with APNEP before it was APNEP – before it even existed, in fact.” APNEP is an effort to understand, protect, and restore natural resources of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system in North Carolina and Virginia, its website explains.

The only National Estuary Program in the 1960s was the Chesapeake Bay. In the late 1960s, “somebody got the happy idea that Congress ought to have an annual or biannual report on the status of the nation’s estuaries, so they commissioned one,” Copeland explained.

He went to Chapel Hill in 1968 to work on a report on the nation’s estuaries. He and the late Dr. Howard Odom wrote “Coastal Ecological Systems of the United States.”

“To do research for it, we went to every state and gathered material that had been written up or stuck in a drawer, and we took that data on coastal systems and turned it into a book. It was the first work on the status of the nation’s estuaries,” Copeland said.

A handful of Congressmen in the 1970s, including Walter Jones from North Carolina, who was chair of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, pointed out that there’s an estuary in North Carolina.

Copeland continued that the whole setup of the National Estuary Program was changed to include not only Chesapeake Bay, but also other estuarine systems. The Albemarle-Pamlico system “includes a lot of water and a lot of territory – we were known as the second-largest ecosystem on the East Coast.”

In the early 1980s, work began on establishing the Albemarle-Pamlico as a National Estuary Program, and he helped form the first technical committee. “In 1987, we got the first grant for the program – for the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuarine Study (APES). We were a part of the National Estuary Program, authorized by Congress earlier that same year,” he said.

At the time, there were water quality problems that he described as “astronomical,” with algal blooms in the Chowan River, Albemarle Sound and Pamlico River. The Neuse River had fish kills.

“We had a crisis. You couldn’t sell seafood for a year, so we had to solve this problem. You’ve got to turn this thing around or the seafood industry is going to go down the tubes – that’s the reason for the program. But what people sometimes forget is that you can’t do all this at once. You’ve got to prioritize, you’ve get something understood and you find out it’s really connected to something else over here – it’s not easy,” Copeland told APNEP. “And so, we began to work. We had technical committees and proposals for projects and for priority research, and things began to trickle into state policies and state government.”

After the technical committee completed the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuarine Study and produced the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan for the region in 1994, the project was renamed as the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuarine Program. In 2012, program was changed to partnership.

Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Attorney Derb S. Carter Jr. told Coastal Review that Copeland was leading the state’s Sea Grant program when the Coastal Area Management Act was enacted in 1974 and when the Albemarle Pamlico Estuarine Program launched. 

“Effective environmental and natural resource programs must be based on sound science.  We are all fortunate that B.J. was passionate about ensuring programs to manage our coastal resources incorporate the best science,” Carter said.

It was also in the 1980s when Copeland was appointed the first time to the Marine Fisheries Commission, and eventually helped draft the Marine Fisheries Reform Act in the 1990s.

In the 2016 Q&A for Carolina Coastal Voices project, Copeland said he became involved with fisheries management because Sea Grant has programs on commercial fishery, recreational fishing, interactions, management of fisheries, how things worked, and could translate research into management.

“And I got into fisheries management for real when I was appointed to the Marine Fisheries Commission in the 1980s, under the so-called, ah, Egghead Commission,” he explained, adding he served on the commission for four or five years before it dissolved.

“I mean, the state government decided that commissions weren’t really the way to go, so the Marine Fisheries Commission was actually dissolved and they started over again. And so there was legislative action to create a new commission, which kept getting things added to, and added to, and added to until we have a 19-member Marine Fisheries Commission,” he explained. This was in the mid-1980s.

“And that was also a disaster, because 19 people can’t make any kind of decision,” Copeland said.

The committee argued a lot and “what happened with the Fisheries Moratorium Act, I mean–that was one of the factors, that we had an unwieldy commission — no way to get there — we had regulations right and left, none of which were related to others. People were kind of fed up with the whole idea,” Copeland said. The fisheries moratorium “came because they wanted to stop, look, consider, and really come up with something. And so, we had a three-year moratorium on anything; on any regulation, on any activity, any new activity. And that resulted in the Fisheries Reform Act.”

The North Carolina General Assembly approved in 1994 the moratorium on selling any new commercial fishing licenses and established the 19-member Fisheries Moratorium Steering Committee to study the state’s coastal fisheries management process and recommend improvements.

The committee issued a draft report in late summer 1996, held 19 public meetings statewide, and adopted a final report in October 1996 that formed the basis for the Fisheries Reform Act, which was signed into law Aug. 14, 1997, according to the oral history project, calling it the “most significant fisheries legislation in NC history.”

Copeland was on the moratorium steering committee and as director of Sea Grant, he said he represented the research and information side.

As part of the moratorium, Copeland said, funds were appropriated for research that was administered through N.C. Sea Grant college program, and “I think I knew about all of the players. So, communication and interaction amongst the players was also important, and Sea Grant played a role in that, as well.”

Another part of Sea Grant’s role was to get the information out broadly and quickly, Copeland said they did that through a network “and we traded on two very important elements: one of them was the truth. If you’re a bearer of the truth, you usually get along pretty well. And so we had a reputation for doing that. And secondly, we thought that information was a necessary ingredient for anything we did. And so, we were doing that, too. It was kind of a natural fit.”

The committee was tasked with creating parameters for a Marine Fisheries Commission that “could actually function,” Copeland said, trimming it down from 19 to nine. The commission has three people from the commercial interests, three people from recreational interests, and three at large, all appointed by the governor. He served on the newly structured commission for 12 years.

Copeland said in the Q&A that “we were purveyors of the truth. We had a reputation of, you know, you can come and ask Sea Grant a question, you were going to get an honest answer. And so we could be a player without taking a side. And that was really important, because most people take sides somewhere, sometime. And so we worked very hard at not taking a side.”

He lamented that fisheries is going to take a hit because of misinformation, in the 2016 interview.

“Some of these environmental issues, which are going to get scuttled because of some misinformed position, somebody who’s more powerful than somebody else will get their way and so on. I mean, they practice the Golden Rule, you know: them what’s got the gold, rules. So, you know, I think things are going to get worse before they get better. I keep thinking that, one of these days the general public’s going to wake up and say, ‘We need to get rid of this bunch!’ but that’s not happening,” he said.

After the Fisheries Reform Act, Copeland said in an interview that he went back to the academic department at N.C. State and taught a couple of courses, retiring in 2002.

North Carolina Coastal Federation founder Todd Miller told Coastal Review that Copeland influenced the direction of coastal science and management in North Carolina for more than half a century.

“After ‘retirement,’ he continued to shape coastal policy and practice as a member of the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission, an active participant in the Albemarle–Pamlico Estuarine Partnership, the Coastal Habitat Protection Plan process, and numerous other civic efforts,” Miller continued. “He built a Sea Grant program in North Carolina that earned international respect and, importantly, translated coastal research into practical solutions for real-world management challenges. Through his leadership and service, he profoundly influenced efforts to protect and restore the North Carolina coast and left it stronger for future generations.”

He and his wife owned a farm near Apex from 1978 until 2002 and later a farm near Pittsboro, according to his obituary, and he found joy in gardening and farming.

“For many who knew and loved him, B.J.’s deep voice and his loud belly laugh will always be remembered. His excellent memory and quick wit made him an entertaining teller of stories and jokes. We can only hope that some of us can tell them as well as he did. B.J. will long be remembered with gratitude, admiration, love and a big smile,” his obituary states.

His memorial is at 2 p.m. Friday at Pleasant Hill United Methodist Church in Siler City.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in memory of B.J. Copeland to: Boys & Girls Homes of North Carolina, P.O. Box 127, Lake Waccamaw, NC 28450, or Pleasant Hill United Methodist Church at P.O. Box 1322, Pittsboro, NC 27312. Arrangements are by Donaldson Funeral Home and Crematory.

A group of North Carolina State University researchers has created a model that simulates wind, waves, tides and currents to help pinpoint areas that are likely best to install offshore energy facilities.

The model, called a portfolio optimization framework, also identifies what combination of wind and marine hydrokinetic technologies, which capture energy through water flow, may work together in an area to produce the greatest amount of power.

“It’s not about only one type, but multiple sources of generation that can somehow work together to generate a more stable output of your portfolio,” explained Dr. Anderson de Queiroz, co-author of the study and associate professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering. “For example, if you think about the single source, let’s say offshore wind or wave energy, they have lots of variability with respect to their supply because it depends on natural conditions. It depends on wind speed or the ocean heights and in periods, so it’s variable.”

By locating areas where different offshore energy technologies can work together, a phenomenon researchers refer to as “complementary behavior,” power companies can get the most bang for their buck.

For context, picture an offshore field of 50 wind turbines. Within that field are marine hydrokinetic devices such as wave energy converters or underwater kite turbines that generate electricity from ocean currents and tidal streams.

“When you’re collecting the electricity, instead of collecting only from wind with transmission lines, you can also collect electricity from this other source. So, the electricity that you’re bringing to shore in that situation will be more stable because of the complementary behavior between the sources,” de Querioz said.

For the developer trying to explore and analyze where they can get the most power output possible, this model could help reduce their financial risk.

“For government analysts and planners, they can also see strategically where there are regions that would be beneficial in terms of most electricity that they are able to get to at a reasonable cost and that’s away from, for example, protected habitat areas or away from strategic areas” used by military forces, de Querioz said.

The team of researchers, with support from the North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program, conducted an analysis for the North Carolina coast, focused on wind turbines and marine hydrokinetic kites.

But de Querioz points out that the model they have developed can be used globally and with any combination of technologies. And, he said, it may be applied onshore.

The research team is in the process of expanding its analysis to other regions, including the coasts of New Jersey and Virginia.

The project, which is through the Atlantic Marine Energy Center and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, will use the portfolio optimization model to support bringing electricity to the East Coast through the Eastern Interconnection.

The Eastern Interconnection spans from central Canada east to the Atlantic Coast, south to Florida and west to the foot of the Rockies. It is one of two major power grids.

Researchers will pair the portfolio optimization framework with another model known as Tools for Energy Model Optimization and Analysis, commonly referred to as Temoa, which produces long-term analyses of energy systems.

“We are going to combine analysis from this offshore portfolio with the long-term energy planning for the Eastern Interconnection,” de Querioz said. “Basically, we’re looking at the entirety of the Eastern Interconnection, and then deploying not only offshore energy, but also looking at natural gas potential, new nuclear or the potential to have energy storage, onshore solar, and things like that.”

The team is also working with the North Carolina Renewable Energy Program this year to develop an adapted design for a wave power buoy called Reference Model 3, or RM3, that converts wave energy into electrical power.

“On these, we’re going to do more specific and detailed analysis for the North Carolina coast with this new design of wave energy converters,” de Queiroz said.

He is extending an invitation to collaborate with industry, government and other scientists with an interest in the model. The model is expected to be released sometime this year. Anyone interested may contact de Queiroz by email at ardequei@ncsu.edu.

“Fused Portfolio Optimization for Harnessing Marine Renewable Energy Resources” was published in the journal Energy earlier this month.

N.C. State doctoral student Mary Maceda is a corresponding author of the study. Co-authors of the paper include Rob Miller, a doctoral student, Victor de Faria, a recent doctoral graduate, Dr. Matthew Bryant, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the university, and Dr. Chris Vermillion with the University of Michigan.

A team has scheduled two discussions for later this month to hear from Ocracoke residents their thoughts on the challenges associated with changes to the physical environment the island is likely to experience.

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, Duke University and East Carolina University researchers have already completed a multiyear research project that simulates how the physical landscape such as beaches, shoreline, dunes and marshes of Ocracoke Island may change in the future because of road management decisions.

The team now is looking to hear from residents their perspective on meeting these challenges, particularly to transportation and accessing the island.

Sessions are scheduled for 1-3 p.m. Friday, Jan. 30, and 10 a.m.-noon Saturday, Jan. 31, at the Ocracoke Community Center. Reserve a spot to join the discussion. Participants must be an adult residing in Ocracoke.

“We’re conducting community deliberative dialogues to better understand your unique perspective about the challenges Ocracoke faces due to increasing environmental hazards,” researchers said. The two “events are a part of a research study to gain a better understanding of how communities demonstrate scientific literacy, within the context of coastal resilience issues and solutions.”

A deliberative dialogue is a structured discussion, moderated to help foster open conversations and provide an opportunity to share and hear different perspectives.

K.C. Busch, who can be reached at kbusch@ncsu.edu, is leading the study titled, “Redefining Scientific Literacy At The Community Level.”

Most often, when we talk about fishing, it’s the physical aspects we are concerned with: how to catch, what to catch, etcetera? But what about the metaphysical? The Why.

The Why is at least as important and, in many aspects, quite a bit more. The Why is what gets us going when the 4 a.m. alarm rings, or weather decides to be uncooperative. If the Why is not strong, the What will not even be a concern.

There are as many reasons why people fish as there are fish. They are varied and interesting. Every person has a different reason, and all are valid, ranging from simple escapism to the most complex mindset. It’s important to so many. Let’s take a little journey to the hearts of some extraordinary individuals.

In communications with anglers across the country in a variety of disciplines we will find certain differences and similarities.

Escape

Tim Brooks of Syracuse, New York, was a hard-hitting college linebacker who is now a leading member in his community. He is an accomplished lake-run rainbow trout fisherman. Those fish, commonly known as Great Lakes steelhead, are a mystery to unlock that provides exciting times during drab winter seasons.

Tim says he mainly fishes, “so he won’t become homicidal.” Now that’s a joke, of course, but the kernel of truth here is the getaway from the events of the day. It’s similar to what Paul Gilbert of Wilmington says.

As well as being a state champion lacrosse coach, Gilbert teaches middle school social studies, and he says he loves to fish because, “There are no eighth graders there.”

He loves his students as they do him, but we all need the separation.

Another good category is where all the world’s cares melt away.

Steve Feinberg has been retired for a few years now from his career as a highly successful advertising executive in New York, and he and I used to fish together often. He talks about how, “Fishing takes him to beautiful places and the world contracts to whatever is on the end of his line.”

Focus

Rob Snowhite is well known podcaster who produces “The Fly Fishing Consultant” podcast.

“Fishing is the one thing I can do where it’s the only thing I’m thinking about,” says Snowhite.

Interestingly enough, Norman Maclean writes in “A River Runs Through It and Other Stories,” “That the best part about fly fishing is that soon the world contracts to thoughts of nothing but fly fishing.”

Understanding

There are those who take a more deeply philosophical angle. One is Capt. Joe Demalderis, who owns a fly shop, outfitting service, and is generally considered to be the guru of the fly fishing community of the Upper Delaware River on the New York-Pennsylvania border. He says that the fish understand him better than he understands himself.

“When I’m lost in my thoughts on the water it’s nice to know that something gets you,” says Demalderis.

Kesley Gallagher is one of the leading female voices in the world of fly fishing. She says she loves fishing because it feeds her soul.

“I love the way the fish reflect the beauty of the area,” says Gallagher. “Like a trout reflects the light of the mountains and a marlin encapsulates the sapphire depths of the ocean.”

These are the kind of rhapsodic experiences we need in our lives.

Chris Desosa is a freshman at North Carolina State University. He’s a leader amongst his peers in athletic and academic pursuits and sure to be an amazing teacher, coach and educational administrator someday when he graduates from being in the education fellow scholar program.

“I fish because it brings me closer to the outdoors with the creations and the beauty of life,” says Desosa. “Being on the waves in a boat, or standing in a creek surrounded by nature, is more calming than any pastime I know. There is nothing like it.”

The challenge

Another category we need to explore is that of the people who do it for the challenge. These are the ones who put a lot of effort into preparing tackle and pay attention to the fine detail. David Edens is a longtime fly-fishing guide on Georgia’s coast. He loves saltwater fly fishing because he loves the hunt and the challenge, “… and being able to do something well that most others cannot.”

Brian S. Leon (Scott to his friends), is an incredibly accomplished angler, former Navy SEAL, author, and former editor of Fly Fishing in Saltwaters magazine, as well as being about as handsome as a TV star and married to Kesley Gallagher. He likes, “the journey to find fish and the people he meets along the way and embraces the intellectual challenge it brings.”

‘Democracy of life’

It may seem that I’m dropping a few names here to show how many different cool people I know (OK, I am) but the real point is that we meet a lot of extraordinary folks on the water.

Regardless of what we think of him as a president, Herbert Hoover himself said, “Fishing is a constant reminder of the democracy of life.” He was absolutely correct. I’ve been fishing with some quite famous people and a whole lot more who aren’t, including people who had little in the way of material things but did not measure life or success in the same way.

I’d say that the only nonvalid reason to like fishing is to prove that you are better than someone else.

Personally, I take the thinking of fishing writer Robert Traver, a federal judge whose real name was Robert Voelker and has a fly fishing writers award named after him. He was of the opinion that the reason he liked fishing so much was, “Because all the rest of the cares of the world mean so little.”

Now, I am locked in a situation where I can’t participate in the best pastime due to medical issues. Hopefully I can continue to contribute in any small way going forward. If I were to let the rest of my cares weigh me down, it would be quite a challenge indeed.

Reprinted from North Carolina Health News

Though the holiday season is here — with all the responsibilities it entails — some North Carolinians might consider adding one more thing to their to-do lists: weighing in on an EPA proposal that could reshape how the government collects information about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. The agency is taking input during the public comment period, which is open now and closes on Dec. 29.

On Nov. 10, the EPA announced a proposal to loosen reporting requirements for businesses that make or use PFAS. Agency officials say the changes are intended to make the rules easier for companies to follow and to avoid duplicate or unnecessary paperwork, while still allowing EPA to collect key information about how PFAS are used and what risks they may pose.

Currently PFAS are regulated under the Toxic Substances Control Act, a federal law that allows the EPA to require businesses to report, test, track or even ban chemicals that may threaten human health or the environment.

In October 2023, the Biden administration’s EPA finalized a one-time PFAS reporting rule under TSCA’s Section 8. The rule requires companies that manufactured or imported PFAS between 2011 and 2022 to disclose how the chemicals were used and provide available environmental or health data. Industry groups have pushed back, saying the rule is too costly and difficult for small businesses to navigate.

“This Biden-era rule would have imposed crushing regulatory burdens and nearly $1 billion in implementation costs on American businesses,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said when announcing the proposed changes. “Today’s proposal is grounded in common sense and the law, allowing us to collect the information we need to help combat PFAS contamination without placing ridiculous requirements on manufacturers, especially the small businesses that drive our country’s economy.”

But environmental advocates and clean water managers say the proposal would significantly weaken PFAS oversight.

“By EPA’s own estimate, the proposed rule would eliminate more than 97 percent of the information that would have otherwise been generated by the (current) rule,” said Stephanie Schweickert, NC Conservation Network’s director of Environmental Health Campaigns.

“With PFAS and Chemours in North Carolina, we really need more information about PFAS, not less. This (proposal) is very problematic for public health in North Carolina,” Schweickert said. 

Harder-to-detect PFAS raise new concerns

The proposal comes when North Carolina researchers are uncovering PFAS pollution that standard monitoring can’t detect — raising new questions about whether EPA already has blind spots.

Recent Duke University research uncovered a previously unrecognized source of contamination in the Haw River, a tributary of the Cape Fear River: tiny solid PFAS “precursor” particles in industrial wastewater from a Burlington textile manufacturer that entered the local sewer system. These nanoparticles don’t show up in standard PFAS tests, which typically look for dissolved chemicals. But during wastewater treatment processes, the particles break down into better-known PFAS compounds that can contaminate rivers, drinking water sources and agricultural sludge.

At peak discharge, researchers detected precursor-particle levels exceeding 12 million parts per trillion — millions of times higher than EPA’s enforceable drinking-water limits of 4-10 ppt for regulated PFAS. The findings highlight major blind spots in current monitoring and suggest that industries may be releasing far more PFAS (or PFAS precursors) than regulators currently can detect.

“We have some of the most sophisticated instruments in the world for PFAS analysis, and we couldn’t detect these until we dramatically changed our approach,” said lead researcher Lee Ferguson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke, in a release. “Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know, and there is a lesson to be learned about blind spots in our analyses when it comes to looking for new PFAS in the environment.”

In a follow-up email, Ferguson said the findings show why PFAS disclosure rules should be strengthened, not rolled back. “Our work highlights why it is important to increase, not decrease, PFAS waste discharge reporting requirements for industries.”

Downstream utilities feel the impact

A public utility that relies on the Cape Fear River, echoed Ferguson’s concerns.

The Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, which provides drinking water to more than 200,000 customers in New Hanover County and spent $43 million installing a granular activated carbon filtration system in 2022 to remove PFAS, said weakened reporting would make their job harder.

“We are concerned that these (proposed) exemptions could create additional uncertainty for utilities, such as CFPUA, that are located downstream from known PFAS polluters,” the agency said.

“Utilities rely upon detailed, accurate data from potential and known contamination sources to inform our treatment processes in order to protect the drinking water we provide our customers,” the statement continued. “Rolling back reporting requirements for PFAS manufacturers passes more of the burden of monitoring and testing source water on to utilities and our ratepayers.”

Advocates say the stakes extend beyond utilities.

“The EPA is carving out loopholes under the Toxic Substances Control Act that allow industry to avoid reporting its use of PFAS — current forever chemicals that pose serious risks to people’s health,” a Southern Environmental Law Center spokesperson said in an emailed statement to NC Health News. 

“These exemptions include PFAS produced as byproducts, the very issue at the heart of the Chemours crisis,” the SELC statement said. “For decades, Chemours discharged GenX as a byproduct before intentionally manufacturing it, yet the harm caused by byproduct PFAS is no different from that caused by intentionally produced PFAS. This reality devastated 500,000 North Carolinians who drank—and continue to drink—water contaminated by Chemours’ PFAS pollution, and it remains true for communities across the country today.”

Health risks tied to PFAS exposure

These gaps in monitoring matter because PFAS exposure has been associated with a growing list of health concerns. Often called “forever chemicals” because they break down slowly and accumulate in the body over time, PFAS have been linked to immune system suppression, developmental and reproductive harm, thyroid disruption, elevated cholesterol and certain cancers.

In North Carolina, the GenX Exposure Study has documented elevated PFAS levels in blood samples from people living near the Cape Fear River, along with health markers such as increased cholesterol and changes in liver enzymes that have been associated with PFAS exposure. Researchers say the findings underscore the risks for communities living downstream of industrial PFAS sources.

“Some PFAS are formed as byproducts of chemical manufacturing. These chemicals, even though they aren’t used to make new products, are released into air and water and have been found in the blood of people who rely on downstream drinking water,” said N.C. State University epidemiologist Jane Hoppin, when responding to questions about the new Duke research and the EPA’s proposal.

“In our research, PFMOAA was detected at the highest levels in blood samples collected more than a year before the contamination was publicly identified,” she said. “Other byproducts of PFAS — Nafion byproduct 2 and PFO5DoA — were found in nearly all Wilmington residents tested in 2017 and remain in people’s blood today. We need more, not less, information about chemical byproducts to ensure drinking water safety.”

“The mission of the EPA, in the beginning, was to protect the public and the environment,” said Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University who’s widely regarded as the father of the environmental justice movement. “Anytime you’re relaxing rules that would not only threaten the environment but also compromise public health — that’s the wrong way to go.”

The public comment period is open through Dec. 29. To submit a comment, go to: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/EPA-HQ-OPPT-2020-0549-0311.

This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

There’s only a week left to register for a new webinar series created by North Carolina Sea Grant and the Coastal Landscapes Initiative that explores sustainable practices that protect North Carolina’s unique coastal environment.

The 2025-26 series, “Landscapes that Last,” is intended for coastal residents, local governments, homeowners associations and nurseries “to build shared knowledge and healthier coastal communities,” organizers said.

Registration is open for the first webinar but space is limited.

Each session will feature presentations by panelists with a variety of expertise and experience. These include practical strategies, such as choosing salt-tolerant plants and conserving trees to improving stormwater ponds, and tips for sourcing eco-friendly plants. Sessions will end with 15 minutes of audience questions.

The first in the series, “Local Policies for Native Plants,” is set for noon until 1:15 p.m. Dec. 11. The session will feature speakers from North Carolina communities who will discuss their policies to advance landscapes that protect native vegetation and discourage the spread of invasive plants.

This session’s speakers will share how local policies and community guidelines can make a lasting difference. Speakers include Pine Knoll Shores Planning Administrator Charlie Rocci, Bald Head Association Assistant Director Dora Richey and Raleigh City Council Member Jane Harrison.

Rocci, a coastal municipal planner, facilitated development of new landscaping requirements for forest management while updating the town’s Unified Development Ordinance.

Richey, a homeowners association director, is implementing planting covenants on new construction and renovated properties to enhance and protect island properties and the environment.

Harrison, in her capacity as an elected official, has promoted and helped to adopt ordinances to prohibit invasive species and encourage restoration of native landscapes in an urban area.                                                                                                              

Future webinar dates are to be announced as schedules are confirmed.

Professional development credits are available under the North Carolina Environmental Education Certification Program: Criteria III or Continuing Education.

A musical performance by the Raleigh Civic Symphony set for this weekend will share what organizers call a musical vision of conservation for the American red wolf and other threatened species.

Composer Stephanie Ann Boyd’s “Carnival of the Nearly Extinct Animals and other works focused on our relationship to the natural world” is at 4 p.m. Sunday in the North Carolina State University’s Stewart Theatre at 2610 Cates Ave. in Raleigh.

The performance is part of the university’s NC State LIVE season.

The concert, conducted by Peter Askim, will feature the world premiere of a new movement in “Carnival” honoring the endangered eastern red wolf population in northeastern North Carolina.

The performance will feature images of the remaining red wolves in North Carolina by wildlife photographer Aspen Stalls.

Organizers call the work, “a kaleidoscopic, aural presentation celebrating a menagerie of animals (including coral) faced with the dismaying possibility of being the very last of their kind; some have already ceased to exist except in memory. Leading with a powerful message, the work will also serve to delight, educate, and empower the audiences who meet it.”

Boyd said she had already chosen the animals to be features when Askim advised her that an important addition was needed.

“He said, ‘Well, Stephanie, we really need to talk about the red wolf.’ And he told me about it, and we, I don’t know. I mean, I spent most of the summer working on this piece and just crying because the subject matter is so difficult to parse through,” Boyd told Coastal Review Wednesday.

She said that telling difficult stories is a big part of what activism is in a way that connects, rather than other tactics that may not.

“There’s a lot of shaming and anger, and I understand that, but for me, the thing that I’m here to do is bring love and inspiration, because those are the highest sort of vibrations we can have in emotion, in our emotions.”

Boyd said that in working with NC State LIVE on a new, extra movement for the red wolves meant that she got to spend more time exploring bluegrass and other musical traditions important to North Carolina.

“And I’m just gobsmacked that this is all just actually happening,” said Boyd.

A preshow “info fair” is scheduled for 3 p.m. in the theatre lobby with students and organizations presenting about their work in wildlife conservation and sustainability.

After the performance, audiences are invited to stay for a conversation with composers Boyd and Ryan Lindveit, wildlife researcher Dr. Roland Kays and researchers exploring how creative expression can deepen public engagement with conservation and climate awareness. NC State Senior Vice Provost for University Interdisciplinary Programs Dr. Rob Dunn will moderate the discussion.

Tickets are $25-30, $10 for NC State students and $25 for faculty and staff and are available online or at the box office, the only authorized source. “Tickets obtained from unauthorized online sources may be stolen, counterfeit and/or extremely overpriced,” university officials warn.

The blue crab population in the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuarine System is taking a hit sometime between when juveniles leave their nursery habitats and before reaching sexual maturity, a recent study finds.

Published last month in Fisheries Oceanography, “Long-Term Trends in Juvenile Blue Crab Recruitment Patterns in a Wind-Driven Estuary” examined the density of blue crabs in three different types of nursery habitats during the instar stage of the species’ complex life cycle. That’s when the tiny juvenile crab is about the size of a pea.

The North Carolina blue crab population began declining in the early 2000s, and despite state-mandated measures implemented in the years since to protect the lucrative fishery, the population hasn’t recovered. “With fishing accounting for approximately 80% of total annual blue crab mortality, these measures were expected to allow the stock numbers to recover, which has not occurred,” the study explains, referencing a 2018 N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries report. “This absence of recovery has often been attributed to recruitment overfishing.”

But, that’s not what the authors found.

The research shows that the juvenile blue crab population numbers from the late 1990s and the late 2010s are similar, and point to a “potential population bottleneck occurring in later life stages.” But the bottleneck is not the result of recruitment overfishing, which “occurs when the spawning stock of a population has been depleted to the extent that there are insufficient adults to produce the required number of recruits to replenish the population.”

Lead author of the study, Erin Voigt, is a doctoral candidate in David Eggleston’s lab in the North Carolina State University’s Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Also listed as authors are Eggleston, a professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, and previous N.C. State doctoral student Lisa Etherington.

Voigt told Coastal Review that one of the biggest takeaways from her research, at least in looking at the instar stage, is that “there is no evidence of recruitment overfishing.”

And if it’s not recruitment overfishing, “then that means that there’s something going on after the instar stage but before the adult stage that’s resulting in the blue crab population not rebounding,” Voigt said.

Another component of the study, which also relates to Etherington’s work, was to determine which habitats the blue crabs use.

Voigt sampled at Ruppia seagrass beds and shallow detrital habitats found along the mainland shores and the mixed species seagrass beds on the sound side of the Outer Banks.

Early in the life cycle, when the megalopae return to the inlets, the seagrass bed structure is the first nursery habitat they encounter on the sound side of the Outer Banks if there are no storms to interfere with the pattern.

“However, the surprising thing that we found was that if you look at the density of blue crabs,” which she said is the amount of blue crabs per meter squared, “you find almost four times as many blue crabs in these super patchy, very hard to see, kind of scruffy seagrass beds on the western shore.”

The researcher, the research 

Originally from Maryland, Voigt earned her bachelor’s in biology from St Mary’s College, spent a few years researching at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, and then earned her master’s in ecology at San Diego State University.

She began her doctorate in 2016 but took an extended leave of absence when she began working in 2023 as program coordinator of the Duke University Marine Lab Scholars and Climate Scholars Program. Voigt resumed her research earlier this year and plans to defend her thesis later this semester.

Voigt began explaining her research by reviewing the “complex life cycle” of a blue crab.

In early summer, the male and female typically mate upriver in low-salinity environments. The female, or sponge crab, carries the eggs on her stomach. When it’s time to hatch, the planktonic larvae, or zoeae, which Voigt said look like space aliens, drift into the inlets or ocean and undergo several molts, with the last transition in the ocean being to the megalopa or megalopae phase.

“The megalopae have a little bit more swimming ability. They look less like aliens and slightly more like something that you might consider a crab or a shrimp,” Voigt said.

Starting in late summer and early fall, the winds shift from primarily southerly to northeasterly, and with that shift, the megalopae are pushed back into inlets, usually the Oregon and Hatteras inlets. They will use their sensory capabilities to find a nursery habitat and then transform to instar, or a small crab.

The instar stage in the life cycle is the focus of her study, she said, and builds on the research of previous graduate students in the Eggleston lab, including Etherington, who had sampled areas within the Pamlico Sound between 1996 and 1999 to learn where juvenile blue crabs were settling.

“In about 1999 — unrelated to her experiment — there was a massive overfishing event, and this occurred due to three hurricanes,” which were Floyd, Dennis and Irene. Overfishing means that a species is being removed at a rate too high for the population to maintain.

The inundation from these storms decreased the salinity upriver, forcing blue crabs to migrate to smaller, higher-salinity areas. This concentration led to a 300% increase in catch-per-unit effort, which is a way to measure how abundant a species is by dividing the total weight of the catch by total amount of work it took, such as hours fished and with what equipment.

“There was just a ton of blue crabs caught that year. We had a really high take. The blue crabs have never rebounded from that,” Voigt said. “There has been a decrease in fishing pressure during that time — a 50% decrease in fishing pressure — and we still have not seen it rebound.”

Then in 2016, when Voigt began as a doctoral student, Eggleston told her he found it interesting that the blue crab population wasn’t rebounding and it wasn’t clear why, though the going theory was recruitment overfishing.

For her research, she sampled from 2017 until 2019 the same exact locations Etherington had sampled 1996-99 for her study.

Voigt said she expected to find a strong reduction in the number of crabs in these key nursery habitats, “because if we’re running into recruitment overfishing, then you’re assuming that not enough juveniles are recruiting back into Albemarle-Pamlico Sound, and therefore you will not see as many instars in these habitats,” Voigt explained.

“However, what’s really interesting about this study was that we did not find that. In fact, the numbers of blue crabs we found when I studied were statistically no different from the number of blue crabs” that Etherington had found when she sampled the same areas before the fisheries collapse, Voigt continued.

The first chapter of a recently published book about Ocracoke’s unique dialect begins with the imagined experience of a visitor’s first time taking the ferry from Swan Quarter across Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke Village.

During the trip to the 14-mile-long island only accessible by boat or light aircraft, the visitor decides to explore the ferry, pausing upon hearing a group speak a sort-of familiar dialect they can’t quite place.

“You greet the group and then make the same mistake as hundreds of tourists before you, by asking ‘Where are y’all from?’ The response, ‘right here,’ accompanied by uproarious laughter, leaves you disoriented,” the scenario continues.

The mistake is “so frequent that it is part of island lore, passed down by O’Cockers – Ocracoke residents who trace back their family lineage on the island for generations.”

This encounter in the first chapter of “Language and Life on Ocracoke: The Living History of the Brogue,” sets the scene for an exploration into the once-prominent dialect now only spoken by a few hundred on the island.

Published by UNC Press, authors are North Carolina State University English professors Jeffrey Reaser and Walt Wolfram, and Ocracoke Preservation Society board member Candy Gaskill, a fourth-generation resident.

“With this prolonged and comprehensive approach to the region, the authors document the island’s changes, providing readers with a deeply researched, empathetic, and engagingly written snapshot of one of North Carolina’s most cherished places, one with a linguistic heritage worth celebrating,” UNC Press said in a release.

Wolfram told Coastal Review in an interview that he really wants people to understand that Ocracoke had this rich legacy of language.

“What’s Ocracoke famous for? Well, it’s famous for Blackbeard,” Wolfram said about the pirate that was beheaded on the island in 1718. “It’s also famous for its language,” but O’Cockers are losing this tradition that has been a part of the island culture for centuries.

The dialect was “once an iconic trait of the 200-mile chain of Outer Banks islands” but is “now merely a whisper in the region.” Now, there are less than 200 who speak some semblance of the traditional brogue, the book states, and “there are sure signs that the traditional Brogue will soon become extinct.”

Wolfram said he thinks “there are certain things that are strongly associated with that community, and the language has been one of them, and now it’s threatened. What the book does is remind them of that tradition. So in a sense, (the brogue) will be remembered with examples even when it is almost gone.”

This is their third book on Ocracoke and builds on Wolfram’s 1997 “Hoi Toide On The Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue.” “Hoi Toide” is the brogue pronunciation of high tide — the long i vowel is pronounced as “oy” – and is the origin of the nickname, hoi toiders.

Reaser said in an interview that they “really wanted this to be the first linguistics beach read” and be a bit of an introduction to the linguistics, which is the study of language and structure, to make it accessible for all audiences.

The book is broken up into 24 short chapters, which can be read in any order, and touch on what the brogue is and who speaks it, if the brogue is Shakespearean English or if it’s pirate talk, how to study language, accents and dialects, about African American and Latino communities on Ocracoke, the weather, how the language is evolving, and speculation on how the brogue will evolve, or disappear.

The brogue isn’t Elizabethan, by the way, and it’s “not just pirate talk” (their emphasis) despite Ocracoke’s ties with Blackbeard.

What is it then? The short answer is that the “primary finding was that it was an English dialect that had been influenced by Gaelic languages and other English dialects that had previously been influenced by Gaelic languages.”

“We’re focused on Ocracoke, and we want to preserve and celebrate that dialect and that tradition, but there is another purpose of just getting people to understand more generally, that this is how languages work, this is how dialects work. That they’re always patterned and systematic,” Reaser explained. “Even when there’s a dialect that isn’t celebrated the way that Ocracoke tends to be, that is something that people should take seriously and value.”

Of special note is the companion website with more than 80 QR codes that link to sound or video clips on ocracokebrogue.com, all pulled from their extensive collection of oral histories, media clips, documentary footage and other materials.

“You don’t want to just read about it, you want to hear what it actually sounds like,” Wolfram said.

A peek between the pages

Many of the chapters are based on stories from villagers, such as the first chapter, “Do they take American money over there?” That’s coming straight from the O’Cockers’ stories, Reaser said.

There’s even an anecdote in the book about a British Broadcasting Co. crew that traveled to Ocracoke with the intention of having residents recite lines from Shakespeare’s plays.

Reaser said that having the BBC visit was a “really funny experience,” because they were sure the story was that Ocracoke had preserved Elizabethan English.

“We’re trying to tell them otherwise,” he said, and tried to direct their attention to how interesting the community is with its “really rich mix of all these historical traditions,” but they stuck with their story.

“They actually had the complete works of Shakespeare, and they’re trying to get locals to read it,” he said, expecting it to sound like they were at the Globe Theater, “which is so insulting.”

So, some of the performers in the community recognized what was happening, and decided to put on their best British accent, and overdo the stage performance.

“What the BBC captured was something that’s not even close to the local dialect,” Reaser said, but they aired it, and they must have received enough feedback because you can’t find it anywhere on their website. An updated version has been released but it still pushes the Elizabethan myth.

Wolfram said the publication features stories that people aren’t necessarily aware of as well, like the prominence of the one African American family that moved there in 1865 and maintained the family as a unit until the late 2000s, and how men’s and women’s speech patterns were affected by changing economic drivers, namely the village increasingly depending on tourism.

“We want people to remember how the Black family fit and didn’t fit into the community,” Wolfram said.

Women were in the service industry as tourism grew for the village while men continued to focus on water-related work, Reaser said. The brogue then became “crystallized as this artifact of masculinity, where it never had that in the past.”

Appreciating Ocracoke

Wolfram first heard about Ocracoke as a new professor at N.C. State in 1992.

In the acknowledgement, Wolfram explained that he and his wife decided to travel the state to experience different communities. While explaining these trips to his colleagues, another faculty member told him to “take a trip to Ocracoke, where ‘the people speak Elizabethan English.’”

Wolfram said he recognized the comment to be a “simplified romantic myth often associated with long-term isolated language varieties such as Appalachian English, but I was intrigued.”

That first trip was the catalyst to him devoting more than three decades and taking hundreds of trips to the island to learn more about the village’s families and their history.

When Reaser was a graduate student at N.C. State in 2000, he joined Wolfram on a trip and became just as enthralled with Ocracoke.

The two emphasized how grateful they are to have been welcomed over the years.

There’s a real love of the community and people who live there. “They’re so generous to us. It’s an incredible experience,” Reaser said.

Wolfram said the residents “have been incredibly collaborative and cooperative with us, and we can’t thank them enough for that.”

He feels that when researchers study a community, it’s nice for academics and their reputation, “but we want it to be meaningful” for the communities who give their time and resources.

“We do these sorts of sophisticated analyzes, but what does the community get out of it?” Wolfram continued, explaining that he finds it “ethically inappropriate” when academics go to a community for information and never see them again.

People need to know what you’re doing with the stories, histories and cultures they share with you, and how what you’re doing can help the community, Wolfram said, adding he and his team try to help with any project or program they can as a way to thank the community for “being so generous in terms of talking to us, working with us, and allowing us in.”

The state has the protocols in place for successful fisheries management, but North Carolina is missing the mark, recently released state-mandated research concludes.

A top recommendation: Hire more fisheries scientists.

And the head of the state body formed to coordinate scientific research for the legislature, in a letter accompanying the report, states that lawmakers’ recent failed shrimp trawling ban measure had no basis in the report’s findings and clarifies that the recommendations did not address trawling.

Legislators in 2021 directed the North Carolina Collaboratory to evaluate the overall health of fisheries and habitats and make recommendations for better management ahead of the 25th anniversary of the state’s Fisheries Reform Act of 1997 and the Coastal Area Management Act’s 50th anniversary in 2024.

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences Director Dr. Joel Fodrie and a team of nine researchers presented a summary of their findings to the North Carolina General Assembly late last month, as the legislature had mandated.

Fodrie told Coastal Review that the state requested a broad analysis as part of its 2021 budget bill, so the research team, over the course of three years, collected and used data to assess the state’s fisheries and make the state-mandated recommendations based on those findings that could improve “both marine fisheries and our coastal habitats, with a specific link between those habitats and the way they support fish.”

The 46-page summary highlights the seven findings and the five recommendations to “achieve the vision of the Fisheries Reform Act.” The state Fisheries Reform Act requires fishery management plans to ensure long-term viability of the fisheries, according to the state.

The final, comprehensive report with full analyses and data is still being fine-tuned and is to be sent to the legislature later this year, Fodrie added.

In addition to Chapel Hill, researchers who study fish biology and ecology, estuarine ecology, fisheries management and environmental governance from N.C. State University, East Carolina University and UNC-Wilmington participated in the research.

Fodrie explained that if you were to gather data across states to quantitatively evaluate each state’s attempt to manage fisheries, North Carolina scores pretty high based on the management components put in place as a result of the Fisheries Reform Act, or FRA.

The state seems to have adopted many of the practices that should produce better outcomes and have strengthened these practices for most species over time. Despite those gears being in place, the results are only so-so, he said.

The findings point to at least three significant hurdles for optimizing management outcomes, including a significant time lag in the implementation of new data or information for up-to-date decision-making, a breakdown of trust and communication among managers and key stakeholder groups, and long-term shifts in estuarine habitat quality and coverage.

“What the FRA did for North Carolina is it put us in a position to have many of the building blocks that are helpful and can remain part of the solutions, while the analyses also show that we’re still falling short of the FRA’s core objectives and thus some changes in management structures ought to be seriously considered,” Fodrie said.

About the findings

Researchers found that management intensity in North Carolina had increased over time and is equal to or exceeds the levels of other states throughout the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast and Gulf of Mexico, but despite the presence of a rigorous management structure, the state continues to “exhibit challenges in achieving the core goals of the FRA, which is ‘to protect and enhance … coastal fisheries in NC.’”

A benchmark for informed fishery management, according to the summary, are quantitative stock assessments. These produce estimates of stock biomass and the harvest rate, which define overfished, related to how much fish biomass is in the system, and overfishing, related to how high the catch rate is, for the population.

The most recent stock assessments estimate that blue crab, southern flounder, spotted seatrout, striped bass and striped mullet are experiencing overfishing, meaning that the harvest rate is too high.

Blue crab, southern flounder, striped bass and striped mullet are overfished, or the stock is too low, and sheepshead and red drum are neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing.

The summary notes that developing and updating the fishery management plans process “is relatively slow, which potentially limits the efficacy of science- and process-based public trust resource management,” what researchers call in the summary “hallmark goals” of the Fisheries Reform Act.

Across the 12 stocks the state manages that have an initial fisheries management plan, the average time between the first plan and amendments is seven years. The average time between management plan actions is a little more than five years.

“In the context of these timelines, there is little evidence that adaptive management is being achieved by increased activity within” the North Carolina General Assembly, “by the breadth of motions adopted” by the Marine Fisheries Commission or by proclamation authority from the Division of Marine Fisheries, according to the summary.

The remaining findings relate to the pressures coastal habitats are facing from fishing, development, climate variability and other human activities. Data suggests that the entire ecosystem has changed since the Fisheries Reform Act was passed, particularly for water quality and coastal and estuarine habitats.

Researchers offered five recommendations.

Fodrie said that a primary recommendation is to increase the Division of Marine Fisheries staff, especially the number of stock-assessment scientists, so the stock assessments and fisheries management plans are regularly updated.

An independent science and statistical committee to improve fishery management outcomes in the state, as well as new approaches for enhancing the division’s outreach with stakeholder participation, trust, and management transparency, are also recommendations.

Fodrie said that the role of this type of committee and a redesigned Marine Fisheries Commission would be to target current weaknesses related to implementation of the Fisheries Reform Act, such as the mode and tempo by which catch limits are set, when and how stakeholders can be engaged, and resolving disputes between key resource users.

The final three recommendations relate to fisheries and habitat health, including adopting an ecosystem-based management approach to assess the health of the state fisheries as a whole and the drivers that affect them; stopping or reversing patterns of habitat loss and degradation, along with requiring improved monitoring of habitat extent and water quality; and re-evaluating the nursery designation system and creating an adaptive framework for protecting critical nursery areas.

“The state also has some real challenges related to what’s happening with its coastal habitats,” Fodrie said, adding that it’s a big ask to take the major steps needed to halt or reverse those trends. “This involves balancing fishing practices, coastal population growth, climate variability, and development; which would require buy-in at the whole-state level to manage at the coastal ecosystem scale.”

Note from the Collaboratory

The North Carolina Collaboratory’s “Study of Coastal and Marine Fisheries of the State” hadn’t gotten much attention since it was first mandated — that is, until the Senate added in mid-June to a House bill about recreational flounder and red snapper seasons a proposed law to ban shrimp trawling in inshore waters and within a half-mile of the shoreline.

The report was mentioned more than once during discussions between supporters and opponents. The House declined to advance the bill with the Senate’s amendment on June 25.

Looking back: House Republicans decline to take up shrimp trawling bill

Collaboratory Executive Director Jeff Warren, in a letter dated June 30, the deadline and date when the summary was released, wrote that “recent legislative actions – specifically, those related to shrimp trawling language in the current version of House Bill (H) 442 – have brought into question the contents of this report. Because this specific issue was out of the scope of this study, this report neither advocates for nor opposes a ban on shrimp trawling.”

Warren stated in the report’s cover letter that there had been multiple comments made by legislators in both chambers as well as statements circulating in the media, that “suggested the Senate was aware of the contents of this report and this advance knowledge drove actions to amend the legislation to include a shrimp trawling ban prior to the report’s release.”

Those statements were untrue, Warren stated, “and undermine the credibility of this multi-year research study carried out by nine researchers across four UNC System campuses.”

Warren added that the recommendations in the summary, and ultimately the full report, do not address, nor respond to, the shrimp trawling language contained in the shrimp trawl ban “nor were they ever designed to. Further, no legislative influence or pressure impacted the legislative recommendations or the scope of work, which has remained consistent over the three-year arc of the broader study.”

He closed the letter by adding the full report will be available later this year after it’s refined, “to ensure a broad variety of users can access the data and information. To be clear, this clarifying work will not substantively change the recommendations provided herein.”

Guest Commentary

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues. 

It was a losing battle from the start, watching the inevitable rising and receding of the waves simultaneously fill up the hole I had been digging, and swiftly erode the accompanying pile of sand I had dug.

Perhaps it is an intrinsic childhood need to move sand from one location to another. As Sisyphean as the task may seem to an adult, sand is an all-encompassing playground; a place to dig in, sink into, and even to create your own tide pool/hot tub as the waves accentuate your enjoyment.

My first exposure to the sand with every beach trip was the arduous trek (for a young child) up the stairs of the public beach access point down Heverly Drive in Emerald Isle.

I would pause in equal measure to catch my breath and take in just how cool it was to be atop the dunes, peering down on the crashing Atlantic Ocean below. But my expeditions into the dunes as a child were limited to exactly this: brief crossings on established wooden traverses. The landscape of the dunes was dotted with sign after sign stating, in no ambiguous terms, to keep off of their sea oat-covered crests. 

Folks from all over North Carolina and beyond flock to the Crystal Coast to experience the sensation of warm sand on their toes, the waves crashing on top of them, and perhaps a shrimp burger (or 10). Whether or not they realize it, visitors and residents pass through several distinct ecosystems as they stroll toward the beckoning ocean. The first ecosystem is the maritime forest, where hardy Live oaks and Wax myrtles make their living despite the sandy soil.

Then you reach the dunes, where crystal skippers eke out a living amongst the stalwart grasses that stitch the Bogue Banks in place against the ravages of the wind and waves. Afterwards comes the open beach, which might seem like a domain reserved exclusively for beachgoers but is also one that provides critical habitat for nesting least terns and loggerhead sea turtles.

Lastly before the ocean, the area where the waves first crash on the beach is known as the swash zone, where sanderlings, a small wading bird, can be frequently observed searching for bivalves. All of these ecosystems are within sight of each other, and yet their differences can be felt the moment one no longer has a delicious sea breeze standing behind the dunes. 

Flash forward to the present day, and I am a member of a team of scientists tasked with flaunting each and every one of these signs, looking straight at passersby as we rock our highlighter yellow vests and our sweat and sunscreen-streaked faces. We catch our breath and explain to these folks the nature of what we are doing.

“We are researchers with NC State and the North Carolina Aquarium, studying a butterfly endemic to this area called the crystal skipper,” we repeat to various folks taking an interest in our work.

One of the most underappreciated skills required of us is the ability to clarify what terms like “endemic” mean or to satiate people’s curiosity about the subject while being fully conscious of just how bad we smell after a day of traversing the hot and humid dunes.

What is it like to walk through the dunes? In a word, or several, hot, breezeless, and saturated with ankle-seizing smilax. One step takes the energy of three normal steps as the sand inevitably gives way on your ascent. The dunes blocking the sea breeze is likely important ecologically for our skippers, but that perspective is hard to maintain as the stifling air quickly dishevels and frustrates us. For nature nerds like myself, the presence of snakes and wheel bugs as well as the opportunity to study a rare species are well worth the effort. 

To answer that aforementioned question about what “endemic” means, it’s a term used in biology to refer to an organism whose range is restricted to a very specific place. Marine iguanas are endemic to the Galapagos Archipelago, lemurs are endemic to Madagascar, and the crystal skipper is endemic to our own coastal North Carolina.

North Carolina’s barrier islands are famous for how thin they are, and the crystal skipper’s range spans a mere 30 miles of said barrier islands. We as researchers are fairly fortunate in that this range encompasses not one, but two state parks: Hammocks Beach and Fort Macon. This means that we have a considerable amount of public land to study this species on.

True to the moniker of the Bogue Banks, the species can be identified by the distinctive white “crystals” speckling its brown wings. If you are fortunate enough to see a skipper, however, in some cases you might see black markings on their wings. Those are the codes that we have written onto their wings as a part of our mark-recapture study, where we endeavor to estimate the population of skippers in a given area based on the percentage, we are able to recapture.

But our research isn’t limited only to the adults, we spend substantial time looking through the seaside little bluestem, which is the grass the skippers are dependent on, to find and track the development of eggs and caterpillars as they stitch the grass around them into tents that would make the Spanish architect Gaudí proud.

This is all in addition to studying the habitat itself, which encapsulates everything from collecting nectar samples to taking seaside little bluestem samples back to the lab to assess desiccation. 

One of my favorite things about our work is that we find ourselves with equal frequency in the backcountry of the Crystal Coast in remote areas such as Bear Island, part of Hammocks Beach, as often as we find ourselves in the backyards of, at times, residents and unsuspecting tourists. This seems to encapsulate the essence of both conservation and preservation in our project.

One of the most fortuitous happenstances in the preservation of the crystal skipper is that roughly half of its range is already protected within Hammocks Beach State Park in the Swansboro area, which encompasses some of the undeveloped dune habitat in the state outside of its two national seashores. This land offers researchers a chance to observe the crystal skipper in an area of land that is wild and remote.

While we hope that our work will help ensure the population remains robust, the lives of individual adult crystal skippers are not very long. All skippers emerge during two time periods: April through early May and July through mid-August. Insects as a rule are very short-lived, and the crystal skipper is no exception with a lifespan of only one to two weeks.

The nature of our line of work means that multiple cycles of technicians such as myself will study the crystal skipper over summers as ephemeral as the butterfly itself. And while the crystal skipper is immortalized through passing on its genes, we hope that our legacy in the dunes is immortalized in others taking up this work after we have gone. And yet, at the same time, the crystal skipper is always here in the dunes with us, even when passers-by cannot see it.

The caterpillars are going about their business eating, making tents, and growing as they wage an often-unseen struggle for survival against the ravages of hurricanes and the myriad predators of the insect world. This is a struggle unseen by most passers-by in the dunes, and yet forms of the crystal skipper are always present in and around these select islands. It was here before our study of it began, and hopefully it will be here long after, both ever-present and ever-ephemeral. 

The Crystal Coast is many things. From the least terns laying their eggs on the beach to the deft slithering of eastern glass lizards to the skips and flutters of our beloved crystal skippers, nature permeates the man-made structures of the Crystal Coast. It’s an area where the natural world and the human history of the islands are both preserved and lived-in.

The islands of the Bogue Banks are narrow and yet flanking both sides of the narrow dividing roads are natural wonders and all the facets of human life. We, the human race, are locked in an existential struggle trying to figure out how to balance our own needs with those of the natural world.

Existential crises are often easier to face when we can break them into bite-sized pieces, and I believe that by learning to harmonize human life with the natural world here in the living laboratory of the Bogue Banks, we can help create a template for how to do so in the world at large. All of that is reflected in the rare and humble crystal skipper, a butterfly that is uniquely our own.

Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or our publisher, the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

Coastal communities are inundated more often than previously believed, and floodwaters take longer to recede in rural areas than in urban areas, according to a new study.

The study, published Monday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, also found that the way government agencies gather data used to predict floods fails to truly estimate how frequently water may get pushed over land.

“To capture the burden on coastal communities and to capture what people are really seeing on the ground, it’s so important to measure flooding on land,” said Dr. Miyuki Hino, a co-author of the study and assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

What people living in Beaufort, Carolina Beach and Sea Level, an unincorporated area of Carteret County, told researchers they are seeing is that it floods “all the time,” said corresponding author Dr. Katherine Anarde, an assistant professor of coastal engineering at North Carolina State University.

“People know where it floods and a lot of people can put numbers to how frequently it floods, but as scientists, we just had no idea what ‘all the time’ meant,” she said.

To find that answer, researchers installed a network of in-house, custom-designed water level sensors in storm drains in Beaufort and Carolina Beach. Sensors were installed next to ditches cut along roads in Sea Level, a rural community about 28 miles northeast of Beaufort.

Each sensor measures when water rises and spills onto a nearby road.

The frequency at which that occurred during the course of the one-year study stunned researchers.

From May 2023 through April 2024, Beaufort experienced 26 days of flooding. Carolina Beach flooded 65 days.

And, “all the time” in Sea Level equated to 128 days of flooding. That’s one-third of the year, or once every three days.

“That was really shocking for me and I think for Miyuki too, just the sheer magnitude of flood days,” Anarde said.

It’s a reality in low-lying coastal areas where flooding is being driven more often by a combination of ingredients rather than large storm events.

The major ingredient, Hino said, is sea level rise. Rising seas strain storm drain systems and infrastructure designed decades ago when the ocean was much lower than it is today.

“And so while that highest tide 50 years ago, 100 years ago, might not have been high enough to get onto the road, now it is,” Hino said.

Sea level rise is exacerbating normal variations in water levels from tides and wind, which play a huge role in flood frequency.

If, for example, it rains on a day when a community’s storm drains are inundated with water from the tide, the rain that would normally drain into that system is pushed out across nearby roads.

But Mother Nature is not solely to blame.

Coastal areas have seen a population boom that has all but erased any semblance of what were once small fishing villages.

“Development definitely plays a role,” Anarde said. “Water has to have somewhere to go, and if the landscape is covered in impervious surfaces — roadways, buildings – then water is just going to sit on top of the road and on top of those impervious surfaces and create deeper, longer floods.”

Even in rural, low-lying areas that have fewer buildings and roads, water is not being absorbed into the ground at the rate it once was because sea level rise is elevating the groundwater table in the coastal plain.

One of the big motivations for installing the water level land sensors was to study how the different ingredients combine to cause flooding and, if you measure flooding from all of those sources, how the information gathered from those sensors compares to that taken from tide gauges.

Forecasters have widely relied on tide gauges to predict flood occurrences. The problem is, that is not what tide gauges are meant to do. And, there are many areas of the coast that are not close to a tide gauge, which are maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“They do a great job at what they’re supposed to be doing, which is measuring water levels in oceans and bays,” Hino said. “But we knew that they’re not designed to measure flooding and that some of the other forces that influence flooding, like rain and local infrastructure, weren’t being captured there and so we wanted to know how accurate those tide gauge-based indicators are and how well they match up against what people living there are experiencing day to day and year to year.”

Over the course of the past five years, 11 land sensors have been installed in coastal areas of the state.

The information these sensors provide can help guide a community’s plan for a future expected to be only further impacted by sea level rise.

“We get asked a lot about how to fix this problem of more recurrent, chronic flooding in coastal areas,” Hino said. “There are solutions to the problem. They’re going to be different from place to place and many of them are going to involve difficult choices and so having more input from the affect people into what those choices are is really important.”

Jeremy Hardison, Carolina Beach’s director of Community Development, said in an interview last month that the study has “definitely” been a benefit to the town.

“We’ve kind of monitored how much water was in the street before, but not in the storm drains where the water is actually coming up during high tide events,” he said. “I don’t know that we would have come up with flooding sensors within our storm drains to monitor how much water is in our drains. We want to continue planning and we want to do some implementation and try to see what we can do to mitigate the problem so we’re working in that direction.”

Reprinted from our longtime collaborator, North Carolina Health News, to complement our ongoing series on federal budget and staff cuts and the dismantling of programs and services affecting life and lives here on the North Carolina coast.

People who have been struggling to clean up decades of industrial pollution in the lower Cape Fear River basin are expressing their dismay and anger at a federal delay announced Wednesday on a crackdown on so-called forever chemicals that have fouled their drinking water.  

That day, the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to extend the timeline for water utilities to reduce the maximum safe levels for human consumption for a select group of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances known as PFAS.

In 2024, under the Biden Administration, the EPA finalized the first-ever enforceable standards for six PFAS compounds: PFOA, PFOS, HFPO-DA (GenX), PFBS, PFNA and PFHxS. At that time, water utilities had until 2029 to comply with the new standards. 

A year later, the Trump Administration’s newly appointed EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the agency would uphold standards set for PFOA and PFOS — legacy PFAS that persist in the environment despite no longer being manufactured. But Zeldin also announced he would rescind and re-evaluate rules for the other four, including GenX. 

GenX is the common name for the substance produced at the Chemours Fayetteville Works plant; it was discharged into the river’s water for decades until researchers revealed their presence in 2017. 

Additionally, the new federal timeline gives utilities until 2031 to comply with the standards, extending the original 2029 deadline.

“We are on a path to uphold the agency’s nationwide standards to protect Americans from PFOA and PFOS in their water,” Zeldin said in a news release. “At the same time, we will work to provide common-sense flexibility in the form of additional time for compliance.”

While Zeldin’s statement appeared aimed at reassuring the public that the EPA is taking control of the situation, to critics, it sounded like a betrayal — signaling, in their view, a retreat from more robust protections from substances that have become known as “forever chemicals” because of their persistence in the environment.

‘Not forward-thinking’

“Overall, PFOA and PFOS are chemicals of the past, though they are still present in drinking water sources. So removing them will get a lot of others,” said N.C. State University epidemiologist Jane Hoppin in an email. “But the other four are chemicals of the future, particularly GenX, so removing these rules would not be forward-looking.”

In 2017, Hoppin headed a team of researchers and launched the GenX Exposure Study, which revealed that most of the people from the Cape Fear River Basin who participated in the research have PFAS in their blood.

There are thousands of unique PFAS in the environment, according to experts. They’re present in multiple products to help make them slippery and resistant to oils, water and solvents, including some cosmetics and apparel, microwave popcorn wrappers, dental floss, firefighting gear and some firefighting foams.

PFAS exposure is associated with a range of adverse health effects, such as increased cholesterol levels, kidney and testicular cancer, pre-eclampsia in pregnant women and decreased vaccine response in children, among other conditions.

“The EPA is caving to chemical industry lobbyists and pressure by the water utilities, and in doing so, it’s sentencing millions of Americans to drink contaminated water for years to come,” said Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook in a statement.

Cook’s organization has worked throughout the country to document environmental problems.

“The cost of PFAS pollution will fall on ordinary people, who will pay in the form of polluted water and more sickness, more suffering and more deaths from PFAS-related diseases,” he said. 

Kelly Moser, senior attorney and leader of the Water Program at the Southern Environmental Law Center, echoed this sentiment. “When this administration talks about deregulation, this is what they mean — allowing toxic chemicals in drinking water at the request of polluters,” she said in a release.

Living with PFAS

It has been a tumultuous eight years for thousands of North Carolinians living in the Cape Fear River Basin since the presence of  the forever chemicals was first announced in 2017. Among those affected are residents whose drinking water wells are contaminated, likely because of PFAS that were incinerated at the Fayetteville Works plant and drifted far and wide in emissions from the factory. 

Despite a 2019 consent order — established among Chemours, Cape Fear River Watch and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality — aimed at assisting residents with PFAS-contaminated wells, living with PFAS is a daunting challenge.

Jamie White, administrator of the Facebook group “Grays Creek Residents United Against PFAS in our Wells and Rivers,” which works to raise awareness about PFAS contamination, expressed the group’s frustration after the EPA’s latest announcement.

“Well, it shocked us all, first off — and when I say all I speak for the group,” White said during a call with NC Health News. “Number one, we have worked for eight years to get the limits lowered, to bring awareness to everybody, because our wells are contaminated.”

“(The EPA) extended the public water facilities another two years (before) having to have the chemicals cleaned out of their water systems — another two years of contaminating the public,” she said.

Jane Jacobs (EagleHeart), a tribal leader of the Tuscarora Nation, an Indigenous community with many members in the Cape Fear River Basin, criticized the lack of action to protect vulnerable communities.

“My children, my grandchildren, need to be protected from all of the poison, not some of the poison,” Jacobs said. “If somebody was pointing a gun at my kid right now, am I going to protect him from one bullet or all of the bullets?”

Jacobs also highlighted the disproportionate impact on her community. 

“Being a bipoc community, we face a lot more environmental hardships than most people do,” she stated. “We have to drink the tap water. We don’t have money for filters, so for the people in my community, this affects us 10 times worse because we don’t have the money to protect ourselves.”

Looking ahead

While many expressed disappointment over the EPA’s decision, the environmental community remains hopeful that more stringent rules could eventually prevail at the state level — though it may take time. 

One significant obstacle is the Environmental Management Commission, which is responsible for developing regulations to safeguard, preserve and improve the state’s air and water resources. Since 2022, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality has been working with the commission to establish regulations for PFAS and 1,4 dioxane — a cancer-causing pollutant that’s also been found to be widely discharged by industrial companies and ultimately flow into the Cape Fear River.

However, a series of delays have stalled progress, preventing the process from advancing to the public comment period — the next step toward establishing maximum contaminant levels for PFAS at the state level.

The most recent Environmental Management Commission meeting, on May 7, ended in another delay after the Office of State Budget and Management raised concerns about the proposal’s fiscal analysis.

Possible remedies

Despite the setbacks, several people at the meeting expressed relief, including Haw Riverkeeper Emily Sutton.

“There’s not actually any checks or enforcement to make sure that the plans that are drafted are effective, and so this (plan) doesn’t do anything for our downstream community members,” Sutton said. 

She also criticized the fiscal analysis requested by the Office of State Budget and Management.

“The fiscal analysis that they’ve asked for also is flawed. It doesn’t include information about the financial impacts for downstream communities who are bearing the burden of this pollution. (The fiscal analysis) is looking at how much this is going to cost polluting industries. That’s not our concern. Our concern is the health of our community members.”

Southern Environmental Law Center’s Moser agrees that the commission’s proposal falls short of the outcome environmental groups demand. 

“The EMC is siding with polluters and considering adopting rules that were written by polluters,” Moser said. “That could allow industrial facilities to release PFAs indefinitely into North Carolina’s drinking water sources and even increase the toxic water pollution that they are putting into our waterways.”

Sutton and Moser and their colleagues are closely monitoring Senate Bill S666 — the Water Safety Act — proposed by North Carolina Senate Majority Leader Michael Lee, R-New Hanover. If passed, the bill would deliver the state-level regulatory action environmentalists are pushing for.

“ (The proposed bill) directs the EMC to set regulatory limits on PFAs, and that is what our hope is,” Sutton said. “We don’t trust that this commission will hold polluters accountable, and unfortunately, the Department of Environmental Quality has to abide by what they are directed by the EMC.”

Moser pointed out that a potential remedy exists to address the water pollution problem: “It’s more important than ever that states like North Carolina, EPA and wastewater treatment plants use their current authority under the Clean Water Act to require that industry stops their pollution at the source before discharging it into our waterways.” 

The Environmental Management Commission is scheduled to meet again in July, while the EPA is expected to update federal PFAS standards by late 2025, with finalization anticipated by spring 2026. Amid these ongoing challenges, Jacobs offered a rallying cry to fellow environmentalists: “We just need to keep pushing. We need to keep fighting.”

There’s an opportunity for fishing enthusiasts to spend the week learning from longtime captains during the 71st annual sportfishing school scheduled for this summer on the Outer Banks.

A program of the North Carolina State University’s Continuing and Lifelong Education, the immersive five-day experience taking place June 1-5 based at the Hatteras Civic Center offers a “comprehensive journey into sport fishing, blending classroom instruction with hands-on training,” organizers said.

For two days, participants will be in the classroom learning about advanced equipment techniques and fishing methodologies and three days gaining practical, hands-on experience in both inshore and offshore Gulf Stream environments. The week closes with a celebratory banquet.

Instructors include captains Ernie Foster, Rom Whitaker, Ken Dempsey, Dr. Herbert Kirk, and Skip Blaylock, “each bringing decades of expertise and deep connections to NC State. These accomplished professionals are not just instructors but living legends in Eastern North Carolina’s fishing community, having established reputations through successful charters and prominent tournament participation,” organizers said.

The Sport Fishing School originated in Morehead City in September 1962 as a collaborative effort between N.C. State’s Department of Zoology and the College Extension Division, and has evolved into a fishing education program.

“This isn’t just a fishing school — it’s a legacy program 70 years in the making,” said Foster, lead program instructor with more than 50 years of maritime experience and an NC State alum. “We’re not just teaching techniques; we’re passing down generations of wisdom. From understanding the delicate ecosystems of North Carolina coastal waters to mastering intricate fishing techniques, we’re preserving a tradition that connects people to the ocean in one of the most profound ways.”

Open to fishing 18 and older, explore the full program schedule, instructor profiles and registration information at lifelonglearning.ncsu.edu/sport-fishing-school.

Fees are $2,495 for returning participants and $2,995 for new attendees. A discount of $300 will apply to individuals registered at the same time. First person pays the full amount, and each individual after the first person receives $300 off. Discount does not apply to the deposit.

An interdisciplinary team working to understand harmful algal blooms and the resulting human health risks has organized a chance for those working in coastal issues to meet others with the same focus.

North Carolina Center for Coastal Algae, People, and the Environment, or NC-CAPE, has scheduled “Connecting The Coast: Networking and Resource Swap” for noon to 4 p.m. April 11, at the Estuarium on the Pamlico River in Washington.

N.C. State University-based NC-CAPE is inviting community leaders, researchers, and organizations working on coastal issues to the Estuarium to discuss key issues affecting coastal communities, particularly harmful algal blooms, and to foster collaboration.

“This event offers an exciting opportunity to build connections, share resources, and discuss ways to strengthen our collective efforts in managing harmful algae blooms and other environmental challenges along North Carolina’s coast,” organizers said.

The Estuarium features more than 200 exhibits on estuaries and coastal rivers and offers special programs on natural and cultural heritage, aquariums with crabs and other estuarine life, art, interactive displays, artifacts from life on the Pamlico River, and information on hurricanes and sea level rise.

Email community engagement coordinator for NC-Cape, Vivian Taylor, at smtayl27@ncsu.edu for more information.

​As the hours passed, day turning into night, prospects looked bleak for a research vessel carrying scientists and students hoping to get past the mouth of the Cape Fear River to deeper waters offshore.

The R/V Cape Hatteras had essentially been stuck at the mouth of the river for about 24 hours after leaving the morning of Feb. 10 from its mooring at Cape Fear Community College in downtown Wilmington, thanks to an abrupt change in the weather.

“I won’t lie, I did not think we would make it offshore, which feels like a waste with this large vessel to just be stuck at a spot we could sample fairly easily on smaller boats,” said Dr. Bradley Tolar, an assistant professor with the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

February tends to be a month when the weather serves up less-than-ideal working conditions offshore.

Cold temperatures, whipping winds and rain proved that to be the case during the first several hours of the maiden trip of the TEAL-SHIPS project, a groundbreaking expedition to study shore-to-sea habitats.

TEAL-SHIPS, an acronym for this mouthful: Transect Expedition to Assess Land-to-Sea Habitats via Interdisciplinary Process Studies, will allow researchers the opportunity to get an understanding of the biological, chemical and physical changes in habitats from the mouth of the Cape Fear River to the Gulf Stream’s warm waters.

This particular area of North Carolina’s coast has largely remained understudied since the 1990s. And those previous studies of the area between the 1970s and 1990s focused primarily on nearshore ecosystems.

Now, through a series of cruises (no, not the kind where mai tais are served on the pool deck), researchers of different coastal marine science disciplines hope to build a baseline in understanding how changes in the Gulf Stream flow affect the ocean’s food chain and critical habitats between the coastline and Atlantic continental shelf.

Tolar is spearheading the venture, one that was able to come to fruition through a $1.5 million General Assembly-funded grant through the University of North Carolina System Research Opportunities Initiative, a program that focuses on several research areas including marine and coastal science.

TEALS-SHIPS includes principal investigators from UNCW, the UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University and East Carolina University.

Over the course of the next two years, researchers and some of their students will embark on an expedition about every three months, setting course to a series of stations mapped from the river’s mouth to the Gulf Stream. By going out every three months, researchers aim to capture any potential changes in each season of the year.

“Even though this is only giving us two years, the goal is to write grants to continue sampling further, maybe not to this level or this frequency, but just to have a better understanding of how the coast and offshore are connected,” Tolar said.

The Gulf Stream is a powerful current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico, curves around the Florida peninsula, up the Eastern Seaboard and extends toward Europe where it warms western European countries.

“But for our coastline, we know that it transports nutrients, it transports species up to our coast,” Tolar said.

The Gulf Stream oscillates and there is some thought that rising sea temperatures might actually weaken the current over time.

“We don’t really know what those consequences might be to what it transports up to our coast,” Tolar said. “If it’s transporting nutrients that feed our coastal habitats, which we care about a lot with our state’s blue economy, if it weakens or oscillates farther offshore rather than coming inshore, we would want to know.”

During each cruise, physical oceanographers will collect fine-scale water samples to get a sense of how the Gulf Stream current is moving and any changes in that movement over the course of a year.

Two, 20-minute-long fish trawls will capture as much fish as possible at each of the project’s six major stations, each of which include vastly different types of habitat. Researchers will count all of the species captured during the trawl sweeps, collect 10 of each species, and measure 30 of every species.

“This allows them to get a sense of the diversity of fish, the abundance of fish, and then their variability and size to see basically how fish communities change as we go offshore,” Tolar said.

Dr. Christian Briseño-Avena, a UNCW assistant professor of biological oceanography, plankton ecologist, and another principal investigator on the project, will collect zooplankton and larger phytoplankton to study how those organisms change over time.

“Eventually we’d like to know more about how the zooplankton, or the plankton in general, are changing or not changing for this region over longer periods of time,” he said.

Copepods “change a lot in this region,” he said. But samples of the tiny crustaceans collected from this region are sparse.

Briseño-Avena said he is learning as he goes on each expedition, targeting smaller plankton, fish larvae and zooplankton scooped up from the seafloor to the surface in “bongo nets,” aptly named because they are shaped similar to the open bottomed hand drum.

During TEAL-SHIPS maiden cruise earlier this month, he was met with some surprises when the bongo nets surfaced back aboard the R/V Cape Hatteras, a 135-foot oceangoing research vessel used as a hands-on training tool for marine technology students at Cape Fear Community College.

He wasn’t expecting to see in the winter what turned out to be a large amount of ichthyoplankton, which are the eggs and tiny larvae of fish.

His students have already begun the tedious task of extracting and identifying the different groups and species of plankton he collected. The plankton will be preserved in ethanol and used to build a library-like catalogue of samples that will be available to future coastal marine scientists.

He and Tolar agree the expedition was a success, despite the weather challenges that cut the initial trip by a half day and covered four of the six stations. The ship traveled just under 75 miles offshore, making it to the Gulf Stream where the water temperatures were 30 degrees warmer than those near shore.

“At least we confirmed if we were able to do as much as we did in our 18-hour weather window we’ll be fine for our future expeditions,” Tolar said. “We’ll have no problem getting all the way out there. We learned that we could do it and we learned how to be more efficient about it.”

UNCW’s Center for Marine Science is in the process of acquiring its own, larger research vessel. The 73-foot vessel is expected to be complete in the spring of 2026. TEAL-SHIPS project principal investigators hope to use the new vessel during their final two expeditions covered by the current grant.

Tolar hopes to tap additional funding sources for the program to collect samples beyond two years.

“If we’re able to get more funding in the future we can compare the changes year-to-year,” he said. “Even if not, we have a really nice study that shows this is what’s happening here off the coast of Wilmington and that can connect how other folks along the East Coast are measuring their samples.”

A public meeting on prospective wind energy projects scheduled for Thursday has been canceled because of weather conditions has been rescheduled for April.

The Southeastern Wind Coalition and North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center, which are part of the Carolinas Renewable Energy Development Assistance and Siting Hub, or DASH, will host the meeting from 6-7:15 p.m. April 3 at the Brunswick County Center, 25 Referendum Dr. NE, Bolivia.

Organizers said the intent is to provide a platform for residents to voice their perspectives on large-scale solar and wind energy project development and learn about the DASH initiative, a collaborative led by N.C. State University’s Clean Energy Technology Center.

Input gathered will shape future educational workshops, technical assistance and an online technical assistance hub with resources for communities in North Carolina and South Carolina.

Those interested are asked to RSVP to the new date online.

The bright green scum coating areas of the Cape Fear River’s surface caught everyone by surprise.

Until that summer in 2009, no one had seen Microcystis blooms in the river, which for decades leading up to that point had been monitored for algae.

“The community members, researchers, the water utilities, this was a really strange system to have these types of cyanobacterial blooms,” in the Cape Fear, said Madi Polera, a doctoral candidate at North Carolina State University. “Many historic blooms are typically associated with some kind of nearby, still-moving water, like another lake or reservoir, and the blooms appear immediately downstream.”

Even more baffling was the fact that the blooms abruptly stopped appearing in the river in 2012 — and they haven’t appeared since.

The presence of blooms set off a flurry of investigations. Water utilities studied what types of toxins the blooms may have been emitting into the drinking water supply and how to best remove those toxins from the raw water source. Wildlife officials wanted to know how the blooms might affect fisheries, particularly the anadromous fish swimming upstream to spawn.

Two years after the blooms disappeared, researchers in 2014 initiated a forensic-like investigation to rule out any possible explanation of how the algae got into the river, how to prepare for a reoccurrence of the blooms, and seek out ways to prevent the blooms from sprouting up on the river’s surface again.

Polera, one of the authors of the study that was published in March, explained that the investigation was not one where researchers tried to prove anything.

The study “was just what is the most likely, the most plausible aspects that we could not rule out,” Polera told Coastal Review via telephone earlier this week.

Microcystis algae blooms are made from a recipe largely of nitrogen and phosphorous. The cyanobacteria thrives in waters like lakes and ponds, blooming during warm summer months before hunkering down into the sediment, where it lies dormant in the winter.

Microcystis blooms produce a few different types of toxins, primarily microcystin. Microcystin can affect the liver and is considered a possible human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency. If ingested, microcystin and the other toxins can cause digestive issues and may cause flu-like symptoms in both humans and animals.

Dogs are especially sensitive to microcystin.

The blooms in the Cape Fear River were localized primarily upstream of Lock and Dam No. 1, an area where conditions are ripe for algae growth because of the lake-like effect the dam has on the water. The dam is near Riegelwood, a community roughly 30 miles upstream of Wilmington and near the drinking water source intake for thousands in the region.

“What we really tried to do was look at everything that we know about the biology of Microcystis and what can contribute to it and kind of go down the list to rule out any possible explanation,” Polera said. “We started with the conditions in the river and we asked what is special about these four summers and at this location that may have changed to now support these blooms that we’ve never seen before.”

Were the summers between 2009 and 2012 particularly hot? Was there an unusual amount of nutrients in the river? Did the turbidity change in a way that would favor Microcystis blooms?

Polera first turned to monitoring data collected between the early 1990s through the 2000s. It was determined that there was nothing particularly unique about those summers or that location.

Researchers then turned way upstream to Jordan Lake where waters, they knew, had harbored other cyanobacteria in the past. Could a chance in the lake have created conditions that allowed Microcystis to incubate there and send it down river?

No. Researchers determined that the blooms that appeared that far downstream could not have possibly gotten there from the lake.

“We’ve never seen blooms at any other areas of the river that have the same type of lake-like characteristics that Lock and Dam 1 does. There were no blooms behind Buckhorn Dam, no blooms behind Lock and Dam 3 and there were occasional surges out of Jordan Lake when they got really big rains that we didn’t see blooms immediately following that,” Polera said.

Next, researchers focused a little closer to Lock and Dam No. 1, turning their attention to major industrial dischargers.

They were able to rule out wastewater treatment plants in Fayetteville and Elizabethtown.

But they could not eliminate Smithfield Foods’ plant in Tar Heel, a tiny town in Bladen County that’s home to the largest pork-processing facility in the country.

After confirming the presence of Microcystis in samples of discharge from the plant, researchers combed through monitoring reports to look at whether there was a correlation between when the facility discharged into the river and when the blooms appeared.

Next, researchers compared the Microcystis found in the plant’s discharge to that found downstream near the dam.

“Yes, there’s chlorophyll in there. Yes, there’s Microcystis. Yes, there’s enough nutrients. Yes, they were discharging during the times. Yes, they were discharging enough based on our calculations and modeling that what was coming out of the discharge was enough to seed the population that we saw downstream. I just can’t find anything in their data and in our sampling to say, no, this wasn’t possible,” Polera said.

One simple way to prevent the possibility of future blooms, she said, is for regulatory agencies to require industries that may have chlorophyll a, which allows algae to use sunlight to convert molecules into organic compounds, to monitor for that particular type of chlorophyll.

The EPA is currently proposing revisions to wastewater discharge standards for meat and poultry products facilities. The revisions would require facilities to reduce the amounts of nutrients and other pollutants they discharge by using “affordable and available wastewater treatment technologies.”

“I think the good news is we have been watching now for over 10 years,” Polera said. “We’ve been prepped and ready to go if it ever does happen again. The water utilities are very prepared, if it does happen, to make sure that nothing gets into the drinking water and they can do that very effectively. As far as the risk goes, the water utilities and researchers that are really keeping an eye on the conditions of the river have it covered. My hope is that with all that preparation and additional monitoring, I would be surprised if we see it again.”

WILMINGTON – North Carolina’s leading PFAS researchers aim to trace the chemical compounds found in waterways, air and soil in the state to the polluters emitting them.

Using newly acquired machines called mass spectrometers, scientists will also have the ability to identify per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances not in the Environmental Protection Agency’s registry, one that has steadily grown over the past several years from a few thousand to 15,000 known PFAS today.

The brand-new fleet of mass spectrometers are being disbursed to research labs on a handful of university campuses that are part of the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory’s PFAS Testing Network.

Referred to as the PFAST Network, this group of academic researchers was created after scientists at N.C. State University and the EPA discovered that the Cape Fear River, the drinking water sources for tens of thousands, contained elevated levels of PFAS.

The discovery sparked what has become a nationally-recognized, state-led effort to better understand the potential human health effects of PFAS and ways to cut down the amount of these chemicals from getting into the environment.

Academic researchers, state legislators, environmental regulators and representatives with Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., the multibillion-dollar company that makes the mass spectrometers, recently hosted a press conference on the campus of the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science to announce how the technology will be used to expand PFAS research here in the state.

Related: Secretaries’ Science Board to review PFAS’ effects

Dr. Lee Ferguson, an environmental analytical chemist and assistant professor at Duke University, said the investments by the North Carolina General Assembly, which has pumped millions into PFAS research, and the collaboration with Thermo Fisher, puts the network at the cusp of increasing the sophistication of its PFAS investigations.

The mass spectrometers will allow researchers to move from canvassing the state for PFAS contamination to “understanding sources, tracking those sources, fingerprinting those sources and then move into collaborations with treatment technologies and treatment engineers to try to remove those contamination sources,” he said.

“Specifically, the new instrumentation that we are getting, and already have in some cases, will allow us to do things like ultra-fast and ultra-sensitive, targeted and nontargeted analysis so that we can try to get a picture of those 15,000 PFAS compounds that may be present,” Ferguson said.

In all, five mass spectrometers are being delivered to labs at Duke University, N.C. State, UNCW and East Carolina University.

Thermo Fisher showcased a mock mass spectrometer at the March 27 afternoon press conference. The instrument is not exactly a visual marvel. It looks like a large, boxy-shaped piece of equipment you might see in any given lab.

Each machine will be used like a key that will unlock some of the mysteries about PFAS –which PFAS are in the environment, what levels of them are in the environment, where they’re coming from and what treatments are available to reduce the amount that get into the environment.

UNCW Professor Dr. Ralph Mead explained that the mass spectrometer in a lab he heads at the university’s Center for Marine Science will be used to investigate samples of everything from rain and snow to soil.

“Specifically, the questions that we’re trying to address is understanding can we use that instrument to develop a forensics approach to trace the source of PFAS, as well as understand the fate and ultimate transport of it,” he said.

As researchers gather this and other information, they will be able to create an online library, one that would be a resource for environmental regulators and law makers navigating how much to crack down on industries that use PFAS to make a sweeping array of consumer goods.

The General Assembly will, by this July, have appropriated more than $50 million for the collaboratory specifically to perform PFAS-related research in the state.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-New Hanover, one of a small number of state delegates who spoke at last week’s press conference, said North Carolina is fortunate, not because it is, in some respects, ground zero for PFAS, but because the state has some of the leading experts to take on PFAS research.

“Here we are today utilizing state-of-the-art equipment from a great company to really accomplish some of the goals that we not only want as a state, but we want as a solution to a worldwide problem,” he said.

Rep. Deb Butler, D-New Hanover, said the discovery of PFAS in the Cape Fear region is a reminder of the far-reaching consequences of unchecked pollution.

“For too long, PFAS contamination has lurked beneath the surface undetected and unchecked,” she said. “In my opinion, we have not been diligent enough on the front-end of manufacturing and that must change. We must demand stringent standards for PFAS emissions, as well as any discharge that affects our public trust resources. We must strengthen enforcement mechanisms and promote pollution prevention initiatives. By addressing the root causes of contamination rather than focusing on the cleanup, we will better serve the citizens of North Carolina.”

Friendship Cake was as close as cooks came to sourdough bread where I grew up in eastern North Carolina. And you were no pal if you shared a jar of the strange starter, a soupy blend of fruit cocktail, more sugar and packaged dry yeast, even though the starter always came with an undeniably tasty cake.

Black-coffee-begging sweet, dotted with jewel-toned fruit and incredibly moist, Friendship Cake hit the marks of a proper Southern dessert. But the recipe had nothing in common with wild yeast starters that cause sourdough bread to rise — except that you felt obligated to use the starter even if you didn’t want to bake a cake. How else could you morally get rid of the stuff? And who did you want to unfriend?

The idea of a live starter growing in a jar on the kitchen counter was just one reason why cooks in my neighborhood shunned sourdough bread. San Franciso, bless its heart, could have those tangy, hard-crusted, sourdough loaves whose chewiness was thanks to high-gluten, hard-wheat flour.

North Carolina’s warm, humid climate nurtures soft wheat milled into lower-gluten flours that produce tender biscuits. Southern Biscuit is an actual flour brand here, and the cooks I knew honored tradition. They served baking-powder- or baking-soda-leavened biscuits at nearly every meal. The only time they pulled out yeast was to make even softer lightening rolls at holiday time.

Over time, sourdough bread found a place in North Carolina. In fact, North Carolina State University, the same school that helps the state’s farmers successfully grow soft wheat, plays an important role in international sourdough research.

The university’s Wild Sourdough Project, launched in 2020, builds on the ongoing collaboration between scientists in the Global Sourdough Project. The research aims to understand preexisting sourdough starters from across the world and identify the microbes living in those starters.

While starters date back 6,000 years, exactly how a small number of wild organisms end up in sourdough starter and leaven bread remains unclear.

Relying on laboratory work and bakers worldwide, who produced and helped assess 500 sourdough starters, researchers have made surprising discoveries and busted some long-held sourdough opinions.

The projects’ results fascinate millions of U.S. home cooks. Their favorite COVID-19 pandemic pastime was baking sourdough. The bread remains one of 2023’s biggest trends, international bakery magazine BBM reports, so the studies also benefit North Carolina’s growing number of artisan bakeries, places like Little Loaf in Wilmington, Union Special in Raleigh, Old World Levain in Asheville and Verdant in Charlotte, all of which produce gorgeous sourdough loaves.

But unlocking the mysteries of wild microbes that help leaven sourdough bread may also help scientists to better understand microbes’ roles in complex ecosystems like oceans and estuaries.

Here’s what sourdough researchers have discovered so far.

Sorry, San Francisco

Wild yeast and beneficial bacteria that produce acids, which flavor sourdough, love San Francisco’s famously foggy climate. Many bakers believed location was the key to good sourdough. “But what we found is that, while there could be tremendous variation between the microbial ecosystems of different sourdoughs, we could not find any single variable that was responsible for much of that variation,” N.C. State assistant professor of applied ecology Erin McKenney said. That means anyone can bake great sourdough anywhere.

McKenney is the lead author of a paper published Oct. 4 in the open-access journal PeerJ.

What else matters

Researchers found different variables like a sourdough starter’s age is, how often it’s fed and where it is stored had small effects that added up to a significant difference in starters and breads. Bakers themselves must control variables to produce the best loaves for their circumstances. “Because sourdough is a living culture, it adapts to whatever conditions we impose on it,” McKenney said. For instance, she stores starter in the fridge to buy extra time between feedings. Countertop starters want to be fed two to three times a day, whereas McKenney has delayed feeding her chilled starter for up to six weeks.

Flour power

The projects’ latest report discusses the significant role flour plays in determining which bacteria thrive in starters. Bakers can influence sourdough bread’s aroma by choosing different flours, each of which foster different communities of bacteria, McKenney said.

Researchers used 10 different flours to create 40 starters, all in the same growing environment. Over 14 days, each flour formed increasingly distinct microbial communities. “Essentially, it appears that different types of bacteria are able to make the most of the nutritional compounds found in different types of flour,” McKenney said. When different bacterial communities thrive on different nutritional inputs, those bacterial communities produce different smells.

“For example, the bacterial community in amaranth sourdough produces an aroma that smells almost exactly like ham,” McKenney said. “I’ve never smelled a sourdough that had such a meaty aroma. Rye produces a fruity aroma; buckwheat has an earthy smell …”

“One surprise was that rye flour fostered a much wider diversity of bacteria than any other type of flour,” McKenney said. “We found more than 30 types of bacteria in the rye starters at maturity. The next highest was buckwheat, which had 22 types of bacteria. All of the other flours had between three and 14.”

More bacteria doesn’t necessarily translate to better aromas. The rye starter smelled sour/vinegary for the entire two weeks. “Days 4-11, we picked up on a lot of pickled okra smells. Days 8-12 we also detected smells of acetone, a compound often associated with fingernail polish remover…; but days 13-14, it smelled more distinctly like sour bread/dough,” McKenney said.

Researchers did not conduct a standardized bread tasting, so they can’t say which flour produces the yummiest sourdough, but McKenney loves sourdough bread made with emmer and einkorn flours. 

Exactly how long it takes starter to kick off

Ten days, McKenney said. “It’s possible that a starter grown in a very cold location might take longer than 10 days to mature. However, we fed the starters once every 24 hours – plenty of time for even cold bacteria to divide enough times to achieve a successional progress.”

A world full of yeast

While 70% of starters contained only one type of yeast, the researchers found 70 distinct types of yeast across all 500 sourdough samples. More work needs to be done to determine if specific microbes are responsible for shaping specific sourdough characteristics.

Sourdough research is bigger than bread

Bread is so ingrained in human existence that we take it for granted. Bake a loaf, buy a loaf, make a sandwich. No big deal. But the Wild Sourdough and Global Sourdough projects could have broad impacts because of the focus on microbes. They’re essential to life on Earth. Microbes make dead things decay, thereby providing nutrients to soil. They can break down industrial sewage. Microbes help clean the ocean of waste. They can also cause harm. Much about microbes remains unknown.

“Sourdough is an excellent model system for studying the interactions between microbes that shape the overall structure of the microbiome,” said Elizabeth Landis, a sourdough project participant and postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University. “By studying interactions between microbes in the sourdough microbiome that lead to cooperation and competition, we can better understand the interactions that occur between microbes more generally – and in more complex ecosystems.”

HARKERS ISLAND – About a quarter-mile along the Soundside Loop Trail behind Cape Lookout National Seashore’s visitor center is a two-board wooden fence, indicating that hikers need to make a sharp left turn to stay on the path.

In addition to guiding foot traffic on the 0.8-mile-long trail through maritime forest, the fence at the bend is where a new public science project called “Chronolog” was recently installed. The online tool helps track changes in the environment. In this case, the ghost forest on that side of the island.

When hikers walk by, they can place their smartphone in the gray bracket attached to the top of the fence post to align their photo, take the shot, then email it to Chronolog. Once received, the photo will be added to that location’s time-lapse almost immediately.

Chronolog houses crowd-sourced time-lapses of parks, nature centers, wildlife organizations, schools and museums. Currently, there are more than 500 Chronolog stations in 45 states. The Cape Lookout station is the 18^th on the coast and there have been 10 submissions so far in the month since it was installed.

On a breezy morning in late June at the visitor center, Nate Toering, Cape Lookout’s chief of interpretation and education, explained that the Chronolog allows them to make informed decisions for managing that area of the park and provides “a better understanding of what’s going on in the environment around us.”

This Chronolog is part of a bigger project with the National Park Service, North Carolina State University and Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center. Four NC State undergraduate students worked with three mentors at the university on a ghost forest communication strategy for a senior-level course. The students wrote and designed a brochure as well as a “glideshow” that’s similar to a slideshow, called “Ghost Forests: The Dead Trees Down East.” Down East is a group of more than a dozen rural communities east of Beaufort. 

Ghost forests occur when healthy coastal forests are repeatedly exposed to saltwater through high winds, tides or storms, making the plants, or trees, with low salt tolerance die off, eventually being replaced by salt marsh habitat.

From the Chronolog photo station down the trail, Toering pointed out the gradual transition of the dead trees that are rotting and breaking, but farther inland, there are super healthy trees.

He said that they’re finding at the National Seashore more salt-tolerant species in areas that didn’t have salt-tolerant species before, and are interested in observing the growth of the ghost forest and potential erosion in that area.

Jutting past the ghost forest, several yards away from the existing station, are the jagged remnants of a walkway across a salt marsh that had been destroyed by Hurricane Florence in 2018.

Toering said there are plans to rebuild the walkway, hopefully by the end of the year. When that build is complete, there will be a second Chronolog installed looking toward the ghost forest in the direction of the existing Chronolog, to provide a panoramic view.

Long term, especially after the second Chronolog is installed, there will be a more site-specific assessment of the growth of the ghost forest, such as how fast an area that used to be a forest is transitioning into salt marsh, he explained.

Toering said that as a ranger, he provides frontline messaging on ghost forests and encourages visitors to participate in this public science project. Adding, he’s trying to get people engaged, more knowledgeable about their environment and more caring about what’s going on around them. “Because one way or another, it impacts all of us.”

Part of that frontline messaging is providing to visitors the brochure, “Ghost Forests: What are they and how can you spot one?” that the NC State students designed for their senior course, called a capstone project.

Dr. Erin Seekamp, distinguished professor of resilience and sustainability and director of the Coastal Resilience and Sustainability Initiative at NC State, coordinated the project.

Seekamp has been working with the Down East community since 2015 on adaptation planning for Cape Lookout’s historic districts, and had discussed with Core Sound Museum and Heritage Center Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher that ghost forests are a good indicator of the vulnerabilities in these communities. 

When Seekamp was approached by a colleague to design a capstone project for the interdisciplinary degree, environmental sciences, she said she immediately connected the two. 

Serving as community liaison, Seekamp brought in as a ghost forest expert for the project Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources associate professor Dr. Marcelo Ardón, who has been behind installing Chronologs on the coast, and science communicator Michelle Jewell with the Department of Applied Ecology and president of the Science Communicators of North Carolina.

Seekamp said that this project helps students recognize how applied science is important, and integrating that with community engagement. Engaging students in the process of observation opens the door to being more aware of your environment and watching change, as well as using science to understand the changes that are occurring.

The idea is to grow the project in future semesters. “We really want to embed the next phases to include integration of schools and that intergenerational learning component,” with parents and grade-school students, and have further conversations about the future and adaptation, Seekamp said.

Amspacher said Core Sound is dedicated to learning and sharing more about the changing environment along the coast and especially Down East.  

“Partnering with NC State and other universities has opened doors for us to be involved with the important research taking place around us. We are very thankful to bring the community into this conversation. We look forward to working with local students to use this Chronolog project as a way to increase their — and their families’ — understanding of how saltwater is already impacting our landscape.”

Students on the project were Rachel DeChicio, Andrew Barfield, Jordan Strickland and Arden Lumpkin, who each graduated this year with a bachelor’s in environmental sciences.

DeChicio told Coastal Review that one of her biggest takeaways from this project is how important it is to focus on a community’s culture and values when communicating about climate change topics such as saltwater intrusion and ghost forests. 

“Harkers Island has an amazing community that loves their home and has deep ties to the land, so it is important to create educational materials on climate change that inspire curiosity and not fear,” DeChicio said. “I hope people who visit the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center are able to learn a little bit about saltwater intrusion and ghost forests from our products, and are then able to identify why their coastal forests are dying. I hope seeing the formation of ghost forests on Harkers Island and having the knowledge to name that occurrence empowers people to learn more about combating climate change.”

Barfield added that he learned through this project how ghost forests are a very visible aspect of our changing climate. 

“It is my hope that ghost forests can be used as a tool to further educate the public on the many ways that our world around us is changing. The more involvement that we get from local communities, then the better chance we have of adapting to these changes moving forward,” Barfield said.

Strickland said in an email that the two main things he learned while working on this project are the technicalities of designing and developing science communication products and ghost forests in general. 

“One of the main reasons why I chose this project as my top pick when we were deciding teams, was because I never heard of the term ‘ghost forests’ before,” he said. “Of course, I knew they were not referring to an actual haunted forest, so it intrigued me.”

After learning what ghost forests are, and how they have begun to spread on the coast of Harkers Island, he said he wanted to help provide the community with information about what ghost forests indicate.

“I knew if me, as an environmental science major, didn’t know much about ghost forests, then that means most of the general public doesn’t as well. Ghost forests are not only an indication of climate change and sea level rise, but also foreshadow how our coastal forests could end up as these two factors continue to impact the NC coast in the coming years,” Strickland added.

Lumpkin said the project taught her the importance of properly communicating climate science through the lens of who it impacts. The ghost forests that are popping up and growing quickly along the coast of these Down East communities are a tangible example of the effects of sea level rise and saltwater intrusion. Viewing this issue through the eyes of a community member gives you a wider perspective on the best way to communicate it. 

“The Down East community has a rich, generational history and connection with their land and have persevered in the face of many challenges,” she said. “My biggest hope with our project is that it will spark curiosity and conversation about climate change among the community. The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum is such an important place visited frequently by residents and I hope that our project can, at the least, be the start of a conversation about climate change impacts.”

Jewell explained to Coastal Review that this type of class project works all the way around: “The community’s needs are heard and answered, the students receive training and experience in co-creation and science communication, and the researchers will get more data from this changing landscape. Truly encapsulating the N.C. State mission of research, teaching, and extension.”

Science communication is an iterative process, and the hope is that this piece is the first of many touchpoints, Jewell said. “Our aim is to create a space for community members to engage with the changes happening around them. And that engagement can come in many forms,” from submitting photos at the Chronolog site, to being able to identify and understand ghost forests. 

The Chronolog station on Harkers Island is one of the nearly 20 that Ardón with NC State has either installed or helped coordinate the installation along the coast.

He said in an interview that the idea to have the public help monitor ghost forests dates back a few years and was asking the public to submit photos through an online platform before discovering Chronolog while on vacation on Bald Head Island.

Chronolog’s process appealed to Ardón. Rather than photos being submitted from all over, have the public take photos of the same location to make tracking the changes easier to observe.

He explained that these forests and marshes change on the scales of decades to centuries, but they’re probably changing a lot faster, on the scales of years to decades, “but that’s still pretty slow for us to see on a regular basis. I think the idea was if we have these photographs, then maybe it’ll become a little bit easier to see the change of these ecosystems.”

Ardón said in addition to looking at change over time, he wants to use the photos to study how the seasons change the landscape. 

With a grant through the National Science Foundation, Ardon began in 2021 installing Chronolog stations at Goose Creek State Park, Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, E. Merle Waterfowl Impoundment, and Swan Quarter National Wildlife Refuge.  

After installing the first round, he said N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources officials liked the project and decided to fund 11 more stations. He worked with the site managers to determine the best location for each Chronolog, depending on what they wanted to document, such as a marsh or a living shoreline.

“For the ghost forests, I’m really interested in looking at how long the snags, the standing dead trees, actually last, because there’s been some studies of those snags but there’s not a lot of good fine-scaled information of: How often do they fall over? Is it just after big storms? Is it small storms? Is it just after time that eventually they fall over? So those are the kinds of questions that I want to answer with these stations,” he said. 

From a Port City Daily report

A team of engineers from North Carolina State University is leaning toward Greenfield Lake in Wilmington as a research site to install and monitor a series of floating wetland islands as part of a $100,000 state-funded stormwater innovation grant.

The grant for the initiative to “optimize floating wetlands” at either Greenfield Lake or a retention pond on the university’s campus is one of the more than 60 projects that Gov. Roy Cooper announced last week. The projects will be funded with $14.6 million to be dispersed by North Carolina Land and Water Fund, or LWF, to protect 6,710 acres across the state. The school will receive $100,000 of a requested $187,000.

Project leader N.C. State professor Bill Hunt said there’s a more than 50% chance he will choose Greenfield Lake because of its potential to influence a broader effort to improve the lake’s water quality.

Hunt explained that the water quality issues at Greenfield Lake stem from excessive nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus entering the lake via stormwater runoff.

“While those nutrients do exist naturally, in Greenfield Lake they are present in very high numbers. And they get into the lake by running off from the watershed,” Hunt said.

Will Summer, deputy director of the LWF,  explained that a floating wetland island is “essentially a mat constructed in such a way that you can put plants in it through the top and the roots can hang into the water.” Floating islands filter out excessive nutrients harmful to the water quality but nutritious for the plants in deeper waters.

According to the LWF, the proposed project would include purchasing and installing the wetland islands, installing two groundwater wells at Greenfield Lake, pre- and post-installation water quality monitoring, measuring plant biomass and density to track nutrient absorption, and the evaluation of collected data. The city has agreed to perform maintenance of the floating islands.

Summer said in the coming weeks a program manager will negotiate with Hunt on what can be done with $100,000 instead of the $187,000  before anything is finalized. The city agreed to a small financial match, according to the LWF. If the project had been approved for the initially requested $187,000, the city would have contributed $3,457, with N.C. State’s contribution estimated at $19,090.

Hunt said that if the proposal goes through, his team will place lines of connected floating islands stretching across the northern arm, one near the stream’s entrance into the lake, and another about 100 feet downstream and perform water quality testing.

Although the project is not intended to fix the pollution problems at the lake, he said, “we think it is a part of a larger strategy to address them.