North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality staff are in the process of updating the state’s long-term strategy to protect coastal habitat, a necessity for a sustainable seafood industry.

According to the strategy called the Coastal Habitat Protection Plan, or CHPP, the need for a coastwide habitat plan came about in the 1990s because of growing concerns about fish populations, declining coastal habitats, and deteriorating water quality.

The CHPP was mandated by the Fisheries Reform Act of 1997, and the first plan was adopted in 2004 by the Marine Fisheries, Environmental Management and Coastal Resources commissions. The document, which was designed to “achieve the long-term enhancement of coastal fisheries by identifying, protecting, restoring, and enhancing critical fish habitats,” and is updated every five years.

CHPP is to provide “information on the habitats’ distribution and abundance, ecological functions and importance to fish production, status and trends, threats to the habitats, and includes recommendations to address threats,” according to DEQ’s Division of Marine Fisheries.

The Division of Marine Fisheries staff that make up the CHPP team, with guidance from a steering committee, have been working on the 2026 update. Charlie Deaton, habitat protection supervisor with the division, presented an status update to the Environmental Management Commission during the July 9 meeting in Raleigh.

He said the staff are drafting issue papers for the 2026 update that are broadly organized under three different themes: ecosystem-based management for coastal habitats, seagrass protection and restoration, and planning for multi-decadal wetland change, all of which build on previous editions of the CHPP.

The outlines of these papers are to be presented to the steering committee by web conference 1-3 p.m. Wednesday, the division announced July 15. The full agenda and link to the meeting are on the NCDEQ website.

Deaton said that the last full rewrite of the plan was in 2016. New issue papers were added to the 2016 CHPP as the 2021 update, and “we are continuing efforts on these issue papers and introducing a few more with this edition of the CHPP.”

Deaton reminded members that the 2021 CHPP prioritized submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV, protection and restoration through water quality improvements. The chapter on seagrasses “had 13 different recommended actions, but the big one that this commission has heard the most about is the recommended water clarity standard to ensure that adequate light penetration allows for seagrass growth.”

According to that document, seagrasses are “critical for healthy fisheries, such as shrimp, blue crab, red drum, and flounder and provides valuable ecosystem functions.” The state has one of the largest seagrass habitats on the East Coast, but water quality impairment coupled with climate change stressors can limit their growth, reproduction, and distribution.

The chapter for the 2026 update on seagrasses will use data from the Albemarle Pamlico National Estuary Partnership’s recent findings on seagrass decline. APNEP, a partnership of NCDEQ and the Environmental Protection Agency, has been fundamental in CHPP development in some capacity since its inception.

From 2006 to 2020, the state’s estuaries continue to lose more than 1% per year of its seagrass extent, which “might not sound like a lot, but that’s 15% in the time period. And if you look 30 years into the future, that’s another 35% that we would be losing if we continue at this rate. So, it’s a concerning rate of loss,” Deaton said. “We’ve lost 50% of our continuous seagrass meadows, and the losses have been most notable at the deep edge of the seagrass beds. So that implies a connection to water quality and decreased water clarity, light not penetrating deep enough.”

This new seagrass chapter is to build on the 2021 CHPP’s proposal to develop a water clarity standard, which was referred to the Environmental Management Commission’s water quality committee where it’s on hold. 

Turbidity “remains the biggest threat we see to seagrasses, and so it’s something we really want to get some action on,” Deaton said. Staff are also going to work on a permitting framework for active seagrass restoration projects, which could be planting seeds or transplanting seagrasses in areas that no longer have seagrass but should still have the conditions to support it.

The paper is also to explore habitat protections under the Marine Fisheries Commission authority. The commission considered restrictions for shrimp trawling in 2023 but decided against those. Instead, staff was asked to look into what that rulemaking might look like.

For the ecosystem-based management chapter, Deaton said that staff are reviewing how the Division of Marine Fisheries uses mapping and monitoring data to guide species management work. Staff will determine goals and targets on how to better integrate the research, as well as create indicators with data from the North Carolina Collaboratory’s study on 25 years of the Fisheries Reform Act.

“The other half of the ecosystem-based management chapter is advancing strategic habitat areas,” Deaton said, that were identified in the first edition of the CHPP as a priority. “These are areas that are defined as high quality, connected habitats that were identified to protect biodiversity and ecological function through a nonregulatory approach.”

The “Planning for wetland change” chapter concentrates on laying the groundwork for thin-layer placement. Other states are exploring this method to accent natural sediment accumulation by taking dredged material and placing it directly on the marsh in a layer of 6 to 18 inches.

North Carolina doesn’t have a permit for the process, meaning any applications for thin-layer placement must be approved through the Coastal Resources Commission’s variance process for rule exceptions.

“We have a couple projects in the hopper right now that may reach the variance process in the coming year or two and seeing those as potential pilot projects. If they show promise, this is something we could explore to make a little easier to for restoration practitioners to implement,” Deaton said.

“The other half of the sea level rise and coastal wetlands picture is marsh migration,” he said.

There’s been a lot of talk and writing about how ocean levels have been rising and will continue to rise. The current projections are that the ocean will rise an estimated 12-14 inches by 2050 and ever higher in the ensuing decades.

With all of the very technical and well-researched and documented writing published about this topic, let’s take a look at what that means for us as anglers and other people who enjoy the coastal waters.

Fourteen inches of rise may not seem like a big deal when accounting for the vastness of the entire ocean, but there will be definite changes. They won’t be great.

Dr. Shintaro Bunya, an avid angler, is also a research scientist at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Center for Natural Hazards Resilience. His work involves hydrodynamic and coastal modeling, specializing in developing and applying numerical models to simulate and forecast storm surges, compound flooding and the general physics of coastal water movement.

His goal is to provide the data and tools that government agencies and local communities need to better understand and prepare for coastal flood risks. This all means that he is right in the middle of what is going on concerning coastal flooding.

First, let’s talk about tides. It will happen gradually but the number of times the tide will rise over the streets in coastal towns will increase.

“The data confirms that sea levels are not just rising; the rate of that rise is accelerating,” Bunya recently said to me.

Obviously, this will make it more difficult for smaller beach towns than bigger cities due to limited resources, but even the biggest coastal cities like Miami and New York will have problems with saltwater in the sewage treatment plants. South Florida towns already see high tides coming into lawns almost every day. Some days the low tide will be what the high tide used to be.

Higher tides will disperse fish over wider areas. With more places to access, fish will be more difficult to locate. It’s likely that they will be less abundant, also because of increased pressure on fish populations from humans and water quality issues. What this means is that fishing will become increasingly difficult and individual anglers will have less and less success.

Access to the water will become increasingly difficult as well. Many of the places we use now may become inaccessible as water rises, as documented by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“According to NOAA’s tide gauge measurements, we have observed about 11 inches of rise since 1950 along the North Carolina coast and we face a unique challenge here because our land is also slowly subsiding (sinking),” said Bunya.

Let’s take boat ramps for example. These are already built upon the lowest ground available in order to accommodate parking next to the water. During high tide conditions, parking lots may become flooded, ironically making the ramp unusable due to there being too much water.

Some communities may become unlivable. In certain areas, high tides will make it impossible to access places. At this time, only the very highest tides cause this flooding. The popular term that has been coined by the TV weather stations is “King Tides.” These are the very highest water level periods, which coincide with the periods of full moon, especially during September and October.

People who live in Down East Carteret County are familiar with having to drive alternate routes or even plan their trips to the grocery store around the tides.

“What was once considered a ‘100-year flood’ is happening much more frequently,” Bunya said. “We are seeing a marked increase in high-tide flooding (often called ‘sunny day flooding’), where coastal streets and yards flood even without a storm, simply because the tide is higher than it used to be.”

Higher tides such as these will occur more frequently. Anglers will find the fish so spread out they will be extremely difficult to locate. In many places, as has been already mentioned, the tides will get so high that locals will find themselves stranded for hours and possibly days at a time. Military-style vehicles with super-high ground clearance will be needed in order to drive around numerous coastal communities. Going fishing will not be a great concern.

Personally, I have been stuck with no recourse a time or two already and have had to either take long detours or find a place to hang out as the water receded. The increased sea levels will make it harder for commercial fishers to make a living in seaside communities because access points will become inaccessible and because the fish will be more difficult to locate. Also just driving from one place to another will be difficult in these places.

According to a 2024 NOAA report, Beaufort will face 60 high-tide flooding days by 2050 and 338 by 2100. Wilmington will experience 30 high-tide flooding days by 2050 and 323 by 2100. This will make it extremely difficult to travel and work in those communities. From there on, the situation only gets worse.

Again, according to Bunya, “By the end of the century, we are looking at a likely range of 2 to 4 feet of rise, though scenarios up to 7 feet are possible.”

So the next several decades will provide challenges to already existing infrastructure such as bridges and culverts that were not built to withstand such saltwater intrusion. The groundwater will be inundated and the tillable soil in areas such as Open Grounds Farm, a roughly 45,000-acre farm in Down East Carteret County operated by a corporation based in Italy, will be threatened. Work and school will be disrupted due to the inability to travel. Tropical storms will be more of a problem in the future because storm surge will be on top of higher water levels than measured historically.

There is a lot to ponder here. Hiding our heads in the disappearing sand will not make the problem go away.

If the tide’s ebb and flow have appeared more extreme than usual over the last few days, it’s because of the king tide event that began Friday, the everyday term for exceptionally high and low water levels that happen when the moon is either full or new and orbiting at its closest to the Earth.

The Sunny Day Flooding Project, a group of researchers who studies chronic flooding in Eastern North Carolina, has a particular interest in these natural and predictable tides because they illustrate what average tidal cycles may look like as sea levels change.

While sunny day flooding sounds counterintuitive, it is a chronic issue coastal communities are facing more often, especially during king tides.

“As local sea-level rise, land subsidence, and development continue to increase in coastal areas, so does the frequency of flooding,” the project website explains. “The tidal cycle now takes place on higher average sea levels, resulting in ‘sunny day’ flooding of roadways during high tides. Sea water also infiltrates stormwater drainage systems at normal tidal levels, such that ordinary rainstorms lead to flooding. While these minor floods draw less attention than catastrophic storms, their high frequency imposes a chronic stress on coastal communities and economies by disrupting critical infrastructure services.”

Two of the project’s leaders, scientists Katherine Anarde and Miyuki Hino, told Coastal Review in an email response that sunny day flooding is inundation that happens without any rain or storm taking place.

Anarde is an assistant professor in North Carolina State University’s Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, and Hino is an associate professor in University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s City and Regional Planning and an adjunct assistant professor in the Environment, Ecology, and Energy Program.

“It can be a perfectly sunny day, but due to tides or wind, water levels in the ocean are high enough to cause flooding,” they explained. “King tides occur during the coincidence of perigee and spring tides – when the moon is closest to Earth in its orbit and in alignment with the Sun, which exerts the largest tide generating force on the world’s oceans.”

The Sunny Day Flooding Project launched in 2021 “to understand and address the incidence and impacts of chronic coastal flooding, which includes sunny day floods but also ‘flash floods’ from routine rain events coinciding with high tides” and is currently funded by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation and NASA, or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“We partner with communities to monitor how often floods are occurring, measure their impacts, and evaluate potential adaptation responses,” Anarde and Hino explained.

The team collects measurements, holds interviews and conduct surveys to better understand the effect of floods on residents, economies and human health. They communicate the flood risks through its flood alert system and king tides program.

While king tides “are not a new phenomenon,” the higher sea levels combined with sinking land, called subsidence, allows tides to rise relatively higher and higher, inundating low-lying infrastructure that was built decades ago, they said.

“The most visible impact is flooding on roads, often due to water backing up through stormwater drainage networks. However, the high water levels can also affect other aspects of infrastructure, such as septic tanks and underground sewage pipes,” the two continued.

A now-retired researcher at UNC Institute of Marine Sciences based in Morehead City started about a decade ago the North Carolina King Tides Project to study the floods that historically occurred during king tides, in association with the international King Tides Project. The global initiative began in Australia in 2009 and asked the public to document and share their photos showing how these higher tides affect shorelines.

North Carolina’s project began releasing a calendar with predicted high tides and encouraged the community to photograph and submit their observations of shoreline water levels.

The Sunny Day Flooding Project absorbed the N.C. King Tides Project after the researcher retired a few years ago and now publishes the calendar of when to expect king tides each year. The project also encourages the public to upload photos and details through the free Coastal Observer app.

The first king tide of this year was April 17-19, the current king tide is supposed to end Thursday, and more are expected June 13-16, July 12-15, Aug. 10-13, Oct. 25-31, Nov. 23-27, and Dec. 24-25, according to the calendar.

The calendar notes king tides as well as amplified tides, which they define as a nonscientific term for when higher and lower water level events are expected that “result when perigee and spring tides almost co-occur, yet are offset by a day or more.”

On the project website, the team offers the caveat that the calendar “does not predict coastal flooding.” Floods are often caused by wind and pressure, seasonal changes in sea level, and land-based factors like high groundwater, rainfall, and existing infrastructure.

“With sea-level rise, flooding during the perigean spring tides has become more and more common, but flooding is also occurring during moderate tidal cycles in some communities,” the website states.

Researchers recommend checking the NOAA Monthly High Tide Outlook for flooding probabilities.

The team also communicates flood risks through its flood alert system available for Beaufort, Carolina Beach, Down East and New Bern, where there are water level sensors. Those interested can sign up to receive an email whenever water levels overtop the roadway at the chosen sensor location.

On the project website, researchers explain that the chronic flooding affects people differently than extreme events like hurricanes because it is not as deep and widespread as storm surges from hurricanes, but it is more frequent. The high rate of constant flooding interrupts travel and could also increase infrastructure maintenance costs for coastal communities.

Anarde and Hino said that there are ways to address the impacts of chronic coastal floods, and the right response is going to differ from place to place.

“Elevating infrastructure can help keep it dry and reduce damage from saltwater. Scheduling trips to avoid the highest tides can help avoid flooded roads and keep travelers safe. Given that this type of flooding is projected to become more frequent in the future, it’s important to consider both immediate, short-term responses and longer-term strategies,” they said.

Dr. Reide Corbett, executive director of the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese, is the featured lecturer this month at the institute’s “Science on the Sound” lecture series.

The public is encouraged to attend Corbett’s lecture, “Holding the Line? Coastal Change and Barrier-Island Dynamics on the Outer Banks.” The program is set for 6 p.m. May 28 at the institute and there’s no charge to attend.

From collapsing oceanfront homes to repeated beach nourishment projects, coastal change is becoming increasingly visible across the Outer Banks. But what do these changes reveal about how barrier islands function — and how different management approaches interact with these naturally dynamic systems?

Corbett will discuss the science behind erosion, storms, overwash, sediment transport, and sea level rise, while exploring how shoreline management strategies influence beaches, infrastructure, and long-term resilience.

“Rather than focusing on simple solutions, the discussion will examine the tradeoffs, time horizons, and challenges associated with managing development on a constantly changing coast,” organizers said in their announcement.

Whether you work in coastal science, policy, planning, or simply care deeply about the Outer Banks, this presentation offers an opportunity to better understand the processes shaping one of the most dynamic shorelines on the East Coast.

The program will also be livestreamed on YouTube.

Corbett is a coastal oceanographer and geochemist whose work focuses on coastal change, sediment dynamics, shoreline processes, and the geomorphic evolution of barrier island systems.

Born and reared on the North Carolina coast, he earned his bachelor’s in chemistry and his master’s and doctorate in chemical oceanography from Florida State University before beginning his academic career at Tulane University in New Orleans. He later returned to North Carolina to join ECU, where he serves as dean of Integrated Coastal Programs, executive director of the Coastal Studies Institute, and professor in the Department of Coastal Studies.

Corbett’s research examines the dynamic interface between land and sea, from estuaries and continental shelves to barrier islands and polar coastlines. His work has taken him from North Carolina and Puerto Rico to New Zealand and Antarctica, with a particular focus on how storms, sea level rise, sediment movement, human activity, and long-term geologic processes shape coastal environments. Through the lens of North Carolina’s coast, he helps communities better understand shoreline change, barrier island evolution, and the choices needed to adapt to a changing coastal future, organizers said.

The Army Corps of Engineers wants more time to mull over concerns that have been brought up on the proposed project to deepen and widen portions of the Wilmington Harbor channel.

The North Carolina Division of Coastal Management announced late Tuesday afternoon it had granted the Corps’ request, indefinitely pausing the division’s review of whether the proposed project is consistent with state coastal management program laws, regulations and policies.

“The decision to pause allows time for the Corps to review and consider issues raised by DCM and the public before DCM completes its review,” according to a release. “A timeline has not been established for when the pause may be lifted.”

The pause follows a series of deadline extensions that have been made in recent weeks on the proposed project, one that is being highly scrutinized for its potential effects to the environment, shorelines and treasure of historic and culturally significant areas along the shores of the lower Cape Fear River.

The N.C. State Ports Authority says the project designed to accommodate larger ships would attract more import and export business to the port, ease shipping congestion on the East Coast, and keep the state’s ports competitive. The proposal calls for deepening the harbor channel by 5 feet and widening portions of it from the mouth of the Cape Fear River to the Wilmington port.

In late December, the division announced that the Corps’ Wilmington District was giving the division more time to complete its review of the federal determination, pushing its deadline from Jan. 5 to Jan. 19.

The Corps requested the pause on Jan. 16, just days after state fisheries and wildlife resources officials sent the division memorandums saying those agencies continue to have concerns about impacts to fish and wildlife resources within the proposed project area.

A Corps spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment by deadline for this report.

In its Jan. 14 memorandum to the Division of Coastal Management, the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries reiterated its concerns about the proposed project’s effects on habitat essential to fish in the river, wetlands connected to the river, and the overall water quality in the river.

Deepening and widening the harbor as planned “will have significant adverse impacts to fisheries resources due to the permanent loss of state-designated nursery and anadromous fish spawning areas along the Cape Fear River estuary and its tributaries,” the memorandum states.

“There is also potential for significant adverse impacts to wetlands, (submerged aquatic vegetation), shellfish resources, and water column habitat due to insufficient mitigation plans and uncertain impacts associated with the proposed actions that are not adequately discussed,” in the federal letter report and draft environmental impact statement of the Wilmington Harbor 403 navigation project released in September. The figure 403 refers to the relevant section of the Water Resources Development Act.

N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission officials raised similar worries, stating in a Jan. 15 memorandum to DCM that while it had been involved throughout the project’s development process, “our agency still has concerns regarding impacts the proposal will have on wildlife resources in the project area.”

“These comments include concerns regarding the proposal’s direct impacts to wildlife habitats, whether impacts to these habitats have been adequately assessed, inadequacies of mitigation proposals, the need to consult appropriate agencies prior to moving forward with the proposal, and the subsequent impacts to wildlife and their habitats (particularly nesting waterbirds and shorelines) from larger and increased vessel use.”

A number of towns in Brunswick and New Hanover counties have adopted resolutions urging state and federal agencies to protect a series of islands within the lower Cape Fear River that support 30% of the state’s coastal shorebird population.

Those towns are also calling for the creation of a comprehensive, long-term, and fully funded environmental and adaptive management plan to cover costs related to monitoring and mitigation to prevent and repair environmental harm.

A Corps official earlier this month confirmed to Coastal Review that the agency was implementing a programmatic agreement with the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office, the General Services Administration, the state Ports Authority, “and possibly the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation” to review historic and culturally significant areas along the river that may be impacted by the proposed project.

The agreement must be signed before the agency finalizes project plans, which would occur after the Corps releases its final environmental impact statement.

The final environmental impact statement is expected to be released sometime this summer, according to a tentative timeline released by the Corps. It is unclear how the Corps’ request of the state to pause its review may affect that projected timeline.

Once the review process resumes, DCM must decide whether to concur with or object the Corps’ determination.

“If DCM objects, it can offer alternatives or conditions that, if agreed to by the Corps, would allow the project to proceed,” according to the division.

Construction on the proposed project would begin no earlier than 2030 and take about six years to complete, a schedule Corps officials have said is optimistic.

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

This fall has been one of the wettest in my memory — and yet, we haven’t had much significant rainfall, or a single hurricane or tropical storm make landfall. Still, the water lingers.

King tides have been washing over docks, creeping across yards, and flooding roads that once stayed dry except in the worst storms. For those of us living Down East in Carteret County, it’s a clear sign that something deeper is changing.

I’ve lived in Atlantic for six decades. I’ve never seen the roads hold water like this. The fields don’t dry out anymore. The ditches stay full — they just don’t drain.

When ditches stop working

For generations, Down East communities-built ditches moved water off the land and into nearby creeks or sounds. Those systems were based on one simple principle: gravity. Water flows downhill, and as long as the outlet of a ditch was lower than the land it drained — and the tide stayed low enough — water could flow freely.

But that balance has been shifting. The “hydrologic head,” or the difference in elevation that drives water to move from land to sea, has been shrinking as sea level rises. When the sea surface and ditch outlet are nearly the same height, there’s no longer enough downward pressure to push the water out. Even small rises in tide height or groundwater level can stop drainage altogether.

Today, many ditches are effectively at or just above mean high tide. That means during normal tides, water from the creeks seeps inland through the ditches, instead of the other way around. Even when a ditch still looks dry at low tide, the groundwater beneath it is now closer to the surface, leaving the soil perpetually saturated. Digging the ditch deeper doesn’t help — it only invites more saltwater in and raises the groundwater table even higher.

In short, the plumbing that once kept the land dry is backing up.

Ghost forests: symptom of a deeper change

Drive Down East in Carteret County, and the change is plain to see. Along North River, Core Sound, and the backroads of Cedar Island and Atlantic, stands of gray, lifeless trees rise like skeletons from the marsh — the ghost forests of a drowning coast.

Where there were once loblolly pines, red maples, and black gums, saltwater now seeps through the soil, killing the trees from the roots up. These ghost forests are not isolated patches — they are expanding corridors of dead timber that trace the slow inland march of the tides. They are, quite literally, the frontline of sea level rise.

The loss of these forests shows that this isn’t just a surface flooding problem. It’s the entire groundwater system responding to rising seas — a shift in the coastal hydrology that’s transforming once-productive working lands into wetlands and marsh.

What the future holds

If sea level continues to rise at its current pace — or faster, as most scientists expect — the next two or three decades will bring dramatic change to Down East Carteret County.

• Farming will become progressively more difficult, as fields stay too wet or too salty for crops or equipment.
• Roads will flood more often and for longer periods, isolating communities during high tides.
• Septic systems will fail, as the groundwater table rises to meet the drainfields.
• Homes and businesses built on low ground will face chronic flooding, declining property values, and higher insurance costs.

And yet, all this is happening without a single hurricane this year. The water is simply no longer leaving.

Working with water, not against it

The North Carolina Coastal Federation and many partners are working to restore natural hydrology on thousands of acres of previously ditched farmland and forestland. By filling or plugging ditches and re-establishing wetland systems, these projects allow the land to store and slowly release water — the way nature intended.

Restored wetlands act like natural sponges and filters, reducing flooding, improving water quality, and providing habitat for fish and wildlife. More importantly, they show that living with water is possible — but only if we plan for it, rather than trying to drain it away.

Facing reality

The ghost forests now lining our creeks are not just dying trees; they’re a warning. They tell us that the old ways of managing water — cutting deeper ditches, pumping harder, pushing it away — will not work in a world where the sea itself is rising.

Down East has always lived close to the water and thrived because of it. But if we want our communities to endure, we’ll need to give the land room to breathe again — to let it hold water where it must and adapt to what’s coming.

Because the water isn’t waiting.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review.

As you near Wilmington for your beach vacation, you take in the classic coastal Carolina scenery — tall longleaf pines, grassy marshes, and the wide Cape Fear River. But then something strange catches your eye: a forest of bare white tree trunks rising from the swamp like a field of bones. The eeriness of this ghost forest — a place where living woods have turned to watery graveyards — leaves you wondering, “What killed all the trees?”

The answer researchers with the University of North Carolina Wilmington found in the boneyard may surprise you.

For centuries, bald cypress trees thrived on the banks of the Cape Fear River and its tributaries. Bald cypress trees — ancient survivors — are not fragile. These giants can live for thousands of years, stretching to 120 feet tall and standing strong through hurricanes thanks to buttressed roots that prevent the tree from toppling in high winds. An hour away, cypress trees on the Black River are some of the oldest trees in the world with some in Three Sisters Swamp found to be aged at over 2,600 years using tree-ring dating in a 2019 study. But here along the Cape Fear River — like much of the East Coast — many of them are dying and leaving behind ghost forests.

The cost of ghosts

Ghost forests aren’t just spooky. They’re a warning sign. Remote sensing photos from a 2020 paper by Jessica Lynn Magolan and Joanne Nancie Halls show Smith Creek’s freshwater wetlands giving way to salt marsh. Old-growth freshwater swamps are engines of life. They shelter birds, fish and reptiles. They store vast amounts of carbon. Their roots absorb floodwaters, buffering nearby communities when hurricanes roar ashore.

Ghost forests, by contrast, provide little protection. They are markers of loss — loss of biodiversity, of resilience, of time.

And they’re spreading.

Digging into the past

On a warm morning standing in the mud near Smith Creek, graduate student researcher Kendra Devereux of the University of North Carolina Wilmington holds a cylinder of tree core to the light. Each ring tells a story of a year in the tree’s life: how much it grew, whether it was stressed, whether conditions were good or bad.

Devereux and her team are piecing together a mystery. Along with her research advisers, Dr. Monica Rother and Dr. Andrea Hawkes, and a team of other collaborators and students, she’s collected tree cores and sediment samples from two sites on Smith Creek, looking for clues hidden in growth rings and in the microscopic remains of creatures. Tiny, fossilized organisms buried in the layers of river mud act like timekeepers, revealing how salty the water was at different points in history. By studying them, the team can reconstruct how salty the water was when they lived.

And the evidence revealed in their report points to what may be a surprising culprit.

A river made deeper

The cypress deaths weren’t just caused by globally rising seas or regular tides. It appears that the trees were undone, in large part, by ongoing dredging.

Over the last century, the Cape Fear River was repeatedly deepened to allow bigger ships to reach Wilmington’s port. Each time the channel grew, for example, in 1912, 1930, 1946, 1950, 1970, and from 2000 until 2005, more ocean water pushed upstream, according to a 2011 UNCW study for the Army Corps of Engineers that monitored how deepening the Wilmington Harbor would affect tidal range. Combined with rising sea levels, that extra saltwater slowly crept farther upriver and into tributaries like Smith Creek. Even tiny increases in salt can stress or kill bald cypress trees. For people, it was invisible. For trees, it was deadly.

And the problem may only be exacerbated if the Wilmington Harbor channel is deepened from a depth of 42 feet to 47 feet.

Earlier this month, the Corps released a draft environmental study on the proposed multimillion project, which would permit larger ships to cruise from the mouth of the Cape Fear more than 20 miles up river to the North Carolina Port of Wilmington.

Salt: silent killer

Freshwater has almost no salt. Ocean water is about 3% salt, or about 35 parts per thousand. Bald cypress trees start struggling when there’s just a trace more salt than they’re used to. To put it in kitchen terms, just over a pinch per gallon is enough to start killing them. Older trees, despite their size, seem more vulnerable. Along the saltier stretch of Smith Creek, untold numbers of older trees have died, leaving only snags — the standing skeletons of once-living giants.

Upstream, where the water is fresher, cypresses are still thriving, with at least one more than 800 years old. But closer to the Cape Fear, trees that have managed to survive amidst the ghost forests show signs of years of stress, with observable ring patterns that coincide with the dates of major dredging projects. In the 1970s, cypress growth was suppressed in the area with high salt. By 2000, whole stretches of trees had died, leaving behind today’s ghost forest.

A warning rising with the tide

As Wilmington faces sea level rise and continued dredging, Rother, Devereux and the other authors found, the salty tide will keep pushing inland. That means more ghost forests, fewer living cypress trees, and greater risk of flooding for the people who call this coast home.

The white skeletons along Smith Creek are more than strange landmarks. They are warnings etched into the landscape, reminders of how human choices and a changing climate can reshape even the hardiest of forests. As Rother explains, “Climate change and sea-level rise will form more ghost forests across the Atlantic and Gulf coasts,” leaving communities with less natural protection from flooding. And with continuing dredging of the Cape Fear River bottom, hurricane-prone Wilmington could face even greater risks.

Next time you cross that bridge, look again. The ghost forest isn’t just haunting the swamp, it’s a warning carved into bone-white silence.

Third and final in a series on a recent visit to Louisiana’s bayous, a trip sponsored by the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, to start a conversation between people there who are being flooded out and those in the Down East communities of Carteret County who face similar threats.

GRAND BAYOU VILLAGE, La. – Home is where we feel we belong. Its mystic cords connect us to everything we know and cherish – our family, our friends, our culture, our past. Its hold on us is so complete that we must fight to save it, even as the water rises around our ankles.

Maybe, in the end, that’s the simple, but profound, lesson in all this.

 A group of North Carolinians had gone to the battered bayous of southern Louisiana to connect with those at the edge of the climate crisis. We found resilient people who have withstood numerous storms and the constant flooding that comes with living at ground zero for rising seas. We found a natural world that is changing so rapidly and so dramatically that those who live there barely recognize it anymore. We had hoped to return better prepared for what’s coming because our state’s uniformly flat coastal plain will be one of most-threatened landscapes in America.

The scientists, as they did there in Louisiana, will almost certainly advise us to surrender to the impending flood. But it’s never that simple. Like the survivors of the bayous, we will try to adapt, pick up the pieces and soldier on, many to the bitter end. This is home, after all, and retreat isn’t an option.

“Leaving would be almost like death,” said Rosina Philippe, before we boarded the small skiffs for the short trip to her village in the bayou. We can reach it only by boat. “For us, home is more than the building you live in.”

Philippe is an elder in the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha Tribe, one of the several small Native American groups we visited. They fled from Andrew Jackson in the 1830s and sought refuge along the remote, watery fringes of the continent. Her people settled here in south Plaquemines Parish, close to where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Here, they fished; they farmed; they survived.

But, then, the water started rising. Slowly, at first. Then, more rapidly. Now, acres of marsh disappear in what seems like a blink of an eye. (See a previous story for the reasons.)

The small squadron of skiffs glided through Grandpa Bayou to what remains of Grand Bayou Village. Fourteen houses, perched on wooden stilts pounded into small plots of squishy land, dotted the water. No road connects them. “When I was a girl, there were forests as far as you can see,” Philippe said, as she scanned the open waters of the Gulf. “You could walk for miles without boots on your feet.”

Her grandparents told of a time, back in the 1940s, when almost 1,000 tribal members lived in hundreds of houses that lined the high ground of the bayou for more than five miles. Each had a proper yard with enough land to raise goats and plant peach orchards. The surrounding waters provided their bounty of fish, shrimp, crabs and oysters. Now, the 50 or so remaining residents must plant portable gardens in canoes and small boats. They try to protect their burial grounds and other sacred sites with reefs made from oyster shells recycled from New Orleans restaurants, 40 miles away.

Most of the tribe’s 800 members have left, but those who remained, including Philippe and her brother Maurice, intend to stay. She already has a solution for when dry land completely disappears. She’ll live on a houseboat moored to her sunken home.

“Everything you see around us is in our DNA. We’re part of the land, the air, the water.” Philippe explained. “If you leave, you become someone else. You are no longer the same person. No longer the same people.”

A Homecoming

In Ironton, 20 miles to the north on Louisiana Highway 23, the Rev. Haywood Johnson Jr. is trying to bring his flock home after a series of devastating hurricanes scattered it to the wind. Most are descendants of the slaves who founded the settlement soon after emancipation, making Ironton one of the oldest Black communities in the state.

Being Black and poor in the Deep South during the reign of Jim Crow meant nothing was ever easy. Life was particularly onerous in Plaquemines Parish, where Leander Perez ruled with an iron fist for more than 40 years during the mid-20^th century. The Democratic Party boss, district attorney and head of the parish commission was a racist and an avowed segregationist in the old Dixiecrat mold. He cared nothing for the Black residents of the parish and made sure they were last in line for everything – voting rights, equal schooling, sewerage, even running water. The parish didn’t lay water lines to Ironton until 1980 and then only after “60 Minutes” made a big deal of it.

The same was true of flood protection. Ironton was excluded from the massive federal levee that Congress authorized after Hurricane Katrina inundated much of southern Louisiana in 2005. Had the wall been extended 10 miles south, hurricanes Issac in 2012 and Ida nine years later would likely have been less destructive. “Ida was the worst,” Johnson said. “It devastated our community. I had never seen anything like it.”

The eye of the Category 4 storm passed over the Ironton on Aug. 29, 2121, just months after Johnson and his congregation celebrated the 143rd anniversary of their St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church. The hurricane damaged or destroyed every building in the community. Even caskets floated out of their graves.

For the third time in 16 years, Johnson’s church was wrecked. “We weren’t going anywhere,” he said.  “We were going to come back and rebuild because this is our heritage. This is our identity. If you lose that, you cease to exist.”

It took four years, but Johnson was notified just before our visit in June that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had finally approved money to raise and rebuild the church. He hopes the reopening will reunite his congregation. “Many left after Ida,” he said. “Their hearts had been broken.”

He promised to invite us to the first Homecoming.

Staying Home

The bright orange globe of the setting sun was dipping into Terrebonne Bay when we came upon brothers Dominic and Levis Dardar sitting on a dilapidated dock sipping beers and admiring the sunset. They are the last members of their tribe living on their ancestral island.

The Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians have lived on a narrow ridge of high ground in the marsh in Terrebonne Parish for more than 170 years. Until the asphalt road was built in 1953, boats were the only reliable way to get home. Island Road today is often impassable because of high winds and tides. But few people use it now.

The amount of land that has been lost here is staggering, from 22,000 acres in 1955 to about 300 acres today. With the land went the people. Several hundred tribal members once lived in 60 or so homes. By the early 2000s, only 25 families remained on the island.

Chief Albert Naquin then began his tireless efforts to relocate the entire community to save the tribe’s culture and traditions. It took almost two decades, but the federal government In 2016 gave Louisiana $48 million to voluntarily move island residents to higher ground. It was the first federally funded climate migration program in the US.

The country’s relationship with its native peoples has been marked by disappointment and betrayal, and this deal was no different. Naquin had hoped that all his people would be reunited in one place, but only tribal members who left Isle de Jean Charles after 2012 were offered money to move. They could choose to live in a new, planned community, The New Isle, 40 miles to the north, or anywhere else in the state that was safe from flooding. Homes in the new community would eventually be available to anyone. “The plan was to reunite the tribe, and now it’s going to be destroyed,” a heart-broken Naquin told the Los Angeles Times in 2019. “Instead of fixing it, I broke it.”

Chris Brunet took the offer and left the island for the new community. “I can’t smell the water,” he told the BBC last year. “I can’t smell it, I can’t see it, I can’t sense it. And I miss it.”

As it dipped below the horizon that night, the sun cast its orange glow on the water, and the breeze carried a faint scent of the sea. “This is home,” Dominic told us. “I was born here, and this is where I will die.”

Precariously perched as a narrow strand protruding into the stormy Atlantic Ocean, Ocracoke Island and its vulnerable highway have been a longtime headache for coastal scientists and road engineers.

Worsening erosion, flooding and storm damage exacerbated by climate change have heightened the urgency for the year-round community: What can be done to save their beloved island?

Researchers met with islanders Sept. 10 at the Ocracoke Community Center to present a study that modeled what the island’s future may hold under different scenarios, from the status quo to new efforts at beach nourishment and bridging.

The bottom line is that the very road itself, along with ongoing attempts to block the ocean’s advance with dunes and stabilize the roadbed with sandbags, has instead resulted in the narrow, low landscape that is currently so under threat by natural forces.

“The heart of the challenge is that the storm events we need to protect roads and buildings from would actually otherwise provide a lifeline for barrier islands in the face of rising sea levels,” Laura Moore, professor and associate chair of research with University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, said in an interview before the meeting. “It’s an extremely difficult reality, but unfortunately, the more successful we are in preventing storm impacts, the more quickly we’re managing the barrier islands out from under us.”

Accessible only by ferries, private boats and small planes, Ocracoke Island, most of which is part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, depends on a single, highly vulnerable highway stretching about 13 miles from the ferry dock on the north end of the island to the village.

The road, N.C. Highway 12,  has been protected by oceanside sandbags for years along one section about 5 miles from the northern ferry terminal known as the South Dock because of the link to Hatteras Island. But not only are the sand barriers unable to withstand the overwash during storms — the road was impassible and closed for several days after Hurricane Erin in August — the stacking lanes by the ferry dock have also suffered severe erosion.

“It’s very threatened,” Moore told Coastal Review. “I mean, we spend so much time thinking about the road, and yet (potential loss) at that terminal is a storm away, maybe two.”

The multiyear study, led by the UNC Chapel Hill researchers as part of a team that also included scientists from N.C. State University, Duke University and East Carolina University, as well as representatives from the N.C. Department of Transportation, the National Park Service, Hyde County and Tideland Electric Member Corp., is intended to provide information based on scientific modeling, and does not make recommendations or propose solutions.

“What we were charged with was to consider how different management strategies might influence the future landscape,” Moore said. “So, we have looked at different management strategies under different sea level rise scenarios, and we are able to say something about how the different strategies will likely influence Island width and island elevation and the persistence of the island in the future.”

In other words, as Moore explained, the study did not set out to design and test strategies; it instead modeled, which is essentially, “if you do ‘X’, this is what is likely to happen.”

“We’re really looking at relative differences between the management strategies in terms of their effects on the island,” she said.

Moore said that researchers studied current coastal conditions and processes and worked off data and prior research provided in the N.C. 12 Task Force report and NCDOT feasibility studies for guidance as the team developed the strategies to be reviewed: the status quo, i.e., dune road and/or sandbag rebuilding and maintenance; beach nourishment, i.e., widen or nourish the eroding shoreline with sand pumped from stored dredged material or offshore deposits; or road alternatives, i.e., relocate the ferry dock(s), which would eliminate the need to maintain hot spots on N.C. 12,  or build a bridge or causeway to Hatteras Island.

What the modeling revealed is that under the status quo, the island would continue to narrow until, within years or decades, it would become impossible to maintain the transportation corridor. With use of beach nourishment, there would be short-term improvement for 10 to 20 years. But elevating or bridging the road would help to rebuild the landscape.

It’s the first time that the coastal scientists have been able to customize a barrier island model that includes all these processes for a particular location, Moore said, as well as conduct hindcast to calibrate that model.

“Not only are we supporting the local community and the stakeholders … we’re also supporting the scientific community and barrier island communities more broadly because what we’re learning also advances the science so that we can do even better next time,” she said.” It’s really been a beautiful next step to both be coproducing the science in a way that contributes to the local conversation and also contributes to the scientific advancements so that other communities throughout the world on barrier islands can also learn from one another.”

The Ocracoke erosion and road problem has been the target of much study by several iterations of an N.C. Task Force, a multiagency panel of coastal scientists and engineers and government officials that focused on seven vulnerable areas — the “hot spots” — all but one on Hatteras Island. The most recent group was established by the Dare County Board of Commissioners in 2021, with a report released in 2023.

Back in 1972, renowned University of Virginia coastal scientist Robert Dolan, who died in 2016 at age 87, warned in a study published in the journal Science about the consequences of development on the Outer Banks.

“Barrier dune development has been encouraged by man along the Outer Banks of North Carolina to stabilize the barrier islands,” according to the study abstract. “This modification of a delicately balanced natural system is leading to severe adjustments in both geological and ecological processes.”

Dolan, who was credited with being the first scientist to determine that the Outer Banks, rather than being anchored to coral reefs, was instead a 30-foot-deep shifting “ribbon of sand,” later elaborated, saying that the islands’ dune system “may be detrimental to the long-range stability of the barriers and may become more difficult and costly to manage than the original natural system.”

While other coastal scientists have built on Dolan’s research, including Moore, it is undeniable that the complex tension between natural forces and humanity’s need to control them where they live is becoming more difficult in places like Ocracoke.

“And so, the only reason the barrier islands exist in the first place is because of these processes that move sand from the front to the island interior,” Moore said. “That’s what formed these islands, right? And so now that things are changing more rapidly, we’re just really getting pinched in a way that we haven’t seen before.”

In simple terms, barrier islands are built higher and broader by overwash and wind carrying sand over the land. Where the ocean is battering away at the shoreline, the swath of land from the ocean to the sound side collects the sand, unless it’s blocked.

“We are understandably wanting to protect road and roads and infrastructure,” she said. “It makes perfect sense from that perspective, to build a dune to protect the road.”

As sea levels are getting higher, and storms intensify, the battering is more powerful. “And if we don’t allow the island elevation to build up, it will eventually become fragmented and drown in these areas,” Moore said. “So we’re kind of fighting a losing battle, unfortunately.”

Sea levels have been rising ever since the islands formed, she added. But it’s now rising much faster. Between the year 2000 and 2050, seas have been expected to rise 12 inches, a rate Moore called “very significant.”

“It’s so unfortunate, but if we can’t quickly slow the rate of sea level rise, we’re definitely going to have to find different ways to live at the coast,” she said. “In the case of barrier islands, if we want them to persist, we need to find a way to allow them to shift underneath us or accept that we may lose the ability to live on them at all.”

Still, with adjustments, there is hope, Moore said. Citing the 2.4-mile Rodanthe “jug handle” Bridge” and, farther north, the 2,350-foot-long Richard Etheridge Bridge as examples, she said sand will rebuild the island and the shoreline when the natural processes are allowed to happen.

The main goal of the research is to provide the scientific models of several scenarios so the community can work with partners in planning their island’s future.

“It’s really an opportunity to be an incredible example and posterchild leading the way for coastal communities broadly, because they are at the forefront,” Moore said.

Naturally, islanders can see that conditions are changing, and something has to be done, said Randal Mathews, chair of the Hyde County Board of Commissioners and an Ocracoke resident. For the time being, he said, the consensus seems to be to do beach nourishment.

“Well, it’s going to buy some time, because there’s no long-term plan, and there’s no real good short-term plan.”

What could be a reasonable solution, he said, is to “harden” the area with a jetty by the South Dock Ferry Terminal.

What the island folks don’t want to do is move the ferry terminal toward the Pony Pens in the middle of the island, as has been proposed in the recent past.

“They did a survey, and it was 90% of the people don’t want to move south and don’t want to lose access from Hatteras, because they know, like after Dorian, that’s what it was like here, logistically,” he said. “We were dying.”

Mathews said he is truly grateful for Moore’s and her research team’s work, and islanders are listening. But meanwhile, Ocracoke can’t withstand repeated hits to its economy, and the ferry system and road access are major concerns. And he knows that they need political support and funding.

“You know, in the big picture, there’s a lot of moving parts that we have to address, we have to come up with these short-term solutions,” he said. “And we’ve got to  go to Raleigh, and we’ve got to go begging, you know, and that that’s how it works.”

Second in a series on a recent visit to Louisiana’s bayous, a trip sponsored by the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, to start a conversation between people there who are being flooded out and those in the Down East communities of Carteret County who face similar threats.

BAYOU LAFOURCHE, La. – Eric Verdin clearly knew where he was going. These waters are like family, after all, but his GPS plotter was frantic. Using the latest marine charts, its line tracing our path on the screen in front of us blinked red, warning us that we were about to plow into dry land. It was a good time, it seemed to suggest, to ABANDON SHIP. But we had open seas ahead of us and 8 feet of water under our keel.

“There used to be an orange grove here,” our captain conceded with a shrug.

Not a hundred years ago. Not 50. Not even 20. “Not that long ago, really,” Verdin said, as he looked out the window of the shrimp boat’s pilot house across the placid water of the bayou to the glimmering Gulf of Mexico on the horizon. “Just about all that water you see in front of us was all marsh.”

His native people, the Biloxi-Chitimacha, have lived on the fringes of this watery world along the southwestern tip of Louisiana for many generations. Verdin, 58, has known these waters since boyhood. He makes his living here, first running big boats to supply the oil rigs out in the Gulf and now chasing brown and white shrimp. He’s witnessed changes he never thought possible. “I’ve seen the absolute devastation of our coast during my lifetime,” he said with a sigh. “Miles and miles of marsh are now open waters.”

Nowhere on Earth does land disappear as quickly as it does here in southern Louisiana. According to one fantastic estimate, the water covers, on average, a chunk of marsh the size of a football field every hour or so. Or is it 15 minutes? No matter. The change is so rapid that not even online navigation charts can keep up. Brought about by a catastrophic combination of human engineering, ignorance and hubris, it’s been going on, though more slowly, for at least a century. During that time, an area of marshland the size of Delaware vanished. Now, add another human-induced insult — rising seas triggered by the warming climate — and a similar-sized piece is expected to disappear in just 25 years.

This is ground zero for sea level rise and wetland loss in the world. We, of course, had to see it ourselves.

A group of North Carolinians, on a 10-day trip sponsored by Duke University, toured coastal Louisiana in June looking for connections, for people at the water’s edge who are facing the perils wrought by a rapidly changing environment. They have weathered the frequent storms, survived the destructive aftermaths, and found ways to accommodate the rising seas as the familiar natural world transforms in the blink of their lifetimes. Some of their communities have been displaced, and their cultures are threatened.

Coastal people back home will soon increasingly confront the same dangers, knows Karen Amspacher, a native of Harkers Island in Carteret County, the director of a cultural museum there and the group’s inspirational leader. “We’re all living on the edge,” she told Verdin after he welcomed us aboard his 55-foot shrimper, Lil’E. “I’ve been trying to find common ties with people who are going through what we will.”

After the bayous of Louisiana and Florida’s Gold Coast, the uniformly flat North Carolina coastal plain is the most-endangered landscape in America. The small fishing and farming villages of low-lying eastern Carteret County, Amspacher’s beloved Down East, face a grim future of increasing storms and flooding. Many of the homes will become uninhabitable by century’s end.

Jerrica Cheramie understands all too well the fears that the people there will have to confront. “I’m just 36 and I’ve seen all this change,” said the local high school teacher who joined us on the boat. “It’s terrifying.”

Taming A River

Since its beginning, the Mississippi River has deposited the silt of a continent to build the Louisiana coastline. Its delta, a water-logged labyrinth of bayous, marsh grasses and ancient cypress trees, fans out like a swampy snout into the Gulf. The first European settlers along the lower Mississippi in the 18^th century started throwing up dirt walls along the river’s banks to protect themselves from the frequent floods. The effort intensified a century later after a series of devastating deluges. Congress got involved after the Great Flood in 1927 killed 500 people and inundated 27,000 square miles. It authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to begin digging. That old river man, Mark Twain, once scoffed at the notion of containing the mighty Mississippi. “Ten thousand River Commissions …,” he wrote, “cannot tame that lawless stream … cannot say to it, ‘Go here,’ or ‘Go there,’ and make it obey.”

By God, they tried, and they came damn close. Close enough, anyway, to make southern Louisiana disappear.

Today, massive levees line the river for about half of its 2,400-mile-long route to the sea. Along the very southern leg of its journey, the Mississippi is little more than a big canal, hemmed in place by huge earthen walls.

We followed it one day for its last 75 miles. Down Louisiana Highway 23 we went, through Bohemia and Port Sulfur, past Home Place and Triumph, to Venice, population 164. It’s as far as you can go by car. The river was on our left the entire way, but it flowed unseen behind its wall. The smokestacks of the ships we passed were the only hints that the river was actually there. At the end of the road, we had hoped to watch the great Mississippi make its last, lumbering lurch to the Gulf. Alas, there was nothing to see but more marsh, the wall and assorted bits of industrial detritus – cranes, barges, pipes, barrels and such. More on that shortly.

As we stood at the end of the road expressing our disappointment, a set of eyes popped up through the murky water of a lagoon that wasn’t 20 feet away. Then, another. Soon, it was a dozen. Then, more. I had never seen so many alligators in one place at a time, and I once lived in Miami and fished the Everglades in a canoe. They all came toward us, gliding silently through the water, leaving gentle wakes behind them. Our presence clearly triggered this conclave. Other gawkers, we surmised, had also come this way and had fed the native wildlife. The approaching gators were expecting a handout. What tidbits do you toss to giant reptiles? I wondered as we quickly headed back to the cars. A bucket of Col. Sanders? A Big Mac? Chick-fil-A nuggets, we agreed. Everything likes them.

After that meander worthy of the old Mississippi, let’s get back on course. The point of all this is that the river now heads straight to the Gulf. No more oxbow cutoffs, no twists, no turns. With it, goes all that muck. Very little now leaks into the surrounding bays. Without sediment to nourish them, the marshes have been sinking for a long time. They are drowning more quickly now as sea level rise accelerates.

Big, Big Oil

Verdin killed the engine and dropped anchor. We bobbed under a scorching sun in languid Lake Raccourci. A lot of open water bodies on the Gulf’s fringes in Louisiana are called lakes because they were surrounded by marsh when the mapmakers named them. To Verdin, these are sacred waters. His son, Eric Jr., died in a car wreck five years ago. He was only 34. His family spread his ashes here, one of his “honey holes.” Verdin named his boat after Eric and put a picture of his smiling son in a frame on the bulkhead behind the ship’s wheel. “He always used to stand behind me and say go this way or that way,” his father explained. Verdin comes back often, especially on the anniversary of his son’s death in December when he places flowers in the water. He couldn’t think of a better place to take visitors. We were honored.

We were also surrounded by an odd array of pipes, pumps and iron platforms that rose out of the water everywhere. Rust was their primary color. Each one marked an oil or natural gas well, Verdin explained, and most are still producing, though some are approaching 100 years old. They are relics, really, of simpler times, when the Gulf was just becoming America’s great oilfield.

Like the deltas of many of the world’s great rivers, the Mississippi’s is full of oil and gas. All that muck that the river deposited for millions of years contained the organic ingredients — ancient plants, algae, bacteria – of oil and gas. They’re called fossil fuels for a reason. Time and heat did the rest.

I sat one night on the beach at Grand Isle, one of the few sandy beaches in the lower bayous, and counted the lights of 22 offshore oil rigs blinking on the horizon. There are more than 600 out there, making the Gulf of Mexico America’s primary source for offshore oil and natural gas.

Big Oil is really big here. Its presence is almost everywhere: Refineries with their fiery tails of methane, mountains of pipeline stacked in neat pyramids, natural gas liquification plants, petrochemical complexes, miles of storage tanks, acres of stacked barrels. All in industrial grimy gray with splashes of white. It ain’t pretty and there’s likely no way to make it so.

From Lake Raccourci, we could see the outline of Port Fourchon, maybe 8 miles away. It is Big Oil’s most important port. More than 400 ships leave it every day to supply the rigs. More than 15,000 people fly out of there every month to work on them. It’s the operational base for almost 300 companies. The port is perched at the tail end of LA1, a vital road so threatened that it’s being raised on a causeway to keep it from slipping under the Gulf.

Before all that, there were these pipes now sticking out of the water. The reservoirs closest to shore were, naturally, the first to be tapped, starting in the 1930s. The companies dug canals through the dense marshland to dig the wells. The channels ended up becoming pathways for water, accelerating the marsh’s demise. Many of the wells are now miles from the nearest dry land.

Everybody understands the role the oil and gas industry played in destroying the marshes, Verdin explained as the shrimp were almost ready for lunch. “In hindsight, it ruined our environment, but you won’t find fishermen around here who are anti-oil.” he said. “We know how much we’ve benefitted. When the fishing was good, we fished. When oil was booming, we worked in oil.”

The Diversion

Verdin spilled the pot of boiled shrimp, corn on the cob and potatoes onto one of the hatch covers, and we dug in. The lunchtime conversation turned to The Diversion, the first step of a grand ecosystem experiment that would have taken 50 years to complete and would have cost more than $50 billion. Officially known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, the controversial project intended to divert some of the Mississippi’s flow to allow sediment to once again nourish portions of the marsh. “We need to do something,” Verdin said. “This can’t go on.”

That was the state’s conclusion after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region 25 years ago last month. Healthy marshes, scientists said, would have lessened the damage. In response, the state legislature in 2007 passed the first coastal master plan, a 50-year initiative to blunt the forces eating away at the coastline: sinking land, rising seas, and the channels dug by the oil and gas industry. Barrier islands would be rebuilt, levees bulked up, and structures raised. The plan also endorsed 11 river-diversion projects. The biggest was in Barataria Bay, about 30 miles east of our lunchtime anchorage. Engineers planned to poke a hole into the levee near Ironton in Plaquemines Parish and release 75,000 cubic feet of sediment every second. They estimated that doing so every day for six months a year would create 21 square miles of new marsh in 50 years. “It gives us a fighting chance to win this battle,” Chip Kline, the chairman of the state authority charged with the task, said in 2021.

Others weren’t so sure. Fishermen worried that the sudden influx of freshwater would push oysters and brown shrimp, mainstays of the local fishing industry, out of their current ranges. Federal scientists feared that the salinity drop could cause skin diseases in the bay’s dolphins, killing maybe a third of them. Opponents noted that even if it completes everything in the plan, the state will still lose more wetlands – 2,300 square miles — than it saves or creates – 1,200 square miles.

The scheme went on life support the day voters sent Jeff Landry to the governor’s mansion in 2023. He had been a staunch opponent of the project as attorney general, questioning its ballooning cost — $3.1 billion — and claiming it would kill fisheries important to Cajun culture. A month after our visit, Landry canceled the project.

Its demise didn’t likely lessen Charamie’s resolve “People ask why do I live here?” she said before we said our goodbyes back at the dock. “Where am I to go? This is home.”

It would be a sentiment we would hear again and again.

Next: Life on the edge.

This story has been updated.

WILMINGTON – Beams of sunlight broke through dark gray storm clouds suspended in the sky above this historic city on a recent August morning.

The local forecast was calling for rain, the kind of weather that drives tourists from area beaches to explore other experiences the area has to offer. The kind of weather that makes for a busy day at the Battleship North Carolina, the iconic floating World War II memorial moored on the Cape Fear River across from downtown Wilmington.

“This parking lot will be full in another hour,” said Terry DeMeo, the battleship’s director of development.

A year ago, DeMeo might not have made that prediction with as much certainty.

Back then, floodwaters overspilling from the Cape Fear River might have swallowed dozens of parking spaces in the western portion of the parking lot and forced visitors to make a decision: wade through water to get to the museum’s visitor center or head for higher ground.

That’s not much of a worry these days.

A wetland has been built in place of the chronically flooded section of parking lot to help absorb high-tide driven water. A tidal creek now meanders through this area of the property to direct water from the wetland back to the Cape Fear River.

A 500-foot-long and 50-foot-wide bioretention area extends through a paved, raised parking lot that has, since its completion Memorial Day weekend, gone untouched by floodwaters.

A bioswale runs the length of the parking lot next to Battleship Road. Living shorelines blend in with the rest of the natural, wild landscape around the ship’s mooring.

These features are all part of the battleship’s “Living with Water” project, one that accommodates the water rather than try and fight it back.

Construction on the project, some seven years in the making, is mostly complete.

Land next to the battleship has become a well-known and well-documented case in point on the impacts of sea level rise.

Since the memorial opened to the public in 1961, flood events on the property have climbed on a near-steady incline. Over the past six decades, a more than 7,000% increase in tidal flooding frequency has been documented at the site.

Flood events spurred by the rising sea created a sense of urgency for the museum’s leaders. The memorial does not receive regular government funding.

Persistent flooding of the property threatened one of the primary sources of the battleship’s funding – admission fees and gift shop sales.

“We actually lost parking, but that’s how committed we are to this project,” DeMeo said as she looked across the parking lot.

The lot sits at an elevation 6 feet above the old gravel one it replaced earlier this year.

The parking lot slopes to a bioretention area that looks as much like a pleasing water feature as it does a functional holding area for stormwater that allows water to percolate down into the soil.

A total of 450 spaces were at the memorial before the project was built. Today, there are 150 fewer parking spaces on the property.

Of those parking spaces, 100 were unusable due to flooding of the western portion of the old parking lot, DeMeo said. Plans are in the works to finish an overflow lot that may add roughly another 55 spaces.

“So, discounting the unusable old spaces, we expect to come out about even,” DeMeo said later in an email.

The loss of spaces has been a small price to pay for the multimillion-dollar project, one funded through federal and state grants, including the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the North Carolina Land and Water Fund, as well as the USS North Carolina Battleship Commission, Atlantic Coastal Fish Habitat Partnership, and numerous individual donors.

Within days of the wetland and tidal creek’s completion, birds moved in on the area, DeMeo said.

“That’s been pretty amazing to see the avian community step in right away, which means fish were in there,” she said. “That’s also when we saw the diminution of walking through knee-high flooding.”

The land, she explained, has been able to recreate itself.

The site now hosts researchers from NOAA as well as the University of North Carolina Wilmington, who are monitoring everything from the physical and vegetative parameters of the area to water quality.

The museum’s leaders are now in the early stages of exploring the creation of a living lab partnership with the university and NOAA.

A living lab is a natural fit, “and it’s a way to keep an eye on the project itself,” DeMeo said.

“This is a long-term project,” she said. “We don’t know where it’s ending. We consider ourselves a model for how this can be done and how it can’t be done. We really see ourselves as an opportunity to use as a case study. We had the opportunity and we had the need. That’s why we feel so strongly about serving as a model.”

First in a series on a recent visit to Louisiana’s bayous, a trip sponsored by the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, to start a conversation between people there who are being flooded out and those in the Down East communities of Carteret County who face similar threats.

NEW ORLEANS – Our search for connections and common ground began with a tour of this storm-struck city on the Mississippi River.

We didn’t set out to find the Big Easy. No double-decked tourist buses for us. No frozen daquiris from one of the drive-throughs that seem to be everywhere. The famed French Quarter wasn’t on our itinerary. Neither were any cool jazz clubs on Bourbon Street or warm beignets at the Café Du Monde. No, ours was a melancholy excursion that took us to landmarks of our hubris, monuments to our supreme self-confidence that we can control the uncontrollable.

We visited the places where the levees gave way and the walls collapsed 20 years ago in August when Hurricane Katrina exposed their fragility and futility. Canals designed to drain water away from the city carried a devastating storm surge into it. One built to encourage commerce took the flood into New Orleans’ beating heart and drowned an entire parish that has yet to recover. Pumps failed, and as much as 17 feet of water ended up covering 80% of a city that exists mostly under sea level. Almost 1,500 people died, more than 100,000 families were left homeless, and about $200 billion worth of property was destroyed or damaged. The American Society of Civil Engineers later called it “the worst engineering catastrophe in U.S. history.”

The hurricane wasn’t the killer. We were. We thought we were gods who could contain the tempest. Rosina Philippe knows better. You’ll meet her later in our journey through the bayous of southern Louisiana. She’s an elder with the Atakapa-Ishak Nation in Plaquemines Parish, down in the far southern tip of the state. Her people have existed for centuries surrounded by water.

“Water will always meander,” she told us. “It will always find you. It will go this way and that until it finds your weakness. You can never control the water. You can only try to live with it.”

It seemed like a fitting first lesson for a group of North Carolinians who spent six days in June exploring a state that a dozen hurricanes have battered since Katrina, a place where a football field of marshes disappears on average every day. As Rosina warned and Katrina attested, the calculations of engineers may not offer much protection when the storms come, and the floods threaten.

Sponsored by Duke University and led by Karen Amspacher, a Harkers Island native and the director of a cultural museum there, the group hoped to connect the people of the bayous with those living at the water’s edge in the small fishing and farming villages of low-lying eastern Carteret County, Amspacher’s beloved Down East. They face a grim future of increasing storms and flooding as the climate warms and the seas rise. Many of their homes will become uninhabitable by century’s end. Can connecting with people who have already faced those dangers raise awareness and lead to understanding and ultimately to solutions?

“I don’t know if it can,” she said, “but we have to try.”

The Unexpected Flood

We drove along City Park Avenue, atop the remnants of a sand ridge that the Mississippi created eons ago, took a right on Canal Boulevard, and headed north, downhill, toward Lake Pontchartrain. In a couple of miles, we reached Lakeview, a neighborhood of handsome brick and stucco homes. We were below sea level, kept dry by the city’s extensive system of earthen walls, or levees. Look closely, advised Barry Keim, and the evidence of living below the sea is everywhere. Many of the houses’ foundations are exposed and their driveways cracked as the peat soil of the old marsh beneath them dries and compresses. Side streets are buckled, and the tops of storm drains are above the sinking pavement.

“Every house you see on both sides of the road was flooded after Katrina,” he noted. “The water here was 8 to 10 feet deep, some of the worst flooding in the city.”

A thick black line around the exterior of the neighborhood Starbucks memorializes those dark times. The line is more than 7 feet above the ground with one word printed above it in bold letters: “Katrina.”

“And this is where all that water came from,” Keim said, standing on the seawall that borders the lake. An affable man who was the state climatologist for more than 20 years, he now directs the Environmental Health, Climate, and Sustainability Program at Louisiana State University in New Orleans. He knows the city intimately, having grown up in one of its suburbs.

Down this way, they call the oval-shaped body of water behind him a lake, though it’s technically a lagoon because it has an opening to the Gulf of Mexico at its east end. By any name, it’s big, covering more than twice the area of North Carolina’s largest city, Charlotte. Though a levee was built along the shoreline here after a 1947 hurricane flooded a portion of New Orleans, Pontchartrain was considered far less of a threat than the mighty Mississippi, which snakes along the other side of the city.

Engineers found the lake to be a convenient place to dispose of excess water as New Orleans grew from its original settlement on the high ground of a natural levee created by the river. Over time, they dug three large canals to drain the low-lying land that locals call “the Back of Town.” Katrina came along on just the right path to turn the tables, pushing its deadly surge up the canals. “Everyone expected the big flood to come from the river,” noted Amy Lesen. “No one expected the levee system here to fail as it did during Katrina.”

A professor at Antioch and Tulane universities, Lesen organized much of the trip to come. She has spent most of her career teaching and writing about climate change and its effects on people. A striking resume popped up on Google when I searched: Bachelor of Science in marine fisheries biology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley; a long list of books and publications; an impressive array of research grants; and weighty appointments and awards. Most striking, though, is what Google only hints at. Unlike most professors, Lesen gets out of the classroom and into communities, helping the poor and disadvantaged recover from storms or prepare for them. Over the next six days, I will come to learn that she’s just a big-hearted Jewish girl from the Bronx who came to New Orleans almost 20 years ago and found her life’s work helping the marginalized water people of the bayous adjust to a rapidly changing world.

Residents of 4900 block of Warrington Drive didn’t have much time to react when Katrina arrived that morning of Aug. 29, 2005. All they could do was run for their lives. Water from the lake rushed up the London Avenue Canal, which ran through their backyards along a channel lined by concrete and sheet metal walls that had been reinforced just a decade earlier. The engineers unknowingly anchored their walls in the soft sand of an ancient barrier island, Keim said. At 9:30 a.m., a 30-foot section of the wall collapsed, releasing a geyser of sand and a torrent of water that topped 15 feet. The neighborhood disappeared. “When I drove down here, there were houses on houses, cars on top of cars,” Amy remembered. “It was complete devastation.”

We are peeking through the windows of 4918 Warrington, a solid brick house that withstood the flood. No one lives here now, and you can’t go inside. The Flooded House Museum is a stark re-creation, a haunting reminder of what the people here came back to after the flood waters receded. Dark mold covers the walls. The baby grand piano in the corner is destroyed. Yet, the books on the shelves seem undisturbed. Photo frames hang askew. Toys are tossed around the room, and a thick layer of dirt covers every piece of furniture. The wrinkled, faded front page of the city’s Times-Picayune sits atop a broken table. The newspaper was published the day before the storm. “Katrina Takes Aim,” the headline screams.

We headed back to the van. “I hate I have to take you on this tour of woe,” Lesen says.

Mister Go

In the ponderous language of the bureaucracy, it’s known as the Mississippi-Gulf Outlet Canal. Locals took the acronym, MSGO, and came up with a more memorable moniker, Mister Go. It was the last and maybe most depressing stop on Amy’s tour. Of all the deadly screw-ups that led to a drowned city, Mister Go was the most predictable and most lethal.

Fittingly, then, it started to rain, though the sun was still shining, as we headed south out of town on LA 39, following the Mississippi. A huge levee obscured the river on our right, though we sometimes glimpsed the smokestacks of passing ships. “The devil is beating his wife,” Keim said from the front seat. “That’s what we say down here when it rains while the sun is shining.”

As Lucifer wailed away, St. Bernard Parish rolled by our windows. At almost 2,200 square miles, it is the state’s second-largest parish, or what we In North Carolina would call a county. Eighty-three percent of it is water, however, making it the wettest place in Louisiana, which is saying something. The passing scenery confirmed that: a thousand cuts of water coursing through an endless sea of marsh grasses, dotted by small islands of bald cypress trees. “Out here, you’re in another world,” Keim noted.

We reached our destination, Shell Beach, which has neither a beach nor any readily apparent shells. Shrimp trawlers and rusting oyster dredges were tied up along the Mister Go waterfront, confirming the community’s past prominence as a fishing port. “If you came here before Katrina, you would have seen a lot of activity,” Keim said as we got out of the van. “It was a bustling place.”

About 40 minutes from downtown New Orleans, Shell Beach is about halfway up the 76-mile channel that links the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans’ inner harbor. The city had been clamoring for years for a shortcut for commercial ships. With support from the Army Corps of Engineers, Mister Go finally got congressional approval in 1956. The Corps started digging two years later, dredging up more earth then was moved during the building of the Panama Canal and destroying thousands of acres of wetlands in the process. The channel opened to shipping in 1965 at a cost of $92 million, or almost $900 million today when adjusted for inflation.

“Scientists warned of the environmental effects, and locals worried about the flooding.” Keim explained as we walked along the deserted waterfront. “The people here didn’t want this built. They thought it would be a disaster. It turned out to be worse than they imagined.”

As soon as the channel was dug, saltwater from the Gulf swept in, drastically changing the ecosystem. The dead, sun-bleached stalks of bald cypress and live oak trees, what scientists call ghost forests, mark the salt’s line of advance. Muskrats went next, taking the parish’s thriving fur industry with them. The oysters followed along with another industry. The brackish marshes were important to wintering waterfowl, but the birds went elsewhere after the water’s salt content tripled, killing most of the marshes.

The long-term effects stretched far beyond muskrats, oysters, and ducks, however. An estimated 20,000 acres of marsh that served as a buffer against storms were swept away over the next 40 years. By the time Katrina arrived, the original 500-foot-wide channel had more than quadrupled in size in some places.

Poor people bore the brunt of what came next. Katrina’s storm surge barreled up the channel and into the connecting Industrial Canal in the heart of New Orleans. Containing walls collapsed, and the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly Black neighborhood, was under 12 feet of water. Its residents became the storm’s human face of suffering on TVs around the world. The Lower Ninth was the last place in the city to get power restored, the last to be pumped dry. Empty lots and collapsed houses covered in vines dot it still.

In poverty-stricken St. Bernard Parish, the destruction was complete. Every inch of the parish was underwater, every building flooded. Many who fled never came back. The parish’s population is still two-thirds of what it was before the storm.

The most-maddening thing about it? All that death and all that destruction and all that despair were for nothing. Absolutely nothing. A few people probably made money on Mister Go, but the economic boom it was predicted to trigger along its length never happened. In fact, it was a bust. Before the storm, the channel cost more than $8 million to maintain each year for the two large container ships that used it on any day. In the Corps of Engineers’ long list of misjudgments and disasters, the Mississippi-Gulf Outlet Canal must rank somewhere near the top.

Under extreme local pressure, the Corps shut the whole thing down after Katrina. It built a rock dam in 2009 at Mister Go’s Gulf end to close it to shipping and completed a $1.1 billion storm-surge gate across its connection to the Industrial Canal four years later. In New Orleans, it built floodgates at the mouth of the other canals.

The people of St. Bernard Parish were left to mourn, but they got busy building, too. They erected a monument along the shore in Shell Beach that lists the names of all 164 residents who died during the flooding: Bernhard, De la Fosse, Gallodoro, LaBlanc, Morates, Roark, Vidross …

“Those are the names of St. Bernard Parish,” Amy said.

Next in the series: Ground zero for wetland loss in the world.

OAK ISLAND – When Gigi Donovan looks at the dune fronting a row of largely undeveloped oceanfront lots across the street from her home, she sees a false sense of security.

“We’ve seen this dune go away three times in 12 years,” she said.

The sandy mound that separates the public beach from private lots along a stretch of East Beach Drive wasn’t here just a few years ago. It has been built up and planted with dune-stabilizing sea oats through the town of Oak Island’s efforts to restore its oceanfront shore. 

Now there is enough of it to render at least one of the thin slices of long-vacant beachfront lots suitable for building.

That has Donovan and several of her neighbors worried.

Amber and Dean Russell live a few doors down from the Donovans. When the Russells bought their bungalow in 2022, they went ahead and purchased the beachfront lot directly across the street.

“We bought that just to keep our view,” Amber Russell said. “It’s not safe to build on.”

That’s a sentiment a group of homeowners and residents who live in the area of SE 58^th Street and East Beach Drive have expressed to town officials in the days and months since they received notice that a developer had applied for a Coastal Area Management Act, or CAMA, permit to build a house on one of the oceanfront lots.

They’ve made countless telephone calls and sent emails to North Carolina Division of Coastal Management and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers staff.

They’ve posted handmade signs that read “SAVE OUR BEACHFRONT — No Building on Narrow, At-risk Lots!” along their block of East Beach Drive.

They started an online petition that, as of June 13, had more than 600 signatures.

They’ve dug in their heels and pushed back, calling “for the return to responsible, sustainable environmental development on fragile oceanfront properties” in a plea to Oak Island’s mayor.

But even they acknowledge this fight is an uphill battle, one that is likely to rage on as low-lying coastal areas deal with the effects of sea level rise, more frequent, intense coastal storms and shoreline erosion.

Regulatory flexibility

Last month, a CAMA minor permit was issued for 5515 East Beach Drive. Proposed building plans on the 0.17-acre lot include a 2,856 square-foot house.

Town officials in an email responding to questions said they do not have on file when a home last stood on that lot. Aerial satellite images from Brunswick County show that this particular block of East Beach Drive had more homes along the oceanfront in 1989 than today.

The homes captured by satellite imagery in 1989 were gone in 2003, destroyed by nature or demolition.

Today, houses stand on only two of the oceanfront lots along this block of East Beach Drive.

Oak Island officials said the town does not have an overarching designation determining whether a lot is buildable based on oceanfront construction setbacks.

“For building on an oceanfront lot, the developer would submit information to show compliance with CAMA regulations and receive a permit if they meet said requirements,” an official said in an email.

Back in 2023, the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission rubber-stamped Oak Island’s beach management plan, which gives beachfront builders more regulatory flexibility regarding how far back they must build from the sea.

The year before, the commission repealed regulations that allowed coastal communities to use the less restrictive setback measurement line for oceanfront construction, instead requiring builders to measure back from what is referred to as the preproject vegetation line.

The preproject vegetation line is the first line of stable, natural vegetation that is on an oceanfront before a large-scale beach nourishment project begins, one where more than 300,000 cubic yards of sand is placed on the beach.

But coastal communities that create and follow beach management plans approved by the commission may measure setbacks from the vegetation line rather than the preproject line as long as they meet the obligations detailed in their plans. Setbacks are 60 feet from the measurement line.

Coastal Resources Commission approved beach management plans for five coastal towns: Carolina Beach, Kure Beach and Wrightsville Beach in New Hanover County, and Oak Island and Ocean Isle Beach in Brunswick County. Once approved, plans must be reauthorized every five years.

Oak Island’s authorized plan calls for placing a total estimated 16.2 million cubic yards of sand on the beach over the next three decades. Under the plan, the beach will be nourished every six years.

Oak Island’s most recent sand nourishment projects were carried out in 2021 and 2022.

A nourishment project originally planned for winter 2024-25 was postponed after the town was informed contractor bids for the project “had far exceeded the amounts expected or budgeted,” according to the town’s website.

The project is again out for bids, and town officials anticipate a contract will be awarded and work will begin later this year.

Risky building

“They’re looking to the renourishment as the permanent solution,” Donovan said.

Dr. Gavin Smith, a North Carolina State University professor who researches hazard mitigation, disaster recovery and climate change adaptation, is not a big fan of beach nourishment.

“I think that overrelying on beach nourishment as a way to protect coastal development is fraught with problems,” he said in a telephone interview earlier this month. “It’s extremely expensive. It can take several seasons or it can take one bad storm and it’s gone.”

Smith pointed out that coastal zones, in particular barrier island, are highly dynamic and subject to significant change.

“Thinking about the construction of a house in a highly dynamic area, I think we need to be really careful,” he said. “Builders and homebuyers need to think about the life of that structure. The conditions that that site might face in 40 or 50 years is worthy of consideration. Individuals need to think about and actually ask a question: While you might be able to legally build in a given place, should you build there? I think that’s something that we all need to perhaps be more aware of.”

It’s time governments at all levels, local, state and federal, “do better,” he said.

“How can we recognize or applaud local governments that have the political will to adopt more stringent standards than the minimums? That’s what many governments adhere to is the minimum standards” Smith said. “Our codes are inadequate in the state, yet that’s what we adhere to in many cases. The National Flood Insurance Program should be viewed as a minimum, not the maximum. In an era of climate change we’re moving toward this idea of nonstationary, which we don’t know what the future holds. So, therefore our codes and standards ought to be that much more rigorous to account for the uncertainty. But instead, we’re relying on old data. We’re relying on old codes and that’s a significant problem.”

Sitting at the kitchen table in her home on a late May afternoon, Donovan mulled the many concerns she, her husband Mark, and their neighbors have raised to government officials.

They worry about whether more lights from new construction will hinder sea turtles from nesting on the shore. They worry about how stormwater runoff from new rooftops, driveways and other impervious surfaces may exacerbate flooding on their second-row lots.

They worry what one unwelcome coastal storm, be it a hurricane of any category or a potential tropical cyclone that packs a punch like the unnamed storm that pummeled Brunswick County last year, might do to the dune and any homes standing on the small land plots just behind it.

“We don’t know. That’s the thing. We don’t know what’s going to happen,” Gigi Donovan said.

In a statement to the town’s mayor last month, the Donovans and their neighbors wrote: “While we cannot control the weather, we can mitigate the damage it causes by responsibly managing the development of oceanfront properties.”

Oceanfront lot development “should be based on comprehensive land-use plans that take into consideration beach erosion, turtle nesting habitat, climate change, protection of private and town property, and preserving the legacy of (Oak Island) as a quaint, family-focused beach community.”

They are appealing to Coastal Resources Commission Chair Renee Cahoon, who determines whether or not property owners can make their case in a hearing before the full commission.

“We are very motivated and stubborn,” Gigi Donovan said in a text message. “If we allow them to plow ahead, steam-rolling any local opposition, our entire island beachfront will be irreparably destroyed.”

As the weather and water warm, beachgoers will flock to the North Carolina coast just as many of the native shorebirds and seagoing avian residents begin to nest.

Piping plovers skittering up and down the sand with the surf, gulls loitering for picnic castoffs and tossed fish bait and pelicans soaring overhead or skimming the swells are all well-known and welcome sights for tourists to the North Carolina coast.

The annual nesting sanctuary closure window from March 1 to Sept. 15 helps both early and late-season nesters like brown pelicans and black skimmers. Least terns have already begun their courting and nesting rituals and American oystercatchers have started hatching chicks.

While almost any sandcastle builder, surfer or fisherman can expect to share the shore with these birds, almost all of them are in steep decline from habitat loss, rising sea levels, pollution and other threats, a new study led by the Audubon Society shows.

The 2025 State of the Birds Report shows sharp declines in shorebirds and other species along the Atlantic Coast, including least terns, American oystercatchers and piping plovers. In North Carolina, black skimmers have also seen a drop in documented nests, leading to their designation as a state-threatened species.

“The issues facing shorebirds are complex,” Audubon North Carolina spokesperson Brittany Salmons told Coastal Review. “The combined effects of sea level rise due to climate change and how we respond to that by choosing natural solutions versus shoreline hardening play a central role in the long-term hope for these species. Development brings more people and more alterations — like dredging, beach nourishment, terminal groins — to the habitats birds need. For shorebirds in particular this can be catastrophic. Having inlets with natural oscillation and broad flats are critical, along with water quality and prey abundance.”

If shorebirds can rise above all of that, many species also have to endure lengthy, challenging migrations from their nests on the Arctic tundra to wintering grounds in South America and places in between. The quality of each of the habitats they will encounter on their multi-thousand-mile annual odysseys is critical to their survival and ability to return to their nesting grounds to breed once more, Salmons said.

Nationally, about a third of all bird species – Audubon kept count of 229 individual species from coast to coast – are considered of high or moderate concern because of declining populations.

Of those, 42 species are listed as red-alert tipping point species, or “birds with perilously low populations and steep declining trends.” Another 37 species are considered orange-alert, populations that show long-term population losses and accelerated declines within the past decade. Thirty-three species qualify for yellow-alert status, showing long-term population losses that have stabilized in recent years yet still require conservation to sustain that tenuous recovery, Audubon said.

All of those species, regardless of their color coding, have one thing in common: They have each lost more than half of their measurable populations in the past 50 years.

“Some of these species lack sufficient monitoring to thoroughly investigate losses,” states the report. “Tipping point species require focused scientific research to pinpoint drivers of declines, paired with fast action on conservation measures to bring these birds back.”

As a group, shorebirds fared worst among the bird populations outlined in the report. Since 1980, shorebirds have suffered a 33% decline in overall population, which the report characterizes as “widespread declines with accelerating losses.”

Of 28 species of shorebirds measured, 19 showed “definitive negative population trends,” with 18 of those showing accelerated losses in recent years. Shorebirds are most heavily represented among the species listed as at a tipping point.

“Surveys show steep shorebird declines at migratory staging sites along the Atlantic Coast from North Carolina to Nova Scotia, as well as the Gulf Coast,” the report says. “Conservation actions to restore these critical coastal habitats will protect shorebirds, people and property from storms, flooding and sea level rise.”

Targeted efforts needed

Targeted conservation efforts are needed to protect shorebirds along the North Carolina coast and elsewhere along the Eastern Flyway, Audubon said. The report highlights efforts to protect the American oystercatcher, the black, white and brown shorebird notable for its thick, sturdy orange bill.

Fifteen years ago, the oystercatcher was in serious decline throughout its Atlantic Coast range. In 2009, Manomet Conservation Sciences, in partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, launched the American Oystercatcher Recovery Initiative composed of state, federal and private groups across 16 states all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The coordinated conservation effort has resulted in a 43% increase in oystercatcher populations, from about 10,000 individuals in 2009 to nearly 15,000 in 2023, according to the report.

Targeted management and monitoring along the coast, including protecting areas for oystercatcher use paid off, the report says. Remote islands and portions of public beaches were also roped off to keep the public from interfering with the birds’ natural behavior and reproduction.

“This coordinated, multi-state effort saved this iconic, orange-billed bird from irreversible loss,” Audubon Coastal Biologist Lindsay Addison said. “People visiting the coast this summer can do their part by respecting posted sanctuaries and keeping a safe distance from beach-nesting birds. We’ve already limited available habitat with development, the least we can do is share the shore.”

Seabirds – gulls and similar species that spend much of their time soaring over ocean waves – were also found to be in freefall. Audubon characterized seabird populations as suffering “cascading declines, but recovery efforts show great promise.”

Seabirds face numerous threats

Rising sea levels coupled with booming coastal development have wreaked havoc on natural seabird habitat and roosting sites, the report says. Seabird colonies on low-lying islands, like North Carolina’s barrier islands, are flooding more often. Marine heat waves are shocking their food sources.

Ravenous invasive species consume seabirds and their eggs in many coastal areas. They also become bycatch in many coastal fisheries and fall prey to plastic pollution and infectious disease, Audubon says.

“Protected nesting colonies and marine foraging areas can provide refuges for seabirds during extreme storm events,” the report says. “Policies that reduce fishing bycatch and plastics pollution can help mitigate direct human-caused stressors.

Most of the shorebird species highlighted in the report are long-distance migrants, which face a somewhat different set of challenges than temperate-nesting, shorter distance migrants like the American oystercatcher, Salmons said.

“To get between breeding and wintering grounds, these long-distance migrants must navigate a series of steppingstone sites where they stopover before continuing on,” Salmons wrote in an email. “Many of these are impacted by human presence on the coast, be it from beach renourishment or other coastal engineering projects that degrade habitat quality and prey availability.”

Waterfowl and waterbirds — ducks, rails, egrets, heron and the like — showed some of their long-term population gains level off but have fared better than their seaside cousins, according to the report.

In general, duck populations have grown 24% in the past half century and waterfowl were the only group of birds in the report that showed population gains. Of 20 species of duck measured, 14 were found to be increasing in population while one was stable and just five are declining.

Large-scale conservation policies and efforts from legislation like the North American Wetlands Conservation Act and the Duck Stamp program are partially responsible for the health of duck species in particular.

“But today, this legacy is in jeopardy,” the report said. “Loss of wetlands and grasslands is accelerating in key regions for waterfowl and wetland protections are being weakened. Environmental land-use changes are driving recent duck and marsh bird declines in many areas.”

Declining bird populations were laid bare in a 2019 study published in the journal Science that showed a net loss of 3 billion birds in North America over the past half-century. The 2025 State of the Birds report shows those losses are continuing.

But, Audubon stresses, conservation works. Coastal restoration, conservation ranching, forest renewal and seabird translocations “show how proactive, concerted efforts and strategic investments can recover bird populations,” the report says.

“The science is solid on how to bring birds back,” according to the report. “Private lands conservation programs, and voluntary conservation partnerships for working lands, hold some of the best opportunities for sparking immediate turnarounds for birds.”

Share their habitats

Policies aimed at reversing bird population decline can also benefit humans who share their habitats by creating healthier agricultural land, cleaner water and natural landscapes that better resist flooding, wildfire and drought, Audubon says.

Birds are also the natural foundation for a soaring outdoors industry. Around 100 million Americans are avid birdwatchers, not to mention hunters and anglers, all activities to which healthy bird populations are a keystone feature, Salmons said. Audubon puts the total economic impact of birding activity at $279 billion annually.

Regular folks can help support healthy bird populations by giving them room this summer, as they roost and lay their eggs along the North Carolina coast. Getting too close to a nest can scare parents away from eggs or hatchlings, Salmons said.

Human disturbance, in which recreational or other activities disrupt shorebirds’ survival behaviors, she said.

Such activities include people walking through resting or foraging flocks and allowing dogs or children to chase birds which wastes their energy and makes otherwise suitable habitat unavailable for their use. Repeated disturbance has a cumulative impact on birds at the coast.

“Just as running once to catch the mailman won’t cause a person to be too exhausted to cook dinner and clean the house but doing it all day can, being repeatedly disturbed over and over impacts the health of shorebirds,” Salmons said. “Compounding these challenges which relate to the heavy development and recreational use of coastal sites are issues related to climate change, such as impacts to Arctic nesting grounds, timing of resource availability, and other factors.”

Guest Commentary

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

Life along the North Carolina coast is steeped in saltwater – but the future seems to be drowning in it. With 1 meter of sea level rise expected by 2100, rising waters are already encroaching on low-lying coastal communities. Chronic flooding and intense storm damage have become the new normal. Stands of ghost forests, stressed to death by saltwater in the soil, announce a clear message: Move, adapt, or drown.

Folks who live here are figuring out how to trade resistance for resilience. Coexistence with the sea could become a bridge to the future. Bulkheads attempt to enforce a static line on a dynamic shore. The ocean continues to defy this hard boundary. The soft boundary of a living shoreline ensures connection doesn’t transform into fear, cooperation doesn’t sink into combativeness. Where do we start to build a future that works with the shorelines of North Carolina?

A rising crisis 

The issue of sea level rise is urgent and unavoidable on NC coasts. Where roads keep flooding from higher tides and ditches don’t drain anymore, “you’re seeing it. This is sea level rise,” says Christine Voss, retired research associate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences based in Morehead City. Even if they don’t use the phrase “sea level rise,” she says “people are noticing changes.”

Voss likens the situation to the health of a patient: “Sea level rise, that might be like your allergies… and then comes a hurricane. And because you may have been worn down by your allergies, when the cold or the pneumonia or the flu comes by, you’re actually more susceptible.”

She says that it’s easier for us to notice the big events like hurricanes, but really what we’re seeing with sea level rise is a cumulative effect of both hurricanes and a higher water table. Higher groundwater levels decrease soil’s ability to absorb floodwaters. The constant stress of waterlogged existence makes the coastal ecosystem immunocompromised. 

For properties that border the ocean, a range of options exist to “hold the line.” Traditional gray infrastructure manages the coastline with solely hard materials. This includes concrete seawalls and fiberglass bulkheads that act as armor against constant wave action. Fully natural, or green shorelines, include sandy beaches and salt marshes that fluctuate with the tides. There are also shoreline management strategies that combine gray and green elements, such as sills with planted vegetation or oyster reef breakwaters. 

Walling ourselves off

When threats loom, we resort to division, installing walls to armor ourselves against a fight with the waves. “We’re still pretending like we can hold it all in place for forever, everywhere…from Maine all the way around to Padre Island, Texas,” says Rob Young, geologist and director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University. Fighting the ocean is a losing battle.

“Seawalls don’t stop the shoreline from moving,” he says. “It just sort of draws a line in the sand. Eventually the beach disappears in front of the seawall, because the seawall isn’t halting erosion.” 

This combative approach against the sea is destructive to the very ecosystems that would protect us. The erosion of beaches amplified by seawalls is paralleled by the undoing of marsh by estuarine bulkheads. North Carolina has restricted the building of new seawalls since 2003 to protect beaches, but bulkheads against estuarine waters are ubiquitous, and the salt marshes they neighbor are in danger. 

When a bulkhead is built, “the marsh is going to drown in front of it over time,” says Young. The waves bounce off the bulkhead and “tear up that marsh.” The impulse to protect our properties threatens the protection of our collective future.

Waves deflected by a bulkhead eat away at the land beside it, prompting another bulkhead to be constructed. Alyson Flynn, environmental economist at the North Carolina Coastal Federation, describes this hardening cascade: “it got to the point where people had no choice, because their neighbors’ property was causing their property to erode so much faster, because they had a seawall up, that they felt like the only way to protect their property was to also put up a seawall. And so then it had this barricading effect across the whole shoreline.” 

A wall necessitates more walls until we’ve replaced the breathing border of marsh. Eight percent of NC’s coastline is hardened through bulkheads, groins, and jetties. A survey in North Carolina found that waterfront homeowners perceived bulkheads as the most effective shoreline protection, even though properties with bulkheads reported twice the cost of repairing hurricane damage as properties with natural shorelines. Yet permitting processes and homeowners still favor hardened infrastructure in pursuit of shoreline preservation.

“There’s this tendency to think that a seawall is easier and less expensive, and that’s not the case,” says Flynn. “Especially when it comes to some of the maintenance costs with living shorelines, it can actually be quite a bit cheaper, especially after storm events.” 

Adding life to the line

Living shorelines, which replace the hard line of a bulkhead with opportunities for vegetation and wave attenuation, are a step in the right direction.

When Havelock homeowner Vernon Kelly looked out at the bulkhead on his property, worn down by years of storms, he had a decision to make: “Do I just replace it back with another and better bulkhead, or do I really look at creating another alternative?” 

Kelly recognizes the value of nature that he witnessed as a state land surveyor. “I was out in the coasts, in the swamp…everywhere from Jacksonville to Down East,” he says.

He has seen his North Carolina change, witnessed the bulkheads of his neighbors fail to block the oncoming ocean. With assistance from the Coastal Federation, he installed a living shoreline and has since seen “a world of a difference.” 

The nature Kelly treasures has become part of his backyard, complete with new saltwater neighbors. “Minnows seem to have figured out, ‘Hey, we’ve got a sort of a haven here.’ I’ve seen an increase of blue crabs in that sill area. And I actually had one oyster starting to grow,” he says.

The living shoreline didn’t just protect as a bulkhead would, it created space for life on that section of shore.

“What we’ve done, it’ll save it for my lifetime, maybe my kids,” says Kelly. “But if Mother Nature really decides she wants to do something, we can’t stop her.” 

Not a solution, but a start

Living shorelines can’t stop the ocean from rising, can’t stop seawater from creeping inwards from the shore and raising the water table from below. Development on the precarious line between land and sea is built on the assumption that the line can be held with stronger armor. The coastline is not a property line to be guarded but a continually negotiated convergence of ocean and land. 

The sea has sustained community here since the Coree fished the Core Banks and the Neusiok harvested along the Neuse River. Yet these life-giving waters are now described using language of wars and monsters. Framing storms and floods as opponents sinks us deeper into a combative mindset. We can’t hold the battleline if the ground itself is transforming beneath our feet. The coasts as we know them will not be the coasts of our future. 

Embracing change might be the only way to navigate the changes we fear. “People are adaptable,” says Voss. “Enough people have to decide that things have to change.”

The salt marsh has a lesson to teach about handling change. Many shoots rooted in the soil, united in density and scope, can diffuse the force of oncoming waves. As the saltwater rises, the marsh travels. 

Marshes migrate landwards, racing against sea level rise toward safety. Responding to change allows for a chance of survival. Marshes might not keep up with dire projections of sea level rise, but hardened shores don’t even give them a chance in the race.

When a migrating marsh hits a bulkhead, a line that refuses to budge until a storm forces collapse, the marsh is made static. Trapped between wall and rising water, the marsh suffers from “coastal squeeze” until it drowns. Confronting an inundated future, those on the coasts can choose to heed the lesson of the moving marsh or drown with the walls.

Living shorelines are not the answer to save the coasts but they are a potential action toward reimagining future coastal resilience. Relinquishing the ideal of a manicured waterfront is the start of embracing an alliance with the ecosystems we inhabit. Starting in backyards like Kelly’s, there is an opportunity to recognize the value of wetlands and begin to dissolve the walls, physical and philosophical, built between humans and the sea. 

Note from Kocher: This article was reported, photographed, and written in partnership with the Pulitzer Center and the science journalism course at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort.

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

Guest commentary

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

Each winter, as lights and decorations are packed away, holiday trees are typically discarded or sent to landfills in most areas. But in the Wilmington region of North Carolina, the Cape Fear Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation has been doing something different.

For the past 11 years and this past Saturday, this chapter has led the community in repurposing Christmas trees to rebuild dunes in critically eroded stretches of the coastline. These efforts not only help restore the natural landscape, but also educate the community about one of North Carolina’s most pressing challenges: protecting our coastline in the face of sea-level rise and intensifying storms.

The threats facing Cape Fear’s beaches are not unique. Across North Carolina, rising seas and worsening coastal erosion jeopardize the Tar Heel State’s ecosystems, communities, infrastructure, and economies. Climate change has led to higher tides, more frequent flooding, and even homes collapsing into the ocean due to severe erosion and storm damage.

North Carolina’s coastal property owners and communities have typically addressed chronic erosion and storm damage through beach renourishment or replenishment. This short-sighted “solution” disrupts natural sand movement and processes, frequently smother adjacent ecosystems and wildlife, and can cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, or more, to maintain in the long term. One storm event can easily wipe out a multimillion dollar project in a matter of a few hours, leaving North Carolina’s coastal habitats at risk of permanent loss due to sea level rise and flooding.

This is where nature-based solutions come in.

Nature-based solutions restore and conserve ecosystems by leveraging natural processes and resources to enhance biodiversity, protect habitats, and promote resilient communities. They also help mitigate disaster risk, including the effects of sea level rise, flooding, and storm surge.

In the case of the Cape Fear Chapter’s annual dune restoration event, volunteers place Christmas trees collected by the city along coastal areas in need of protection and rebuilding. Working closely with local government, community members, and wildlife advocacy groups, Surfrider ensures the trees are positioned to maximize sand capture while avoiding harm to wildlife. Once staked in place, the trees act as natural dune infrastructure, capturing sand and fostering the regrowth of critical dune plants and ecosystems.

In 2024, the Surfrider Foundation launched its Climate Action Program to focus on implementing nature-based solutions for climate impacts in coastal areas from Cape Fear to Hawaii, and everywhere in between. While the official program is new, volunteers across the country have long been leading efforts to address these challenges in their communities through the Surfrider Foundation. The Cape Fear Chapter exemplifies this approach, demonstrating how grassroots action can drive meaningful coastal change.

Across Surfrider’s network, volunteers are championing local initiatives to combat the impacts of climate change. From advocating for living shorelines and marsh restoration to promoting managed retreat, Surfrider’s activists are showing how nature-based solutions can address erosion and flooding sustainably.

The annual Christmas tree dune restoration event in Cape Fear serves as an entry point to educate the community on how nature-based solutions can mitigate climate-driven impacts. Through hands-on volunteer opportunities, Surfrider emphasizes the need for widespread adoption of sustainable practices along our coasts. These efforts empower community members to advocate for long-term, science-based policies, calling on decision-makers to prioritize the resilience of their communities.

As we welcome 2025, let’s make this the year we reimagine our relationship with North Carolina’s coast. By embracing nature-based solutions and working together to protect what we love, we can create a thriving, resilient coastline for generations to come.

To get involved with the Cape Fear Chapter’s dune restoration event next year — or to find volunteer opportunities with other Surfrider chapters along the coast — visit surfrider.org/volunteer.

Let’s make the health of our coasts a shared New Year’s resolution.

Surfrider Southeast Regional Manager Kayla Huff contributed to this piece.

Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or our publisher, the North Carolina Coastal Federation. See our guidelines for submitting guest columns.

A recent U.S. Geological Survey study projects that rising sea levels and stronger, more intense storms will exacerbate four specific coastal hazards and associated management challenges for Cape Lookout National Seashore.

Rising waters and eroding or sinking lands may be unsurprising on the coast, but the findings are troubling for anyone on or near a barrier island, those slivers of sand so popular with visitors and vital to protecting mainland folks.

“Accelerating sea level rise (SLR) and changing storm patterns will increasingly expose barrier islands to coastal hazards, including flooding, erosion, and rising groundwater tables,” according to the study titled, “The projected exposure and response of a natural barrier island system to climate-driven coastal hazards,” published in Nature scientific reports.

The authors explain in the study that their findings illustrate “viability of this barrier island system will be compromised by increasingly severe flooding, rising groundwater, erosion, and land subsidence over the next century.”

Three of the paper’s authors, oceanographer Jennifer Thomas, coastal geologist Patrick Barnard and research oceanographer Sean Vitousek, told Coastal Review in a joint response that the study looks at the coastal hazards related to sea level rise and storms on Cape Lookout National Seashore, which is just a short boat ride from mainland Carteret County.

The scientists are based at the Geological Survey’s Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz, California.

“This study shows model projections of overland flooding, groundwater depths, and shoreline change for a series of plausible sea level rise and storm scenarios over the next century. Vertical land motion is derived from satellite observations,” the scientists said.

The team explained how sea level rise can increase the impacts of coastal hazards.

A higher sea level means that high tides can more easily cause sunny day, or nuisance, flooding, and that waves and storm surge can reach higher elevations, which can then lead to overwash, erosion and flooding farther inland. This can also cause groundwater tables to rise, they said.

Since the land is also sinking, that makes relative sea level rise even higher, intensifying these hazards.

Barrier islands, like those in the Cape Lookout study area, “buffer storm impacts for the mainland coast. However, the barrier islands themselves are at an increased risk compared to mainland coasts, as they can experience the hazards of SLR and storms on all sides. Vulnerable barrier islands can lead to more vulnerable mainland coastlines in the future,” the study states.

The researchers told Coastal Review that without intervention, flooding and erosion will be pervasive across barrier islands over the next century.

“As these islands are the first line of defense for mainland communities, reduction in this natural protection will create more hazard exposure in the future,” the team continued. “Managing coastal resources under a changing climate will be extremely challenging.”

Cape Lookout Superintendent Jeff West told Coastal Review that the report findings confirmed what the park staff has seen happening over the years: “an increased number of flooding events, and more devastation” from storms.

“Not only does it confirm what we have been seeing, but it helps detail what to expect in high visitor use areas — places we have infrastructure assets,” West said.

Managed by the National Park Service, Cape Lookout is made up of barrier islands off mainland Carteret County, and is home to several threatened and endangered species, a herd of wild horses, the still-operational 1850s Cape Lookout Lighthouse, historic villages, campsites and ferry landings.

Based on these projections, West said that he thinks the park service and visitors should expect to see places they love begin to disappear over the next two decades.

“They will have environmental impacts that change where and when they can visit, and I expect they will see a change in services they have come to expect and that the NPS provided.”

Cape Lookout Wildlife Biologist Sue Stuska monitors the horse herd along with management partners the Foundation for Shackleford Horses Inc. She told Coastal Review they are trying to determine how to plan for the herd with the upcoming changes.

Models project that emerging groundwater will likely not cause flooding on Cape Lookout National Seashore because, by the time sea level rises high enough to cause that, overland marine flooding will already be occurring, according to the study.

Stuska said that while she has not seen groundwater emerging at the surface, “I have documented three new places in the middle (between ocean and sound) of Shackleford Banks where the horses are digging for fresh water in swales where they never dug before. I have theorized that the water table is rising, giving them access there where it would have been too deep before.”

Rising sea level, higher risk

The Geological Survey team explained that the National Park Service requested summaries of recent research of the region relevant to coastal management concerns at Cape Lookout National Seashore.

The team pulled data specific to the national seashore and determined that with 0.5 meters, or 1.6 feet, of sea level rise, 47% of barrier island surface area would flood daily, and the type of storm nearly certain to strike each year would flood 74% of island surface area. During a storm of the intensity likely to come only once every 20 or so years, more than 85% of the island can be expected to flood.

Flood risk for extreme storm events doubles with just 2 to 4 inches of sea level rise, “and therefore, in the coming decades, hurricanes will likely cause more severe impacts than in the recent past for coastal North Carolina,” according to the study.

And a third of Cape Lookout National Seashore is currently sinking at a rate of more than 2 millimeters — about the thickness of a nickel – each year, further accelerating erosion and habitat loss.

With 3.3 feet of sea level rise, models project that shorelines will retreat an average of 178 meters, or 584 feet, if there’s no intervention. That would cover more than 60% of the current island width at its narrower locations. Shoreline retreat is what happens when an area experiences long-term erosion. 

Researchers note in the study that the results are relative to sea level rise values, not the amount of time those levels are anticipated to be reached, to “decouple the uncertainty of timing” from future sea level rise. “However, in the Discussion section, we relate results to time, using the SLR values closest to local estimates for the intermediate-high scenario for the years 2050 (0.46 m) and 2100 (1.60 m),” or 1.5 feet in 2050 and 5.24 feet in 2100. Authors cite projections that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released in 2022.

The researchers said it’s up to the National Park Service to make the difficult decisions on how to manage sea level rise and storm impacts. “Hopefully this study can provide valuable information as a guide to the short- and long-term coastal hazards to consider.”

Cape Lookout plans on sea level rise

Superintendent West said that while management is facing “mounting pressure to balance the needs of human safety and environmental preservation in a landscape increasingly shaped by climate change,” as the Dec. 4, 2024, press release states, he recognizes how much these changes will affect those fond of the national seashore.

Federal and state managers are facing pressure, “but people who live and work in coastal areas, people that visit and love these areas, well, they will suffer from emotional loss,” West said.

He added that while the park service has planning in place and is adaptively managing its resources, people tend to reject change.

“Gradual devastating change is harder to accept. You don’t see it unless you are living it, and even then, people can get use to things and then fail to see the bigger picture,” he said.

Cape Lookout changes every day. Five years from now it will be different than it is today, 10 years from now it will be dramatically different, West said.

The park service is taking action, West said, but, “I am not sure how humans truly plan for that which they do not know or fully understand. Still, we are trying.”

Park officials had already assessed Cape Lookout’s built assets, like the lighthouse and historic structures, and they know how vulnerable they are to storms, sea level rise, storm surge, wind and historic events.

“We know which buildings we are not going to rebuild in their current locations should they be damaged, we know the options we have for each asset,” which are to raise and rebuild with sustainable materials, move, or demolish and abandon the location, West said. “A number of structures that were continually battered by storm have been demolished and removed. We are not investing repair or rehabilitation dollars in structures that have that kind of exposure. There are currently five additional structures on that list that will not be reconstructed if they are storm damaged or flooded.”

New construction takes all factors into consideration, West said.

He said the camp on North Core Banks is an example. Long Point Camp was at one of the narrowest and most frequently affected parts of the island, with 7,000 feet of underground utilities, generators, and wooden buildings. It was subject to both ocean and sound-side flooding.

West said the park service replaced underground infrastructure routinely, and has done over 20 reconstruction or repair projects after storms between 1995 and 2019, when Hurricane Dorian devastated the camp yet again.

They found a site 5 miles to move the camp that’s north on one of the highest parts of the island. The new site sees little coastal erosion.

“The camp itself is designed to take environmental impacts yet be low-cost to build and maintain. Almost no underground utilities, all structures on raised platforms, buildings are principally oceangoing containers modified for residential or utility use, all power is provided by solar and wind generator systems,” West said.

Construction started in December.

To repair or rebuild docks, the park service elevates the structure and uses decking made of concrete that allows water to flow through without undermining the supporting structure, and pilings are driven to a minimum depth of 28 feet.

“We did a large beach nourishment project at the Cape Lookout Lighthouse to protect the lighthouse complex and are currently monitoring it for erosion. Once the data is in, we will look at options to try and hold that beach in place,” West said of the work completed early last year.

“Marsh restoration and protection are currently being planned,” West said. The state will lose about 85% of its current marsh area over the next 25 years.

“We are starting the process of protecting what we have and restoring some of what we lost now to try and stay ahead of sea level rise,” he explained.

West said that the park service approaches each project by posing a series of questions with sea level rise and storms in mind: “Do we need it? If we need it, is it in the right place and/or where is the right place? Can we build it better? Can we fund it? If we can do it, should we?”

The science panel that advises the state Coastal Resources Commission is showing with a new report how the findings of a 2022 federal-level report projecting that sea levels will rise by more than a foot by 2050 apply to North Carolina.

Released in mid-October, the “North Carolina 2024 Sea Level Rise Science Update” is the product of the science panel following the commission’s 2022 charge to present any new or significant data and research on sea level rise projections.

The commission was put in place in 1974 when the North Carolina General Assembly adopted the Coastal Area Management Act, or CAMA. The 13-member commission designates areas of environmental concern, adopts rules and policies for coastal development within those areas, and certifies local land use plans. The state Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management staff enforces the commission’s rules.

The U.S. Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flood Hazard Scenarios and Tools Interagency Task Force wrote “Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States,” that was published in February 2022 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Among the task force members are scientists from NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Army Corps of Engineers, Department of Defense and Environmental Protection Agency.

“In recent years, confidence regarding the expected amount of sea level rise by 2050 has increased,” the science panel recaps from the 2022 technical report in its October 2024 update. Regardless of how much warming occurs by 2100, trajectories evaluated by the 2022 sea level rise technical report indicate sea level rise of 1 foot to 1.4 feet by 2050, relative to sea level in 2000.

“The actual amount will depend on future greenhouse gas emissions, and how much ice is lost from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets,” the science panel continues in its update. “Projections for sea level rise beyond 2050 are less certain because they depend even more strongly on future greenhouse gas emissions and rate of ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica. However, rates of sea level rise are expected to further increase toward the latter half of this century.”

On the science panel, Dr. Reide Corbett is the dean and executive director of the Integrated Coastal Programs at the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus.

He told Coastal Review that sea level rise projections continue to improve as new data becomes available and as the scientific community gains a better understanding of global processes changing sea level on different spatial and temporal scales. 

The state’s science panel used the best available and most recent data to provide this 2024 Sea Level Rise Update, Corbett continued, adding that “It is critical that our communities are working with the most informed projections as they develop actionable plans for building more resilience across our coast.”

The strongest and most significant message Corbett said he sees coming from the 2024 update and other recent reports is that North Carolina must plan for at least a 1 foot rise in sea level by 2050. There is little deviation in this value whether projecting from tide gauges or using numerical models, Corbett added

“This is a reality that we need to start planning for today,” he said. “A 1 foot rise in sea level will significantly increase the number of days coastal North Carolina will experience high tide flooding. Communities need to start building these challenges into their land use plans, stormwater plans, and communicating the risks to residents.”

Division of Coastal Management Director Tancred Miller explained to Coastal Review that the science panel is defining sea level rise as an increase in the average height of the sea with respect to a specific reference.

Relative sea level is the combination of three primary factors: the global sea level, vertical land movement and oceanographic effects. These parameters are usually discussed in terms of their rates of temporal change, commonly expressed in millimeters per year, he said.

“Along the North Carolina coast, sea level is rising and the rate of rise varies depending on the location. There are two primary reasons for this variation along different parts of our coast: vertical land motion and the effects of ocean dynamics,” Miller continued.

He explained that this recent update emphasizes that tide gauge observations and modeling for all scenarios are nearly the same out to 2050, “indicating we are solidly on track for at least one foot of sea level rise by 2050.”

Miller noted that 2050 is just 25 years from now.

“To prepare for this, requires community involvement, planning, mitigation, and adaptation to start now,” Miller said.

To help better plan for sea level rise, the Coastal Resources Commission charged its science panel in 2022 with providing periodic updates to support what it called “informed planning and decision making.”

The charge includes a request for the science panel to review every year any “new and significant scientific literature and studies that address the range of implications of sea level rise at the State, sub-regional, and local scales.” If there’s enough new information to warrant an update, the panel is to present these findings to the commission.

Miller said for the science panel to follow through with the directive, the team of scientists held a series of meetings earlier this year to share and discuss any recent data related to sea level rise.

“Given that the painstaking work of preparing sea level rise projections based on the latest science has already been carried out” by the task force, the science panel recaps the key messages detailed in the 2022 technical report. The science panel also gives a brief summary of the regional sea level rise projections most relevant to North Carolina, and provides updated sea level rise projections and assessment of high-tide flooding frequencies for Duck, Beaufort and Wilmington, all based on data from the 2022 technical report.

The science panel sent out a draft of the sea level rise science update for comment this spring.

The document underwent a handful of changes based on public feedback, including the addition of a paragraph listing some of the key impacts of sea level rise, and adding the names of the different scenarios in the 2022 technical report — low, intermediate-low, intermediate, intermediate-high, and high — and referred to these throughout for clarity.

“The five sea level rise scenarios span the range of sea level rise that can be expected under the emissions and warming scenarios considered in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report,” or IPCC, the science panel states in its update. The IPCC was created by the United Nations to assess climate change-related science.

“We also added text to explain how these scenarios relate to the emissions pathways and warming scenarios used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report,” the new update continues. And provided more detail on the longer-term scenarios out to 2100.

The science panel did note in its update that, although summarizing the latest science on how these impacts will affect the state “is well beyond the scope of the Sea Level Rise Update Charge to the Science Panel, we refer interested parties to the coastal aspects of the 2020 Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, and associated or similar documents (and updates), for a more comprehensive discussion of sea level rise impacts, based on the latest science, to facilitate effective adaptation and mitigation planning.”

The first report the science panel, along with six additional contributors, issued was in March 2010 titled “North Carolina Sea Level Rise Assessment Report,” at the direction of the commission. The science panel recommended the report be reassessed every five years.

In April 2012 the panel issued a follow-up addendum to the report in response to questions from the commission.

That report was met with pushback from certain groups, resulting in a June 2012 law that put restrictions on how the sea level data was collated and used by state agencies and local governments.

The panel released an update in 2015 of the 2010 report.

“The next update was scheduled for 2020. However, due to the COVID pandemic, the 2020 update was postponed. In 2022, the CRC issued a revised charge to the science panel,” Miller said.

The division continues to accept public comments on the newly released update. Send comments to DCMcomments@deq.nc.gov. List “2024 Sea Level Rise Science Update” in the subject line.

“Comments regarding the final report simply serve as an opportunity for citizens to provide thoughts on the finished work and will be provided to the panel for review,” Miller said.

Public comments are being accepted on the Coastal Resources Commission Science Panel’s draft sea level rise update.

The Science Panel provides the commission with scientific data and recommendations pertaining to coastal topics. The commission directed the panel in 2022 to “conduct an annual review of any new and significant scientific literature and studies that address the range of implications of sea level rise at the State, sub-regional, and local scales …”

Periodic updates using current data are vital to help inform planning and decision-making, according to the commission’s charge to the panel.

The draft sea level rise update is available for review online.

Comments are being accepted until 5 p.m. July 3. Submit comments via email at DCMcomments@deq.nc.gov with “Draft Sea Level Rise Update” in the subject line; or by mail to NCDEQ Division of Coastal Management, Attn: Tancred Miller, Division Director, 400 Commerce Ave. Morehead City, NC 28557.

The Science Panel says it will consider all public comments before finalizing the proposed draft report.

Gov. Roy Cooper has proposed around $150 million to go toward conservation and resiliency, with $20 million of that for grants to improve draining and reduce flooding, in the recommended budget his office released released last week.

The $34.5 billion proposed budget, “Securing North Carolina’s Future” for fiscal 2025 announced April 24 recommends investing more than $148 million in land and water resources conservation and resilience to natural disasters, according to the 223-page summary of the suggested budget. The focus of the budget is education with with a proposed $1 billion investment in the state’s public school system.

“This budget is an opportunity to build on our state’s momentum and make up ground in areas like public education, quality child care and clean drinking water, where legislators have fallen short,” Cooper said in a statement. “As the number one state to do business in the country for two years in a row, we have the formula for success in our high-quality public schools, talented workforce and thriving economy. We must make targeted investments strengthening public education, boosting economic development, and protecting our natural resources to secure a bright future for North Carolina.”

The $148 million to conserve land and water resources and build resilience will “promote land conservation through tax credits, reinforce ongoing efforts to preserve the state’s natural and working lands, and aim to mitigate future damages from storms, flooding, and wildfires,” according to his office.

One line item specific to Carteret County is the $50 million for infrastructure improvements at Radio Island as a way “to support economic development at the site.”

To address emerging compounds, Cooper proposes $100 million for the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality to help communities with new federal drinking water per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, standards and address gaps in available federal funding for PFAS remediation.

Highlights of the conservation and resiliency allocations include the following:

• $2 million recurring and $30 million nonrecurring to improve state parks, matching grants for local projects, and access to beaches and coastline.
• $2 million recurring and $30 million nonrecurring for projects that protect and restore the state’s land and water resources, preserve military buffers, restore degraded streams, and develop and improve stormwater treatment.
• $2.46 million in recurring to help the state preserve farmland through grants for conservation easements, farmland preservation plans, and agricultural development projects.
• $1 million nonrecurring to support agricultural water supply and efficiency increases for agricultural water use, with a focus on increasing assistance for on-farm water storage.
• $1 million recurring to expand sustainability and conservation efforts at the Department of Adult Correction, which manages more than 1,040 acres of natural lands and 54 correctional facilities.
• $20 million nonrecurring to support organizations working to reduce flooding through the restoration and maintenance of streams, waterways, and drainage infrastructure across the state.
• $5 million for the Coastal Resilient Roof Grant Program administered by the N.C. Insurance Underwriting Association to create storm-resistant houses by strengthening roofs against natural disasters.
• $5 million to strengthen an application for $68.5 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, and the Division of Coastal Management have partnered on the funding opportunity through NOAA for living shorelines, the Resilient Coastal Communities Program, stormwater improvements, and land conservation to protect against extreme weather in the 20 coastal counties.
• $5 million nonrecurring to enable the N.C. Forest Service to conduct prescribed fires and contain wildfires.
• $4 million to enhance the Flood Resiliency Blueprint with more data about impacts from storm surge and coastal flooding.
• $3 million in nonrecurring funds for grants that support nature-based projects.
• $300,000 nonrecurring to replace the trailers required for transporting mobile units designed to quickly depopulate swine following disease outbreaks, natural disasters, or other catastrophic events.
• A new conservation tax credit to support land conservation efforts.

Republicans have indicated willingness to consider some of Cooper’s proposals and expressed a desire to vote on a budget and adjourn before July.

Tidal flooding is creating a potential public health hazard on the streets and roads of coastal towns, according to a recently published study.

The study found elevated levels of fecal bacteria in water samples collected over the course of two months from a tidal creek in Beaufort and its streets following rainfall.

Dr. Natalie Nelson, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, explained that the study reaffirmed what researchers already knew — stormwater runoff is the largest culprit of elevated levels, or levels that exceed regulatory recreational water quality standards, of enterococcus bacteria in Taylors Creek.

Tidal flooding forces water into the town’s stormwater system that empties into Taylors Creek. When the system exceeds capacity, water overspills onto road surfaces.

This type of flooding occurs when rainfall causes saltwater to overflow from the ocean, sounds and estuaries and, because of sea level rise, it’s becoming more prominent in coastal areas like Beaufort.

Samples collected from floodwater patches on roadways almost consistently had elevated concentrations of enterococcus bacteria.

And, in some cases, bacteria in those samples maxed out the detection limit, Nelson said.

“What it indicates to us is that the concentrations were likely high because of a source from within the stormwater network,” she said. “We say that because the floodwaters, it’s not like they were so extensive that we could really argue that they might be flushing the land surface. But, because those floodwater patches were pretty small, we think the elevated concentrations were coming from within the stormwater network.”

When floodwaters glazing the roadways drained back into the stormwater system during ebb tide, researchers recorded higher levels of bacteria in the creek, indicating that the contamination in the creek is coming from the stormwater network, Nelson said.

The contamination wasn’t present in all of the locations sampled and the presence of the contamination was brief, she said.

Enterococci are bacteria that live in the gastrointestinal tract of humans and warm-blooded animals. People who swim or play in waters with bacteria levels higher than state and federal standards have an increased risk of developing gastrointestinal illness or skin infections.

“I think the problem that we uncovered is not at all unique to Beaufort,” Nelson said. “The stormwater network was never designed to have water come back up through it and then go into places where pedestrians encounter and so we’re now in an era where we have to think about how our infrastructure systems are being stressed in new ways and how that might lead to new types of issues like maybe floodwaters having issues with contamination, but it’s a topic of ongoing research.”

In recent years, Beaufort has repaved hundreds of feet of one downtown street with pervious pavement, which allows water to soak through to the ground rather than route the water to the town’s stormwater system.

That project fell under the 2017 Beaufort Watershed Restoration Plan, one that aims to restore hydrology and reduce polluted runoff using retrofits that direct stormwater to filtrate into the ground or collect it for later use.

The town is among a number of coastal communities that have been examining how to best respond to what researchers often call “sunny day flooding” and other weather-related issues that are being exacerbated by the changing climate.

Dozens of coastal municipalities and counties have received grants through the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management’s N.C. Resilient Coastal Communities Program, or NC-RCCP.

The program is a creation of the state’s 2020 Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, which was the result of Executive Order 80 signed by Gov. Roy Cooper in October 2018.

NC-RCCP aims to boost resilience efforts in the state’s 20 coastal counties and encourages those who live and work along the coast to participate in finding solutions to prioritize projects designed to help their communities bounce back from storms and floods.

For more information about tidal flooding and precautions, visit North Carolina Sea Grant’s website.

The science panel that advises the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission has planned a virtual meeting for 10 a.m. Friday, March 15, to resume its discussion on delineating Inlet Hazard Area boundaries, and recent sea level rise data and studies.

The public can listen to the meeting online through WebEex or by calling 1-415-655-0003. Use access code 2430 465 3667. There will be a listening session at North Carolina Division of Coastal Management headquarters office at 400 Commerce Ave., Morehead City.

Comments can be submitted by email to DCMcomments@deq.nc.gov. Include “Science Panel” in the subject line.

The science panel provides the commission with scientific data and recommendations pertaining to coastal topics.

Members met Feb. 29 to continue the conversation on inlet hazard area boundaries and sea level rise that has been carried through the last handful of panel meetings. They also worked on a presentation on sea level rise data, sunny day flooding projections, water level monitoring efforts and adaptation for the commission’s April 24 meeting.

The upcoming meeting is to be a continuation of that discussion.

The science panel that advises the state’s Coastal Resources Commission has scheduled a virtual meeting to pick up its review of Inlet Hazard Areas boundaries that began during its Nov. 27, 2023, meeting and discuss recent studies and data on sea level rise.

The meeting is to begin at 2 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 29, and is open for public listening either online or call 415-655-0003 and use access code 242 570 64312. Comments can be submitted to DCMcomments@deq.nc.gov with “Science Panel” in the subject line.

The Coastal Resources Commission, known as the CRC, sets rules and policies for the 20 coastal counties, which the Division of Coastal Management, under the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, carries out. The science panel provides the CRC with scientific data and recommendations pertaining to coastal topics.

Inlet Hazard Areas are areas of environmental concern that are especially vulnerable to erosion, flooding, and other adverse effects of sand, wind, and water because of their proximity to dynamic ocean inlets, according to the “Inlet Hazard Area Boundary, 2019 Update: Science Panel Recommendations to the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission.”

The panel during its November meeting began the discussion on Inlet Hazard Areas because of the three-part charge issued by the CRC to reevaluate every five years its IHA methods and boundaries, incorporating data collected since its 2019 study, reassess its 2019 recommendations and consider alternative methods for calculating oceanfront shoreline change rates. They are to present the draft reports including proposed boundaries and erosion rates in summer of 2024.

The panel discussed the background of IHAs, the work that has taken place since the ongoing effort began in the late 2000s, complications, and possible alternatives, such as using different approaches for the inlets experiencing the most erosion. They will continue this discussion.

Last in a series.

The week after Hurricane Florence devastated eastern North Carolina in September 2018, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher wrote in an online message to members and patrons that throughout the 13 unincorporated communities making up Down East and the entire county, “we’ve been putting back the pieces.”

But “in the midst of the damage and pain throughout Down East, the Museum has suffered far more damage than originally seen.” She continued that there were significant leaks in the facility, mold was growing on the carpet, floors were buckling and drywall was crumbling. 

By mid-October 2018, teams and equipment had been brought in to help manage moisture, and staff and volunteers had completely emptied the nearly destroyed building so the damaged floors, walls and roof could be replaced, Coastal Review reported at the time. The museum reopened May 2020, after the $3.4 million in repairs were completed. 

Hurricane Florence’s impact on Down East initially grabbed the attention of researchers, agencies, educators, students, advocates and others invested in adaptation and resilience, leading to research on ghost forests, sea level rise, inundation and flooding. They’ve formed the Down East Resilience Network to raise awareness and create a better understanding of the environmental changes to the area and find solutions. 

As part of that awareness effort, the network hosted a two-day community conversation Sept. 12-13 at the museum on Harkers Island to discuss Down East since the 2018 Category 1 storm and how to prepare better for “the next Florence.” 

Over the course of the two-day conversation, attendees were given tours of Cape Lookout National Seashore and Down East communities, they heard the science behind ghost forests and king tides, had discussions with representatives from the North Carolina departments of transportation and insurance, and area utilities.

There also was time for residents to voice their concerns including the everyday flooding plaguing Down East, the poorly maintained ditches throughout the area, and frustrations with new development. 

Upgrading transportation infrastructure

Department of Transportation Assistant State Hydraulic Engineer Matt Lauffer, Division 2 Engineer Jeff Cabaniss and Division 2 Deputy Engineer Jeremy Stroud explained during the conversation that the state agency is preparing for climate-related change.

Division 2 is responsible for eight counties, including Carteret, and manages preconstruction, planning and construction, and maintenance of roads, bridges and ditches and culverts along state routes. 

Cabaniss said the agency is one of the largest landowners in the state because it owns rights of way. 

NCDOT’s responsibility when it comes to drainage is two fold, he continued. First is to keep water off the road if possible and the other is to divert through pipes, culverts and bridges the water that is coming.

Since the department owns facilities in all communities, as communities face issues with flooding, so does NCDOT. “A lot of times, we have the ditches alongside the road. We can clean those out, but we can’t make (the water) go away from the road because that goes off the right of way. And we don’t have the permission, the funds or the people to make that happen,” he said. 

NCDOT removes debris from the roadways and to restore the network after emergencies and other catastrophic events, Stroud added.

But not all ditches are state-maintained, especially Down East where artificial drainage can also funnel water onto land as well as roadways.

To prepare for how environmental changes will affect transportation infrastructure, Lauffer said NCDOT is working with climate scientists to design projects that consider more hurricane surge and sea level rise, and the implications of those on a proposed facility, such as an interstate. Planners are also beginning to incorporate resilience methodology in new projects. 

 “We’re definitely looking at the hazards that can adversely affect that facility,” he said, and how to best design projects. 

The agency is using past flooding data for vulnerability assessments. An assessment that is nearly complete is for U.S. Highway 70 between the state ferry terminal at Cedar Island and Raleigh that will look at the vulnerability of that major corridor.

Cabaniss said that, on the maintenance side, NCDOT is replacing older, smaller drainage pipes. Recently, a 24-inch pipe in Davis was replaced with a 55-inch by 72-inch pipe. 

Stroud added that they get recommendations from the hydraulic unit for every pipe that is replaced, a requirement now for projects that receive federal funding. 

“If we have future events, we can show that we brought it up to the current standards,” he said. “Hopefully there is no damage to that structure, and even if there is, it’s not because we put an inadequate pipe size in that would not meet the criteria for that event.”

Lauffer said that after Hurricane Florence, there was a huge realization that NCDOT could do better to know what to expect during major storms and how they affect the larger transportation network.

To do that, NCDOT has partnered with other state agencies and researchers who have tools and programs in place to measure flooding across the state, like the Flood Inundation Alert Network. NCDOT is using that data to project what roadways could be inundated based on the forecast for a particular storm. The agency also has a system that continually monitors 15,800 major bridge structures and culverts statewide. 

“We have a better understanding of the vulnerability of our facilities and structures,” Lauffer said, which they’re trying to get a better handle on “so that we can potentially recover faster, respond better, and potentially save lives by knowing these things are coming.”

Girding utilities 

Heidi Smith, manager of energy services and corporate communications with Tideland Electric Membership Corp., which serves parts or all of Beaufort, Craven, Dare, Hyde, Martin and Pamlico counties, and Ethan Horne, field engineer with Carteret-Craven Electric Cooperative’s resilience planning, both said the utilities they represent are working to prepare smarter. 

“We’ve just obviously had a lot of hurricanes. Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, but you get smarter and smarter each time around, there’s always lessons to be learned,” Smith said.

Horne said that flooding is always a big issue, especially because it makes reaching lines when they’re down more dangerous and difficult, but Carteret-Craven Electric Co-op is going to be better with the next Florence, starting with upgrades to the main office in Newport. 

A new fuel system that holds 10,000 gallons of diesel, a new radio tower for better communications, “because we always have problems communicating from Newport down to Cedar Island, Harkers Island area, especially when the towers are down,” he said. The co-op is working on improving response to outages, putting in a new substation in Otway, upgrading lines, and talking about bringing in different contractors with specialized equipment for hurricane response.

Smith said there’s a lot of challenges for underground infrastructure, including inundation, falling limbs and trees in ghost forests, and fires that burn and burn for months, especially for places like mainland Hyde County that are losing population. 

There’s so much technology, but “Here’s what I’m going to tell you, you’ve got to be prepared. We’re getting people back on faster than ever before. Our lives are more electrified, it is more inconvenient but what is shocking,” she said, is that in her 31 years with the utility, she’s seen a lot of hurricanes, but during Hurricane Florence, she saw communities flood that had never been flooded before. 

“When you’ve been flooded before, you’re better prepared than if you haven’t been,” Smith continued. She explained that she witnessed 900 of 2,000 homes in a community flood and “people literally died sooner because of that, because they’ve never been through it before. They didn’t have the mental infrastructure. They didn’t have the physical infrastructure. They didn’t have the family infrastructure –nothing to make them through it. And we’ve got to better prepare people. Because preparation makes us better. Preparation helps us emerge and resume our lives much more quickly. And we’ve got to do it. And we’re going to help lead the way.”

Understanding insurance

Jessica Gibbs, regional director for coastal northeast North Carolina with the state Department of Insurance, said the department has many services and is available to answer any questions. 

“We’re there to help you understand it, help you make sure you’re getting exactly what you need, and you’re not being overcharged, and you’re not being double-covered.” She reiterated that experts in the department answer the calls, not a recording. There are also resources on the department’s website to prepare and recover from catastrophic events. 

Also with the Department of Insurance, Tim Crawley, consumer complaints analyst, told those in attendance that if you run across issues in making a claim, he’s the person you contact. 

Here on the coast, he said during the community conversation, “Most companies will exclude wind and hail, so then you have to chase the wind and hail policy down” and if you have a federally underwritten loan, they’re going to require you to carry flood insurance on your home as well. “Those are the challenges you’re having to face here.” 

He added that it’s important to make sure your coverage is in sync with the current real estate market and adequate for your dwelling – don’t just base it on your tax records.

“When a claim is filed for, especially here, you’re having a multifront attack on your property. You’ve got water coming up from the ground to flood, and then you’ve got the wind assault from above,” he said, and the insurance company is going to have to determine how the damage occurred. For example, if the floor or carpeting is soaked, and there’s a saturation line coming up the wall, the insurance company’s going to say that’s flood related and will have to go through the flood policy. 

“The home policy is a covered-peril policy,” Crawley said. 

That means it only covers those perils that are expressly stated in the policy. 

“We all think, well, I have insurance, so I’ve got everything from hurricanes to lightning, to alien invasion, to my kid drawing all over the house with crayons, you know. It is written as a covered-peril policy for a very specific reason,” Crawley said.

Then there’s also the language used in homeowners policies. “It says they will repair or replace. The word ‘repair’ is first for a very specific reason: They’d rather put X-number of shingles on your roof than have to (replace) your entire roof.”

Ryan Cox, president of Insight Planning & Development consultant services, said he defined a natural flood as moving water covering two or more properties, and that could be your property and the road, which is state property. “If the road and your property are flooded, then that is two or more properties, but that is the definition of a natural flood,” he said. “Flood is water moving across the ground, that’s a flood. If it’s from the roof, that’s wind and hail.”

Your insurance agent is also a great resource to find out if you have the right coverage, Crawley added. But, he warned, agents sell policies, they do not adjust claims.

“Once the claim is filed with the insurance company, it’s the adjuster that’s driving the bus at that point,” he said, adding that the agent has to step aside to let the claims organization take over.

Crawley said he tells everybody before any storm that their smartphone is their best tool. He encourages residents to take photos of their insurance policies and expensive or bigger items, like bedroom and living room furniture and electronics, and make sure those are saved in online storage. 

“As a former claims adjuster, the easier you make it on the adjuster, the faster you’re going to go through the process,” he said, so have your policy information ready when you file a claim.

Cox added that just because you are not required to have flood insurance, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get flood insurance. Many residents don’t get flood insurance because they’re not in a special flood hazard area, or 100-year floodplain. A 100-year floodplain means there’s a 1% chance of annual flooding, or a one-in-a-hundred chance every year that an area could flood. 

“The gamble is, where is it going to happen? It can happen in the western part of the state for flash flooding. It can happen in the central part of the state through flash flooding or hurricane. It can happen either here from storm surge, or it can happen as a combination of storm surge and riverine flooding,” he said, which is when water from the ocean or sound – storm surge – and riverine flooding meet. 

He encourages residents to have flood insurance, whether in a floodplain or not, “the worst is having to tell somebody that there’s nothing I can do for you because you didn’t have flood insurance,” Cox said.

Identifying what’s next

Organizers spent the weeks after the community conversation compiling notes collected during the two days of programming to identify concerns and what actions are needed. 

The following are some of the comments provided to and compiled by organizers and shared in a spreadsheet with Coastal Review: 

“One person says that recurring flooding Down East is driven not only by sea level rise, but also by poorly maintained ditches – not enough, filled with debris, etc.”

“The tours through Down East communities were eye-opening and having residents leading the way gave me a lot of perspective on the issues they’re facing.”

“I’ll admit that when I first heard about global warming thirty years ago, I thought I’d never live to see it or feel it. Obviously, I was wrong.” 

And one comment said the realistic expectation is that it’s not possible to be able “to protect every parcel” but they “don’t have to run for the hills.”

“Environmentalists aren’t going to let us dump [referring to water] into Sound” later goes on to say that she understands that it may impact sea life, but says that “water needs to go.”

The spreadsheet also detailed notes where action was needed, such as Down East needs to look at all the options for community sustainability and have a “seat at the table” when it comes to planning for roads and other infrastructure, and for a readiness, response, recovery plan to work it has to be developed with the community. 

Amspacher told Coastal Review after the event that she believed everyone who participated went away feeling that the conversation was positive for all involved.

“The community learned about resources for adapting to the changes, and the researchers and agencies gained a firsthand look at the issues Down East residents live with every day,” she said. “These two days were the beginning of many more conversations that have taken place since this gathering, and more are underway for the immediate and long-term future. Those who helped plan see it as an excellent first step in connecting needs and resources.”

Among those who helped plan the conversation were North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency Resilience Planner Holly White, Western Carolina University geology professor Rob Young, and lifelong Down East resident Chris Yeomans, a retired educator. 

White told Coastal Review that resiliency staff attended the recent meetings of community leaders Down East to listen to their concerns about flooding issues and other hazards impacting these areas. 

“We want to understand the local perspectives as a continuation of NCORR’s recent community work in the eastern half of the state through a disaster resilience program called RISE. Through hearing the perspectives of those that live in the region, we hope to determine if NCORR or other partners can be helpful in increasing the resiliency of the communities,” White said.

Young, who is director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western, told Coastal Review that he became involved in the network three years ago when he met Amspacher. 

She shared with him the issues she saw for Down East and how the unincorporated areas of the counties seem to have trouble getting resilience funding and organizing for projects, “Even though it is clearly one of the most exposed areas to coastal hazards in the state,” he explained.

Areas like Down East have a lot of trouble developing projects and getting resilience funds because it’s not an incorporated municipality. It’s really easy for the state to work with a municipality that has lots of capacity, like planning and GIS departments, “but working with an area that doesn’t have any of that, you have to go through the county. And if the county is either not interested or if the county doesn’t have the capacity, then those folks end up at the end of the line.”

Young said meetings like the community conversation are important “even though we didn’t walk out of there with the projects developed and money on the way” and because the state agency representatives showed up and listened, they were reminded what and where the needs are “because ultimately, they are going to have to drive some of these solutions” by working with county governments.

Yeomans, a retired Carteret County principal, spoke to Coastal Review in a follow-up interview from the front porch of his daughter’s home on Harkers Island that she just purchased. He was helping with odds and ends that needed fixing. 

He said he sees how vulnerable Down East is to storms and sea level rise. 

“The water is higher than it was 20 or 30 years ago,” he said. Adding it’s the changing environment is just part of nature, “but I think we humans have sped up that process.” 

His question, which appears to be on the minds of most Down East residents, is “How can locals maintain their heritage and maintain where they live. Be able to stay here and thrive, too.”

When he was a young boy growing up on Harkers Island, before Down East was “discovered,” he could see development coming. He observed it on the Outer Banks, and knew it was imminent for Down East, he said. 

Now, what gets his attention is development in the unincorporated communities, and the associated septic systems and well water, especially in low-lying areas where there’s sea level rise, which is saturating the ground. 

When does development maximize our ability to sustain the natural environment and human interaction? He asked. “When do we put up a ‘No Vacancy’ sign? Who’s going to make that decision?”

That concern, Yeomans continued, runs parallel to Down East resilience efforts. 

“My heart is Down East. I love the Down East people. I love our culture. And I want to see it protected as much as we can with the changes that are happening,” and those changes need to happen responsibly, and in a way that protects the environment and the Down East heritage, he said.

Second in a series.

Aerial photographs that capture ghost forests, pilings jutting up from the water in Hatteras Inlet, the narrow two-lane N.C. Highway 12 at North River Bridge, and oceanfront homes with waves lapping at the front steps were hanging in the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island in late June 2018 as part of a multimedia exhibit showing climate-related change.

“Rising: Perspectives of Change along the North Carolina Coast,” featuring 15 photographs accompanied by firsthand accounts, was on display when Hurricane Florence lingered over eastern North Carolina just a few months later in mid-September, amplifying and exacerbating the changes focused on in the exhibit. 

In the very room where the exhibit survived the storm, its co-creator Ryan Stancil and a gathering of Down East residents, community leaders and academics in September revisited that scene from five years ago when the storm hit and then, its aftermath. Stancil and Dr. Barbara Garrity Blake had collected the oral histories to accompany Baxter Miller’s photography for the exhibit funded by North Carolina Sea Grant.

“Five years ago, this world changed swiftly,” Stancil said Sept. 13 to those participating in the two-day community conversation, coordinated by the Down East Resilience Network.

The network is made up of researchers, agencies, educators, students, advocates and others invested in adaptation and resilience was formed three years ago to raise awareness of the environmental changes taking place in the region.

“Florence sank her teeth into Down East – gnashing at the banks, shoving water up through the marsh and into the 13 unincorporated villages,” Stancil continued. “She dumped nearly 30 inches of rain and left in her wake damage and flooding like we’ve never seen. Homes destroyed, business at a standstill and livelihoods in jeopardy.”

People Down East were battered and bruised, “But, if you know anything about Down East, you know the people are strong, self-reliant and resilient,” and in the days, weeks and years that followed, they held close to each other, neighbor helping neighbor.

“So much has changed since Florence came ashore,” Stancil said. “10 years ago, we were asking what was happening around us. Five years ago, we were asking what we could do to fix it. Today, we are asking, ‘How can we buy more time?’”

Stancil said that the museum’s executive director, Karen Willis Amspacher, has said that “Rising” had inspired the community conversation.

“Sure, ‘Rising’ might play a small part in why we’re here today, the truth is, today’s conversation was inevitable,” he continued.

“There is a different sort of storm brewing – one of eroding shorelines, migrating fish, intruding saltwater, and inundated roadways. And Down East is smack-dab in the middle of that storm’s path,” Stancil said. “The people who live here aren’t the only ones who know it.”

In the last five years, Down East has attracted the attention of most of the state’s academic institutions and state agencies, and there’s at least a dozen research projects taking place in the communities.

“I’m grateful to see the interest and engagement of so many researchers as we all work to open doors of communication. We must work together to better understand the science and its intersection with place and people and policy. I believe the work we are doing here today can be a foundation for resilience building, in unincorporated communities across North Carolina and beyond,” he said.

What is changing?

The fishing industry is having to navigate changes in water quality, development and once-reliable species migrating.

Hardy Plyler with Ocracoke Seafood Co. said he had been told several times long ago by an Ocracoke fisherman that fish populations are controlled by natural cycles and are influenced by climatic events — hurricanes, freezes, salinity changes, droughts — many things that are in the natural world that affect these fish over and above regulations by the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries.

Fish also are influenced by environmental factors like pollution, agricultural runoff, municipal wastewater, and industrial pollution. When you have a big rainstorm in coastal North Carolina, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers wash off the farmland into sounds and rivers, he added.

Adam Tyler, owner of Harkers Island’s Core Sound Oyster Co., said one of the biggest challenges on the coast he’s seeing is development and hardened shorelines. He said that living shorelines, rather than seawalls or bulkheads, are an effective way to protect the coast and promote resilience.

Tyler said there’s a marshy property a half-mile from the water under development in Carteret County that he knows won’t perk, and is being backfilled. Tyler said he didn’t know how that could be allowed.

“And then I asked one of the guys who built the home down here, and he told me, he said, ‘son,’ he said, ‘When you know the right developer and you got enough money, anything can be done.’ That conversation was about six weeks ago,” Tyler said in mid-September.

Adding that the commercial fishing industry “always get blamed for everything,” Tyler said it’s not responsible for all the coastal environmental damage.

“It’s not all us. I’m not saying that we don’t bear some burden there, but it’s not all of us. It’s the people coming in here backfilling these marshes and destroying the ecosystem. I see that all the time.”

Tyler said his frustration with regulatory agencies encouraged him to transition to oyster farming to keep himself on the water and instill in his son the proud Down East heritage.

Raleigh’s Locals Seafood Market owner and co-founder Ryan Speckman said he’s seen the shrimp fishery change since 2010, and the company has been having a hard time getting the popular bottom fish — snapper, grouper, sea bass, triggerfish — that used to be reliable almost year-round.

Speckman said that, traditionally, they’d get their bottom fish from the southeastern part of the state, the coast from Carteret County south, but he’s seen more triggerfish in waters north of Hatteras than in the southeast during the last two years.

Because the Raleigh-based company sells fresh, local seafood bought almost daily from fishermen along the coast, Speckman said he hears feedback daily, including that some species once abundant on the North Carolina coast have moved north.

‘We don’t have to wait for these changes’

Ghost forests are another visible environmental change Down East, and in much of coastal North Carolina.

Duke University professor and ecosystem biologist Emily Bernhardt explained that these dead and dying trees are “an iconic symbol of rapid change” on the coastal plain.

“There’s always hurricanes blowing salt onto the landscape, and there’s trees dying. But in the past, those trees would come back,” Bernhardt said. “What we’re seeing now is that we’re having a lot of ghost forests forming, and the trees are often not growing back.”

When a coastal forested wetland is lost, and can’t grow back because the soil is too salty or too wet for trees to grow, it is a fundamental change to the ecosystem.

“The big question I’m interested in is, what is going to happen to the ecosystems and communities of the eastern coastal plain over the next century? What makes these systems and people and communities vulnerable? What is the impact that we’re already seeing? And that we can expect? And then the big question, which is not a scientific question, it’s a human question, is, what is going to happen next?” Bernhardt continued.

The conversation about rapid environmental change taking place in this country implies it’s going to happen in the future, Bernhardt said, but there are areas already subject to widespread tidal flooding, called recurrent or nuisance flooding. “We don’t have to wait for these changes.”

During hurricanes and tropical storms, areas Down East are extremely vulnerable to storm surge, which can bring not just water but also salt. Storm surge is a big component of how salt gets delivered to the system.

So is drought, which is a very confusing problem to explain to people, she said. Salt can penetrate the ground when it’s arid and when it’s extremely wet, and both are a risk for saltwater intrusion.

“We focus a lot of attention on hurricanes because they’re acute. But what we’re looking at with ghost forests is kind of more of a slow disaster. Those hurricanes might push you over the edge, but it’s a disaster that’s building over time as a result of the accumulation of salts in these exposed and vulnerable landscapes,” Bernhardt said.

Thermal expansion

Scientists have evidence that water levels are rising, another change affecting Down East now and in the long term.

“We’ve been measuring water level in many different ways, and yes, water levels are rising,” said North Carolina King Tides Project founder Dr. Christine Voss, a retired coastal scientist from University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences.

“Part of the whole sea level rise story is just the thermal expansion of water,” she continued.

Also affecting water levels are wind, the tides and the Gulf Stream.

Last year, federal agencies published a report saying that water levels are expected to rise within the next three decades, by 2050. “That difference for the East Coast is about 10 to 14 inches. And that’s kind of hard to comprehend,” said Voss.

King tides have always happened and are predictable, taking place when the moon is at its closest distance to the Earth, causing extremely high high tides, and extremely low low tides. “We use those high tide events to help us visualize what future higher sea levels will look like. It’s kind of giving us a glimpse of what future higher sea levels will look like,” Voss said.

In the last 20 years, sea levels have risen about 6 inches. Within the next 30, federal officials forecast sea levels up to a foot higher. 

Voss said other visible changes are related. “We’re having more and stronger tropical storms,” and know that these will be stronger.”

One of the biggest take-home messages, Voss said during the gathering, is that the changing environmental conditions are basically integrated into the coastal landscape, “and I’ll say in your seascape as well. You are the communities seeing these changes. And there’s a lot of complexity,” she said, referring to the numerous changes happening at once, including warmer temperatures and sea level rise.

Katherine Arnade is co-leader of the Sunny Day Flooding Project, which aims to monitor how often land is flooded due to sea level rise. Project scientists are measuring water levels and storm drains using special gauges they have developed. The sensors also take photos of the roadway and can measure flow in stormwater systems, including the contributions from rainfall and, in some cases, groundwater.  The first installation was in Beaufort in 2021.

“We’re committed to learning about flooding in Down East and collecting data that’s useful to your community for as long as long as we can,” Arnade said, adding the sensors will be there for at least five years. Right now, there are only four sensors in use but the program could expand.

Realtime sensor data is available online.

Priorities identified

Dr. Rob Young, a geology professor and director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, has been part of the Down East Resilience Network since its inception three years ago. Young recently worked with Cape Lookout National Seashore officials to assess its villages’ and historic buildings’ vulnerability and has piloted a program for vulnerability assessments of private homes Down East.

“I can’t tell you how many times in the last 24 hours I’ve had people come up to me frustrated with the nature of the new development that’s going on Down East, where folks are filling wetlands, building in places where we know that septic systems cannot possibly be perking,” he said the second day of the conversation.

Young said residents are frustrated. These folks who are generally suspicious of regulations, always seem to be regulated, while they see others not be held to the same standards. And elected county officials – the only local government representation residents of unincorporated Down East hamlets have – and county management were absent, despite being invited to the event.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the people who might answer some of those questions for us at the county level are not with us for these two days to help us find solutions or have that discussion. I don’t know how to fix that either,” Young said.

Young said his priorities are how to keep residents from being displaced by flooding, how transportation infrastructure and utilities will be maintained in the future, and how to deal with the public health implications of failing water treatment and septic systems.

“The final piece to all of this, I think, is trying to understand how we tap into some of those infrastructure dollars that have become available over the last couple of years that just don’t seem to make their way Down East,” Young said. “How can we tap into all of the new sources of funding available from the federal government that comes to the state and find a way to get some of those funds into a place like Down East, for meaningful projects? That’s what we really need to know, at the end of the day, from a meeting like this. We have to stop talking and start doing stuff. And we need our elected officials to really engage and help make that happen.”

Next: What is being done to prepare?

The science panel that advises the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission is scheduled to meet at 11:45 a.m. Monday to assess recent studies concerning sea level rise.

The meeting is to place in the second floor Berne Room in New Bern Riverfront Convention Center, 203 South Front St.

Members of the science panel, which provides the commission with scientific data and recommendations pertaining to coastal topics, are also to review updates related to Inlet Hazard Areas, and discuss methodologies and data pertaining to oceanfront erosion rates.

The public can attend in person or listen by phone or online. To join by phone, call 415-655-0003 and use access code 242 502 93623. To join by computer, use webinar number 2425 029 3623 and webinar password SCI2023.

Comments can be made in person during the meeting or emailed to DCMcomments@deq.nc.gov, list “Science Panel” in the subject line.

A new collaboration of coastal flood monitoring efforts in Virginia and North Carolina could offer a broader view of how king tides affect coastal communities along both states’ coastlines.

The North Carolina King Tides Project, an international initiative to document extreme high tide events with photos, and Wetlands Watch, an environmental nonprofit organization based in Norfolk, Virginia, began a concerted outreach last week, just ahead of the late-August king tides that began Sunday.

For the North Carolina King Tides Project, the public can upload photos of flooding and water level gauges to illustrate water depths to the Coastal Observer app. Using Wetlands Watch’s sea level rise app, volunteers can drop GPS pins while walking along the edge of floodwaters to map how far water encroaches inland, or the horizontal extent of flooding. Tutorials on using the apps are available on both websites.

Organizers hope these complementary collection tools will lead to more comprehensive data on these highest high and lowest low tides of the year.

The North Carolina King Tides Project was established to help visualize how normal high tides could look in the future. It was created with support from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grant from 2015 to 2019, but the project has relied on volunteers ever since.

Project founder Dr. Christine Voss told Coastal Review in an email Thursday that the initiative was glad to welcome Wetlands Watch and their team to North Carolina.

“We are grateful to have them here. I think we can learn more about the impacts of coastal inundation and salt intrusion along coastal NC by using both of our apps to document the extent of flooding during king tide events, which are natural events that have always occurred, but give us a way to visualize how future, higher sea levels will impact our coast,” she said.

Though the initiative has been unfunded for several years, Voss said the project “has been able to continue by the grace of several dedicated volunteers, whom we appreciate. It is a community science project for NC coastal citizens, by NC coastal citizens and they continue to submit images and data, and help one another learn how to deal with the impacts and complexities of rising sea levels along our coast.”

Wetlands Watch Executive Director Mary-Carson Stiff told Coastal Review in an interview Thursday that she was also excited about the combined effort.

“We have some shared watershed projects through green infrastructure and conservation, landscaping, training professionals at certifications for maintenance of a lot of those practices,” she said. “We do a lot of work with different states and have benefited tremendously from cross-state partnerships in the policy space too. So, seems like a no-brainer.”

Wetlands Watch and the North Carolina King Tides Project held a virtual information session Wednesday to explain their goals and review how the apps work.

Wetlands Watch Community Engagement Project Manager Gabi Kinney explained that king tides occur when the full or new moon’s orbit is closest to Earth, called in perigee. The moon’s gravitational pull effectively raises these high tides.

These tidal events provide a glimpse of future tides, Kinney said. “We can study king tides of today to get a feel for what it might look like in the future with sea level rise and all of these projections.”

Kinney said Wetlands Watch connected with the North Carolina King Tides Project after NOAA’s climate program office approached the organization to expand its annual “Catch the King” weekend effort to document king tides in coastal Virginia.

Catch the King is an annual tide-mapping event that encourages volunteers to collect flooding data during the highest tides of the year. This year’s is Oct. 27-29 in coastal Virginia.

Wetlands Watch selected North Carolina for a few reasons, Kinney said. A graduate of the University of North Carolina Wilmington and previous intern with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, she has connections with the area and is familiar with the flood risk that Wilmington faces, and she learned how flooding is impacting other North Carolina coastal communities through Voss.

Voss is a coastal ecologist who retired about a year ago from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City. During the webinar she explained that while she’s officially retired, she’s still helping with the project.

She said that one of the reasons the King Tides Project was launched was because imagery is powerful in communicating what is taking place with flood events and sea level rise “because it’s hard to imagine what the scientists are telling us.”

Though the project technically is no longer funded, “there’s a core group of volunteers who are very passionate about it, and the public seems to be remaining passionate about it. So, we’re trying to keep everything going, and thank you, with help from Wetlands Watch,” Voss added.

Kinney explained that she and Voss had discussed how to meaningfully merge the two programs. They kickstarted the joint effort in June. Since then, Voss has published a king tides calendar for 2023 and program information. Kinney has connected with nonprofit organizations, local and state agencies, and others working in the flood resilience monitoring space in North Carolina to establish interest. She is also available for training and questions for interested groups and residents.

“With the merging of the two programs, it’s actually been a really nice collaboration because we kind of complement each other’s datasets rather than overlapping,” Kinney said.

Kinney said one of her goals is to foster bigger and broader partnerships between North Carolina and Virginia.

“We each do a lot of flood risk and resilience building work,” Kinney explained. “I think that this is such a great segue for Wetlands Watch to get a view on what’s going on in North Carolina, for us to provide our support wherever we can, and for us to learn from you all in terms of collaboration.”

Another goal is to build awareness about sea level rise and flood risk. “Through community science, we can give people a tool like an app to use and actually go out in the field and feel like they’re part of a climate solution,” she said.

“Once we collect all of this king tide data, we want to try to figure out more pathways to get the data in the hands of people who can use them, how can we export this data and how can we use them to contribute to planning decisions, climate adaptation, even just more public awareness,” she said. “Eventually, later on in the project, we’ll kind of take a look back at all of our data that we collected and then see what we can go from there.”

Volunteers are encouraged to collect data during this week’s king tides that continue through Sept. 4, with particular interest in the super full moon in perigee Wednesday. Though there is no formal event, volunteers are encouraged to download both apps and submit what they observe.

Organizers said that safety is a key priority and to avoid unsafe conditions such as heavy rain, winds, and rapid flood waters.

Remaining king tides for this year are Sept. 25-Oct. 4, Oct. 27-Nov. 1, and Nov. 26-28.

To become involved, email Wetlands Watch Community Engagement Project Manager Gabi Kinney at gabi.kinney@wetlandswatch.org.

Guest commentary

If you bought a home in North Carolina, you likely were never told whether it had previously flooded or whether you are legally required to purchase flood insurance, let alone the cost of that insurance.

That’s because in North Carolina the seller of a property does not have to disclose any of this information. 

A study produced by Milliman, an international insurance actuary, estimated that 13,237 homes were purchased in 2021 in North Carolina that had previously been damaged in floods. None of the sellers of those homes were required to tell the buyers about the history of flood damages. And a home that has flooded once is likely to flood again.

Milliman estimated that North Carolina home buyers who purchased a previously flooded home will pay, on average, $18,164 in unanticipated damages over a 15-year mortgage and $36,328 over a 30-year mortgage. As flood disasters become more frequent and severe and sea levels rise, those damages will climb considerably.

For most of us, if we were to choose between living in a home that’s never flooded and a home that’s flooded repeatedly, we’d choose the one that’s never flooded. Why? Because fleeing rising floodwaters, losing your possessions, and having to spend months cleaning up and rebuilding drains your bank account and it’s incredibly stressful. However, if we do not have the right to know a home’s flood history and risk, then we can be unknowingly forced into this exact situation.

The North Carolina Real Estate Commission is now poised to remedy this problem and grant home buyers the right to know a home’s flood history and other flood risk information. On Aug. 1, the commission closed a public comment period on changes to the state’s mandatory disclosure form. The commission will likely add a series of important questions about flooding that sellers will have to answer and provide to a home buyer – for the first time ever. 

The overwhelming majority of North Carolina residents agree with the commission that this is the right decision. In a poll conducted by the Global Strategy Group, 83% of North Carolinians supported a requirement that sellers tell renters or home buyers the truth about past flooding. Republicans and Democrats, people in the mountains and along the coasts, people of all races and walks of life all agreed that it was wrong to hide such information.

The Real Estate Commission is to be congratulated for putting this policy out for public comment and making sure home buyers are fully informed. It’s unfair that someone selling a house knows about flooding problems and can hide that from the buyer – who is left to find out for themselves after the next flood.

Given the state’s ongoing recovery from hurricanes Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018, and other flooding events that have occurred throughout the state, this decision is long overdue.

As we enter the most active part of 2023 hurricane season, the commission is taking the right step at the right time.

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues. See our guidelines for submitting guest columns. Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or our publisher, the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

Wetlands Watch, a coastal-Virginia-based environmental nonprofit organization, is expanding its king tides monitoring project to North Carolina, and organizers hope to coordinate its first data collection with volunteers later this month.

With funding from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office, Wetlands Watch has teamed up with the existing North Carolina King Tides program, which asks volunteers submit photos of tidal-related events and other examples of flooding.

Both organizations use apps to document king tides. N.C. King Tides uses the Coastal Observer app to collect photo observations of flooding and ruler gauges that measure water levels. For Wetlands Watch, volunteers map the horizontal extent of street-level flooding that occurs during king tide events using the Sea Level Rise app.

Focused on community flood resilience and climate adaptation, Wetlands Watch heads up the annual Catch the King. This year’s tide mapping event that recruits volunteers to collect flooding data during the Perigean tides, the highest tides of the year, is scheduled for Oct. 27-29.

King tides are the most extreme tides of the year and typically happen August to November. These tides can cause several days of high water and flooding in coastal communities. “As normal flood events grow more severe and more frequent due to climate change, we need your help to document kin tides of today to help us visualize high water levels of the future,” organizers said.

Remaining king tides for this year are expected to be Aug. 23 to Sept. 4, Sept. 25 to Oct. 4, Oct. 27 to Nov. 1, and Nov. 26-28. Previous king tides were in June and July.

Organizers hope to coordinate its first data collection effort during the week of Aug. 28, with particular interest in the super full moon in perigee on Aug. 30.

A virtual information session on the project is set for 6 p.m. Aug. 23. Register online.

To become involved, email Wetlands Watch Community Engagement Project Manager Gabi Kinney at gabi.kinney@wetlandswatch.org with how you’d like to get involved in collecting data.

A series of Flood Inundation Mapping and Alert Network, or FIMAN, flood gauges have been installed throughout Dare County, and across the state to provide critical and real-time information regarding changing water levels in specific geographic locations, according to North Carolina Emergency Management officials.

The FIMAN website provides real-time data on stream elevation, rainfall and weather parameters from more than 550 gauges across the state.

To sign up to receive text alerts if water levels begin to rise due to storm surge, visit the Rain, Stream, Weather and Flooding Risk Information website.

Dare County has released a video showing how to sign up for these alerts. For more information, visit DareNC.gov/EM.

Some sites may be rain or stage gauges only while some may have weather data available. Many of these gauges are managed by the Division of Emergency Management, some are operated by local government agencies and private organizations, and gauges from the U.S. Geological Survey are included in this network, officials said.

Even with the might of government, it can be difficult to force people to remove their houses that are at risk of falling into the ocean.

More and more, it’s also proving to be difficult for homeowners to find property insurance that would adequately cover, or proactively prevent, that risk.

But a Federal Insurance Office report, “Insurance Supervision and Regulation of Climate-Related Risks,” released in June shows that the insurance industry is lagging in addressing the wide range of escalating climate hazards far beyond covering oceanfront coastal development.

“More work is needed by state and federal regulators and policymakers, as well as by the private sector and the climate science and research communities,” the report said, “to better understand the nature of climate-related risks for the insurance industry, their implications for insurance regulation and supervision, and for the stability of the financial system — including for real estate markets and the banking sector.”

With alarming spikes in recent years in flood, storm and wildfire disasters, and with property insurers fleeing Louisiana, Florida and California, homeowners are increasingly paying more for less insurance, having policies canceled with no warning, or searching in vain for coverage.

“I think we’re definitely at an inflection point where insurers are pricing themselves out of doing what they’ve been counted on to do for generations,” said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a San Francisco-based nonprofit information resource for insurance consumers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. “This is clearly a national matter.”

One dramatic climate risk, in the form of severe beach erosion, has been on full display in Rodanthe, an Outer Banks village on the northern end of Hatteras Island where, since 2020, five oceanfront houses have collapsed into the Atlantic, scattering debris for miles in the water and on beaches along Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

Related: Federation, law center call for enforcement of existing law

Government-subsidized flood insurance policies won’t pay policyholders until the house is destroyed, nor will they cover proactive removal or cleanup costs for debris.

Although property owners in Rodanthe want Dare County to pay for a beach nourishment project, which could protect houses and restore flood insurance coverage, the county has said that the high rate of erosion — an annual average of about 14 feet — and the relatively small number of affected properties would make it prohibitively expensive.

A recently released engineering report completed for the county estimated that for a project covering 5.7 miles of beach, it would take about 3.8 million cubic yards of sand to offset five years’ worth of erosion, with a one-time cost of about $40 million.

Dare County Board Chairman Bob Woodard said during the commission’s June 5 meeting that U.S. Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., indicated that it may be possible to secure federal nourishment funds.

“There are some folks in Rodanthe that appear to have some pretty strong ties to representatives in D.C. that are trying to help (the congressman) make this happen,” Woodward said. Commissioners agreed to send a letter to Murphy requesting $40 million for the nourishment project.

In a June 16 response to Woodard, Murphy wrote that a feasibility study would have to be performed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that was estimated to cost “a minimum” of $3 million, before a funding request could be made.

A spokesman for Murphy, responding to an inquiry from Coastal Review in a June 26 email, said that the congressman and his team had been in touch with commissioners prior to their request, and he is continuing to discuss “a plan of action and the best way ahead” as the situation evolves.

“Congressman Murphy has been closely monitoring the conditions in Rodanthe and has witnessed the erosion firsthand,” the spokesman wrote.

Starting in the late 1980s, there had been a provision in the National Flood Insurance Program known as the Upton-Jones Act that had provided funds to demolish or relocate houses threatened by encroaching surf on an eroding beach. It lasted less than eight years.

Revival of Upton-Jones or a similar measure is currently being reconsidered by government officials and policymakers as one remedy for the Rodanthe problem. The Upton-Jones Amendment had funded up to 40% of the policy to move houses and up to 110% to demolish them. The maximum payout was $185,000 for the structure and $60,000 for its contents.

But as federal and state laws so far appear toothless to thwart houses from falling onto public beaches, escalating threats created by rising seas, intensifying rainfall and raging wildfires are exposing looming deficiencies not just in the National Flood Insurance Program, but in property insurance overall.

Climate-related risks categorized broadly as physical, transition and litigation, the report found, “present new and increasingly significant challenges for the insurance industry that warrant careful monitoring by financial regulators, policymakers, and insurance companies. The oversight of climate-related risks is also an emerging and increasingly critical topic for state insurance regulators.”

Potential revival of the Upton-Jones Act, which was repealed by Congress in 1994, was part of a broader discussion on insurance options for properties on the vulnerable Atlantic shoreline during the second virtual video meeting of the Threatened Oceanfront Structures Interagency Work Group.

Established jointly in August 2022 by the National Park Service and the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management to seek solutions for the problem in Rodanthe, the group appeared to view the flood program as a concern most relevant to the bottom line.

“And that is the question of the house is going to collapse,” Cape Hatteras National Seashore Superintendent Dave Hallac said to the online group, which included about 24 panelists and 25 attendees. “There’s not only going to be the cost of the payout … but now there is also going to be environmental damage potentially and the cost of cleanup. It is hard to image that that is going to be more than an orderly move.”

During two hours of discussion, the panel agreed that there are gaps in qualifications meeting the need for available grants, and government codes and regulations need to be updated, as well as information on erosion rates. Considering the lack of available private insurance coverage, the recently updated NFIP Risk Rating 2.0 seems to provide the best option for flood coverage. But there were questions whether a new Upton-Jones program would be more appropriate as a hazard mitigation program, rather than insurance.

Even with the updated program that is gradually increasing rates, flood insurance premiums are 50% below what they need to be, said Spencer Rogers, a retired North Carolina Sea Grant coastal engineer and geologist.

“And that’s a major issue for the program,” he said, “that any analysis that’s going to … cost additional money for the flood insurance program needs to address the money.”

As Bach, with the consumer insurance group, explained, recent rate increases have been influenced by inflation and supply-chain issues, but a primary driver is reinsurance, essentially transferring risk to another insurer to protect the primary insurer. But the newest drivers, she said, are insurance technology rating tools that provide much more detail on the risks.

With those analytic tools, California and other states have realized that calculating risks with models that are predicting the future based on the past has greatly underestimated the actual risks.

Bach said the situation currently is reminiscent to what happened in the 1960s, when property insurance for flooding became essentially unaffordable and unavailable, resulting in the federal government creating the subsidized National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP. For a large number of homeowners, options today for property insurance could mean going into more debt by financing the insurance; paying higher rates year over year; having bare minimum insurance; or having no insurance. Insurers, she said, are “running away from catastrophic risk at the same time that they have been raising their rates.”

All Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.-backed mortgages require homeowners insurance, but even uninsured property owners without mortgages often need federal assistance after disasters.

“I think there are increasingly loud cries for there to be a version of the NFIP, basically an American disaster insurance program … in the sense that it’s an insurer of last resort for people who can’t get coverage elsewhere,” Bach said. “But I think that’s what we’re going to be seeing more (demand) for because insurers are a powerful lobby, but so our Realtors and so our builders and so our voters. So at some point a solution is going to have to be found here, but it’s increasingly looking like it’s not going to be the private property insurance system as we’ve known it.”

Bach said that the questions going forward are, what insurance program are elected officials going to come up, and what will the recipe look like? As Bach sees it, people are going to continue to want to live near beautiful coasts and forests, or stay where their family has been rooted for generations for as long as possible.

“They didn’t come to the risk,” she said. “The risk came to them while they were there.”

The regional concerns and global implications of wind energy, flooding and inundation, and toxins and pollutants will be examined during the May 17-19 Global Marine Science Summit at University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Hosted by UNCW’s Center for Marine Science at 5600 Marvin K. Moss Lane, the three-day summit will bring together international, national and local representatives from various business, community and academic stakeholders, including guest scientists from Germany, Chile, Hong Kong, UK, Colorado, Florida and Grand Bahama Island.

This year’s plenary speakers are Stuart McLelland with University of Hull’s Energy and Environment Institute in the United Kingdom, Rainer Lohmann in the graduate school of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, and Elisa Berdalet with the Institut de Ciències del Mar in Barcelona, Spain.

Key topics include the following:

• Wind energy is emerging as a leading solution to global energy demand, and the development of several wind farms along the North Carolina coast is underway. Wind farms have environmental challenges too, but they will help mitigate carbon that impacts climate change and sea-level rise.
• With sea level rise and flooding from rivers, water encroachment is actively impacting communities and causing health hazards, particularly marginal and underserved communities.
• Sea level rise and flood waters serve as transport of chemicals, such as PFAS, and phenomena of harmful algal blooms are further amplified by flooding and water quality.

These topic areas present significant opportunities for growing the blue economy, which is the “sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs while preserving the health of ocean ecosystems,” according to the World Bank.

For registration and accommodations, visit the 2023 Global Marine Science Summit website. Cost for all events over the three-day summit is $300, or $100 for students, and $75 per person, or $25 for students, for one day only of the summit.

The state’s Coastal Resources Commission Science Panel plans an online meeting at 1:15 p.m. March 1 to follow up on a review of new sea level rise studies and information.

The public may join by computer, use meeting number 2420 262 7128 and password SPMAR23. To listen by phone, call 1-415-655-0003, use access code 2420 262 7128 and password 7762723.

Public comment may be submitted by email to DCMcomments@ncdenr.gov with “Science Panel” in the subject line.

The CRC Science Panel provides the Coastal Resources Commission with scientific data and recommendations pertaining to coastal topics.

For questions about the panel’s work, contact Mike Lopazanski, policy and planning Section Chief at Division of Coastal Management, in the Morehead City office at 252-808-2808, ext. 223 or email mike.lopazanski@ncdenr.gov.

Dr. Paul Liu of North Carolina State University will give a virtual talk on sea level rise and the effects on rural northeastern North Carolina during the Feb. 8 “History for Lunch” at the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City.

The program that will begin at noon in the Gaither Auditorium is being offered in-person and through Zoom. Register in advance through the Museum’s Facebook page or website to receive a link to attend the lecture virtually.

The program is in conjunction with “Crossroads: Changes in Rural America,” a traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian made possible by a grant from North Carolina Humanities and Friends of the Museum of the Albemarle.

Related: Elizabeth City museum to look at rural NC, US

The virtual program is supported by Southern Bank of Elizabeth City.

The Museum of the Albemarle is at 501 S. Water St. in Elizabeth City. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday and closed Sundays and state holidays.

The museum that serves Bertie, Camden, Chowan, Currituck, Dare, Gates, Hertford, Hyde, Northampton, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Tyrrell, and Washington counties is the northeast regional history museum of the North Carolina Division of State History Museums within the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

The following essay is published as a guest commentary.

Two trees rise out of the Albemarle Sound, battered straight by the wind. A black gum and a cypress reach together, sharing the sun, the black water, and the wisps of Spanish moss weighing down their thin branches. They lift up more than out, brittle and slender, not wide or imposing like the ancient magnolia in the church graveyard growing out of nameless bodies. 

These trees are native to the brackish waters of the sound. Generations of them have grown here, but sea level rise brings salty tides to drown their roots, knees and knots. Salt sneaks into their veins and travels up toward their fingers, slowing photosynthesis and transpiration. It suffocates them. In the lab, black gum and cypress are capable of withstanding moderate salt events, but don’t fully recover until the salt is washed off of each leaf.

The lifeblood of the Roanoke River is its sweet, black water. It forms from tannin, a brass-orange chemical that turns the water acidic and dark, antimicrobial and transparent. Tannic acid, also found in wine and tea, can stop bleeding and treat rashes in human bodies. In wetland water, it filters decaying vegetation and decomposing leaves, draining blood from the black gum and the cypress. It’s a chemical, spit up by the ground and only a bit poisonous to the body. It looks a lot like sweet tea.

When English settlers first stumbled up the Roanoke River in 1585, they found a town, which already had a people and a name.

Moratuc.

Land of the dangerous river. 

The Moratuc believed in “montoac,” the plurality of gods and spirits. They drank the dark water that flowed from the fingers of one of many gods. Little of their knowledge remains in documentation, but it is believed that they told the settlers of the spirits living everywhere, in the grasses and the swamp, the heron and the trout, the black gum and the cypress.

I sprawled out on the bow of our university-commissioned boat and surveyed the sky. The black gum and the cypress leaned into each other, their canopies winking out the sun only sometimes. Their broken branches and dying leaves drifting by in the too-salty water beneath us. These trees have stood guard over the mouth of the Roanoke for hundreds of years. They have seen Indigenous canoes, Revolutionary six-masted ships, Civil War submarines, and glossy blue kayaks break into the river from the Albemarle Sound. As glaciers melt and temperatures rise and things lift and sink to where they shouldn’t be, the black gum and the cypress have begun to wither. Some will finally surrender.

I joined a group of University of North Carolina students to visit towns on the river’s edge and at its mercy. Our muse was the Roanoke, which begins in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and meets the mouth of the Albemarle Sound 410 miles later in Plymouth. The river drains an agricultural coastal plain from the Appalachian Mountains in the west all the way to the Atlantic, bringing with it the blood of millions of dying black gum and cypress, a tide of sweet black tea.

Early Saturday morning, I slipped on my running shoes and passed a group of women in aprons and head coverings with their elbows linked. They smiled at me as I passed. These were the only faces I saw until I returned to the hotel lobby waffle machine. 

The Quality Inn sits at a highway intersection, eager to catch the traffic of passersby because few tend to stay. I ran toward the Piggly Wiggly out back where I thought I might find people. The sun lit up the sleepy storefronts in an orange haze, and the bolted windows reflected it back at me. I passed graffiti-covered brick and rotting roofs with missing shingles. I picked up my pace across the train tracks, warily eyeing the empty train cars and broken glass bottles strewn around the gravel. The main street looked like a sepia newspaper cover – founded in 1779 and since unchanged, flat storefronts with dark green awnings facing half-manicured green trees and broken glass windows. Out front of a decommissioned movie theater, a single red Honda melted to the pavement with a white rag closed into its back window. I surrender.

The namesake of the town of Williamston is debated, but attributed to one of two men – Col. William Williams, a wealthy and distinguished plantation owner prior to the Revolutionary War, or Dick Williams, a settler in the 18th century who arrived with 75 cents in his pocket and built a fortune with hard work and extreme thrift. 

Williamston was originally settled as a hub of Roanoke River transport, and fell into disuse when railroads and highways became more practical than water traffic, the fate of many east coast small towns that have since become overgrown by weeds and hidden beneath fallen trees. Many people have fled the decaying economy and rising flood risk, leaving behind battered family homes, soggy historic land, and a mess of half-forgotten stories. Now, Williamston advertises as one of the top 10 best places in North Carolina to retire.

Come to surrender. 

Our commute for the day led us to the water’s edge in Plymouth. We took out two boats and spent the morning in the ancient current, testing flow rates with lemons and water dispersion with Cheez-Its. Our laughter bounced off the sunny surface into the woods beyond, tangles of cypress and black gum branches criss-crossing over the roof of a tiny blue cabin whose porch seemed to exhale between its stilts, threatening to fall into the waves.

180 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period, North Carolina consisted of a rocky coastline west of modern day I-95. During periods of low sea level, the western and central portions eroded, and North Carolina built up the sediment into land that is known today as the coastal plain. Change has always been hiding beneath the water and the earth. This region was historically flooded by ancient seas, and is still no stranger to high water, though for some reason, we’re surprised each time. 

As we motored upriver, we passed the Domtar manufacturing site. Smoke stacks littered the property, the majority active and spewing something thick and gray into the sky. Domtar, pronounced by a local artist “dum – tar,” is the paper mill that looms over the sweet black current, west of the sound.

The factory has remained the largest employer of the town of Plymouth since 2007, when the company bought out previous owners. In this merger, Domtar announced its new plan to produce fluff pulp alone, a type of soft paper that would result in a one third reduction in the workforce, a loss of around 360 employees. According to Artist and her cousin, the mill no longer makes copy paper because they are lazy. 

Paper pulp production: 

1. Chop down tree
2. Mechanically or chemically separate cellulose fibers from wood
3. Mix with water and other chemical additives 
4. Produce fluff paper
5. Fill diapers

The Domtar paper mill sucks freshwater from the Roanoke and spins trees into diapers, creating sanitary products for the beginning and end of life, and pumping the leftover water into the sky chemically woven with things you do not want to inhale. The rest floats down the sweet black water towards the Atlantic.

The factory advertises longevity and benefits, but there are fewer people to receive them.

“Still, those few left got a job for life,” said Artist, “old ladies are always gonna need Depends.” 

“Babies, too,” laughed Cousin. 

The morning stretched until we arrived at Cypress Cathedral, a new wooden platform built to attract kayakers and their tents to spend a night in the cypress-gum swamp. We stuck a Russian peat corer into the mud beneath the dock and pulled up soil from thousands of years ago, packed down so tightly and so starved of oxygen that spidery, hair-thin plant roots from 0 AD may have inhaled the breath of the paper mill for the first time. 

I reached over and raked my fingers through the peat. Thick, black, organic mud. We could see rings of light red material between black and brown discs. A change in land use? A flood event? An English colonist with two feet tangled in the swamp and no camping platform to rescue her? 

I wonder if her spirit lives in one of the trees. I have no doubt some explorers perished, declared Bland Simpson (Kenan Distinguished Professor of English & Creative Writing at UNC-Chapel Hill).

My body is also made of this.

I tried to absorb the wisdom of the dirt with the methane bubbles that squeeze their way to the surface. 

How do we fix what we have done?

The water moves slowly here, winding between the tangled swampy knees of the cypress and the fallen leaves of the black gum. Back beneath the Cypress Cathedral, the river leaves more than it takes, depositing dirt that is compressed and compressed and compressed until there isn’t enough oxygen to break down the dead plants and the lives they trap. 

Peat forms when plant material does not fully decay. Because carbon dioxide is naturally released during decomposition, peatland plants capture it. It takes thousands of years for peatlands to develop reserves 1.5 to 2.3 meters deep, which would store around 415 gigatonnes of carbon. Globally, peat sequesters up to 42% of soil carbon, which exceeds the amount hiding in the world’s forests. I wondered if we warmed the atmosphere with the bubbles that escaped from our 3-foot slab. 

Later that afternoon, we docked and scattered around town before lunch. I wandered into the only four Main Street buildings open after 2 p.m. on a Saturday. Artist and Cousin showed me around their new shop and recounted the changes they’ve seen over the decades. 

“The town relies on the factory. The factory relies on the river. We do too, but there is some nasty shit in there.”

The Parisian woman in her ice cream shop across the street cited the Black Bear Festival in June and her bistro’s escargot dish as her motivations for moving from the global fashion capital to a town with 4,000 people. 

“The town is on the up and up,” She smiled like she knew something we didn’t, “We have the largest black bear population in the world!”

Bewildered, I asked many, many clarifying questions. 

“We have the BIGGEST population,” she said, “Like, the bears are quite large. They eat very much.”

I wandered into the street hoping to see the twin cubs they all swore were playing in the parking lot just that morning. The eco-tourism in the area seems promising – the biggest black bears, treehouses for rent and camping platforms with a view of “North Carolina’s Amazon.” Plymouth, and other towns like it, spent the first dawn of their success shuttling shipping containers up river and tearing apart tree fibers to fill diapers. Those that are left look forward, investing in their next sunrise by emphasizing the wonder of the remaining natural wonders – the black bears and the blacker water. 

At Grace Episcopal Church down the street, the Minister gave us a tour and told us stories of the town during the Civil War. Due to its position controlling the Albemarle Sound and the upper Roanoke River, Plymouth was the access point for goods shipped to Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy at the time. The Union Army fought hard for a blockade, forcing the town to surrender. During the war, Plymouth was burned twice, once by each side. During the Battle of Plymouth, the church was used as a hospital.

I could almost picture the chaotic triage inside the walls. 

Tell us what you know, I urged the fading wood panels. 

Legend has it, the holy building even gave up its pews to build coffins for the fallen.

After the battle destroyed all the other holy sites in the town, Grace Episcopal became the sole place of worship, and people of all beliefs flocked. I wonder if they could smell blood over the scent of the sweet black water. 

As I wandered between stained glass windows and tried to keep my muddy river shoes off the plush red carpet, I saw a marble slab with two handles wedged into the floor. I asked Minister, and he promptly lifted the stone to show us its contents. 

Stale air burst from the cavern, revealing dozens of green and red canisters, blue tin cans and silver metal boxes, even a red Prince Albert pipe tobacco jar. 

“Ashes,” he told us, passing a gold container around our circle of uneasy smiles and trembling fingers. 

“So they are just…in there?”  someone asked.

He chuckled at our fear and unscrewed the cap, tugging out one corner of a dusty plastic bag. 

“The identification is either in the bag tag or on the bottom. I don’t see…” he turned the container, spilling some human into the floor. “I don’t see a name on this one.”

My body is also made of this.

I tried to absorb the knowledge of an anonymous life as it mixed with the dusty church air. 

Minister told us that Plymouth is home to four Superfund sites, two of which are still active. Four areas so full of waste that the United States government deemed them hazardous enough to mandate legal postings on homeowners’ informational websites. We used factory chemicals on this land, and now they grow into the grass there, mixing with the Algonquian spirits in the sweet black water and seeping into the drinking reserves. 

We poison the land until we can’t live here anymore, and nothing else can either. 

Outside in the church yard, a few dozen headstones leaned, surrendering to the rich black soil. 

“There are more bodies here than anyone can know”, said Minister, passing under a large magnolia. I imagined its roots spreading deep, cracking into the old church pews buried beneath their younger sisters and feeding on the fallen. I wonder if the trees know which bodies poisoned the sweet black water. 

I took a detour up a trail away from a beautifully manicured green field that I thought was a golf course before I realized it was a public parking lot. Nothing is built there, maybe due to seasonal flooding or historical parking shortages in the town’s prime. I watched the ground closely to distinguish snakes from sticks and almost tripped over the edge of a platform, a pier built out to the river’s edge. 

As glaciers melt and temperatures rise and things lift or sink to where they shouldn’t be, the black gum and the cypress dropped their leaves into my hands. We unbury the bubbles in the peat just to fill the holes with chemicals and bodies and are surprised that the bubbles are angry at what they find at the surface. They warm the air, the ice melts, the water rises, flooding homes with waste and turning rivers from lifelines to monsters. 

Moratuc. Dangerous River. We are driving ourselves out.

The change is seeping in from the Atlantic, sea salt invading drinking wells and paper pulp factories, clogging machines and tree arteries. It mixes and spreads with the factory chemicals we’ve buried in the peat and the red-black tannins that the river gives to heal us. Rising water licks the doorsteps of tiny blue river houses on stilts and steals boats from docks with missing planks. 

Many of the people are gone. They have surrendered, fled from the Superfund sites and the old movie theaters; they’ve been swept out to sea, sequestered in the peat with the rest of our carbon, or stuffed into a Prince Albert can below the church floorboards. Those that remain, though, can hear the cogs slow in the paper mill and look elsewhere to find life. They have begun to listen to the spirits in the grasses. The knowledge is here, how to live with this land. It is buried in the peat along the banks of a sweet black dangerous river.

 The trees are dying, but they will grow back, perhaps upriver where the salt can’t reach. The people will eventually be gone from this land. It will be soon, if we continue to lay the land to waste. If we want to last a bit longer, alongside the black bears and the Great Blue Heron, we can seek out a dusty car melted to Main Street, pull a white rag from the back window, and begin to wash the salt off the leaves of the black gum and cypress until they are healed, one by one. 

References

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/tannin#:~:text=Tannic%20acid%20is%20moderately%20toxic,abdominal%20pain%2C%20and%20liver%20damage.
2.  https://www.nps.gov/articles/carolinaalgonquian.htm
3.  https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/places-we-protect/roanoke-river-region
4.  http://www.townofwilliamston.com/visitors/about_williamston/index.php
5. https://www.witn.com/2021/09/17/study-williamston-ranks-among-top-10-best-places-state-retire/#:~:text=MARTIN%20COUNTY%2C%20N.C.%20(WITN),10%2C%20coming%20at%20number%207.
6. https://www.domtar.com/en/what-we-make/pulp/papergrade-pulp#:~:text=Domtar’s%20northern%20softwood%20grades%20include,white%20spruce%20and%20Douglas%20fir.
7.  https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/plymouth-nc-population
8. https://peatlands.org/peat/peat/#:~:text=Peat%20is%20the%20surface%20organic,high%20acidity%20and%20nutrient%20deficiency.
9. https://emergingcivilwar.com/2014/08/28/the-very-essence-of-nightmare-the-battle-of-plymouth-nc-and-the-destruction-of-the-css-albemarle/
10.  https://graceplymouth.ecdio.org/

Marine geologist Dr. Stan Riggs was recently among six chosen to receive the North Carolina Award, the state’s highest civilian honor. Gov. Roy Cooper presented the awards Nov. 15 during a ceremony at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Dr. Riggs told Coastal Review that the award truly recognizes all the groups, scientists and others who have worked over the last half century to understand, protect and manage the state’s dynamic natural coastal resources. He has provided his award acceptance speech, which follows, as a guest commentary.

— The editor.

North Carolina’s Land of Water represents our past, present, and future. It is a world-class mixing basin and transition zone where upland river valleys and coastal plain peninsulas meet the ocean. It is a high-energy intersection of land, water, and air where sunny day calms quickly shift to high-energy stages of dynamic change.

In our unending rush to conquer the ocean’s barrier islands we tend to overlook the inner coastal world of estuaries, wetlands, and lowlands that require one to slow down and become acquainted with the more introspective and contemplative components of our natural coastal system. This land of water with its vast natural resources and extreme dynamics has dictated the cultural history of our great state of NC; this is the unwritten chapter in most of our history books!

There will always be a shoreline and coastal system wherever an ocean intersects a land mass; it just won’t be in the same place as they move in response to changing climatic and geologic conditions! Unfortunately, historical economic development practices in our coastal system have largely ignored the dynamics of natural change. Centuries of ditching, draining, and clearing wetlands and the more recent development of urban cities on mobile barrier sand piles have created unintended consequences resulting in massive economic losses by ongoing climate change. Within this watery world there are certain limits to growth and development where water is both a critical resource and a harsh dictator!

Related: Stan Riggs to receive 2022 North Carolina Award

The earth’s dynamics have challenged the engineering prowess of many great minds over the past four centuries. Now in the 21^st century with rising sea level and exploding coastal populations, North Carolina finds itself in the throes of a perfect conflict — an escalating battle between natural storm dynamics that drive coastal change and the economic drive to stabilize and develop the land and water resources. This is an untenable path that is severely wounding the golden goose of profits and morphing it into the gray goose of silence. When living within this dynamic intersection of land, water, and air, where change is a critical constant, society must adopt a more humble approach and learn to live with the changing system dynamics!

I have dedicated my entire 58-year career to understanding the complexities, processes, and evolutionary history of our Earth’s resource systems and translating that knowledge to the citizens and leadership of our great State of the Longleaf Pine. I did not earn this award alone; I always worked with great teams of students, colleagues, and public who care about living gently with the dynamics of change in our rivers, estuaries, barrier islands, and vast coastal ocean. This coastal world of land and sea is our only home; its natural resources and dynamics drove our cultural history and will dictate our future.

Finally, I am totally honored and humbled by this lifetime award for supporting an incredibly stimulating and educational career’s worth of work. Thanks to my precious and always supportive family, East Carolina University for providing exciting opportunities and challenges, the many amazing cohorts and team members, the support and partnerships with numerous state and federal agencies and nonprofit organizations, and to our dedicated state leaders and educators.

Thank you for this honor.

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues. See our guidelines for submitting guest columns. Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

The N.C. Coastal Resources Commission Science Panel is holding its annual review of new studies and information on sea level next week.

The web meeting will be held at 1:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 7, and is open to the public.

The panel provides scientific data and makes recommendations to the commission, which has tasked the panel with conducting annual reviews of any new and significant scientific literature and studies on the possible implications of sea level rise at state, regional and local levels.

If members of the panel determine there is enough new information to warrant a report or new analyses, the panel will present its findings to the commission and the public.

To join the meeting by Webex go to https://ncgov.webex.com/wbxmjs/joinservice/sites/ncgov/meeting/download/32c2d833f4d54cd3bc0e364b25e39303?siteurl=ncgov&MTID=m9950f695768235704fab4409e48ea78c

The meeting number is 2435 222 4720 and the password is 2022.

To join by phone, call (415) 655-0003 and use the meeting number and password above.

The public may submit comments at the meeting or by email to DCMcomments@ncdenr.gov. List “Science Panel” in the subject line.

High tide flooding will continue to become increasingly common for coastal communities because of sea level rise, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers predict.

NOAA released its State of High Tide Flooding and 2022 Outlook for the U.S. earlier this month, a report that concludes that coastal communities likely will see between three and seven days of flooding on average through next April. NOAA has released an annual outlook on coastal high tide flooding since 2014.

The 2022 outlook predicts that, in addition to continued frequent high tide flooding over the next meteorological year, by 2050, high tide flooding on a national scale is expected to be between about 45 to 70 days per year on average. The long-term projections are based on the range of expected relative sea level rise, about an inch by 2050, using information from the 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report.

Also called nuisance or sunny day flooding, high tide flooding happens when tides reach anywhere from about 1¾ to 2 feet above the daily average high tide, causing water to spill in the streets or bubble up from storm drains that aren’t really built to handle that much water, William Sweet, oceanographer with NOAA, explained recently during a media conference available on YouTube about this year’s outlook. 

“We released information documenting record breaking coastal flooding or high tide flooding caused by sea level rise this past year, and that is to be expected to continue into next year, and into the foreseeable future,” Sweet said during the Aug. 2 livestream. “As sea level rises, damaging flooding that happened only during a storm will now happen more regularly, even without severe weather.”

He said that in most U.S. coastal locations the number of high tide flooding days per year is growing. 

“It’s accelerating, in fact, along most East and Gulf coastlines,” he continued. “Nationally about two-thirds of locations experienced similar or more days of high tide flooding than the year before and the rate of flooding is more than twice it was about 20 years ago, or around year 2000.”

During the 2021 season, the northern Atlantic Coast saw eight flood days on average, which is about a 200% increase of what would have been typical around year 2000. The southern Atlantic and western Gulf Coast regions each had six flood days, which are a 300% and 500% increase, respectively, and the eastern Gulf Coast saw four days of flooding, a 200% increase, since around 2000. The West Coast experienced some flooding, one day on average along the southern West Coast and seven days along the northern West Coast.

Sweet emphasized that some communities are experiencing more flooding than others, “such as the 10-plus days of high tide flooding seen last year at locations along the coasts of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia and North and South Carolina, Mississippi and Texas. All these regions are experiencing high rates of sea level rise and a growing coastal flood problem,” he said. 

“In short, sea level rise impacts are occurring now and are growing rapidly, which is complicating preparedness planning,” Sweet added. 

At about a quarter of locations, this year’s outlook is higher than last year’s, largely due to continued effects of sea level rise.

High tide flooding is predicted to be highest along the northeast Atlantic and the western Gulf Coast, somewhere between six and 11 days on average, and slightly lower along the southeast Atlantic and eastern Gulf Coast at somewhere between three and seven days on average.

He said the predicted inch in sea level rise by 2050 will be a very noticeable change. With water levels nearing the brim in many communities — having sunny day flooding with no storm — flood defenses, old sea walls are being overwhelmed, and water is coming up through stormwater systems into the street. 

“And that extra inch isn’t helping one bit,” he said. “In fact, it’s definitely increasing the number of days or events that waters can actually reach these heights.” 

The flooding frequency may be five to 10 events now but would jump to 60 to 80 events in 30 years. “So, we do know that every inch matters at this point,” Sweet said.

He said that by using the data, coastal communities can make informed decisions about how to handle disruptive flooding next year and for the next several decades. “This is information needed to protect life, property, the economy and our environment for future generations.”

Sweet acknowledged that while the threshold of 1¾ to 2 feet doesn’t fit all coastal areas, the goal was to provide national coverage and guidance for “what typically is a depth when impacts occur and these thresholds that we have chosen to highlight and provide information on are calibrated to those that the National Weather Service have established in conjunction with local emergency managers.”

NOAA researchers use data collected by tide gauges on United States coastlines to make their predictions. The gauges monitor “the steady creep of sea level rise in a rapid uptick in high tide flooding,” Sweet said. 

“Our 2022 state of high tide flooding announcement brings together data recorded at 97 of these NOAA tide gauges between May of 2021 and April of 2022. The data shows that US communities saw four days on average of high tide flooding in 2021, just shy of the record of five days set a few years ago,” Sweet continued.

One of those tide gauges is in Beaufort, where Miyuki Hino, assistant professor in the City and Regional Planning and the Environment, Ecology and Energy Program at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, is working with a group of researchers from UNC and North Carolina State University on the Sunny Day Flooding Project.

The researchers are measuring high tide flooding on Front Street in Beaufort. They recorded from June 2021 to May 2022, 35 events when there was water on Front Street. This could be any water, from a puddle to a flooded road, and there could have been multiple events on one day if each high tide caused flooding, Hino said.

Hino told Coastal Review that the NOAA findings and the measures of high tide flooding that NOAA uses are helpful in providing a big picture of what’s going on across the United States and how sea level rise is manifesting more and more in day-to-day life. 

By using this nationally standardized way of defining what a high tide flood is, and by using that same measure everywhere across the US, Hino said NOAA can paint a “picture of, ‘we only saw this many days 20 years ago, now we’re seeing this many days and in 2050, we’re probably going to see many, many more.’”

She agreed with Sweet’s assessment that the measurements for a nationally standardized approach aren’t always perfect reflections of what is actually happening in a specific place. “So their measurement might not correspond exactly to how many floods you see on your street or in your neighborhood, because they’re trying to take an approach that works everywhere across the country,” Hino said.

 “I think there are a couple of really key takeaways,” she said. “One is it’s very, very clear that we’re just starting to see the impacts of sea level rise through these types of floods, but that it’s going to become much, much more often in the next couple of years, in the next couple of decades. And that’s true, really, regardless of where you live.” 

In the U.S., because the sea level rise signal is becoming stronger and stronger, Hino said it’s clear that the problem is going to get bigger over time and that the NOAA report does a good job of demonstrating that. 

“I think the second thing that’s worth pointing out is that communities in North Carolina are not alone in facing these challenges. So for those people who are seeing this already and who are really concerned, it’s a problem that’s not unique to North Carolina,” she said. “It’s a challenge that a lot of communities are trying to confront. And I think that by continuing to both try to develop innovative solutions locally and continuing to learn from communities elsewhere that are working on this problem themselves, there’s a lot of opportunities for adapting to sea level rise and mitigating these types of floods. If we really both work on it within our communities and engage a lot with what’s happening elsewhere.”

New Hanover County commissioners will continue weighing development along the Cape Fear River’s west bank across from downtown Wilmington, a process that may be overshadowed if a portion of that land is annexed by a neighboring town.

Commissioners spent the better portion of a Thursday, March 31, work session discussing the future of the west bank of the Cape Fear and Northeast Cape Fear rivers asking questions of local, state and federal officials and geologists. The work session was held in a meeting room in the New Hanover County Government Center in Wilmington.

They focused their attention on land stretching between the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge and Isabel Holmes Bridge, and Eagles Island between the memorial bridge and the Thomas Rhodes Bridge on U.S. 421.

Developers are eyeing these areas, described as mostly private-owned, underused or vacated properties, for two major development proposals on land projected to be significantly impacted by the effects of sea level rise.

A good portion of last week’s discussions centered on the land’s exposure to flooding, safely accessing the property, the impacts of stormwater runoff from the proposed developments to surrounding properties, including the restored World War II battleship, USS North Carolina, a National Historic Landmark, and potential economic impacts.

Rob Young, professor of coastal geology at Western Carolina University and director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, referenced the number of nuisance flood days along that section of river bank.

“Right now, we’re around 80 days,” he said. “That’s a lot. That’s almost 25% of the year that area’s experiencing nuisance flooding.”

Young, who tuned in online to the work session to talk with the commissioners, said he wanted to make it clear that he was not taking a side for or against development on the west bank.

He told commissioners that while he was going to provide “a lot of cautionary thoughts,” he did not want anyone to interpret that as advocacy.

“You have to think of development as a system,” Young said. “This site is only as workable as your lowest point on any road that folks use to get in and out of there. It’s a little bit more complicated than simply thinking about putting a building on there and raising it above the base flood elevation.”

Point Peter, a peninsula that sits at the confluence of the Cape Fear and Northeast Cape Fear rivers, is “an incredibly exposed site so there’s no doubt in my mind that by 2050 that entire Point Peter area is going to be wetland,” he said.

About a year ago, KFJ Development Group presented plans for the Villages at Battleship Point, a proposed mixed-use development on Point Peter that would include a trio of condominiums rising 240 feet into the sky. For comparison, the former PPD building, the tallest in downtown Wilmington, is 193 feet high.

Earlier this year, New Hanover commissioners pressed the brakes on the developers’ request to create a new zoning district and rezone Point Peter within that district, opting instead to take a look at overall future development of the river bank adjacent to downtown Wilmington.

Related: New Hanover County commissioners table zoning request

KFJ took its request across the Cape Fear to Leland, where planning board members last month voted 4-3 recommending the developers’ request to create a River Urban Mixed-Use District to the town’s zoning district and annex the land.

Related: Leland Planning Board OKs riverfront mixed-use district

The Leland Town Council is meeting April 14, when it is expected to consider the planning board’s recommendations.

Jim Lea, a Wilmington attorney with KFJ, said in an interview after the work session that the development group is exploring “every opportunity we have and I’m not going to talk much more about that.”

“We think we need to get in front of people that want to make a change over there,” he said, referring to the west bank. “I think they do. But, it can’t be one-sided. We’ve got to be able to have a say and present our experts and present our case.”

KFJ has obtained a Coastal Area Management Act minor permit to remove debris from the property 75 feet landward of the shoreline.

Cars, tires, boats and steel have been removed from the site, which is just north of the Battleship North Carolina, according to Kirk Pugh, a real estate broker and KFJ partner.

“We’ve removed roughly 400 tons of trash and material off the property,” Pugh said last Thursday. “It was an 8.63-acre junk yard.”

The land was the longtime site of a marine salvage and construction operation.

Pugh said the development group has not asked for permission to build anything.

“We’re asking for permission to have the zoning to be allowed to pursue that,” he said.

“That’s exactly right,” Lea said. “That’s just step one and we realize that. We know that we’ve got to go and get permission for whatever we’re going to build. Otherwise, if we don’t, that west bank is going to keep looking like it’s looked for the last 42 years I’ve been here, which is not good for this community.”

Much of the west bank, including Point Peter, is currently zoned industrial.

Eagles Island is zoned commercial. A six-acre plot on the island, which is just south of the battleship, is being eyed as the site of the proposed Wilmington Hotel and Spa, a six-story building.

Those properties are within a Federal Emergency Management Area, or FEMA, flood plain, an area drawn up on maps that may be well outdated.

Young suggested the county compare FEMA flood maps of the area with data taken from storms that have hit the area over the course of the last 10 to 15 years.

“It would be very helpful for y’all to be able to put those FEMA numbers into perspective of what really happened,” he said.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s, or NOAA, latest report on rising sea levels, one Young called “the best scientific consensus report” thus far on the subject, projects sea level rise to be about one foot in the area by 2050, he said. That’s the same amount of sea level rise that has occurred in the area over the last 100 years.

“It certainly is appropriate that it’s in a flood zone,” Young said. “The FEMA maps, in this case, I would say are a starting point. They are not an overestimate. I promise you they are not an overestimate of the flood exposure of that area.”

As riverfront land, it is particularly vulnerable because it is exposed to water coming down the river and water coming up the river, Young said. He explained that, worst case scenario, water being pushed up the river by storm surge blocks flood waters coming down the river.

“These kinds of locations are particularly exposed to flooding because it’s not potentially coming from one place. It’s coming from two places,” he said.

Roger Shew, a geologist and earth and ocean sciences lecturer at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, told commissioners that they need to consider the fact that much of Point Peter sits at less than 4 feet of elevation, much of it is wetlands, and that, at one time, the property was all wetlands prior to urban soil being placed on the land.

He too stressed the impacts of sea level rise to the property.

Commissioner Rob Zapple asked whether a comprehensive hydraulic study was needed to determine the feasibility of managing stormwater runoff from development on the west bank.

Tara MacPherson, district manager of the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management’s Wilmington Regional Office, said the agency has not received such a study.

“If it’s included it’s great information for us to have,” she said. “We evaluate what’s proposed. We don’t have a proposal in hand. To address specific comments, we really need to see a site plan.”

Lea said KFJ asked if their experts would be allowed to speak at the work session and were told no.

“We recognize the concerns that were brought up” in the work session, Pugh said. “We’ve heard them all before over the past 12 months. We have our own sets of engineers and experts who have helped us create a project that answers all of the concerns and we are anxiously awaiting our turn to present our expert testimony in front of the commissioners and planning staff.”

An agenda for the Leland Town Council’s April 14 meeting had not been published as of press time.

Following the work session, Zapple noted that one member of the town’s council was at the meeting and that others had listened online.

“They’re hearing the same thing that we’re hearing,” he said. “Whether or not Leland decides to go ahead with the annexation is up to the town council, but I know they’re thinking very long and very hard about whether that’s appropriate or not.”

RODANTHE — It was a warm and breezy late winter afternoon, a perfect day for a stroll along the ocean. As seabirds dove for dinner just offshore, Hope Lineman and her family were working their way north, weaving between a stretch of large houses on the beach off Ocean Drive. But they weren’t there to watch the waves; they were there to see the devastation wrought by waves.

And like nearly all who see looming destruction on the eroded beach, they wonder why no one is trying to prevent it.

Weeks before, early on the morning of Feb. 9, one of the houses here had collapsed into the Atlantic. Soon photographs of the ruins filled national news sites and social media. Debris, much of it since picked up, stretched for miles.

Related: Cleanup of fallen house begins; beach near site closed

On Sunday, yards away from the stubs of its pilings, two battered beachfront homes dramatically stood in roiling surf, their fate all but guaranteed.

“It’s so sad,” commented Lineman as she squinted up at teetering decks, dangling stairs and stripped-off siding, while dodging tide that surged under the structures. 

Lineman, from Cranberry, Pennsylvania, said her family has been coming to Hatteras Island for years, and with her son home on spring break, they seized the opportunity for a beach vacation.

But even with her familiarity with the dynamic Outer Banks’ coast, she had the same question: Why can’t the government do something to get those houses off the beach? 

Eight of 11 houses in the section of beach have been “tagged” as unsafe, a condition that includes damaged septic tanks and egress-ingress issues.

“In that case, we typically pull the power to the house so they can’t be occupied,” Dare County Planning Director Noah Gillam said to about 85 people who attended a public meeting March 3 at the Rodanthe-Waves-Salvo Community Center to discuss the situation.

Of the tagged structures, three are at “immediate risk,” he said.

On Hatteras and Ocracoke islands, the ocean beaches from the foreshore to the low-tide line are part of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, meaning they are public lands, National Park Service property. Statewide, North Carolina has a court-tested doctrine that beaches, up to high-water mark, are in the public trust.

Damage mitigation

“We’re right now in a damage-mitigation situation,” Hallac told the meeting crowd, adding that the debris impacts not just the seashore’s environment, but also public safety. “So, we’re really focused on trying to avoid these things.”

As it is now, the National Park Service can only “strongly recommend” that owners remove their at-risk houses from the beach. Homeowners are responsible for “damages they create in a national park,” if their house’s debris is not cleaned up, he said. But sometimes a homeowner lives out of state or out of the country, or cannot be located in time to hire a contractor to do the cleanup. In those cases, the agency will have to take responsibility for the cleanup and, if possible, get reimbursed at a later date.

But even though the homeowner of the recently collapsed house hired a contractor to pick up the debris, more of it is expected to continue to be blown into yards and beach accesses and wash up or float to the surface of the ocean for weeks or even months. Volunteers have already helped the park service clean the beach, and further volunteer beach sweeps are planned for the coming weeks.

In a later interview, Hallac said there are discussions underway about how to better address the impact on the seashore’s property.

“We are actively evaluating the position of the homes and the property boundaries and consider that as we move forward,” he said.

But, as he had told the meeting attendees, the issue is not going to go away.

“We do believe this is going to get worse,” Hallac said, citing recent data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that predicted rising seas will result in moderate high-tide flooding increasing tenfold by 2050.

Dare County Commissioner Danny Couch, who lives on Hatteras Island, said that beach erosion’s risk to infrastructure is not unique to the Outer Banks.

“This is not just a Nags Head thing,” he said. “We’re talking about from Maine to Texas. Even the Great Lakes.”

Couch said that people need to put pressure on their elected representatives in Congress to help property owners and local governments address the problem before houses are taken by the ocean, scattering their contents and chunks of hazardous and/or toxic construction debris onto public and private properties and endangering mariners, sea creatures and beachgoers for months. 

Upton-Jones

At one time, Couch said, a federal insurance program known as Upton-Jones had paid oceanfront property owners to relocate or demolish their at-risk homes. But the program, part of the National Flood Insurance Program from 1988-1995, was repealed because the government said it was too costly.

According to an October 1995 report in The Virginian-Pilot, the Relocation Assistance Program, its official name, paid owners 40% of the insured value to move their house, or up to 110% to tear it down. More than 300 claims were filed, the article said, paying about $24 million. Of the total claims, North Carolina property owners filed 238 — 168 for demolitions and 70 for relocations — totaling about $13.3 million in payouts.

With the Outer Banks having some of the highest beach erosion rates in the nation, it may be unsurprising that property owners in Dare County filed about $7.2 million in claims, including its towns. Property owners in unincorporated Dare County, which includes Hatteras Island, filed 11 claims worth about $1.4 million. Of Dare’s towns, Nags Head filed the most, by far, with 84 claims worth about $4.4 million. 

All of Brunswick County, in comparison, filed about $5.5 million in claims.

Fletcher Willey, a longtime owner of a homeowner’s insurance agency in Nags Head with experience in federal flood insurance, confirmed in an interview that flood insurance policies cap claims at $250,000, and in circumstances such as those in Rodanthe, they are not paid until the house is destroyed by the ocean. 

Willey said he is not aware of any interest in reviving Upton-Jones; nor does he expect lawmakers to pursue something similar in the future.

“I don’t know why there’s no initiative to prevent houses from falling into the ocean,” he said. “I haven’t heard anything about it.”

Few options

Hallac said that the park has an approved sediment-management plan that can readily address beach nourishment projects within the seashore. But he said that sandbags are not a long-term solution to erosion because they worsen erosion on either side of them, they’re an eyesore when they break apart, and they are not appropriate on an already eroded beach such as Ocean Drive in Rodanthe. 

“Where would you put the sandbags if there’s no beach?” he asked in response to a man’s question about a possible protection strategy. 

Another man who owns a home on Ocean Drive said he inquired with a house mover about relocation cost, although his house is not currently threatened. Not only was he informed that there is an 18-month waiting list, he said, it would cost between $100,000 to $200,000 to move.  

“Most people don’t have that kind of money,” he said. “So, by default, they let the ocean take it.”

Bobby Outten, the Dare County attorney and county manager, told the packed room at the meeting that beach nourishment is not an option in Rodanthe, mostly because of high costs and increased demand from beach communities throughout the county. The new “jug-handle” bridge that is near completion by Mirlo Beach on the north end of Rodanthe makes emergency projects to protect N.C. 12 a moot issue, meaning that state funds would be unlikely to be forthcoming.

Numerous people at the meeting expressed frustration that government officials were offering no solutions to save their property, or even to prevent debris from spoiling the beach near their home.

“I’m watching my retirement go into the drink,” said one woman.

Outten explained that the U.S. Court of Appeals 4th Circuit had ruled against Nags Head after the town in 2010 had sued property owners to force them to remove their storm-damaged oceanfront houses. The court had decided, Outten said, that the town did not own the beach where the houses stood and therefore it lacked the authority to order the private property removed. The town later settled with owners for $1.7 million so it could remove the houses.

Cliff Ogburn, who had been the town manager in Nags Head during the legal battle, said that without cooperation from the homeowners or assistance from the state, the town had few options to address the hazards from the condemned houses.

“My frustration is that the state seemed to have no initiative to get these houses off the public trust,” he said in an interview on Monday.  Ogburn is currently serving as the town manager in Southern Shores.

Currently, there are numerous exposed or destroyed septic tanks in the surf zone. The county administers septic permits that are issued by the state.

A request for information on state policy on protection of the public beach from hazards was made to the state Division of Coastal Management and the Department of Environmental Quality, but officials were unavailable to respond by deadline for this report.

“This is not just something in our little bubble,” a woman told officials at the meeting. “It’s made the national news. With these homes collapsing, how can we get these homes cleaned up quick enough so our tourism is not affected?”

The Cape Hatteras National Seashore had record numbers of visitors last year, ranking it as one of the most-visited sites in the entire park system.

Responded Hallac: “As I said earlier, this not a good look for a national seashore.” 

The public is invited to a community discussion this week about the oceanfront houses in Rodanthe in danger of collapsing on Cape Hatteras National Seashore beaches.

The meeting is from 6 to 7 p.m. Thursday in the Rodanthe-Waves-Salvo Community Building at 23646 N.C. 12 in Rodanthe.

National Parks of Eastern North Carolina Superintendent David Hallac, Dare County Commissioner Danny Couch and Dare County Planning Director Noah Gillam are scheduled to be at the in-person meeting to discuss the recent collapsed house, provide updates on other oceanfront houses and answer questions from community members.

Related: Cleanup of fallen house begins; beach near site closed

A house in Rodanthe collapsed into the ocean morning of Feb. 9. The owner of the home contracted with W.M. Dunn Construction, LLC of Powells Point to remove the house and all associated debris. National Park Service rangers observed debris along 15 miles of beach to the south of the collapsed house site, officials said earlier this month. The National Park Service organized a volunteer beach cleanup on Feb. 14 to help the owner cleanup the extensive amounts of debris spread along the seashore.

A federal report released last week forecast sea levels in the contiguous United States to rise by about a foot in the next 30 years. These findings support predictions in previous North Carolina-based reports.

The report, Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, does not contain new information — it’s a synthesis of the latest data available – but sea level rise researcher Rick Luettich says what makes this report stand out is the certainty of the predictions over the next few decades.

Luettich, who is director of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, said that the report’s data didn’t surprise him. “I think the information that’s in this report is very consistent with what was in the North Carolina Climate Science report that came out about two years ago.”

In addition to being an author of the sea level rise section in the 2020 state Climate Science Report, Luettich is director of the Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence, a UNC-led program funded through the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate.

He said what makes the latest report different is the clarity of the data, that is what’s compelling. It’s time to stop pretending the outcome will be different than what the data suggests.

“We should recognize that the data is very definitive,” Luettich said.

He explained that over a fairly small period – three decades — there will be significant changes and consequences from sea level rise. The converging information is giving researchers “a pretty tight understanding of exactly what that’s likely to be. The uncertainty levels are starting to diminish, particularly over that 30-year timeframe.”

Researchers have long been warning that change was coming. “This report, I think, says climate change is already here,” he said.

The Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flood Hazard and Tools Interagency Task Force, which produced the report, based its findings on NOAA’s tide gauge data and satellite observations as well as the sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, released in August 2021.

The report is built on a longer record of data, satellite data, water level gauge data and more robust and accurate computer models than previous reports, Luettich said, “all of which are telling us a story that is becoming tighter and tighter, better and better defined, and those uncertainties are starting to shrink, particularly over this 20- to 30-year timeframe. The certainty with which we are at least looking forward over this time period is simply really coming into focus.”

In addition to NOAA, the report incorporates data from NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Geological Survey, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Programs.

“What we’re reporting on today is historic,” NOAA Administrator Richard Spinrad said during a press conference Feb. 15, the day the report was released.

He said one of the report’s most profound statements was that the U.S. would see as much sea level rise in 30 years as seen during the entire previous century.

“The report predicts sea levels along the U.S. coast will rise 10 to 12 inches on average by the year 2050 with amounts varying regionally, primarily due to land shifts,” Spinrad said, and this will happen no matter what is done about greenhouse gas emissions.

If emissions continue at the current pace, it’s likely there will be 2 feet of sea level rise by 2100, “and that estimate is on the conservative side,” he said.

“This report is a wakeup call for the United States, but it’s a wakeup call that comes with a silver lining. It provides us with information needed to act now to best position ourselves for the future. It’s going to take all of us — government, businesses, academia and community citizens to make a difference in the future,” Spinrad said.

Assembling the report

Luettich explained that the process of compiling the report began with the IPCC, which assembled aspects of climate change on a global level and released a sizeable update to its technical report in August. This latest report by the interagency task force builds on that global report and is designed to take the best available information, specifically as it relates to water level and coastal flooding, and package it for the United States. The report is broken down by region to make the information more relevant for the public.

The interagency report highlights other key takeaways. One is that sea level rise will create a “profound shift in coastal flooding” in the next three decades, causing tide and storm surge heights to increase and reach farther inland.

Higher sea levels will amplify the impacts of storm surge, high tides, coastal erosion and wetland loss, even without any changes in storm frequency and intensity, according to NOAA.

Further, about 2 feet of sea level rise along the U.S. coast expected between 2020 and 2100 is because of emissions to date. “Failing to curb future emissions could cause an additional 1.5 – 5 feet (0.5 – 1.5 meters) of rise for a total of 3.5 – 7 feet (1.1 – 2.1 meters) by the end of this century,” according to the report.

Also, ongoing and expanded monitoring will be critical as sea levels continue to rise, according to the report.

“The task force developed their near-term sea level rise projections by drawing on an improved understanding of how the processes that contribute to rising seas – such as melting glaciers and ice sheets as well as complex interactions between ocean, land, and ice – will affect ocean height. “That understanding has really advanced since the 2017 report, which gave us more certainty over how much sea level rise we’ll get in the coming decades,” Ben Hamlington, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and one of the update’s lead authors, said in a statement. His team developed an online mapping tool to visualize the report’s sea level rise projections on a localized level across the country.

Luettich said that for North Carolina, while it may be slightly less or slightly more, a foot of sea level rise by 2050 is probably the best estimation for the state’s coast. But that’s just the sea level baseline.

“This foot becomes much more significant if a hurricane comes through. It might not be the foot that gets (a structure), but it’s the foot plus the hurricane,” he said. The next time the coast gets a storm event, instead of water rising to the first street closest to the sound or ocean, it may now reach the second street. Or instead of it getting partway up the dunes, the waves may reach farther up, maybe overtop the dunes, “certainly causing greater dune erosion.”

That foot of sea level rise is going to make nuisance flooding, often called sunny day flooding, occur more often and will likely cause moderate damage, particularly to piers and storefronts, businesses and low-lying homes closest to the water.

“It’s going to cost more and more to live in these coastal areas,” Luettich said.

There will be a slight difference in relative sea level rise between the northern and southern extremes of the North Carolina coast. The northeast will see higher levels because of subsidence, or the gradual sinking of land, which is about a tenth of an inch per year more than it is in the Wilmington area.

“But in general, it will look a lot alike. It might be 10 inches in Wilmington, and 12 inches in a Duck or Oriental,” he said. “You can see the contribution of the subsidence relative to the contribution of global sea level rise is getting smaller because global sea level rise and the amount of water going into the oceans is accelerating over time.”

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management is already taking into account the predicted 10- to 12-inch rise and encouraging communities to consider a 1-foot scenario as a minimum when planning, Tancred Miller, policy and planning section chief, told Coastal Review. “However, communities can choose to look at scenarios above 1 foot, and this report can help inform their decision making.”

The division is heading up the new Resilient Coastal Communities Program, which provided funding for about 25 local governments to create a resiliency plan tailored to the town’s needs and based on resident input. Beaufort, one of the selected communities, is in the process of developing its plan and used information from the new report.

“The Town of Beaufort is a frontline coastal community directly affected by rising sea levels, threatening our public and private infrastructure (including roads and aging water/sewer infrastructure), natural systems, and the very fabric of our community, Beaufort Town Planner Sam Burdick told Coastal Review in an email.

“Having these projections from the new NOAA report has helped us validate our decision to use a 3 feet by 2080 intermediate sea level rise scenario for our Resilience Strategy, a plan we are in the process of writing to enhance coastal resilience throughout the Town and its Extraterritorial Jurisdiction,” she said.

When Luettich moved to Carteret County 35 years ago, flooding was less frequent and usually only when a big hurricane came through, but today, it’s happening multiple times a month. He pointed to Front Street in Beaufort and Shepard Street in Morehead City, which have seen increased rates of flooding in recent years.

Luettich said the information about the next few decades in the new report needs to be taken seriously and wise decisions need to be made.

“If nothing else, the report is a call to action,” he said.

The Coastal Resources Commission last week adopted a new charge for its science panel to report any new sea level rise data and research annually, rather than update every five years its 2010 report on sea level rise.

During the commission’s meeting in Beaufort Hotel in Beaufort Thursday, Tancred Miller, policy and planning section chief with the Division of Coastal Management, explained to the commission that the science panel held a virtual meeting Feb. 3 to discuss the new directive on reporting sea level rise information to the commission. The science panel provides the commission scientific data and recommendations related to coastal topics.

Related: CRC may change how it receives sea level rise updates

The panel members reviewed the charge and made some edits to clarify what they felt was within their expertise, Miller told the commission Thursday. Essentially, the science panel every year will look at any new data, reports, implications, recommendations and bring any necessary updates to the commission.

The commission adopted the following charge that will go back to the science panel:

The issue of sea level rise is of great importance to the State, its policy makers and the citizens of North Carolina. Periodic updates using current data are vital to help inform planning and decision making.

The Commission therefore requests that the Science Panel meet annually to determine whether any new scientific literature and/or data have become available that have implications on sea level rise projections, or associated inundation-related hazards at the State, sub-regional, and local scales. 

If the Panel feels sufficient new information is available to warrant a report, or new analyses, they will present their findings to the Commission and the public in the form of oral presentations and/or written briefs/fact sheets. In this case, the Panel review will include any key data or information gaps that should be prioritized for additional collection/study and/or funding opportunities.

Christy Simmons, the division’s public information officer, told Coastal Review Monday that the science panel has requested the commission determine the range of implications of sea level rise on which the panel should focus.

More than decade ago, the commission asked the science panel to develop a sea level rise report. The first report was released in 2010 and an updated report in 2016. The panel was working on the 2020 update but hit some snags due to COVID-19 and waiting for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, numbers. During that time, the state Department of Environmental Quality released the 2020 North Carolina Climate Science Report.

The report was updated in 2016 and work was underway on the next update when the suggestion to go from every five years to annually was broached at the commission’s September 2021 meeting.

Miller, during the September 2021 commission meeting, mentioned that an update on the sea level rise report was due. In the time since the 2016 report, Gov. Roy Cooper’s Executive Order 80 signed October 2018 directed the state to produce a climate science report and resiliency plan, which was released in 2020, plus there are new websites looking at tidal gauges and historic and projected reports on sea level changes.

Because of the new information available, the science panel could provide annual updates on the most current reports and information available to identify North Carolina’s needs and trends instead of a sea level rise update, according to the September meeting minutes.

The division, under the state Department of Environmental Quality, provides staffing services to the commission, implements its rules and issues Coastal Area Management Act, or CAMA, permits.

Interested parties may submit comments at the meeting or by email to DCMcomments@ncdenr.gov. Please list “Science Panel” in the subject line.

The Coastal Resources Commission, when it meets Thursday, Feb. 10, in the Beaufort Hotel, may revamp how it receives updates on sea level rise research.

The commission’s science panel held a virtual meeting Thursday to discuss a revised charge, or directive, from the commission asking the panel to review any new and significant scientific literature and studies on sea level rise annually rather than every five years. The panel discussed the charge, suggested some changes and if it all comes together in time, will go before the commission at the next meeting.

The science panel, a group of volunteer coastal geologists and engineers, provides the commission with scientific data and recommendations related to coastal topics.

The commission, more than a decade ago, tasked the science panel with creating a sea level rise report to be updated every five years for the next 30 years. The first report was released in 2010 and an updated report in 2016.

The panel was gearing up to work on the 2020 update but was delayed due to COVID-19 and was waiting for new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, numbers. While in the holding pattern, the 2020 NC Climate Science Report was released, Tancred Miller, policy and planning section chief with the Division of Coastal Management told Coastal Review. The division, under the state Department of Environmental Quality, provides staffing services to the commission, implements its rules and issues Coastal Area Management Act, or CAMA, permits.

The commission decided during its September 2021 meeting to change the charge and ask the science panel for an annual review “because there are a number of other sources now for comparable sea level rise assessments and projections, including the 2020 NC Climate Science Report,” Miller said.

Related: CRC to consider variance for new N.C. 12 sandbags

The commission members “felt the panel’s time would be better spent keeping them up to date on significant developments, rather than duplicating other work,” Miller said about moving to an annual review rather than a five-year update.

The new draft charge reads as follows:

The issue of sea level rise is of great importance to the State, its policy makers and the citizens of North Carolina. Periodic updates using current data are vital to help inform planning and decision making.

The Commission therefore requests that the Science Panel conduct an annual review of any new and significant scientific literature and studies that address the range of implications of sea level rise at the State, sub-regional, and local scales. This review should include any key data or information gaps that should be prioritized for additional study and/or funding opportunities.

The Panel should present their findings to the Commission and the public on an annual basis, in the form of oral presentations and/or written briefs/fact sheets.

Science panel members suggested a few edits to the charge during the meeting, particularly “the range of implications of sea level rise,” which Miller said will likely be clarified.

“If the panel settles on a charge they are comfortable within the next few days, we will present it to the CRC next week,” Miller said. “They seemed to be in consensus on the nature of changes and questions, so it’s just a matter now of wordsmithing.”

He added that the panel is not scheduled to meet again.

Interested parties may submit comments at the meeting or by email to DCMcomments@ncdenr.gov. List “Science Panel” in the subject line.

The state Coastal Resources Commission Science Panel is to meet online at 3 p.m. Thursday to discuss the commission’s request for a review on new sea level rise data.

The public may join the meeting by computer or phone. The public can join by computer. Meeting number is 2434 795 6151, password is 1234. To join by phone, call 1-415-655-0003 and access code 243 479 56151.

“The issue of sea level rise is of great importance to the State, its policy makers and the citizens of North Carolina. Periodic updates using current data are vital to help inform planning and decision making,” the draft charge, or written request, from the Coastal Resources Commission reads.

The charge goes on to detail the request that the science panel conduct an annual review of any new and significant scientific literature and studies that address the range of implications of sea level rise at the state, subregional and local scales. The review needs to include any key data or information gaps that should be prioritized for additional study and funding opportunities. The findings should be presented to the commission and the public annually.

This item is not on the commission’s agenda for the meeting scheduled for Feb. 10.

It’s to be determined during the Feb. 3 science panel meeting if the draft charge will be added to the commission’s agenda, a representative from the Division of Coastal Management told Coastal Review Tuesday.

Comments can be submitted during the meeting or by email to DCMcomments@ncdenr.gov. Include “Science Panel” in the subject line.

The science panel provides the commission with scientific data and recommendations pertaining to coastal topics.

Conservation organizations continue their fight against the proposed $500 million mid-Currituck bridge.

The Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of the North Carolina Wildlife Federation and No Mid-Currituck Bridge, a resident group from Currituck mainland and northern Outer Banks, filed Monday an appeal asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit to “declare the illegal and outdated analysis prepared for the Mid-Currituck Bridge invalid,” the law center said.

The proposed 7-mile toll project includes a two-lane bridge across Currituck Sound connecting Currituck County mainland to the Outer Banks and a second two-lane bridge spanning Maple Swamp on the Currituck County mainland, connecting Aydlett to U.S. 158, according to the North Carolina Department of Transportation. 

The bridge opponents contend that the project has not been through a legally required, public review of costs and impacts since 2012, despite significant changes over the past decade and that sea level rise projections now show the roads around the proposed toll bridge “will be under water and unusable long before the project will be paid for.”

Kym Hunter, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a statement that the project is a bad investment.

“The bridge would primarily serve out-of-state tourists and only for a few weekends in the summer. When you factor in the limited use, the availability of cheaper and less damaging alternatives, and that much of the bridge project area will soon begin to flood and become less reliable due to sea level rise, it is hard to think of a worse way for North Carolina to spend scarce transportation funds,” she said. “We urge Governor Cooper to think again before making this big and costly mistake. In the meantime, we will continue to challenge the illegal analysis in court.” 

The law center, on behalf of the two organizations, filed a lawsuit in April 2019, challenging the Federal Highway Administration and NCDOT’s environmental analysis and decision document for the project.

A federal judge in December ruled in favor of the state and the Federal Highway Administration. The court found that the two agencies had complied with federal law.

State Rep. Bobby Hanig, R-Currituck, told Currituck County commissioners Thursday that the department’s work had resumed on the project and construction would begin early next year, the Daily Advance reported last week.

Hanig added that funding was in place to build the bridge and had been.

Related: Southern Shores to push mid-Currituck bridge project

In January 2012, the N.C. Turnpike Authority and the Federal Highway Administration approved the final environmental impact statement for the project. The final environmental impact statement was reevaluated in 2019, confirming that the information was an accurate analysis with no supplemental environmental study required, according to NCDOT. The record of decision was published in 2019, bringing an end to the environmental study process. 

Before construction begins, the state will need to update the traffic and revenue study as well as the toll financing plan, select a builder, prepare final design plans, acquire right of way and obtain environmental agency permits, officials said.

WILMINGTON – Next week, the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners is expected to consider a regulatory text amendment that would clear the way for a development group to move forward with a proposal to build riverfront luxury, high-rise condominiums that a coalition of environmental and historic preservation groups argue would destroy river habitat, burden county infrastructure and threaten areas of historic and cultural significance.

The board’s decision during its Monday meeting could be a projection of how one coastal county measures the development market amidst the changing climate, one where sea level rise is increasingly impacting the Cape Fear River through downtown Wilmington.

That was evident Wednesday when the coalition held a press conference on the deck of the Battleship North Carolina, which is just south of Point Peter, the plot of land at the confluence of the Cape Fear and Northeast Cape Fear rivers where developers envision building a complex of three high-rises called the Villages at Battleship Point.

Around noon, an hour or so after the press conference ended, attendees had to wade through floodwaters that had risen with the tide to get from the front doors of the battleship visitor’s center to their cars. In some areas of the lot, the water was nearly knee-high.

Floodwaters overwashed much of the road leading from the parking lot to U.S. 421. The water was so deep along a short stretch of the road that drivers could not see the yellow dividing line.

The Battleship North Carolina is currently undertaking “Living With Water,” a project to make the grounds around the national historic site more flood resilient.

The roughly 8-acre site being eyed for the project proposed by KFJ Development Group, LLC, was the backdrop for the press conference, where members of the coalition verbally checked off a list of concerns they have about the development in an ongoing push urging the county to oppose the developer’s requests.

“Point Peter is at the mercy of the water that surrounds it,” said Kemp Burdette, Cape Fear Riverkeeper with Cape Fear River Watch. “All of that water is rising in one way or another. To allow this kind of development on Point Peter or anywhere along the western bank of the river is sheer folly.”

He noted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, sea level rise projections of 1 to 3 feet in Wilmington by 2060.

“Point Peter would be unrecognizable and completely under water,” Burdette said.

He questioned where stormwater runoff from the proposed development would be directed.

Regarding NOAA’s projections, prospective condominium buyers would just barely have paid off their mortgages by then, he said.

The New Hanover County Planning Board in early December declined in a 5-1 vote the developer’s request to add a new zoning district called Riverfront Urban Mixed-Use Zoning district to the county’s Unified Development Ordinance, or UDO.

The planning board’s decision essentially quashed another request by the developer to rezone the property.

In New Hanover County, the board of commissioners make the final decision on UDO amendment requests.

The coalition on Wednesday argued that the proposed zoning district conflicts with New Hanover’s UDO, which addresses minimizing losses to the public and private sectors in flood-prone areas.

Point Peter is in a Federal Emergency Management Agency-designated floodplain, an area, members of the coalition point out, is vulnerable to floods, storm surge and sea level rise.

The coalition includes the Brunswick County Chapter of the NAACP, Cape Fear Group of the Sierra Club, Cape Fear River Assembly, Cape Fear River Watch, Coastal Plain Conservation Group, Historic Wilmington Foundation, Lower Cape Fear League of Women Voters, New Hanover County Chapter of the NAACP, and the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

Representatives of those groups stressed the environmental, cultural and historical importance of the area currently zoned industrial.

Burdette said the part of the river on both sides of the property is a primary nursery area, or PNA, a designation determined by the North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission. The commission designates PNAs to protect habitat, particularly along bottom areas, including sand, mud, sea grasses and oyster rocks.

Brayton Willis, a member of the Brunswick County Branch of the NAACP’s environmental and climate justice committee, pointed out that the property is included in the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, a national heritage corridor established by Congress to recognize the culture of the Gullah Geechee.

Gullah Geechee are descendants of Africans enslaved on rice, indigo and sea island cotton plantations of the lower Atlantic Coast.

“Not many people know about this area, this vast, beautiful viewshed, but it sits within the Gullah Geechee heritage corridor,” Willis said. “That’s a national heritage corridor and what they are proposing with the Battleship Point project is the destruction of that important resource. It’s a scarce resource and it requires protection.”

He referred to the 2020 North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan and the Lower Cape Fear Blueprint as guidance for how to address future development in the face of the changing climate.

“There’s some good answers out there, things that we can do better,” he said. “And, I think that we need to make sure that our planning folks take full advantage of what we in the state and all across the country dealing with climate change can do to minimize this.”

Willis said climate-adaptive, low-impact development would be a suitable option for the property.

“Rather than building large megastructures, we can do things out here that will preserve and protect not only the floodplain ecosystems, history and culture, but also give our gift to our kids and our grandkids. They’re the ones that are going to wind up playing the bill,” he said.

Historic Wilmington Foundation Executive Director Travis Gilbert said rezoning the land would have a detrimental effect on the region’s cultural resources, specifically the USS North Carolina, one of two national historic landmarks in the county.

“We would like to see this parcel be rezoned with prescriptive zoning measures that protect the viewsheds of this memorial and national historic site. Measures could include height restrictions and setbacks that preserve the viewsheds of the USS North Carolina,” he said. “We cherish this site. It would be extremely disappointing in the Wilmington Historic Foundation’s opinion to have a 240-foot wall impede the views of this memorial.”

The parcel at issue also includes an archeological resource recorded by the North Carolina Office of State Archeology in April 1979. That resource includes cultural remains on land and under water “that help illuminate the industrial history of New Hanover County,” Gilbert said.

Commissioners are accepting public comments about the proposed project through noon Jan. 9. Comments may be submitted online at planning.nhcgov.com/public-comment-form.

Just look around.

Rising sea level, increased tidal flooding, more frequent, beach-eroding storms – those who live and work on Topsail Island see it.

With the help of a new state program, the three towns on the barrier island are tackling where and how to prepare for what’s to come in the face of the changing climate.

“Topsail Island is no stranger to resilience,” said Surf City Mayor Doug Medlin. “We’ve had to go through this many, many times, but maybe we’re going to learn some new things to make us more resilient. Some people don’t believe when you say ‘climate change,’ but climate change is here and if you don’t believe it just look around at everything. We’re going to have to be more resilient to all of this stuff, especially the water that’s rising. We know it’s going to rise. We’ve got a lot of stuff that we’ve got to be prepared for.”

Medlin’s comments set the stage Wednesday night in Surf City Town Hall during the first public meeting about Topsail Island’s island-wide resiliency project.

North Topsail Beach, Surf City and Topsail Beach are among 26 coastal communities — eight counties and 18 municipalities — in the state to receive grants on behalf of the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management’s N.C. Resilient Coastal Communities Program, or NC-RCCP.

This is the first year of this program, one that aims to boost resilience efforts in the state’s 20 coastal counties and encourages those who live and work along the coast to participate in finding solutions and prioritizing projects designed to help their communities bounce back from flooding and storms.

NC-RCCP is a product of the state’s 2020 Climate Risk Assessment & Resilience Plan, which was the result of Executive Order 80 signed by Gov. Roy Cooper in October 2018.

The program is funded by the North Carolina General Assembly and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

Mackenzie Todd, a coastal resilience specialist with the Division of Coastal Management, explained Wednesday that the 2020 Resilience Plan directs the state to establish a formal planning process to get projects in coastal communities to shovel-ready status.

The Topsail Island towns were among about 30 coastal communities that applied for the program.

The division has contracted directly with and paired consultants with the municipalities and counties selected earlier this year.

Kleinfelder Inc., a San Diego-based architectural, engineering and scientific consulting firm, is overseeing Topsail Island’s resiliency plan.

Coastal communities that are part of the NC-RCCP are undergoing the same, four-phase process.

One of the initial steps of the process include the establishment of community action teams that consist of representatives, including local government officials, residents and business owners, from within those counties and municipalities.

The Topsail Island Community Action Team, or CAT, includes about 20 members and kicked off its first meeting in mid-October.

Michael Hicks, project manager with Kleinfelder, said the team has held three workshops during which the group developed a vision, established a set of goals, and identified natural infrastructure, critical assets, vulnerable populations and hazards.

The team’s goals include finding ways to minimize damage from flooding and storms, improve reliability of built infrastructure and road access, identify and prioritize specific resiliency projects and investments, and conserve and adapt natural infrastructure.

Natural infrastructure the team has identified include New River Inlet, wetlands, public beaches, marshes, North Topsail Beach’s maritime forest, Surf City’s maritime forest, New River Inlet’s bird nesting islands, Lea and Hutaff islands, and Holly Shelter Game Land.

Critical assets include businesses, powerlines, water and sewer infrastructure, main roads, emergency access roads, churches and religious meeting places, and tourist destinations.

The team’s list of vulnerable populations includes the elderly, those with limited financial resources, and property owners whose property is located within a Coastal Barrier Resources Act, or CBRA, zone and do not qualify for federal flood insurance or any type of federal post-storm aid.

Hicks clicked through a series of a maps displayed on a large screen in a meeting room of Surf City’s town hall that depict projected sea level rise over the next 50 years.

The maps were created primarily with data produced from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to show sea level rise projections consistent with North Carolina’s Climate Science Report. That report projects sea rise at a rate of about 3 feet.

Suggestions from those who attended the meeting Wednesday included adding properties in inlet hazard areas, fishermen and oystermen to the vulnerability assessment and areas on the mainland where development is being planned under natural infrastructure.

North Topsail Beach Planning Director Deb Hill urged that the towns work together to identify a project that will benefit all three towns.

The second phase of the project is to develop a portfolio of potential solutions, including nature-based solutions.

Todd said the hope is that more coastal communities will be included in the program.

Toiling through nearly two years of remote meetings, a 14-member partnership last week completed a comprehensive plan to save miles of marshlands in the northeastern corner of North Carolina.

The Currituck Sound Coalition Marsh Conservation Plan released Tuesday is the culmination of a goal seeded more than a decade ago, when Audubon North Carolina started managing 2,600 acres it acquired on Pine Island, near the village of Corolla in an undeveloped area of the northern Outer Banks.

“I think the fact that so many partners have come together to collaborate on this work, despite being in the middle of a global pandemic, despite the magnitude of some of the challenges we’re up against — like sea level rise — I think that really speaks volumes about how important this work is,” Cat Bowler, coastal resilience program manager with Audubon North Carolina, said in a recent interview.

In an ironic way, it is fortuitous timing for the plan’s release, since what it lays out is the kind of strategy that climate scientists have been urgently advising for coastal regions to mitigate the impacts of climate change. But it took multiple climate disasters for governments in the U.S. and worldwide to finally adopt programs and policies — and open their wallets — to address the increasing risks.

Last month’s global climate conference in Scotland emphasized that the climate threat had reached the emergency stage, and it must be addressed from the community level on up.

That is just where the coalition plan is poised.

“Our shared vision is to increase community and ecosystem resilience to climate change and other threats through enhanced collaboration and partnership on nature-based initiatives,” a statement in the plan explained. “Among our first priorities as a coalition was the development of this conservation plan, which serves as a starting point in an ongoing process of collaborative conservation planning and action.”

In 1979, Winston-Salem developer Earl Slick, who built Corolla’s first subdivision, donated 2,600 acres of untouched marsh, upland maritime forest and sandy beaches to Audubon North Carolina. By 2010, the nonprofit conservation group had established the Donal C. O’Brien Jr. Audubon Sanctuary and Center at Pine Island, which includes a 1913 hunt club.

Five years later, director Robbie Fearn established a steering committee to seek ways to protect the center, the sound and the surrounding marshlands. Since then, the center has hosted researchers and educators and has begun implementing a two-part restoration and conservation plan.

Located on the north tip of the Albemarle-Pamlico sound system, its watershed boundaries stretching to Virginia Beach, the 153-square-mile Currituck Sound estuary stretches along the northern Outer Banks in Dare and Currituck counties.

With the last inlet having closed about 200 years ago, the barrier islands separate the sound from the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, the water is between salty and fresh, but only slightly brackish, which scientifically makes it an oligohaline water body.

Blocked from the powerful ocean — the nearest connection is 45 miles away at Oregon Inlet — the sound’s shallow marshlands are influenced by wind tides but lack natural flushing action. Once an attraction for astonishing numbers of waterfowl and migrating birds, as well as fish and other wildlife, Currituck Sound was known for decades in the 20th century as a world-class destination for waterfowl hunting.

Calling it “a globally rare ecosystem,” Audubon says that the sound is one of the world’s most important places for birds. Its wetlands also filter water and serve as a valuable buffer from flooding.

But over time the sound, with depths ranging between 5 feet and about 13 feet, has suffered degradation of its water quality and has lost considerable amounts of submerged aquatic vegetation.

“Today, the marshes of Currituck Sound are increasingly at risk due to threats such as habitat loss and fragmentation, sea level rise, and proliferation of invasive aquatic plants — all of which may be exacerbated by climate change,” the new conservation plan said. “Loss of marsh and submerged aquatic vegetation has led to population declines in birds and fish in the sound.”

Although the coalition found that marshes are being lost at a rate of about 70 acres per year, Bowler said it could be even more, since that estimate is outdated.

“No, that is not an ongoing survey,” she said, adding that the number came from the 2011 Army Corps of Engineers Currituck Sound Ecosystem Restoration Feasibility Study. “So that number is about a decade old at this point. And so it very well may be a conservative figure. We need further research and monitoring to understand the current rate of marsh loss.”

Prior to release of the Corps’ report, initial research in 2001 had suggested that poor water quality was driving degradation of the ecosystem, as reported during a September 2011 scoping meeting on the feasibility study. The agency also listed 25 additional Currituck Sound-related studies, reports, programs or efforts that had been conducted earlier.

In addition, the 2001 “reconnaissance” study found other problems, including high salinity, reduced submerged aquatic vegetation and a decrease in the largemouth bass fishery. Development of a hydrodynamic flow model and analysis of alternative plans were recommended, and in 2004 the Corps and the state agreed to share costs to do the restoration feasibility study.

The Corps’ 204-page 2011 report was created with collaboration from participants that included 26 different public and nonprofit entities as well as “local environmentalists and sportsmen.”

Stuffed with information on the past, current and future state of the sound waters and marshes, illustrated with scientific charts and filled with reams of data culled from dozens of research projects, the findings were a clear warning of what the Currituck Sound is facing today.

Water in the 98,000-acre sound, which is 36 miles long and 3 to 8 miles wide, is murkier, and erosion is increasing. Sea levels are rising, and saltwater intrusion is a growing threat. Healthy grasses are depleted, and marsh is at risk of being subsumed or eroded away.

Despite the enormity — and foresight — of the effort, the draft ecosystem restoration plan was never implemented.

Then in 2016, the Corps’ built a $1.3 million research project in Currituck Sound to collect data on hydrodynamics, contaminants, nutrients, sediments, salinity, algae content, pH levels, attenuation, wind and water temperature. With numerous instruments attached to five monitoring platforms, the project was a first-of-its-kind effort to measure the range of biological and physical processes in the sound. The goal was to collect decades of data to provide scientists information on trends and impacts from climate change.

But in January 2018, the platforms, along with many of the instruments, were destroyed by a freak ice storm.

“We did collect about 2 years of data prior to that,” Patrick Dickhudt, an oceanographer at the Army Corps’ field research facility in Duck, said in a recent email, responding to a query about the project. “Those data have all been archived and are publicly available (along with all of the other data collected at the Field Research Facility).”

Dickhudt added that with the facility primarily focused on ocean processes, the Corps does not have plans to replace the monitoring platforms.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has estimated that sea levels in the region are expected to rise 1.5 feet by 2050, but there is not much available data about the rate of shoreline erosion — historic, current or projected — along the Currituck Sound. Also, limited visibility in the water has made it difficult to do accurate surveys from the air to determine the amount of submerged aquatic vegetation loss.

According to the marsh plan, “the other effects of climate change are expected to increase stress on aquatic ecosystems and diminish their ability to support and maintain a balanced, adaptive, and diverse community of species” in the sound.

“Without effective conservation action, the future of this important natural resource is in jeopardy,” according to the document.

Many of the 14 partners in the Currituck Sound Coalition have been working independently on various restoration or conservation projects in the sound region at different times, and some are ongoing.

Members represent a range of interests from nonprofits, academics, local communities and government agencies, including the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership, Audubon North Carolina, Chowan University, the Coastal Studies Institute, Currituck County, Ducks Unlimited, National Wildlife Refuge Association, North Carolina Coastal Federation, North Carolina Coastal Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve, North Carolina Sea Grant, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, The Nature Conservancy, town of Duck and U.S Fish and Wildlife Service.

“With a range of expertise and experience, the coalition is uniquely positioned to tackle the challenges facing marshes in Currituck Sound through ecosystem restoration and conservation,” the plan says.

Bowler said that after collecting feedback from coalition on the new marsh plan, the group will focus on addressing the myriad issues with action, with climate threats top of mind. Now that most people are taking the risk seriously, Bowler is optimistic that the coalition will be able to tap the increasing availability of funds to tackle urgent issues.

“We are losing marshes at a more rapid rate than we were in the past and that is due to threats like sea level rise and erosion,” she said.

As detailed in the plan, Currituck marshes are experiencing lateral erosion at the boundary with the sound, meaning that they’re losing height, not just width. They are also subject to “break-up,” caused by inadequate accretion with rising sea level. Potential remedies include a combination of living shorelines, submerged sills, or underwater breakwaters, and thin-layer sediment placement, which would build up the marsh. Research must be done to determine the appropriate measure at the appropriate place.

“As sea levels rise, those marshes only have a couple of options for how they can persist,” Bowler said, elaborating on the challenges. “One of those options is to stay where they are, and to accrete sediments to grow in place and keep pace with sea level rise. Another option is for those marshes to actually migrate upslope in a process that we call marsh migration.”

Thin-layer sediment placement has not been widely applied in North Carolina, she said, and “is one of the more innovative techniques” that Audubon plans to pilot in the Currituck Sound region. Marsh migration, she added, could be a good option in undeveloped areas where there is space for the marsh to move into.

Despite the impact of development on marshes, and vice-versa, Bowler said there’s reason to believe that both can coexist, to the benefit of both.

“We know that marshes provide reduction of storm surge,” she said. “We know that they help to attenuate floodwaters during heavy precipitation events. They sequester carbon. They provide wildlife habitat for the birds and other wildlife that we all appreciate seeing when we visit the marsh.

“So really, we look for places where we can create those multiple benefits to both the natural system but also to human communities.”                                                

Relatively small, short-lived flooding events – just enough to be a nuisance – are occurring more often along the coast.

These “sunny day” floods are becoming the new norm, disrupting day-to-day life in coastal areas, affecting everyone from residents and business owners to first responders.

“We’ve already started seeing how coastal communities are experiencing flooding more often than they were before and especially on sunny days, outside of storm events when tides are particularly high,” said Miyuki Hino, assistant professor with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

“We know that this type of flooding is going to become more and more common as sea levels rise in to the future. We decided to start this work because we felt like these types of impacts from these small but very frequent floods were really, for the most part, being overlooked,” Hino added. “It’s hard to understand how often they’re occurring and what types of impacts they have, but we think they have really important consequences for coastal communities and their residents.”

Hino, who works in the university’s Department of City and Regional Planning, is heading research to learn more about “sunny day” flooding, its causes and ways to better forecast when and pinpoint where floods may overtake streets in coastal towns.

To do this, sensors are placed in storm drains located in flooding “hot spots” to track when waters are rising in a drain and when floodwater begins to spill onto a street.

The sensors were developed by Tony Whipple, a research technician, and Ryan Neve, IT and engineering technician at UNC’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, and in collaboration with Katherine Anarde, assistant professor at North Carolina State University’s Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering.

“We can measure the depths of water and how deep the water is on the road,” Hino said.

The first sensor was placed in a storm drain in Beaufort. At the moment, that sensor is tracking water levels in a drain on Front Street.

The sensor is paired with a street camera pointed at the storm drain. It’s a system that helps researchers verify that flooding is, in fact, occurring and gives them a picture of how much water is on the road and whether the water is covering one or both lanes of the street.

From mid-June through mid-September, the sensor documented eight flooding events on Front Street. Three of those floods were associated with king tide events, when the tide was especially high, Hino said.

King tides, the nonscientific term used to describe the predicted highest high-tide and lowest low-tide events in a year, have been tracked on an international scale going back to 2009.

King Tides Project International, a nonprofit aimed to help coastal residents worldwide understand how sea level rise will impact their communities, has been recruiting locally shot photographs to document extreme high tide events.

The images help coastal residents “visualize how ‘normal’ high tides could look in the future due to sea-level rise,” and are used to create a record of how shorelines look today and track shoreline changes, according to King Tides Project International’s website.

In the U.S., coastal states, including North Carolina, have their own king tide projects.

Hino’s research delves a bit further into the causes of “sunny day” flooding by looking at complications beyond the tide.

In Beaufort, for example, five of the eight flooding events recorded by the sensor in the storm drain on Front Street occurred when the tides were normal.

“But there was rain that then flooded the road because the drainage system was full of ocean water and there was no room for the rain to drain,” Hino said. “That’s been really interesting because these types of short combination rain/tide events really are very difficult to capture and so we had really no sense of how often those would happen. It’s been really interesting to us to see that in just three months we’ve captured five of those and that’s more frequent than tidal flooding.”

Her research will soon expand to Carolina Beach, where the plan is to place sensors in several storm drains along Canal Drive and at the intersection of Florida Avenue and Canal Drive, and in New Bern.

“Both of those are hopefully going to be ramping up in the next couple of months here,” Hino said. “We’ve had a series of conversations with local officials in both places to understand where their priorities are in terms of the spots that they suspect are the worst flooding areas or the spots where they would most benefit from more data in understanding what’s going on. We hope that by collecting data and mapping it back onto those different contributions to flooding that we can actually help them respond in a more efficient way.”

In Carolina Beach, there are two sources of “sunny day” flooding.

“One is through our storm drains and one is through inadequate bulkheads or no bulkheads at all,” said Carolina Beach Planning Director Jeremy Hardison.

Town officials are working with property owners to identify those areas, which include town-owned property at some dead-end streets that stop at the water.

Hardison said sensors will ultimately help the town better respond to flood events. Ultimately, he’d like to be able to pass real-time information collected from sensors to town residents through the town’s website.

The town created a Canal Drive Flooding Advisory Committee in early 2018 to study flooding issues along the road.

Canal Drive and Florida Avenue, which run parallel to the sound, are most impacted by king tides, Hardison said.

About 250 properties line those streets.

“If you live on Canal Drive it’s kind of become a way of life,” Hardison said. “It’s definitely happening more frequently and when it does happen, it’s lingering more often.”

The next step in Hino’s research includes visiting and interviewing residents and business owners in towns where sensors are located to find out how their daily routines are impacted by flooding. Hino said she hopes to start conducting interviews next spring.

She said the intent is to leave the sensors in place for as long as possible, one of the goals being able to demonstrate how much more flooding is occurring because of rising sea levels.

“From our perspective this type of flooding is a really powerful way of experiencing climate change. It’s visible. It’s tangible. It’s disruptive and it’s linked to sea level rise, which we know is a consequence of climate change and we know what direction it’s going in the future,” she said. “We’re always keeping our ear out for communities that feel like this is a problem where they live. It is really hard to track this type of flooding because it’s relatively short-lived and that means that, as researchers, we can’t just point to a place on a map and say this is where it’s worst. We’re really always on the lookout for which places are struggling with this where some of our research can help kind of get a better handle on what’s going on and inform their plans on how they’re going to invest in preparing for a changing climate.”

North Carolina King Tides Project organizers are asking residents and visitors to photograph this week’s king tide — extreme high and low tides events of the year — through Tuesday and share their images on the Coastal Observer app.

The King Tides Project is an international effort to document extreme high tide events with photos used to help visualize how “normal” high tides could look in the future caused by sea-level rise.

“From these images we can create a record of how our shoreline looks today and track future changes. By visualizing these higher tide events we can start to understand how rising sea levels will impact local resources and community investments,” according to the king tides website.

These extreme tides are regular and predictable, occurring when the sun, Earth, and moon are in alignment and the moon is at its closest point to the Earth. The next king tide event is Dec. 2-7, according to the project.

More immediately, the weekend forecast for the coast calls for conditions that could push water on shore, compounding the likelihood for flooding.

NC King Tides project researchers plan to fly with SouthWings to capture aerial imagery of the Crystal Coast area from 10-11:30 a.m. Monday during high tide and again 4:10-5:10 p.m. Monday during low tide. They’ll take flight again for high tide 10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m. Tuesday.

Researchers are asking the public to submit photos of water levels from the ground during these time frames as well as images from established water-levels gauges, such as the North Carolina King Tides Project, the Flood Inundation Mapping Alert Network, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or the U.S. Geological Survey gauges during this king tide event. 

Visitors who stop at the Salvo day use area, a part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, almost certainly notice the small cemetery with a few dozen graves perched right on the edge of the Pamlico Sound.

The Salvo Community Cemetery on Hatteras Island dates back generations and has long been at risk of eroding away, even losing graves to the sound as a result of erosion.

There have been efforts In recent years to save the cemetery, including putting in a bulkhead in 2018, and earlier this year, the National Park Service announced plans for improvements, but the descendants are acutely aware it’s only a matter of time and tide before it’s all under water.

“They say in years to come this is really not going to be an island. It’ll be all water,” Earl Whidbee told Durham photojournalist Justin Cook for his photography and reporting project, “Tide and Time: Sea Level Rise and Solastalgia on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.”

“Tide and Time” was first published in May in Coastal Review in partnership with Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines and is now an outdoor exhibit at the cemetery, on display since mid-September.

Cook recapped in an interview that he spent four years working on “Tide and Time,” a documentary, photography and reporting project that investigates the effects of sea level rise and erosion, as told through a small cemetery on the edge of the Pamlico Sound that is eroding into the sound.

“It investigates the people with deep familial connections to that piece of land, the ecosystems around it, and the psychological impacts of that change in their daily lives as opposed to the big, dramatic, short-term effects of hurricanes. The project, instead, investigates the slower creep of climate change and everyday lives of people,” he said.

Cook introduces several descendants of those buried in the Salvo Community Cemetery, he talks to them about sea level rise, storms, what they’ve lost and what they remember. He also speaks with scientists about climate change and delves into the term, solastalgia, which Cook said philosopher Glenn Albrecht “defined it as a sense of loss, homesickness and distress specifically caused by environmental change around someone’s home and a sense of powerlessness over that change.”

With help from descendants and locals, Cook extended his project into the free, outdoor exhibit at the cemetery. Installed in mid-September and on display from 9 a.m. to dark, the long banner fastened on one side of cemetery’s fence documents the accelerating effects of climate change and erosion on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. There is scientific information, photographs and portraits of those buried at the cemetery on the banner.

Cook is a descendant himself through his grandfather, the late William Albert Best Jr. from Stumpy Point in Dare County.

The banner exhibit was a natural extension of “Tide and Time” and was inspired by Photoville, a New York-based nonprofit organization founded in 2011. The organization holds an annual photography festival in public spaces and Photoville FENCE, a year-round public photography project displayed in major parks and downtowns across the continent, which has made stops in Durham.

Cook said anyone can engage with the Photoville exhibit because they’re free and in a public space. This also give people an opportunity to confront the work and the work confront them.

He was out for a walk in Durham and thought that a Photoville FENCE exhibit of “Tide and Time” on the cemetery fence would “be wild.” He said he pitched the idea to locals on  Salvo Community Cemetery Friends and Descendants  Facebook page and “the buy-in was immediate.”

Cook designed the banner with help from the community, and collaborated with descendant Robin Holt on the text – her research and his reporting – and Photoville walked him through the process of getting the banner printed.

That buy-in from the community and having a hyper-local focus is an important element of his work, a large part of why he found value in working with Coastal Review to publish his project earlier this year, he said.

The Pulitzer Center’s mission, especially with Connected Coastlines, is to infuse local news outlets, particularly smaller ones, with reporting projects that require resources often beyond the ability of the small publications. They either don’t have the staff or time to invest in a project like this, Cook said, adding, “It actually just came together perfectly and just made a lot of sense, the impact was hyper local, which is something that’s really important to me as well.”

He explained that the longer he does documentary work, the stronger he feels that the community he’s doing the work in should garner the most impact from it.

“For this (project) to appear in a coastal North Carolina publication, that to me was in line with those values and I think it made it way more possible for me to actually pull off the banner exhibit as well,” he said.

Cook explained that he wanted to have an exhibit on the Outer Banks, but then the pandemic happened. While there was the option to spend thousands on nicely printed, framed prints to hang in a gallery, he opted for something completely different that would open to the public and safe during the pandemic. 

He said when he pitched the idea for the banner to those he had been working with, they were already familiar with Coastal Review and being backed by the Pulitzer Center gave the project legitimacy.

“Having a national institution backing this (project) and publishing in a local publication that had familiarity, was just a real sweet spot for the work,” he said.

The reporting project and fence exhibit have been made possible by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Connected Coastlines Initiative, The North Carolina Arts Council, the Photoville FENCE exhibit, The Coastal Review Online, and The National Park Service.

The news on the climate front keeps getting worse.

Regarding the report released Monday by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, the headlines paint a dire picture: “Code Red for humanity,” was CNN’s banner for its coverage, quoting UN Secretary-General António Guterres; “Humans have pushed the climate into ‘unprecedented’ territory,” was how The Washington Post topped its story; “A Hotter Future Is Certain, Climate Panel Warns. But How Hot Is Up to Us,” warned The New York Times’ analysis.

All noted that even if nations of the world acted immediately to curb greenhouse gas emissions, enough damage is already done to guarantee a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures, or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit hotter.

The consequences of not rapidly and permanently cutting emissions, as The Post reported, are “increasingly catastrophic impacts.”

As we reported last year, North Carolina’s Climate Science Advisory Council’s 2020 assessment predicted warmer and wetter conditions with more flooding statewide and with coastal areas as risk from rising seas and increasingly frequent heavy downpours. At the time, our Kirk Ross interviewed State Climatologist Katie Dello about the report. She made it clear then that change was already happening.

“We’re feeling climate change now, so we don’t get to the luxury of talking about this as a future problem anymore,” she said. “It’s here in North Carolina. It’s here in our backyard and we’re seeing it through the sea level rise and extreme downpours.”

The IPCC’s summary of its findings for policymakers bears that out: “Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years.” Some of the changes already happening, including sea level rise, are irreversible.

In 2019, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were higher than at any time in at least 2 million years, according to the summary, and concentrations of other greenhouse gases were higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years.

Global mean sea level has risen faster since 1900 than during any century in at least the last 3,000 years

Each of the last four decades has been successively warmer than any decade that preceded it since 1850.

It is likely that human behavior contributed to changing rainfall patterns since the mid-20th century, and mid-latitude storm tracks have shifted toward the poles in both hemispheres since the 1980s.

The scientists say it is virtually certain that oceans have warmed just since the 1970s and it is extremely likely that human influence is the main driver. It is also virtually certain that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main driver of ocean acidification.

Coastal cities, towns and villages “are particularly affected” by climatic factors that have already changed and will continue to change, whatever happens with regard to emissions. That means increases in extreme heat, flooding rainstorms, coastal erosion and coastal flooding. Increasing relative sea levels are compounding the flood problems associated with storm surge and intense rainfall.

There’s still much we can do to limit the damage. As the Times phrased it, “humanity can still prevent the planet from getting even hotter.” Doing so will require what the IPCC report describes as “strong and sustained reductions” in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. And even then, it could take two to three decades before global temperatures stabilize. But we will have at least taken steps to lessen the damage that would otherwise only be worse for our children and grandchildren.

And while there’s no silver lining, North Carolina, which still has a reputation for climate change denialism, has begun slowly moving in the right direction. As Coastal Review has reported in detail, debate here has shifted over the past decade from whether to do something to what should be done.

Officials released in 2020 the North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan as a comprehensive guide for addressing the risks of climate change to the state’s infrastructure and economy. The plan was hailed for addressing both the causes and effects and providing planning tools for local governments.

Also, the legislature has in recent sessions advanced bills that reflect a more comprehensive approach to flooding and stormwater management.

The House budget plan for the next two years would boost funding for the state’s Land and Water Fund and and other conservation programs with nearly $2 billion for flood prevention, resiliency and stormwater and wastewater infrastructure.

Meanwhile, new federal infrastructure and climate initiatives promise an even larger flow of funds if the state has programs in place to take advantage of it.

While these efforts offer numerous reasons for optimism, as the IPCC report states, the time to act on resiliency and the kind of carbon reductions that will truly make an impact for the next generation is now.

As we look ahead to the prospects outlined in the report and the state’s risk assessment, we know that what we do in the immediate future will have an impact on what the next generations face.

At Coastal Review, our role is not just to report on the impacts of the climate crisis, but to critically examine the plans, the science and proposed solutions in detail and to take a clear-eyed approach to the decisions at the state, federal and local levels that will affect our region and, ultimately, our planet. 

Something about describing a lunar cycle that influences tide levels as “moon wobbles” sounded tantalizing enough to flood the recent news cycle for a few days. Yet, if it takes a tipsy moon — a phenomenon known for centuries — to bring attention to climate science and evolving understanding of sea level rise impacts, it could help engage the public in supporting efforts to mitigate the worst effects. 

The article published in a recent issue of Nature Climate Change found traction because of the wobble, despite it being a normal part of the moon’s nodal orbit, a nearly two-decade cycle where the moon’s orbital plane intersects with Earth’s orbit at two spots called nodes.

“Yes, this moon wobble is certainly not a new thing. It’s always been there — the moon drives changes in our tides on a wide range of timescales,” Benjamin Hamlington with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and a co-author of the paper, said in an interview. What is new, according to the paper, is the effect that the wobble has on the moon’s gravitational pull, and consequently the tides, in combination with rising sea levels.

Anyone living near an ocean or sound is already familiar with tides — low tide, high tide, neap tide, spring tide, sound tide, king tide, moon tide — which result from certain orientations of the moon and sun relative to the Earth.

In recent years, nuisance flooding, often called sunny-day flooding, is commonly used to describe high tide inundation that frequently occurs, even in the absence of storms. According to a July press release about the research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported more than 600 sunny-day flood events in 2019. 

“Coastal locations around the United States, particularly along the Atlantic coast, are experiencing recurrent flooding at high tide,” the paper said.

But as seas continue to rise, high-tide flooding will eventually reach a tipping point that results in rapid increase in the frequency of those events, the paper continued. And that is where the gravitational pull of the wobbling moon comes into play. 

“The study assesses a wide range of variabilities — the ups and downs that occur from year to year, the natural cycles in the ocean,” Hamlington told Coastal Review. 

Hamlington explained that the natural variabilities, once a nonissue, are now viewed by scientists as a looming problem.

“Because of the long-term sea level rise and the ongoing sea level rise, we’ve seen that variability that wasn’t a problem previously is going to be a problem in the future,” he said.

Led by the members of the NASA Sea Level Change Science Team from the University of Hawaii, the study is the first to account for all known oceanic and astronomical causes for flooding, the press release said. The researchers collected data from 89 tide gauge locations in every coastal U.S. state and territory but Alaska.

“The important part of this study is really just putting as many of the pieces together as possible,” said Hamlington, who is also the leader of NASA’s Sea Level Change Team,  “then assess how coastal flooding is going to work in the coming decades.”  By “pieces,” he elaborated, he means natural processes that cause sea level to change: tides, seasonal ocean cycles, heating and warming, in addition to the background, long-term global warming that is underway.

As part of the 18.6-year lunar nodal cycle, the moon orbits around the Earth on a plane that is tilted about 5 degrees relative to the Earth’s orbit around the sun, known as the ecliptic plane. When the moon intersects with Earth’s orbit at the two nodes, it wobbles. Hamlington compared it to what happens with a spinning coin as it slows just before it falls flat.

“It does this very slow wobble over time,” he said. “And that positioning, that orientation relative to Earth’s orbit, causes a shift in the tidal amplitude.”

Although the wobble is imperceptible to people, what is important is that when the moon is on the lower part of the wobble, it pulls the tides down with it, meaning that high tide would be lower. Then when it moves to the higher part of the wobble, it will do the reverse — pull the high tide higher than usual.

The current moon cycle is moving toward the downward part of the cycle, but it is still amplifying tide. Even so, sea levels are not so high now on most U.S. coasts that high tides regularly top flooding thresholds. But that’s not expected to be the case when the cycle moves back again to amplifying in the mid-2030s. What the scientists found in the recent research is that the moon wobble will be moving back to its higher position, unfortunately, just as sea levels are ready to spill over the metaphorical rim of the bathtub.

Translation: in about a decade, coastal areas will start experiencing higher high tides, on top of higher seas, meaning more beach erosion, more tidal flooding and higher water tables. Over the years, as current trends are going, more and more coastlines will see increased days of high tides. 

“So, we’re just so close to this threshold of flooding in these coastal locations that a near-term push — any near-term push — is going to get you into flooding conditions more frequently,” Hamlington said. “And then it happens to be one of the nearest-term pushes is going to be from this new wobble or lunar nodal cycle.”

Tides have always been different on different coastlines and at different places on each coastline. By determining the timing and effect of the moon wobble on high tides — “modulations of tidal amplitude” — researchers have combined that data with the tidal predictions at different coastal locations to calculate the period in coming decades where the flooding threshold will be reached. 

“The mid-2030s, in particular, may see the onset of rapid increases in the frequency of HTF in multiple US coastal regions,” the paper said. “We also show how annual cycles and sea-level anomalies lead to extreme seasons or months during which many days of high-tide flooding (HTF) cluster together. Clustering can lead to critical frequencies of HTF occurring during monthly or seasonal periods one to two decades prior to being expected on an annual basis.”

Scientists can only give a range in predicting the level of rising seas in 2100, Hamlington said. But tide cycles can be predicted. And as sea levels continue to rise, he said, flooding will occur even with lower high tides.

“So as long as we keep increasing that foundation, more and more types of seasonal cycles and signals that we see in the ocean are going to cause flooding to occur,” he said.

Under moderate sea level rise projections, for instance, the inflection — the tipping point, so to speak — in Wilmington is the year 2036.

“And that’s going to be an additional 85 days of flooding a year,” Hamlington said, adding it’s about four times more than what is happening right now.

For the Dare County town of Duck, the year of inflection is 2023.

That means that two years from now, under the minor flood threshold, intermediate sea level scenario, there will be an additional 44 days of high-tide flooding. For the moderate flood threshold, the inflection is 2045, with 48 days of more severe flooding.

Hamlington said that NASA and NOAA, among others in the scientific community, are working on more interagency coordination, with an ultimate goal of communicating the latest findings relevant to climate issues in a clear way that would be accessible to engineers, policy makers, government officials and others, including the public.

Already, in a partnership between NASA and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA created a tool from IPCC sea level projections that allows easy and user-friendly access to the information for the public,  he said.

“I think that it’s important that we, in addition to doing the science research and understanding sea levels, that we also invest in these delivery tools,” Hamlington said.

And as the moon wobble report showed, the public is paying more mind to climate change issues that affect them — once the scientists can get their attention to convey the urgency.  

“Low-lying areas near sea level are increasingly at risk and suffering due to the increased flooding, and it will only get worse,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in the press statement.

“The combination of the Moon’s gravitational pull, rising sea levels, and climate change will continue to exacerbate coastal flooding on our coastlines and across the world. NASA’s Sea Level Change Team is providing crucial information so that we can plan, protect, and prevent damage to the environment and people’s livelihoods affected by flooding.”

Evidence of the rising sea is visible along North Carolina’s coast.

Storms that are more intense and destructive, floods that reach further and run deeper, and marks of habitat shift such as ghost forests are indicators that every year the ocean sits just a little bit higher.

Sea level rise is a problem that affects coastal communities around the world, and thanks to a new study from researchers in the Netherlands, global sea level rise vulnerabilities are being mapped with unprecedented detail. Never before has elevation been mapped globally with such a high degree of accuracy.

According to the recent study, “Global LiDAR Land Elevation Data Reveal Greatest Sea-Level Rise Vulnerability in the Tropics,” published in Nature Communications, the brunt of this change will occur within the tropics.

This study is the first worldwide elevation model that used satellite Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, data. By taking a global approach, the researchers were able to evaluate what parts of the world are most vulnerable to sea level rise. They classified high vulnerability as coastal lowlands less than 2 meters, or about 6 feet, above sea level. They found that 62% of those areas are in the tropics, making this region particularly vulnerable to sea level rise. Around the world, 267 million people live in these vulnerable areas.

According to Dr. Aljosja Hooijer, primary author on the study, these results are conservative. Hooijer used a relative sea level rise projection of one meter by 2100. Even with such a moderate value, Hooijer found that by 2100, 410 million people could be living in those vulnerable areas.

While North Carolina is not in the tropics, much of the eastern part of the state is extremely vulnerable to sea level rise. Approximately 47% of the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula sits below 1 meter in elevation, and this region has already experienced significant changes because of sea level rise. Coastal forest habitats are being converted to salt-tolerant marshes and “ghost” forests, and releasing sequestered carbon into the atmosphere. Along the rest of the coast, sea level rise poses similar threats of habitat conversion, as well as erosion and flooding.

With quantifiable data, more parts of the world can better plan for rising seas.

“As long as there’s not really good data on the table, you cannot have a proper discussion about that,” Hooijer said. “But nowadays, data is there and the accuracy is so much higher.”

Hooijer used data from the ICESat-2, a NASA satellite using LiDAR that was launched in 2018. The ICESat-2 measures global land elevation, comparing it to the sea level. It offers essentially unprecedented accuracy, as well as a global data set — both things that allow researchers like Hooijer to ask targeted questions about worldwide sea level rise vulnerability. According to Hooijer, this study will be the jumping-off point for many more research questions.

LiDAR generates information about the physical characteristics of the Earth’s surface. It works by issuing laser pulses and timing how long they take to return to the origin point. The time the return takes creates a precise measure of elevation. NASA’s ICESat-2 issues 10,000 laser pulses every second, allowing for data with unprecedented detail. This data makes it easier to understand the current conditions as well as trends over time.

LiDAR technology has been around in some fashion since the 1960s. But in recent years, it has evolved significantly and is now much more accurate than before. Hooijer was able to use measurements of land elevation around the world with a much lower margin of error.

Previous Global Digital Elevation Models, or GDEMs, have relied on satellite radar, which has lower levels of accuracy. Radar at 0.05-degree resolution can only promise results within 0.5 meters of accuracy for 19.9% of land measured. By contrast, LiDAR from the ICESat-2 at a 0.05-degree resolution can achieve within 0.05 meters of accuracy for 85.2% of land.

One of the notable differences is that radar often has a hard time discerning vegetation from the ground. LiDAR can penetrate vegetation, allowing for more accurate measurements of land elevation. As GDEMs are often used for flood risk assessments, this data offers a much higher level of confidence in the results.

“It’s mind-boggling, this technology,” Hooijer said.

Until now, LiDAR data like this has only been used at smaller scales, for selected communities around the world. Hooijer’s study is the first global representation of this kind of information.

“Now that there’s better data, it’s almost an obligation for scientists and the policymakers to make better assessments that will lead to better planning,” Hooijer said.

In North Carolina, researchers at various institutions and universities use the latest developments in LiDAR data to ask targeted questions about environmental conditions in the state. Dr. Lindsey Smart, a research associate at North Carolina State University, has used non-satellite LiDAR data for several studies.

In 2020, Smart published a study called “Aboveground carbon loss associated with the spread of ghost forests as sea levels rise.” The paper used LiDAR data from 2001 to 2014 to map changing coastal landscapes over time. Smart was able to use this data to closely document habitat conversions that lead to aboveground carbon loss, demonstrating one critical way that sea level rise poses a threat to current coastal ecosystems.

Even in little more than a decade, Smart saw the capabilities of LiDAR technology evolve rapidly.

More accurate reads come from a higher laser point density — in other words, more lasers per area. Between the data Smart used in 2001 versus 2014, the laser point density increased 18-fold.

“The amount of detail that you can capture from data like that is amazing,” Smart said. “You have a whole wealth of research questions that you can ask that can be answered by these rich data sets.”

In recent years, LiDAR data has become more accessible to researchers. Not only is the data available, but it is obtainable without imposing a financial burden. According to Smart, the evolving capabilities and accessibility of LiDAR data allow researchers to more readily answer questions about these changing landscapes. This in turn helps states like North Carolina better predict what is to come.

“Organizations or state agencies can be proactive in terms of helping the communities adapt, or manage for future risks,” Smart said. “Some of those questions about where to do that can be answered by looking at LiDAR data and the changes in LiDAR data over time. And as time goes on, we’re getting more and more of that data.”

Coastal Review presents this special expanded feature, Tide and Time: Sea Level Rise and Solastalgia on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, in partnership with the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

My grandfather, William Albert Best Jr., was a kind, tender man from Stumpy Point in Dare County, just across the Pamlico Sound from the Outer Banks. I grew up listening to his tales of hurricanes and rugged self-sufficiency during the Great Depression in this tiny fishing village that was all but cut off from the rest of the state.

He doted on me and my twin brother and encouraged our love of art and nature. A man with a silly imagination, he would sit and draw with us for hours. As he washed dishes, he stood us on a stepstool by the sink so we could peer out the window and he could teach us the names of the birds – goldfinches in the summer that pecked at his beautiful summer sunflower patch, or juncos that gorged on seed he scattered in the winter. His backyard was a massive garden of beans, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers. He built an Eden just beyond the back stoop. It wasn’t until long after he died that I understood this was his place to go and be still and pay attention to small things; a world for him to nurture and to escape his anxiety and traumas.   

He and I became really close when I was in high school and I was assigned to interview him for a U.S. history class about his experiences in the Army during World War II. He never talked about this part of his life, but he opened up to me. He was a natural storyteller, so I just asked him to write things down when he remembered them.

We lived across town from each other in Greensboro, and he mailed me beautiful handwritten letters that told stories about living out of the back of a 2-ton Army truck, the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest and being among the first Allied troops to cross the Rhine River in Germany. I would call and ask more questions and typed the stories up as a way to keep them alive.

I wanted to be a marine biologist or a paleontologist when I grew up, but because of him I became a journalist. I went off to college at East Carolina University in 2001, where my grandfather went with the GI Bill nearly 50 years before, and fell in love with the eastern part of the state.

In a letter he sent me when I had barely settled into my dorm, he wrote:

“Now Justin, I want you to know, if you don’t realize yet, you are in eastern N.C. You are at the crossroads of high tiders and low landers. Some of the people speak the strangest language, the brogue is hard to understand. Remember they are folks from all the small communities of eastern N.C. They are good folks. Get to know a few.”

I transferred to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for its journalism program, and graduated in 2006. I worked at newspapers around the country, and when my grandfather died in 2008, I promised myself I would find a story that would help me get to know his beloved coastal homeland.

I still have my grandfather’s letters. They still smell like him. I can still hear his high-tider accent when I read them. But there was one story he never told us.

The war had deeply traumatized him. When he got home to Stumpy Point in 1946, he struggled with alcohol for a year. He met a woman named Mabel Payne, and he got her pregnant. Because my grandfather had access to the GI Bill, she wanted him to make something of himself and encouraged him to go to college. She and my grandfather’s sister, Irene and Irene’s husband, Harold Wise, would adopt and raise the baby.

Mabel gave birth to a daughter named Pam, and Pam had a son named Harold Lee Wise. My grandfather would graduate from East Carolina University, go on to marry my grandmother, Frances Simpson, and start a family in Greensboro, where he became a teacher, and later, a principal. He never claimed Pam or Lee but visited Stumpy Point when he could, and treated Lee like a nephew.

When my grandparents died in 2008, Lee contacted us and told us he was my grandfather’s other grandson — my first cousin — and broke to us the secret connection. Elated to discover we were related, Lee, a prolific writer and historian, introduced me and my brother to folks in Stumpy Point. Nearly a decade later, in 2017, this long-lost cousin would link me to strangers — to distant kin — on Hatteras Island.

I have always wanted to tell a story that connected my interests in science, history and the environment. All of these things collided as I researched stories about climate change on the Outer Banks. When I started this work in 2017, I wasn’t sure what story I would tell. A lot of beautiful work has already been made about the Outer Banks and the greater North Carolina coast, and I wanted to do something different.  

While the Outer Banks are famous for hurricanes, the violence and widespread effects of storms along the 200 miles of barrier islands felt like too obvious of a story. Often, the effects of climate change are gradual, slow, psychological.

What about the slow loss of land, a home rendered unfamiliar by erosion and development? What if I could find a small area and focus on it and the people connected to it? How was climate change affecting their interior worlds? The tiny strip of land that makes up the Salvo Community Cemetery is remarkable because studying it answers all these questions.

It also revealed how people wrestle with their mortality, how they long to be remembered after they die, and how they make peace with their impermanence. It showed me an unnamed grief over their changing home, a phenomenon called solastalgia, coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, as a sense of loss, homesickness and distress specifically caused by environmental change around someone’s home and a sense of powerlessness over that change.

Telling that story required gathering in intimate spaces, around kitchen tables, and plumbing minds and imaginations. It required deeply listening to people who are intimately in tune with their environment and understanding their intense ancestral connections to place. It required paying attention to small things: marsh grass that is there one year and gone the next; trees slowly dying from saltwater intrusion; vanished mulberry bushes; and the seasons of life in the ecosystem on the Pamlico Sound. That required slowing down and surrendering to the whims of the weather and tide. It required time.

This was the story I pitched to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for their Connected Coastlines Grant in September 2020, and the Center introduced me to Coastal Review when my original publication plan didn’t work out.

I believe it’s important to tell as many stories about climate change as we can. The science of climate change alone — facts, figures, erosion data — can be opaque and only tell us so much. Human experiences can scaffold that science into stories that we can relate to. 

Tide and Time is not a comprehensive or authoritative account of climate change on the Outer Banks, but rather a collection of conversations, memories and feelings about home infused with deeply researched science.

The Outer Banks are a world-class tourist destination, but the unsustainable development of these thin barrier islands is causing them to erode, threatening life, property, ecosystems and culture, while rapidly rendering the Outer Banks unfamiliar to the people who have long called them home.

Worse, sea level rise is exacerbating the erosion as the Outer Banks experience the effects of climate change. Scientists predict that by 2100, 6 feet of global sea level rise caused by human induced climate change could inundate the islands completely. 

But that doesn’t have to happen if we refuse to succumb to complacency and cynicism. We can make changes that will slow and reverse the damage. This will require imagination, and imagination is a human specialty. It took imagination for people to learn to survive for so long on the Outer Banks. Our vast imaginations led us to discover fire, invent the wheel, create vaccines, travel to the moon and even discover extinct creatures and realize that we could burn their remains to power our economies. We can reimagine our economic systems so they don’t destroy the planet, and invent more symbiotic ways of living with the sea. Our climate future is only limited by our imaginations.

Continue to Tide and Time: Sea Level Rise and Solastalgia on the North Carolina’s Outer Banks

There will be two public meetings next month for Cape Hatteras National Seashore staff to hear site preservation ideas for the Ocracoke Light Station.

Staff is seeking input on how to sustainably preserve the historic resources at the Ocracoke Light Station in the wake of recent storm damage and in consideration of future impacts from climate change and sea level rise, while providing visitor access to the site.

The in-person meeting will be at 1:30 p.m. Thursday, May 6, at Berkley Barn at Berkley Manor, 58 Water Plant Road, Ocracoke. If the ferry isn’t running due to inclement weather, the in-person meeting will be rescheduled for a later date.

The virtual meeting is from 6-7 p.m. Monday, May 10. Use the online meeting link to view the online presentation from computer or smartphone.
Audio Only, call 202-640-1187, 38403551#, the best option for people with poor or no internet coverage. Audio-only attendees will not be able to view the presentation.

The following are potential site preservation ideas that will be presented at the meetings:

• Option 1: Repair storm damage and preserve site as is.
• Option 2: Repair storm damage, replace existing shotcrete at lighthouse with historic parge coat, and elevate all structures, except the lighthouse.
• Option 3: Rehabilitate to 1823 site by removing the keeper’s quarters 1929 addition and restore or rehabilitate the keeper’s quarters using as many original features such as brick from the house as possible; restore the light station structures and site to the 1823-1854 period of interpretation; and elevate all structures, except the lighthouse. Restoration to the 1823-1854 period of interpretation would include replacing existing shotcrete at lighthouse with historic parge coat and exposing original stone foundation at lighthouse, replacing existing metal spiral stair case with historically accurate wood staircase and removing other structures except for the 1823 privy.
• Option 4: Relocate the lighthouse and the keeper’s quarters to a higher elevation, more storm- and flood-resistant location on Ocracoke Island.

The public is invited to submit comments on the preservation ideas until May 28.

Once a range of preservation ideas are gained and refined through the public meetings, the seashore will move to the next phase, which will include assessing compliance needs under the National Historic Preservation Act, National Environmental Policy Act and other environmental regulations, according to the National Park Service.

Citizen scientists can now use a downloadable app to share with the North Carolina King Tides Project photos of the first king tide event of this year, which begins Monday and ends April 30.

The North Carolina King Tides Project, an initiative to document extreme high tide events using photos, now uses the Coastal Observer app to report water levels and submit photos of king tides and other interesting water-level events, the organization announced Friday. After downloading the app, participants should be able to register, answer a few questions, take or select a saved photo and click save.

King tides are the highest high and lowest low tide events of the year, according to the King Tides Project, and are regular and predictable events. King tides are also expected to take place May 26-30, June 22-26, July 21-25, Oct. 6-12, Nov. 3-9 and Dec. 2-7.

The submitted photos help visualize how “normal” high tides could look in the future due to sea level rise, according to the project. Using these images, a record can be created of how the shoreline looks now and track future changes.

“By visualizing these higher tide events we can start to understand how rising sea-levels will impact local resources and community investments,” organizers said.

While the King Tides Project focuses on water levels, citizen scientists can submit additional information that this app collects. All submitted photos can be viewed on the Coastal Observer website.

Encountering a ghost forest is a decidedly eerie experience. Tall, stripped tree skeletons remain standing long after they have died on the inside. The other deeply visceral part of the image is the sheer expanse of the ghost forests along the North Carolina coast, says Dr. Emily Ury, an ecologist at Duke University who studies ecosystem responses to rapid environmental change.

“Not just one or two dead trees, but hundreds of dead trees in one area,” Ury said. “You know just by looking at it that it’s not normal.”

Ury is the lead author of a study published this month in the journal Ecological Applications called “Rapid Deforestation of a Coastal Landscape Driven By Sea Level Rise and Extreme Events.” The purpose of the study was to map rates of vegetation change in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on the Outer Banks using remote sensing techniques. Ury and her team analyzed data to measure the change in these coastal forests over a period of 35 years. They found that more and more coastal forestland is transitioning away from freshwater forest cover –and it is doing so quickly.

“The rate at which this is happening is fast, even for me, someone who studies climate change and ecological change,” Ury said.

“The rate at which this is happening is fast, even for me, someone who studies climate change and ecological change.”

Emily Ury, study author

Ury and her team found that 32% of the refuge had changed land cover classification over the last 35 years, whether that be through land loss, forest loss or shrubland expansion. This is happening despite the study area’s protected status as a National Wildlife Refuge.

About 19,300 hectares, or nearly 47,000 acres, was converted to marsh or shrubland, while 1,151 hectares was lost to the sea completely. What’s more, approximately 11% of forest cover transitioned into what has commonly become known as a “ghost forest.”

Ghost forests are not a random phenomenon. Most scientists accept the assumption that they are caused by increased exposure to salinity. Too much salt can cause widespread tree death, ultimately changing the ecosystem entirely. This results in habitat loss for wildlife and is capable of wiping out entire coastal forests.

Rising sea levels are one cause of the infiltration of salinated water into coastal forests. Data compiled by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science show that the sea level has been rising every year along the North Carolina coast for decades. While sea level follows a linear curve, Ury’s study shows that ghost forests aren’t following quite the same pattern. Instead, ghost forests seem to expand largely after extreme weather events. For example, the refuge saw 4,500 — plus or minus 990 — hectares of ghost forest form between  2011 and 2012. Ury attributes this high point in conversion to be caused by the end of a five-year drought and the impact of Hurricane Irene that hit the coast in late August 2011.

But either way, said Ury, both the rising tide and extreme weather events are climate change-related things. What’s more, ghost forests are also an indicator of other environmental consequences.

Coastal forests are known for sequestering carbon in high rates in both their soil and in their plant life, particularly trees. When these areas begin to convert, some of that carbon is released into the atmosphere.

Dr. Lindsey Smart of North Carolina State University published a study in 2020 about ghost forest mapping across the Carolina coast. Her study focused specifically on aboveground carbon loss as habitats convert. According to Smart, Ury’s study supports what she and her team of interdisciplinary scientists also found.

“The Duke study identified the potential role of severe storms and droughts in the proliferation of ghost forests, which gives us a better understanding of why these ghost forests can appear in a much shorter timeframe than previously anticipated or expected,” Smart said.

Ury’s study was the first mapping effort to use completely remote sensing data, like NASA’s 430-mile-high Landsat satellite images. Smart’s work also used this technology in part. According to Smart, the technological abilities to make these measurements have expanded exponentially in the last decade, as has access to that technology.

“With the increase in the availability of remote sensing technologies and access to big data, like this volunteer geographic info and drone imagery, we’re really able to piece together the stories of the landscape in time and space more completely,” Smart said.

This evolving technology will allow for additional research to take place in order to more fully understand why ghost forests appear and what they mean for coastal communities. In addition, Smart said some research is needed to determine how people along the coast perceive ghost forests and what steps they are willing to take in order to adapt to them. The coast is a mix of public and private land, and any further conversations about ghost forests should account for the communities affected by them.

“Different landowners have different values for their landscapes,” Smart said. “And it just shows how critical it is to bring landowners into the conversation.”

This information would allow for a fuller picture of the issue and its consequences, as well as help scientists like Ury and Smart piece together the stories of these coastal forests more completely.

This is the sixth and final installment in a series on making the North Carolina coast more resilient to the effects of climate change, a special reporting project that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines initiative.

There’s a growing body of evidence on what a warmer, wetter climate holds in store for our generation and future North Carolinians.

Among the effects already being felt and already baked in for decades ahead are more frequent heavy rains and, with them, repeated flooding in vulnerable areas.

The threat of greater flooding extends to every corner of the state. Eastern North Carolina comes to mind quickest because of the stunning disasters here. But intense rain events are happening in the west as well in places like Asheville, which has seen a series of floods over the past decade.

Although most of the state’s cities and towns have been expanding their stormwater requirements and capabilities over the past few decades, none are engineered to deal with a deluge.

In the state’s farmlands, the effect of heavy rains extends beyond direct damage to crops. Floods delay planting and harvesting, strand livestock and leave fields inaccessible.

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Matthew and Hurricane Florence brought about major changes in the way the state handles long and short-term disaster response. The one-two punch of 500-year storms that struck less than two years apart washed away doubts about the risks ahead. Even though climate science is not universally embraced in North Carolina, a changing climate is evident. Strategies for dealing with it are changing, too.

After Florence in 2018 churned through many of the same places as Matthew did in 2016, taking on disasters one at a time no longer made sense. Resiliency went from buzzword to watchword.

Gov. Roy Cooper and legislative leaders, often at odds, agreed to form a new state agency, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, to handle both the massive inflow of federal disaster and housing aid, but also to find ways to best fit that aid into a resilience framework.

Getting proactive about flooding in the same way has not been so straightforward, in part because the impacts vary with every turn of the waterways, but mostly because of the enormous expense of raising roads, reconfiguring bridges and culverts and moving people and key infrastructure out of the floodplain.

Although there’s consensus across political and ideological lines, turning consensus into action has proven difficult, especially in an era of political polarization and a deadly pandemic.

This year, as the North Carolina General Assembly and the governor begin another fresh attempt to reach a deal on a comprehensive state budget, there’s early agreement on the need for a major effort on flooding resilience.

In his budget proposal last month, Cooper targeted $56 million for flood resilience programs and additional floodplain buyouts, along with a substantial increase for land conservation and stormwater infrastructure.

This week, a state Senate committee charged with working on major flood resilience and mitigation legislation holds its initial hearings.

Although there are differences among approaches and strategies between policy makers and stakeholders, one key theme that’s emerging in resilience and any likely legislation is an emphasis on leveraging the state’s land resources, particularly the vast areas of natural and working lands in eastern North Carolina.

The proposals come at a time when climate researchers say it is even more essential to preserve and enhance those lands because of a growing understanding of how essential they are to carbon sequestration and mitigating the state’s contribution to greenhouse gasses.

Both approaches envision converting some cropland back to forests and using farmlands, wetlands and other natural systems to reduce the severity of flooding.

As the state grapples with what to do about storms and floods to come, the nexus of resilience and sequestration found in its natural and working lands could become the cornerstone of North Carolina climate policy.

Off the charts

Last June, a working group made up of dozens of scientists, state and local officials and representatives of businesses and nonprofits published a 124-page appendix to the state’s 2020 Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan on the potential for working and natural lands.

Misty Buchanan, director of the state’s Natural Heritage Program and part of the working group that wrote the report, said that driving the push for putting natural solutions to work were findings in the state’s 2017 greenhouse gas emissions study, which revealed the scale of sequestration potential in natural and working lands.

“What drew me in, and what I think resonates with people, is when we got our greenhouse gas inventory and first started to understand where our emissions are coming from and how much our emissions are,” she said. “We determined that the land use sector, including natural areas and forest and farms and even things like oyster farms, have a huge potential to offset the emissions that are coming from the state.”

The study found that natural and working lands offset 25% of the state’s current greenhouse gas emissions, she said, more than twice the average rate of other states.

“We’re already in a great position,” Buchanan said. “We can do more. We also need to think about how we’re just going to hold on to that percentage as our state develops around us. We need to think about how we can restore land and manage our land in a way that we can continue to offset those gas emissions and sequester and store more carbon each year.”

To jumpstart the ideas and to build support, the group looked at options that provided multiple benefits, keying in on those that benefited both carbon sequestration and resiliency as well as water quality and biodiversity.

They fall under three main categories: protecting land through conservation easements or acquisition and incentives for protection; restoring lands to increase sequestration and resilience; and improving management of existing natural and working lands.

Proposals include programs for farmers to conserve and enhance lands, tools for local governments, changes to forest policies, tax incentives for landowners, further floodplain buyouts, preserving forests, restoring pocosin and coastal habitats, and improving urban land management.

Buchanan said that in assessing the opportunities, there were obvious win-wins. One that also gives an idea of the scale of the possibilities is that about 5% of the unprotected forests in the state are in the floodplain of watersheds with significant sources of pollution.

“If we just protected those forests, that would be a million acres,” she said. “So, there are some large opportunities still in North Carolina for land protection.”

The goal is 1 million acres of floodplain protection and another million acres of wetland and floodplain restoration. If that sounds like too much to shoot for, Buchanan said, consider that the Biden administration recently set far higher goals for land protection than that.

Scaling up resilience

Near the end of last year’s session, the General Assembly approved legislation to create an inventory of natural and working lands that could be used in flood control and potential incentives for private landowners to do stream restoration and wetlands enhancement and build flood-stage capacity. The bill set the stage for this year’s likely follow on.

The Senate Select Committee on Storm Related River Debris and Damage in North Carolina was set to meet for the first time Tuesday to review preliminary results from last year’s bill. The meeting was set for 10 a.m. in the Auditorium of the Legislative Building.

The committee is co-chaired by Sens. Danny Britt, R-Robeson, and Jim Perry, R-Lenoir, who represent eastern North Carolina counties hard hit by prolonged flooding during Matthew and Florence.

Earlier this month, the two announced that they were working on comprehensive flood resilience and mitigation legislation and holding a series of information sessions over the next several weeks, gathering input and reports from stakeholders and state agencies.

Perry said he and Britt believe that the state’s approach right now is too scattered and their primary goal is to focus it by establishing a sole, central agency in charge of enacting a statewide plan. In effect, Perry said in a recent interview, the state needs a flood czar.

“We think at the end of the day, somebody in the state of North Carolina needs to go to bed thinking about flooding mitigation and resiliency and needs to wake up thinking about it,” he said. The state can’t settle for a patchwork approach or sweeping problems under the rug.

Perry is among those advocating for large-scale debris removal as part of the plan as well. He said he’ll listen to the scientists in terms of best practices, but he doesn’t want a here-and-there approach.

“We don’t need to clean out the spots of river, close to the bridge because people can see it. We need to start somewhere around Raleigh and clean it out all the way down to the coast,” he said.

The whole approach to dealing with flooding has to be that way, he said.

“We got to do it right, we’ve got to be committed. And you have to have someone who has ownership who can coordinate with all these agencies who can help prioritize which thing comes next and what’s the next step.”

In addition to the state commitment, there’s an unprecedented wave of federal funding for resiliency and sequestration programs. There’s also another avenue of support expected should Congress approve an infrastructure package.

With so much money on the table and other states providing a blueprint for drawing down federal dollars for large-scale resilience programs, there is a profound sense of urgency in Raleigh to coalesce around a strategy.

Perry said states like Louisiana and Iowa have shown that having a plan opens a lot more opportunities for federal support. The state needs that, he said, if it’s going to do anything on a scale that will make a difference.

“You look at what they’ve done in Louisiana. They’re getting a $1.2 billion federal grant, because they had a great plan,” he said. “They had a great resiliency plan that could change the lives of the people there.”

Perry and Britt’s committee isn’t the only group in the legislature looking at scaling up resilience.

Late last month, a joint meeting of the House and Senate Appropriations Committee on Agriculture and Natural and Economic Resources met with officials from Resource Environmental Solutions, a Louisiana-based contractor for stream restoration and large-scale natural solutions work. The company recently acquired a North Carolina-based company and told the committee they were ready to ramp up work in the state.

Committee co-chair Rep. Pat McElraft, R-Carteret, told committee members the state would have to look to the private sector in order move quickly on bigger projects.

Broad buy-in

Although the exact policies and the dollars involved in making it work are still a work in progress, the moves by both the administration and the legislature to incorporate a natural and working lands strategy are drawing support.

Todd Miller, executive director of the North Carolina Coastal Federation and a presenter at Tuesday’s Senate committee hearing, told Coastal Review the bills so far are going in the right direction.

“The bills that have been introduced in the Senate and House are very welcome and show a lot of potential for the state making huge gains in using nature-based strategies to reduce future losses from flooding,” Miller said. “The emphasis on the need to develop a volume-based watershed management framework and empower local communities to strategically invest in reducing floods is very encouraging.”

North Carolina Farm Bureau Natural Resources Director Keith Larick said involving farmers in solutions around flooding, resilience and climate-related issues is a growing trend nationwide.

Larick, who has been gathering feedback from farmers on some of the potential flood-mitigation ideas, said most recognize that they’re likely to play a role in the solutions and they’re willing to listen.

“When we talk to farmers there’s a recognition that the types of practices that are being talked about are going to go on working lands, whether it’s forestry, whether it’s ag land, pasture or cropland. That’s where the space is to put these kinds of practices on the ground,” he said.

If the state can come up with a fair system that allows a farmer to agree to conserve land or open a field to floodwaters to take pressure off downstream, there’ll be buy-in, Larick said.

“For a long time, farmers have operated in the world of voluntary programs, voluntary incentives for conservation practices,” he said. “The flood-mitigation side of it is new but it’s an easy connection to make for a lot of folks.”

It’s obvious that farmers in North Carolina, especially those in the east, have been dealt a harsh blow by the major storm hurricanes, Larick said, but they’re also seeing other climate impacts. More frequent heavy downpours with flash flooding are happening in the spring and summer. This year was yet another wet winter that kept some farmers out of the fields. Farmers farthest east are dealing with saltwater intrusion or fouling of groundwater supplies associated with sea level rise.

“There’s been a growing recognition we’re having these issues that are climate related,” he said. “There’s the broader discussion, ‘what are we going to do about climate change?’ but we also have the immediate issue of what are we going to do to mitigate the kind of things that we’re already seeing?”

Larick said he also sees the potential dual role for farmland for flood mitigation and carbon sequestration, which is gaining traction among agriculture interests at the national level.

It makes sense, but the question is whether stakeholders and policy makers can come up with system that works, Larick said.

“The flood mitigation really isn’t the concern at the national level, they’re looking at carbon sequestration, but you know when I see that I’m also thinking in the back of my head ‘OK, there are other benefits here, too. Can we tie all this together somehow?’”

Pavement that allows water to soak through to the ground below now covers 500 feet of a street in downtown Beaufort, part of a town effort to better manage stormwater.

The town worked with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, to include permeable paving as part of a capital improvement project recently completed on Orange Street to upgrade pipes and infrastructure, the federation announced Wednesday. The North Carolina Land and Water Fund provided the grant for the project.

Stormwater runoff from heavy rains typically flows down the hard surface of paved streets, funneling pollutants to nearby waterways. Roads typically are resurfaced with conventional paving material, but this project included permeable sections to reduce the amount of pollution from runoff.

The project is an effort under the 2017 Beaufort Watershed Restoration Plan, which provides “an overview of the past and present conditions of the Beaufort Watersheds and proposes methods and strategies intended to reduce the volume of stormwater runoff to improve water quality in the watersheds.”

The plan includes strategies to restore hydrology and reduce polluted runoff using retrofits that direct stormwater to infiltrate into the ground or collect it for later use. Officials said the retrofits are a cost-effective solution.

The goal of the plan is to “turn back the clock” on water pollution, reduce instances of flooding, align future capital improvements with stormwater retrofits, increase community awareness and position the town for future funding opportunities, according to information from Beaufort Town Planner Kate Allen.

Allen explained that some of the projects identified in the plan that have been implemented or are currently underway include recent improvements at the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission’s boating access area on Lennoxville Road, which reduced overall impervious surface coverage, Cedar Street improvements incorporating stormwater best-management practices and rain gardens at Tiller School.

“In Beaufort, we are committed to taking measures to clean up our waterways. The successful boat ramp and Orange Street pervious surface projects have been a great partnership with Coastal Federation and important parts of large-scale infrastructure improvements across our community,” said Beaufort Mayor, Rett Newton, in a news release. “By improving these systems, we are greatly reducing the amount of toxins going into our waterways as we strive to set the standard as a North Carolina Clean Water Coastal Community.”

Bree Charron, coastal specialist with the federation, is hands-on with many of these projects, including the work on Beaufort’s Orange Street.

“These projects demonstrate a balance between expense and water quality benefit. By directing impervious surface runoff to areas of permeable pavement, our partners capitalized on scheduled infrastructure repair to decrease total runoff,” said Charron in a release.

Charron told Coastal Review that the federation’s goal is to improve coastal water quality and stormwater is the No. 1 polluter of surface water in the state, so decreasing the volume of runoff that reaches coastal waters is imperative.

“While we also work on long-term goals involving state policy guidelines on stormwater, working with local municipalities offers opportunities to get more practices in the ground,” she said.

The goal of the watershed restoration plans is to decrease the volume of stormwater reaching adjacent water bodies. Reducing the volume also reduces the loading of the associated pollutants, especially bacteria. Also, addressing stormwater in the upper reaches of a watershed through nature-based design measures helps reduce downstream flooding.

Lauren Kolodij, deputy director with the federation, told Coastal Review that by developing a watershed restoration plan and implementing stormwater runoff-reduction techniques, a town can improve water quality, reduce nuisance flooding, restore natural hydrology and make waters safer for swimming and shellfishing.

By having an approved watershed restoration plan, a local government can apply for Environmental Protection Agency funding available under Section 319 of the Clean Water Act for retrofit projects and have a framework for water quality restoration funding from additional funders.

Kolodij said watershed restoration planning focuses on working together to use nature-based stormwater strategies that slow down, spread out and soak in the rain to reduce the volume of stormwater runoff.

“It sets out a community collaborative strategy for tackling local stormwater issues,” she said.

“These techniques mimic the natural hydrology of the land to infiltrate, filter, store and evaporate runoff, instead of directing stormwater to ditches, pipes and ponds that go directly to our coastal waters,” she said. “Coastal communities have been partnering with the Coastal Federation for over a decade to utilize the federation’s Watershed Restoration Planning Guidebook to develop plans.”

Atlantic Beach recently joined Beaufort, Swansboro, Pine Knoll Shores and Cedar Point in working with the federation to develop a plan to manage stormwater.

“Our partners in local government right now are fired up about water quality. And they should be, it’s what draws so many people to the coast. They are also actively looking for solutions to flooding concerns brought to them by residents. Our goal is to match flood mitigation with effective strategies that will also address water quality,” Charron told Coastal Review.

Atlantic Beach’s Recreational Water Quality Committee recommended partnering with the federation in January 2019 to create the Bogue Banks town’s watershed restoration plan, which was approved Feb. 22. The town partnered with the federation, surveying and engineering firm LDSI Inc. of Charlotte and Kinston and the New Bern-based Eastern Carolina Council of Governments to create a watershed restoration and stormwater resiliency plan, according to the town.

The plan has been sent to the NCDEQ Division of Water Resources for review and approval to ensure it meets the EPA’s nine minimum elements. Once approved, the plan makes Atlantic Beach eligible to apply for Section 319 funding to implement stormwater management strategies identified in the plan.

Michelle Shreve Eitner, director of Planning and Development for Atlantic Beach, told Coastal Review that the town is looking forward to applying for funding to implement these projects so soon after the plan was approved by Town Council.

“Sometimes plans sit on a shelf in an office, but this one is being put to use as we speak. There are several projects that not only increase water quality and reduce stormwater flooding, but also provide the opportunity for education and outreach. Low-Impact Development techniques and Stormwater Control Measures look nice on paper, but folks can be weary of implementing something they’re not familiar with. Displaying effective methods, like permeable paving or rain gardens for stormwater infiltration and retention, can help bridge that gap,” she said.

Atlantic Beach approved its plan a week before the federation unveiled a statewide nature-based stormwater strategies plan.

“This plan calls for establishing statewide effective watershed management that focuses on protecting, restoring or mimicking natural water systems to reduce flooding and improve water quality as one of four key cross-cutting recommendations,” Kolodij said.

During the press conference March 3 to introduce the statewide plan, Pine Knoll Shores Manager Brian Kramer said the town for the past four decades had been pumping polluted surface water into nearby waterways during storm events or heavy rain events.

Kramer said the town partnered with the Clean Water Trust Fund and the federation to use infiltration methods, avoid additional impervious surfaces and install swales as part of public projects to manage stormwater.

Kramer added that the town is looking at landscape designs for new construction that help with stormwater infiltration.

Charron said that in Pine Knoll Shores construction is underway on a large groundwater/stormwater management system across the east end of town, as part of a North Carolina Land and Water Fund Innovative Stormwater Project, to help address the flooding in a way that’s more water quality-friendly. There is also a project in the design phase to install a permeable “island” in the Acorn Court cul-de-sac.

In Cedar Point, work has been taking place since the mid-2000s to reduce polluted runoff into the White Oak River, which is 48 miles long and runs through Jones, Onslow and Carteret counties, said Cedar Point Town Manager David M. Rief.

He explained that the town is bounded by the river and the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, with major tributaries Pettiford Creek and Boathouse Creek also in the town limits.

“As such, the water quality of these bodies of water are important to the health, safety and enjoyment of our residents. It just made sense for the town to be concerned about water quality and in turn, develop a watershed restoration plan,” Rief said.

Since the plan’s development, it has been used to educate the public become more cognizant of their individual impacts to water quality and encouraging them to take a more proactive role in reducing contamination, he explained.

While a number of projects have taken place, the biggest has been the town’s purchase of a 56-acre tract fronting the White Oak River and containing 19 acres of wetlands.

“By partnering with various other entities including the N.C. Land and Water Trust, N.C. Parks and Recreation Trust Fund, the Coastal Federation, and N.C. Coastal Land Trust, we were able to acquire the property and prevent substantial development of the property, thus reducing the amount of contaminated runoff previously expected from the site,” Rief said.

Another project underway is a state Department of Transportation resiliency project to protect Cedar Point Boulevard, or N.C. 24, from hurricane erosion.

“Rather than using traditional bulkheading methods of bank stabilization, the project will use a living shoreline structure composed of oyster shells to create a naturally growing oyster reef to help slow and break up wave action in the White Oak River. Of course, the oysters will have the additional benefit of helping to clean up the water,” Reif said.

He said it’s currently difficult to quantify the impact of the improvements made so far because each year brings both more improvements and more development. Also, Cedar Point is at the confluence of the river and the Intracoastal Waterway, and what happens upstream has a huge effect on the quality of the water as it passes Cedar Point.

“Therefore, it is difficult to determine, without additional studies, what the net impact is on the water quality,” he said. And while they aren’t able to quantify the results, “we know the study prompted actions that would otherwise not have been taken, and each of those steps was in the right direction for maintaining and improving the quality of this cherished natural resource we all enjoy.”

Work is also underway in Swansboro to put in place permeable parking at Ward Shore Park, where the town installed a living shoreline last year. There is also funding to pursue retrofitting a street end outfall on Walnut Street in the coming year, Charron told Coastal Review. Both are 319 grants that the federation partnered with the town.

Charron added that sea level rise has to be considered in coastal communities. The sound and ocean are the end point of the drainage system, natural or man-made. As sea level rises, the ability to move water is hindered. Beaufort is already seeing this with some infrastructure in the downtown area. The goal would be to decrease the amount of stormwater flowing through traditional drainage pathways.

“I think the towns have sea level rise in consideration, but really preparing for the changing climatic patterns is on the forefront of these plans. While it is silly to design for a Florence-type rainfall event, it seems the ‘typical’ rainstorm is increasing in duration and intensity. Taking these heavier ‘normal’ rainfalls into account is a major focus. Being prepared for action during a Florence-type event is also on everyone’s minds,” she said.

A webinar on how coastal habitats contribute to coastal protection and blue carbon storage will begin at noon April 19.

The Pew Charitable Trusts, Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries are hosting the webinar on how coastal habitats contribute to coastal protection and blue carbon storage and ways states are using this information for climate and coastal management planning.

Register online for the free webinar by 11 a.m. April 19 to participate.

Lydia Olander and Katie Warnell of Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions will present their recently completed mapping work in six states — North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and New York — on how coastal habitats contribute to coastal protection and blue carbon, and how sea level rise will impact salt marshes and carbon storage over the next century.

Chris Baillie, a postdoctoral researcher at East Carolina University, and Casey Knight, a coastal habitat biologist with the North Carolina Department of Marine Fisheries, will then speak about their experiences integrating Duke’s mapping work into updates to North Carolina’s Coastal Habitat Protection Plan.

The appropriation for North Carolina’s parks and clean water trust funds would jump to levels not seen in a decade and a surge of money for flood mitigation projects are key features of Gov. Roy Cooper’s biennial budget proposal.

Cooper and State Budget Director Charles Perusse announced Wednesday the details of the $27.3 billion plan for 2021-22 and $28.7 billion plan for 2022-23.

It reflects a growing, albeit temporary, state budget surplus, in part to collections running higher than expectations and in part due to changes from last year’s tax schedule that pushed a substantial amount of revenues into the new fiscal year.

Although some previous federal aid is in the mix, Cooper’s budget does not include recently approved federal funding from the American Rescue Plan, which he said Wednesday would come later in a separate proposal.

The budget plan includes a pay raise for teachers and principals averaging 10%, a roughly 7.5% raise and bonuses for all school personnel and a 5% raise for state employees. State retirees would receive a 2% bonus each year and a recurring 2% cost-of-living adjustment.

With much of the available surplus deemed nonrecurring or one-time money, this year, budget writers in both the administration and the legislature are tasked with finding ways to spend it without creating ongoing expenses.

Cooper has proposed an extensive series of projects along with a $4.7 billion bond proposal to build out and fix state infrastructure. The bond proposal, which includes money for K-12, university and community college construction and repair; water and sewer infrastructure; and parks, museums and aquariums, would go to the voters in November.

Parks, Clean Water Funds

Cooper wants to see an additional $220 million flow into the state’s two main conservation funds over the next biennium.

The state’s Land and Water Trust Fund, which incorporates the Clean Water Management Trust Fund and other related state trust funds, would receive $49 million in each year of the governor’s budget with $30 million going toward clean water grants and $19 million each year targeted “to increase water storage capacity and decrease future flood risk for communities impacted by recent disasters.”

The trust fund hasn’t been funded at those levels since 2009. The state’s Parks and Recreation Trust Fund would receive $75 million each year to support state and local parks and beach access. State parks would also get $10 million to upgrade paved and unpaved trails, which have been heavily used during the pandemic.

State Department of Natural and Cultural Resources spokesperson Michele Walker said the funds will help with needed clean water and parks projects and expand the heavily used state parks trails system.

“We believe these investments will improve public health, stimulate economic growth, advance diversity, equity and inclusion, and build resiliency in our communities,” Walker said Thursday.

The governor’s budget also includes $56 million for additional flood-mitigation projects, including more focused buyouts.

With some bills to fund flooding projects already introduced this year in the legislature, resilience and flood mitigation, particularly in eastern North Carolina, are early areas of consensus between the governor and the legislature in the budget process.

House and Senate budget committees are expected to delve deeper into plans for a comprehensive flood mitigation program as the budget works its way through both chambers.

Walker said the Land and Water Fund, or LWF, and Parks and Recreation Trust Fund, or PARTF, would work together on some of the projects being considered.

“The proposed floodplain buyout program would allow LWF to acquire and restore high-priority floodplains to increase water storage capacity and decrease future flood risk for communities impacted by these recent disasters. PARTF funds could be used to convert these reclaimed floodplains into active recreational assets, such as parks or trails,” she said.

Office of State Budget and Management spokesperson Marcia Evans said the two funds haven’t been at that level since 2011. She said the rationale for the increases are that parks and clean water projects are cost-effective and have an impact throughout the state.

“Use of parks and trails has risen dramatically since the start of the pandemic and we want to continue to support and encourage safe, outdoor recreation,” she said. “But the benefits go beyond recreational uses because land purchases and improvements can also improve resiliency. A portion of the funds are set aside for floodplain buyouts—moving people and businesses out of the floodplain—and stream restoration. This reduces flooding and loss during natural disasters.”

The governor’s plan also provides more than $79 million over the next two years for navigation, water management, flood mitigation and beach nourishment matching money for more than $220 million in federal funds.

Other clean water initiatives in Cooper’s plan include an additional $9 million to buyout hog farms still remaining in the the 100-year floodplain.

The state’s Department of Environmental Quality would receive additional funding to deal with permitting backlogs and implement a streamlined permitting system as well as money for new clean energy programs for schools and communities.

Cooper also wants to hire 26 new chemists, engineers and hydrogeologists to deal with emerging compounds and provide clean drinking water to communities affected by them.

New positions in the Division of Coastal Management budget includes a coastal resilience coordinator to assist local resiliency planning and a “Southern Sites” manager to manage the new Bird Island Coastal Reserve, the state’s southernmost barrier island.

Cassie Gavin, director of government affairs with the North Carolina Sierra Club, said the budget includes several notable initiatives like the hog farm buyout funds as well as $24 million in local clean energy grants.

“We’re excited to see that the Governor’s budget shows a strong commitment to conservation, clean energy and resilience,” Gavin said Thursday in an email.

Road ahead

The governor’s traditional first volley in the budget process comes after two years of often bitter, partisan battles over spending that left the state without a formal, two-year budget agreement since the last one was adopted in 2018.

Since 2019, state government has been funded through a series of supplemental funding bills and an automatic budget backstop that keeps funding at prior levels.

While Cooper and legislative leadership are sure to clash over the budget, the surge of money could make reaching an agreement easier.

Cooper and Perusse said they do not expect the same kind of standoff over this year’s plan.

“Unlike, the last budget cycle we had, I’ve had numerous conversations with both Republican and Democratic leadership,” Cooper said. “And one thing we agreed on is that, first the people of North Carolina elected us again. So, we’re back in the same situation that we were, and we owe it to them to do the best that we can to find a path forward.”

Coastal provisions

Other coastal-related items in the budget include the following:

• $9.9 million for the University of North Carolina Wilmington Coastal Marine Studies for building renovations.
• $500,000 each year for resources to excavate and conserve artifacts from the 1718 shipwreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge.
• A new sea turtle assistance and rehabilitation center position at the Roanoke Island.
• Additional parks staffing for Hammocks Beach and Jockey’s Ridge state parks.
• A $7 million boost each year to the North Carolina Department of Transportation Ferry Division to enable more timely maintenance and $4.5 million over two years for shoreside infrastructure preservation and improvements.

This is the fourth installment in a continuing series on making the North Carolina coast more resilient to the effects of climate change, a special reporting project that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines initiative.

The treehouses were an early sign that Windsor, Bertie’s county seat, was onto something. When there’s a river running right through your town, resilience requires finding creative ways to coexist with the river.

“It’s a source of flooding, but it’s also a source of recreation,” County Commissioner Ron Wesson said of the Cashie River.

So, five years ago, the town took the boring concept of flood adaptation and made it fun — and a revenue-producing tourist attraction. Accessible via an elevated boardwalk, two treehouses were built among the cypress canopy along the river, each with a sleeping loft and basic furnishings, with a shared bathroom facility available nearby.

Now there’s a “village” of three of the rugged cabins, elevated safely — and irresistibly — above the water. They’re so popular, with weekend bookings filled straight through the summer, that the town is proposing to add two more.

“Two of them have trees coming through the middle of them,” Wesson said in a recent interview.

Canoes and platforms are also available to rent for “glampers,” or those who enjoy glamorous camping, rounding out offerings for the region’s nascent ecotourism industry.

Positioned in the center of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, Bertie County — specifically, Windsor — in the last two decades has suffered some of the worst repeated flooding disasters in inland northeastern North Carolina, an area increasingly beset by changing climate impacts such as flooding from rising sea levels and intense rains.

In 1999, downtown Windsor was inundated with more than 6 feet of floodwater during Hurricane Floyd, destroying dozens of homes, businesses and public buildings. It flooded dramatically again in 2016 during Hurricane Julia. Then, just three weeks later, Hurricane Matthew drove 7 feet of water into the town, destroying nearly 40 homes and numerous businesses.

The one-two punch in 2016 shook Bertie officials into realizing expert help was needed to forestall a future of constant flooding.

But after numerous scientists and engineers evaluated drainage and flooding dynamics in the Cashie River Basin, there were no easy answers.

“We have three major rivers that come together,” Wesson said. “When those rivers back up, it dumps that water into our communities, Windsor especially.”

Potential remedies, such as diverting water to retention ponds or spillways, he said, would help, although it would most likely only reduce the worst flooding instead of preventing it entirely. And although more buildings are being elevated on pilings, even that tactic is not failsafe or always possible.

Considering the billions in mitigation costs the town faces — or accept the loss of the community — town leaders are now making long-term plans to gradually relocate to higher ground.

“There is no real major solution,” Wesson conceded.

On March 17, Windsor was one of 25 communities to be awarded a total of $675,000 in funding through the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Division of Coastal Management’s new Resilient Coastal Communities Program. The grant funds will go toward assessing the community risk and planning, selecting and prioritizing projects, as well as engagement of citizens in the process.

Windsor, however, is just one of numerous areas within the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary forced to contend with increased amounts and days of flooding. The estuarine system, the nation’s second-largest behind the Chesapeake, has 3,000 square miles of open water, encompasses six river basins and eight sounds — the Albemarle, Pamlico, Back, Bogue, Core, Croatan, Currituck and Roanoke — and spans from the central North Carolina coast to southeastern Virginia, according to the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuarine Partnership. It’s got enough total estuarine shoreline — 9,115 miles — and freshwater rivers and streams — 9,299 miles — to cross the country three times.

In 2006, there were 2.5 million acres of wetlands and 4.5 million acres of farmland recorded, although losses have been steadily occurring over the years since. And it has the largest amount of pocosin wetlands in the world.

To retired East Carolina University coastal geology professor Stan Riggs, the region needs to appreciate the ecotourism “golden goose” that exists in its rich natural resources: miles of quiet waters, hundreds of acres of swamp and forests filled with wildlife and star-lit dark skies unsullied by city lighting.

“People go on U.S. 64 and they go to the beach,” he said in a 2020 interview. “They never get off the highway.”

By promoting the region, its residents will find another approach to making a living with its land and water.

“This is a new resource out there. All of this used to be farming land and timberland,” Riggs said. “Alligator River — we ditched it and ditched it and ditched it. You can’t ditch it anymore because the seas are rising. Because of sea level rise that’s taken place since 1700 … it’s rising now more and more. That water comes up a little bit higher.

“Half of those counties are at sea level — it didn’t used to be that way,” he said. “We can’t farm them. We can’t log them anymore. So, let’s recreate with them!”

Riggs has worked closely with Bertie County officials in helping the community understand its flood risk. But as part of a nonprofit initiative that he chairs, the N.C. Land of Water — the focus is on the 17 counties in the northeast corner of the state, which have been hit with dual stresses of economic decline and environmental challenges from climate change.

“When I started here 55 years ago, there were working people out there on the water,” he recalled. “Everybody had a little boat, they’d go out on these black waters. Those waters are absolutely beautiful. All those streams that come into the Albemarle — awesome, awesome for kayaking. We can bring people from all over the world to paddle these waters.”

An early success in the NC LOW effort is an outdoor recreation project in Bertie called Tall Glass of Water, which recently opened the first public beach in all the Albemarle Sound communities.

But Riggs’ and NC LOW’s shared mission is one of a growing number of efforts to foster coastal resilience.

Reide Corbett, executive director of the multi-institutional Coastal Studies Institute in Wanchese and dean of the Integrated Coastal Program at ECU, has been providing data and, when possible, scientists to local communities to help them mitigate climate impacts.

“I think it’s critical that communities really start thinking about resilience,” he said recently. “Certainly, we need to think about changes we want to have in place after an event. The discussion about what that policy is has to happen before that event.”

But the first step is for a community to define what resilience means to the people there, he cautioned. Is it bouncing back from storm damage? Or is it being proactive about determining responsive options to the impacts of an event?

Being resilient is not simply putting a building back, he said.

“It involves the ecosystem, your economy, the biosphere,” Corbett said. “The concept of resilience needs to think about that interaction, that codependence and the economy that’s built. We have to frame that concept of resilience … That’s important to us, to educate the citizenry. That’s something that we need to do — sort of frame that concept. That’s something that’s done through education.”

Corbett said he is encouraged by Gov. Roy Cooper’s efforts to mitigate climate change impacts and the state’s recent outreach to communities to assist in their resilience planning.

“It’s going to take time to make significant changes,” he said. “We went years, essentially, with no science. We’ve come a long way since 2010.”

One effort that also involves the Coastal Studies Institute — among multiple other universities and agencies in the state and beyond — recently launched is C-Coast, which stands for the Collaboratory for Coastal Adaptation over Space and Time. A North Carolina-focused program funded by the National Science Foundation to address a range of challenges in coastal resilience, C-Coast is a network of coastal researchers, stakeholders and practitioners who collaborate on work that fosters better understanding of human interaction with the natural coastal system.

“We envision C-Coast having perhaps a core of participants,” said Laura Moore, professor of coastal geomorphology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the director of C-Coast. “But we also see C-Coast as a broad network.”

Even though its initial focus is on North Carolina, she added, the work that’s done will be useful to researchers and stakeholders from other regions.

C-Coast’s “theme,” Moore explained, is “connecting short term decision-making to long-term outcomes, and understanding what are the ways in which the connection between the short-term and long-term can be influenced by different actors in the process.”

As an example, Moore said, when a road is covered in sand during a storm, does removal of the sand — an island’s land — inadvertently weaken the long-term resilience of the island’s landscape?

“We aren’t looking to advocate for any particular outcome or particular future,” Moore said. “We’re looking to understand the decision process, how short-term decisions lead to long-term outcome.”

James “Bo” Dame, professor of biology and physical sciences at Chowan University in Murfreesboro, has involved students in research on water quality impacts, ideally as a way to answer specific questions, such as influences of water quality on submerged aquatic vegetation, or the health of frogs and toads.

Dame said that he is about to launch a water quality monitoring program this spring with his students near the Tall Glass of Water project on the Albemarle Sound in Bertie County.

Although the Chowan River, which empties into the northwest end of the Albemarle, in recent years has been plagued with algal blooms during the warm months, Dame said the problem happens closer to Edenton and has not been evident at the end where they’ll be working.

Their work won’t solve the Chowan’s algal issue, he said, but he hopes it will contribute to improving water quality in the area around the site.

Dame said he and the students will probably be sampling about a half-dozen locations on the northwest edge of the Albemarle Sound from Salmon Creek to the U.S. 17 bridge. Although specifics have yet to be decided, water quality monitoring could be looking at levels of phosphorus, salinity, dissolved oxygen, temperature, or clarity, turbidity chlorophyll, nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus.

Considering Bertie’s relatively small place in the vast and complex Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, Dame said that its active role in resilience planning, economic adaptation and sustainable environmental restoration may be a positive contagion to other communities in the region.

The key to the appeal of Tall Glass of Water, which will include not just opportunities to camp and swim, but also to kayak, canoe and hike on trails, is the combination of environment, ecotourism and especially education, he said.

When Dame teaches his young adult students, he finds them receptive and open to climate issues, he said, but it’s still a battle with education and science literacy.

“This project feeds into that and it provides a perfect opportunity to make young people more aware of their environment, to get them out in the mud and whatever you find outdoors,” he said about Tall Glass of Water. “That’s usually when the lights go on. That’s when they get excited.”

This is the third installment in a continuing series on making the North Carolina coast more resilient to the effects of climate change, a special reporting project that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines initiative.

MERRY HILL — At the confluence of the Albemarle Sound and the Chowan River, Bertie County residents celebrated in June 2019 the grand opening of their first public beach.

Amid the joyous splashing and squeals of laughter, Ron Wesson spied a young girl trying to coax her little brother into the water. The boy would not budge, so the older man gently offered to help.

“We kind of sat there, with our toes in the water,” Wesson recounted in a recent interview. “He held my hand, and I walked out there with him. We took it real slow.”

Within a short time, the little guy found his nerve and was soon playing carefree in the water with the other kids.

Bertie Beach is the community’s first cool gulp of the “Tall Glass of Water,” the working name for the county’s outdoor recreational project.

“It’s weird, though, because I can kind of relate,” Wesson said, referring to the boy’s hesitation and that he and the boy are both Black.

In 2019, Bertie County was ranked by Wall St. 24/7 analysis as the poorest county in North Carolina. Of its population of 19,000 people, about 68% are Black. Wesson said that, historically, the county has the highest percentage of Blacks in the state.

But the experience that day transcended race, and its implications reverberated beyond Bertie County. The celebration was part of a strategic regional approach to community resilience: Bring the environment to the people and stimulate economic growth through sustainable ecotourism.

After devoting much of his career to study of North Carolina’s barrier islands and sea level rise impacts, Stanley Riggs, a professor emeritus at East Carolina University, has in recent years focused on the inland communities of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, which comprises sounds and rivers and is threatened by sea level rise and other climate change impacts. Those waterways and surrounding lands offer great opportunity but are considered vastly underutilized.

“That’s one of the world’s great water systems and it’s hardly used,” Riggs said in an interview late last year. “There’s nobody on Alligator River and the whole Albemarle Sound system. There’s precious few people out there.

“We’ve lost several generations of people. Kids have never learned to swim. You take people out on boats and they’re scared to death.”

Riggs is chairman of the North Carolina Land of Water initiative, or NC LOW, and Tall Glass of Water is one of its first success stories.

To Wesson, a county commissioner and Bertie native, the project’s multiyear effort shines new light on the county’s wealth of natural resources.

“It’s about broadening the opportunities and possibilities in a community,” he said. “You have to look at the resources available in a community. This is economic development. This is our brick and mortar.”

Perhaps more than any promotion or lecture could ever do, Tall Glass of Water is showing that climate resilience springs not only from a community’s shared investment in its environment, but also from its shared access to and benefits of that environment.

Its success demonstrates to the entire region that resilience and adaptation to changing climate conditions can enrich communities and open up new economic possibilities, while protecting their environments.

People from all over northeastern North Carolina attended the grand opening of Bertie Beach, said Steve Biggs, Bertie County’s director of economic development, in a recent interview. About 250 people were coming on summer weekends, he said. Swimming, kayaking, canoeing and paddleboarding are all allowed. Eventually, he said, he envisions families traveling to the Outer Banks stopping by for a respite in Bertie.

Biggs explained that the genesis of Tall Glass of Water, or TGOW, was in about 2014, when he was on the lookout for a piece of land for the county to build a boat ramp on the Chowan River. As he was heading into work one day, he said he noticed a “For Sale” sign on some waterfront property.

“I came in and jokingly told the commissioner who happened to be here that morning, ‘So I found your 2 acres for your boat ramp, but it comes with an additional 135 acres,’” Biggs said. As it ended up, the county purchased the 137 acres, he said, and added 10 more later.

Even though Phase I of the TGOW project was stalled by COVID-19 shutdowns, the public outdoor recreation plan has already injected a bolt of energy in talk of ecotourism collaboratives among Albemarle communities.

“We wanted to create a place where folks can spend the day,” now-retired Bertie County manager Scott Sauer said in an interview shortly before the June 29, 2019, opening day. “We think this will be a place that will draw people regionally.”

Not only does the project boast a 3/4-mile stretch of shoreline — 350 feet of which is sandy beach — and shallow, calm water bordered by soundside cliffs where the Chowan River begins, TGOW also includes opportunities for kayaking and canoeing, and will eventually offer a music pavilion, picnic shelters, hiking trails, ramps and walkways, primitive campsites and environmental educational field experiences for students and adults, according to plans. There will also be restoration of the former agricultural land and woodlands, which will help restore the wetlands.

Gov. Roy Cooper announced last September that the TGOW project would receive $500,000 through the North Carolina Parks and Recreation Trust Fund, which awarded $5 million total in grants to fund 16 local parks and recreation projects across the state.

Bertie County’s local match for Phase 1 is $529,591, for a total of $1,029,591.

The county-owned land encompasses Site Y, where archaeologists with the First Colony Foundation recently discovered artifacts that indicate some members of the 1587 Lost Colony relocated there after leaving Roanoke Island.

As luck would have it, a large area of adjacent wilderness was protected around the same time as TGOW was hatched. The new, more than 1,200-acre Salmon Creek State Natural Area was purchased for conservation by the nonprofit Coastal Land Trust, which turned it over to the state in 2019. Altogether, a total of 1,432 acres of undeveloped soundfront land is now protected.

Robin Payne, a project consultant for Tall Glass of Water, said that the citizens provided input into the master plan, which was released in March 2020. The project is being built and funded in phases.

“You know, it really all has to be sustainable, and it has to tie together community, environment and economic development,” she told Coastal Review Online last year. “And so, as we move forward, we’re making sure that we connect those three points.”

Until now, unless a family could go to a private pool or beach, it wasn’t a realistic option to enjoy a refreshing dip — especially for African Americans. There are still plenty of kids from Bertie who have never been to the ocean, Wesson said — the Outer Banks is about a 90-minute drive from Windsor.

Wesson, 70, was born and raised in Bertie County before leaving for college and beginning a 32-year career as a corporate executive in supply-management solutions with Dun and Bradstreet.

He returned home about 15 years ago, and he hasn’t forgotten what it feels like as Black kid who had never had the opportunity to swim or go to a beach. He said he didn’t get to swim until he persuaded his mother to take him at age 12 or so to a biracial pool in Rocky Mount, where one of the lifeguards informally taught him the basics of swimming.

“If you’ve never been in the water, other than a bathtub,” he said, “you’re not sure what’s going to happen to you.”

Bertie Beach is the first public access beach not only in the county, he said, but also along the entire Albemarle Sound. To this day, there is no public pool in the area.

Windsor, Bertie’s county seat, suffered extreme flooding from Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016, but flooding overall has increased in recent years. That realization spurred residents to support efforts to make the town more resilient to flooding.

Biggs, the economic development director, said that more people are elevating their homes and businesses, but he said that, right now, there is not much state or federal help for small businesses. Still, with more people homebound as a result of the pandemic, he said, there is a lot more renovation being done, and the town is continuing to build back.

A farming community by tradition, many residents today work at the Perdue chicken processing plant or at the state correctional facility in Windsor, which houses medium- and maximum-security prisoners. Other folks raise chickens for Perdue or have jobs at Nucor Steel in adjacent Hertford County. The Hope Plantation is in Bertie County, but there are few other tourist attractions. At the same time, there are few chain stores and restaurants.

Bigg noted that more farmers and landowners in the county — as elsewhere in the region — are also leasing their land out for solar farms, which can produce steady income.

Inland coastal counties in North Carolina, especially in the rural northeast corner, are some of the poorest in the state, with losses in population and traditional industries such as timber, farming and fishing, leaving historic old towns with vacant storefronts and entire communities with too few good jobs.

Unlike the Outer Banks’ beach communities that benefit from a billion-dollar annual tourism industry, those communities in the “Inner Banks” — a relatively new term used to describe inland coastal counties —are often overlooked by visitors.

As part of NC LOW efforts, Riggs, the coastal scientist, in 2018 produced a report, “From Rivers to Sounds in the Bertie Water Crescent,” which detailed opportunities for economic development that enhances and protects the environment and culture of the region. That environment encompasses numerous rivers and tributaries with pristine, clear blackwater, filtered by the surrounding peat bogs and wetlands.

In a broader NC LOW report, recommendations include development of five educational and recreational “water hubs” for ecotourism development, with each plan designed for the unique qualities of each hub, but complementary to the whole system.

“All ecosystem components of these different water bodies and their vast swamp forest floodplains,” the report said, “are dominated by numerous forms of wildlife including a vast recreational fisheries resource.”

Within the last 15 years or so, an on-again, off-again proposal to connect the Albemarle port communities with a small ferry operation has been enthusiastically embraced by local governments for its appeal to tourists and as a potential bonanza for economic development. But for various reasons, the idea has never come to fruition. Still, it has never entirely died, and the idea may yet bear fruit.

“Every time anything about it happens, everybody gets excited: ‘When are the boats coming?’” state Rep. Ed Goodwin, R-Chowan, who was also a former director of the state ferry division, said in a recent interview. “I firmly believe that sooner or later, I’ll get it. I believe it will happen.”

A 2018 report “The Harbor Town Project,” a collaborative done by the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School, said that a ferry system serving the Albemarle Sound could “increase tourism and create sustainable jobs and careers” and “is an attractive investment opportunity that can become profitable.”

Ferries could serve ports in Elizabeth City, Edenton, Hertford, Plymouth, Columbia and Kitty Hawk, and possibly expand to Windsor, Williamston, Manns Harbor and Manteo, the report said. As many as 140,000 Outer Banks tourists, the report estimated, could be lured to extend their vacation to hop on Inner Banks ferries.

Potentially, the system could garner about $14 million in tourism revenue and create 94 jobs, with annual ridership projected to be 107,000 in the first year.

“Tourists and visitors would enjoy visiting historic towns and sites, seeing nature, and exploring the IBX region by ferry,” the report said, playing off the ubiquitous OBX abbreviation for Outer Banks.

According to news accounts, plans were being made for a 100-foot private passenger vessel to start ferrying passengers between six towns in May 2020. But with COVID-19 shutdowns in mid-March, everything having to do with tourism ground to a halt.

“Everybody is still enthusiastic and wants it done next week, even if it’s an expansion of the current ferry system,” Goodwin said, referring to the state Ferry Division system on the coast.

Goodwin said that he envisions developing routes that highlight the uniqueness of the Albemarle’s environment, while promoting the strength of the region’s rich culture.

“Everybody loves to ride a boat,” he said. “We’ve got to maximize what we have. And what we have is quaint little towns with a lot of history in them.”

Coastal Review Online Assistant Editor Jennifer Allen contributed to this report.

Next in the series: Learning to live with water

North Carolina sounds are losing seagrass, an indicator of the state’s water quality.

According to a recently published metric report by Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership, or APNEP, there’s been a net loss of at least 5% between 2006 and 2013 of the high-salinity submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV, habitat in the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, which is the second-largest in the United States.

APNEP works to identify, protect, restore and monitor the natural resources of the Albemarle-Pamlico region, which has more than 3,000 square miles of estuarine waters and a land area of 28,000 square miles. Pasquotank, Chowan and Roanoke basins flow into Albemarle Sound, and the Tar-Pamlico and Neuse basins into Pamlico Sound. Rivers of the White Oak basin flow into the southern sounds — Core, Back, and Bogue – of the region.

Also known as seagrass or underwater grasses, this vegetation plays various roles in keeping Albemarle-Pamlico Estuarine System waters healthy by providing habitat, food and shelter for aquatic life as well as absorbing and recycling nutrients and filtering sediment, according to the report.

The seagrasses also act as a barometer of the condition of water. SAV is extremely sensitive to water quality, including nutrient and sediment pollution. The decrease in acreage suggests that the overall health of North Carolina’s estuaries may be worsening, according to APNEP.

“Because these underwater meadows are a public resource that play a vital role in maintaining the diversity, health, and sustainability of North Carolina’s sounds, APNEP has designated seagrass as a ‘valued ecosystem component’ and an ecosystem indicator that should be regularly monitored and assessed,” Dean Carpenter, program scientist for APNEP, told Coastal Review Online.

The data used for the report from two aerial surveys, one from 2006-2007 and the other from 2013, confirm that the state has about 100,000 acres of seagrass, the largest acreage on the east coast, according to APNEP.

However, the overall amount of seagrass meadows in the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary decreased by 5,686 acres or 5.6% between 2006 and 2013, even though the estuary is an ideal habitat for seagrasses to survive.

The seagrass communities in the APNEP region are on the back-barrier shelves of the Outer Banks between the Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge on U.S. 64 that connects Roanoke Island and the Outer Banks, south to Ocracoke Inlet, and on the Outer Banks and mainland shores of Core, Back and Bogue sounds, the report states.

The observed decline in seagrass was more pronounced in the southern end of the study area, which includes Back and Bogue sounds, with a decrease of about 1.5% per year, compared to the central and northern sections of the study area, which declined 0.5% and 1.1% per year, respectively.

It is likely that increased water pollution within the relatively highly populated, densely developed southern region contributed to its higher observed rate of seagrass decline, according to APNEP.

The report cites the state Department of Environmental Quality’s North Carolina Coastal Habitat Protection Plan, which states that major threats to SAV habitat are channel dredging and water quality degradation from excessive nutrient and sediment loading, as well as the emerging threat of accelerated sea level rise, barrier island instability, increasing water temperatures and the expansion of shellfish mariculture.

The data presented in the report cannot be compared to earlier SAV mapping efforts, according to the recent report. While some pre-2000 efforts to map SAV in the APNEP region have been performed, they are limited in scope.

Meanwhile, steps are being taken to rebuild SAV in North Carolina waters.

“One of the leading causes of SAV decline is thought to be decreased water clarity, which inhibits sunlight to reach these aquatic plants,” Carpenter explained.

On the research front, he continued, APNEP is supporting research by University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences faculty involving the refinement of a bio-optical SAV model, which will help determine how different water-quality components such as phytoplankton and turbidity are contributing to decreased water clarity.

“Using this bio-optical model in concert with targeted monitoring data will provide valuable input to future assessments as to where water resource managers need to focus their efforts with respect to mitigating particular constituents, with the intention of improving water clarity,” Carpenter said.

On the policy front, APNEP has a SAV Team that includes partners involved the Coastal Habitat Protection Plan implementation, with SAV being a priority focal habitat during 2020-2021, he said.

“Team partners are also involved in NCDEQ’s Nutrient Criteria Development Plan implementation, with SAV under consideration as a biological endpoint targeted for protection.”

More mapping of seagrass amounts is essential to better understand the current status and long-term trends of SAV in North Carolina. Integration of seagrass mapping with other collaborative environmental monitoring programs is critical to identifying and managing the causes of seagrass decline, APNEP said in a release.

APNEP and partner organizations, including the state Division of Marine Fisheries, coordinated a third study completed in 2019-2020.

The additional survey data being analyzed will help APNEP provide a more complete picture of seagrass status and trends in the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary, and will be used to help develop protection and restoration strategies for the region, including conservation and management actions supported by the North Carolina Coastal Habitat Protection Plan.

The hope is to produce a map by the third quarter of this year, followed by a revised assessment report during the fourth quarter. “Note that such deliverable schedules provide a much more rapid turnaround than before,” he said.

Carpenter said it would be premature to predict what the data will show from the third survey.

“Having documented only two intervals in time roughly six years apart, coupled with a lack of knowledge of SAV baseline (historical) dynamics at the regional scale, a forecast would be premature,” Carpenter explained. “But given the factors influencing SAV condition, it would not surprise me if we discover a continued decline in the resource. An intriguing question when we establish that third point is whether that decline is accelerating, and if so in what areas.”

In the near future, Carpenter said that APNEP is scheduled to produce an initial SAV monitoring plan in the first quarter of this year, “Whose purpose is two-fold: to develop an improved SAV monitoring network that in turn generates targeted data for future SAV assessment reports, and to facilitate the engagement of current and potential partners in that effort.”

The report and an associated interactive map are available online. For more information, visit APNEP’s SAV Monitoring webpage.

The North Carolina King Tides Project organizers are asking the public for photos of king tides — the highest high and lowest low tides of the year – but they also welcome any photos of flooding or high water on the coast.

The King Tides Project is an international citizen-science project to document extreme tides with photos. The photos, taken by the public, can be submitted online and are used to help visualize higher water levels to better understand how sea level rise can impact communities.

Christine Voss, coastal habitat and ecosystem ecologist with University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, explained that these extreme water levels are regular, predictable events caused by astronomical forces, but they offer a glimpse of the future.

“We’ve got the moon, the sun and the Earth in play,” she said, and the extreme tides happen when a full or new moon is closest to the Earth during its elliptical orbit. “These are predictable, known phenomena that the whole earth basically experiences along the same period of time, or very similar period of time,” she said. “We have higher high tides and should have lower low tides as well.”

Additionally, coastal water levels are influenced by wind direction, speed and duration as well as the Gulf Stream’s position and flow rate.

“These predictable water level events, especially the highest high-water levels of the year, can give us an idea of when mean sea levels are higher will look like,” she said, “or basically enable us to visualize what higher sea levels will look like down the road.”

Voss earlier this year made available the 2021 King Tides calendar. There are seven king tides predicted for 2021: April 26-30, May 26-30, June 22-26, July 21-25, Oct. 6-12, Nov. 3-9 and Dec. 2-7. The calendar also indicates periods of higher and lower than usual tides that are not king tides.

“Some of the objectives of the North Carolina program are to really just have people understand, observe and be aware of water levels and water level changes around them,” Voss said.

Those who witness the extreme highs and lows during the daily tidal cycle are encouraged to take a photo and submit it to the project either online or on the What’s Your Water Level? page.

The public can also submit photos of any high or low tide, their nearest tide gauge or North Carolina King Tides Project Benchmark. When taking the photo, try to incorporate a vertically stable object, such as a piling, or ruler, to give a water level reference, organizers ask.

“Anybody can contribute,” Voss said. If a person sees a water-level gauge, they can report those water levels on the app, which she said is fairly easy to use but needs some updates. As long as the person using their phone as a camera has their location finder on, the date, timestamp, and latitude and longitude are automatically filled in.

The app asks questions about flooding, if buildings are being flooded, is it a king tide, or is it just normal water levels. “They can submit what they see on the gauge, and that goes into the NOAA database. And then we’re able to use this data to ask various questions.”

Another way the King Tides Project is trying to get citizens involved is through year-round water-level monitoring. Water-level gauges can be found along the coast to report local and regional water levels. Those who have access to a estuarine waters and can collect information at least once a week can email North Carolina King Tides at nckingtides@gmail.com to find out more about participating.

The King Tides Project International got its start in Australia several years ago to show what sea level rise will look like in the future, Voss said.

The North Carolina King Tides Project was funded through part of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grant Voss said she had from September 2015 to August 2019. The project was part of the Ecological Effects of Sea-Level Rise program, which is now the Effects of Sea-Level Rise program.

“When I had this NOAA grant, I learned of the International King Tides Project and I thought it was one that would definitely benefit our state. So, we’ve been part of that project,” she said.

The international program is focused on looking at those highest tides of the year and looking at those impacts on land, to help us foresee what future sea level rises will look like, she said.

“But because it is so challenging to understand water levels in North Carolina, it is valuable at any time or place to see what the water levels are. Now, those data are accumulating and can benefit scientists and others to better understand our level patterns here in North Carolina,” she said.

The negative impact from climate change that probably affects coastal residents to the greatest degree is rising sea levels, Voss explained. Sea level rise is visible everywhere, but especially in North Carolina.

“Sea levels have risen sufficiently high compared to our infrastructure and often our historic infrastructure,” she said. “Water levels actually come up the storm drains and onto the roads in Beaufort, Morehead City, Carolina Beach — there are probably many other places too.”

In addition to sea level rise, another effect of human-caused climate change is more flash rain events on the coast.

“It’s predicted that here on the North Carolina coast there will be more precipitation each year, but in some areas like rural California and some of the Southwest, they’ll have less rain each year,” Voss said. “And then the other thing that affects us a great deal are the stronger storms, especially hurricanes, but also nor’easters.”

Heat is a form of energy and that heat energy is dissipated through the atmosphere, by way of storms.

“For example, hurricanes. The function of hurricanes is basically to take the heat from the tropical areas toward the poles, so it’s to dissipate that buildup of heat in the tropical region,” she said. “But for some reason it seems that storms have slowed and have also basically gotten physically larger.”

Since August 2019, when the grant ended, Voss has been working with volunteers Sarah Spiegler of the North Carolina Sentinel Site Cooperative and North Carolina Sea Grant, and Dan Tomczak, North Carolina Association of Floodplain Managers, on the King Tides Project.

“Both Miyuki Hino, a UNC-CH economist, and LuAnn Dahlman, NOAA Climate Program Office, value the project and are working with us to find funding to improve NCKT and have it become sustainable,” she added.

Hino is looking at the economic impacts of this nuisance flooding, sometimes called “sunny day” flooding.

“There are times as we see here in North Carolina where businesses actually have to close or people can’t get out their driveways, were difficult to do what we consider normal activities tracks can’t be collected, because water levels are so high,” she said.

Voss said finding a way to sustain the North Carolina King tides Project is a priority, and organizers are studying other states’ programs as models.

Cape Hatteras National Seashore will accept comments until April 3 on proposed improvements at Oregon Inlet Marina, also known as Oregon Inlet Fishing Center, located just north of Oregon Inlet and Marc Basnight Bridge.

The site plan and environmental assessment, or EA, looks at improvements at the 11-acre, 60-slip marina such as addressing aging buildings not adapted to sea level rise, vessel traffic, navigation and fueling challenges, parking shortages, pedestrian and traffic flow and the viewshed, according to the National Park Service.

Comments can be submitted on the park planning website, the preferred method, or mailed to Superintendent, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, 1401 National Park Drive, Manteo, N.C. 27954.

Oregon Inlet Fishing Center LLC is in a 20-year lease from 2018 to 2038 with the National Park Service to manage the marina. Under the proposed action or preferred alternative, the park and lessee,  propose replacing and elevating buildings and wastewater systems, increase parking capacity, enhance traffic and vehicle circulation, modernize the vessel fueling system and fueling docks, construct transient docks, implement stormwater control, construct an open-air pavilion, and perform maintenance dredging.

The EA also looks at a no-action alternative, which would continue the current management of the project area.

The marina has slip rentals for charter fishing boats, headboats and tour boats; booking services for charter fishing and other boats; retail sales; and food and beverage sales. The marina lessee is also authorized to provide nonmotorized watercraft rentals such as kayaks and canoes; special events, such as fishing tournaments; and a children’s play areas.

Jessica Whitehead, formerly chief resilience officer for North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, is now the Joan P. Brock Endowed executive director of the Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience, or ICAR, at Old Dominion University, the university announced Thursday.

No decision has been made on Whitehead’s replacement in the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, a part of the Department of Public Safety, Bridget Munger, communications director, told Coastal Review Monday. Gov. Roy Cooper established the office after Hurricane Florence in 2018 to streamline recovery programming and assistance.

Launched in 2019, the institute at Old Dominion offers an interdisciplinary, research-based approach to address pressing issues for the regional coastal communities, according to the university based in Norfolk, Virginia. President John R. Broderick leads the program to study sea level rise and coastal resilience.

“The creation of the Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience marked the culmination of a decade of work and the fulfillment of a vision shared with my late friend and colleague, Dr. Larry Atkinson, with whom I initiated the University’s coastal resiliency effort,” Broderick said in a statement. “The appointment of Dr. Whitehead as the Joan P. Brock Endowed executive director enables us to build upon Larry’s legacy of helping communities threatened by sea level rise by fostering research, leveraging resources, building connections and leading efforts to turn world-class science into global practice.”

The institute has partnered with the city of Norfolk, which will allow Whitehead to collaborate with city staff and leadership to use Norfolk as a testbed for resilience policies, strategies and technologies.

Whitehead explained that local and state governments all over the country are beyond asking if resilience is important. Now they want to know what to do and how to do it.

“We need innovative and collaborative partnerships between universities and governments to answer this question. I’m so excited to be leading ICAR, because ODU and the City of Norfolk are uniquely positioned to set the national standard for implementing coastal resilience and adaptation solutions,” she said in a release.

Ann Phillips, special assistant to Gov. Ralph Northam for Coastal Adaptation and Protection, said the state looks to Old Dominion University as partner to implement Virginia’s Coastal Resilience Master Planning Framework.

“The hiring of Dr. Jessica Whitehead as the founding director of ICAR is a key step to connecting research with action to build resilience for communities across the commonwealth,”  Phillips said. “In her previous role with the State of North Carolina, Dr. Whitehead was a valuable collaborator as we shared strategies between our two states. I welcome Dr. Whitehead to Virginia and look forward to continued collaborations with her and Old Dominion.”

Norfolk Mayor Kenneth C. Alexander said that Norfolk has been hard at work and leading the way in improving coastal resilience and adaptation, and the city looks forward to working with Jessica Whitehead in her new role.

“We are pushing the envelope in innovation with collaborative partnerships with Old Dominion University’s Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience and we welcome Dr. Whitehead to the team,” he said.

Whitehead earned a doctorate of philosophy in geography and master’s in meteorology from The Pennsylvania State University and a bachelor’s degree in physics with a concentration in meteorology from the College of Charleston. Before joining the North Carolina Office of Resiliency and Recovery in June 2019, she was the coastal communities hazards adaptation specialist for North Carolina Sea Grant, where she assisted coastal users with integrating information about resilience to coastal weather and climate hazards into their decision-making processes.

Whitehead serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Board of Outreach and Pre-College Education and the advisory board for the North Carolina State University Climate and Society master’s program, an adjunct lecturer with the Georgetown University emergency and disaster management professional masters’ program, where she developed and teaches the climate change in emergency and disaster management course.

Until June 2020, Whitehead co-chaired the science and technical advisory committee of the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership. She was a member of the Independent Advisory Committee on Applied Climate and the Sustained National Climate Assessment federal advisory committee.

The College of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences recently released its latest annual U.S. Sea-Level Report Cards, drawing on a collection of data that includes water level analysis from the past 52 years.

“Sea level is rising, but it’s also rising a little bit faster each year.”

Molly Mitchell, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William & Mary

Consistent with preceding years, this year’s collection of trends, projections and explanations shows that in most places, sea levels have been rising in year-to-year comparisons, but the rate is faster than in previous decades.

The institute uses 32 tide gauges placed in ports and harbors across the country, from Wilmington all the way to the banks of Alaska. These tide gauges are maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and they take measurements every six minutes.

But the institute doesn’t simply use the measurements, instead, the researchers use a monthly average. This helps them look past anomalies like storms or fluke weather patterns and see the larger trends.

“Sea level is rising, but it’s also rising a little bit faster each year,” said Molly Mitchell, a marine scientist, assistant professor at the institute and one of the researchers responsible for the report cards. Mitchell said the trend is not surprising, but it is a problem.

The institute’s report cards do three things: they depict sea level changes and trends, forecast future trends and offer explanations of the changes at particular localities.

In some places, the sea level appears to be going down, but that measurement is relative to what the land is doing at the same time.

“There are actually falling rates in places like Alaska,” said Derek Loftis, an assistant research scientist who also works on the report cards. Loftis said there, the decrease is due to shifting tectonic plates, which essentially cancel out a rise in sea level.

The institute releases its report cards annually because, Mitchell said, a yearly update allows the researchers to see changes quickly and not be surprised by the results. They can document not only how much sea level has changed, but also the rate at which it changes.

“The sea level’s been rising as long as we’ve been measuring it. We’ve had tide gauges going back to the mid-1800s in some places,” said Mitchell. “But now that rate of acceleration is becoming very noticeable.”

To a certain extent, Mitchell said, the researchers can forecast trends. But whereas many climate predictions look ahead to 2100, Mitchell said the institute’s researchers limit their outlook to the next 30 years. Predictions must include the assumption that the future will be based on the past, said Mitchell, but because rates of acceleration have changed before, they can change again.

One of the tide gauges in Wilmington shows that the sea level in the area rose about 3 millimeters last year. Not an appreciable amount to the average coastal resident, but, Mitchell said, it’s enough to contribute to problems including frequent flooding, changes in coastal marshland and the need to build things like docks higher than during previous years.

Mitchell describes this continual sea level rise as a “slow emergency.” It isn’t a storm that is going to hit tomorrow, but over time it will cause bigger and bigger problems. But, said Mitchell, the report cards are a tool for planning at the local level.

Skip Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch in Virginia, agreed that adaptation is key for the future. Stiles and his team at Wetlands Watch work toward wetlands preservation and use data from the institute to further their mission. One of the group’s main objectives is adaptation, because the rising sea level is projected to affect a large percentage of Virginia’s coastal wetlands.

Stiles said the institute’s report cards make science accessible to everyone. And because that information is accessible, it can be used to adapt.

“Once you have that information, that locality can begin to plan,” said Stiles.

Wetlands Watch’s efforts to preserve coastal wetlands involve policy advocacy as well as street-level solutions, including the development of an app, called Sea Rising Solutions. This app takes a citizen-scientist approach to mapping out where flooding events occur.

Stiles said the project is as much about getting data to flood modelers as it is about engaging the whole community in the sea level rise conversation. Widespread community knowledge can enable developers and legislators to make adaptive decisions regarding sea level rise.

Stiles said adaptation planned for years in advance can help coastal residents deal with the “slow emergency” headed their way.

NAGS HEAD — As one of the Outer Banks’ earliest tourism destinations, the town of Nags Head has dedicated considerable resources to protecting its more than 10 miles of ocean beaches, where millions of visitors flock every summer. Now the town is turning its attention to its less dramatic backyard: the 17.3 miles of Roanoke Sound shoreline that has been quietly eroding away, or periodically flooding, in numerous spots.

With a recent $75,000 grant awarded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the proposed Nags Head Estuarine Shoreline Management Plan would develop a broad strategy to address challenges related to sea level rise and storm damage while balancing private property protections, ecosystem and public health concerns and recreational access.

“We didn’t want to be in a situation where we’re doing projects in a vacuum,” Michael Zehner, the town’s planning director, said in an interview. “We want to do it more comprehensively.”

Zehner said the town board agreed Dec. 2 during its regular meeting to provide the $75,000 local match. After accounting for in-kind work, he added, the actual dollar amount for the matching funds would be $64,500.

Rain garden in works at town hall

Also during the meeting, the board approved construction of a rain garden at the town’s administrative building off U.S. 158 and N.C. 12. The garden would be situated between the parking lot and the road, which is often plagued by standing water after rainstorms. It will include a gutter system at the front entrance of the building and an extension pipe to carry water through the natural rain garden, which will be planted with native plants.

According to information in the grant request, the shoreline plan’s objectives include conducting a biogeographical inventory of the current and historical shoreline and to identify best management practices, uses and policy. The plan would also investigate legal and regulatory issues as well as examine the potential future impacts from rising seas.

“The Estuarine Shoreline Management Plan will be made up of a series of both traditional and innovative design approaches,” according to the town project overview. “While a Shoreline Management Plan can be viewed as a more traditional, planning tool, this project proposes to use innovative approaches within the plan.”

As just a tiny part of the massive Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system — the nation’s second largest behind the Chesapeake system — Nags Head’s sound shoreline is subject to similar forces as its beachfront. Wave-action, currents and sea level rise are all factors that influence estuarine shoreline erosion and accretion, just in a sneakier, less rip-roaring way. It is not unusual, for instance, for a person to stroll along the sound one day and come back after an overnight storm to find the beach is gone, leaving only exposed roots and downed trees.

Dramatic erosion is evident along the west side of Jockey’s Ridge State Park, where the vegetated backside of the park ends along the beach that stretches north to the backside of Nags Head Woods.

On the south end of the town, the Soundside Event Site, owned by Nags Head and the Dare County Tourism Board, is wide open to the sound, but does not appear as eroded. Potentially, the plan could include constructing a boardwalk along the water, Zehner said.

“That fits in nicely with this plan,” he said. “It would be sited in a such a way that’s going to serve to protect and reinforce what we’re doing to preserve and protect the shoreline along the sound.”

Most of the year-round families in Nags Head live in subdivisions on the west side of the town, meaning on the sound side. And anyone who lives close enough to the sound knows that it can look like a bathtub in the morning, and with a shift in weather, become a raging river by afternoon. Although soundfront homes and roads are often protected from sound tide by bulkheads, rip-rap or sand-trapping groins, those measures can cause more erosion down the shoreline. For that reason, Zehner said, there has been a lot more interest from property owners in constructing living shorelines, which use natural measures such as oyster reefs and marsh to buffer wave action.

“All of this is interconnected,” he said. “We want to make sure we’re not creating missed opportunities for the town and the stakeholders.”

Once the town selects an engineering consultant — likely by May — a plan will be developed, Zehner said. If all goes as anticipated, the plan should be completed by 2022. But before then, the town will hold meetings with the public to get input and to keep everyone informed. Also, additional funds will be required to implement the plan’s action items.

A working group of stakeholders would be established to guide the consultant during the planning process, which will include a scientific analysis of the erosion rate and the suitability for natural shoreline stabilization projects. It would represent a diverse range of interests and
and backgrounds including, Nags Head staff, the Coastal Studies Institute (CSI), The Nature Conservancy, the North Carolina Coastal Federation, large estuarine shoreline property owners (Jockey’s Ridge, National Park Service, The Village Golf Course), and individual property owner representation.

The Coastal Studies Institute has volunteered to collect and analyze bathymetric data for the Roanoke Sound.

Reide Corbett, executive director of the Coastal Studies Institute, said that the institute already has numerous datasets available on estuarine shorelines that CSI digitalized from previous state research projects and survey maps. He said that CSI is willing to help as much as possible, within its budget and time restraints.

“We want the science we’re doing to always be impactful for our communities,” Corbett said.

This is the ninth installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

One of the most repulsive things about post-storm cleanup involves wading through fetid water filled with raw sewage.

That plight is not exclusive to post-hurricane recovery — fecal pathogens in leaks and spills now often pollute stormwater after heavy rains.

Climate change is coming for our backyard septic tanks, and eventually, our municipal waste treatment systems.

“In the long run, sea level rise is going to overrun all of this,” Lawrence Cahoon, a biology professor and researcher at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, said in a recent interview. “I think if we’re going to live on the coast for any length of time, sewer systems are going to let us down and septic systems are going to fail. They already are.”

Septic systems are widely used in coastal North Carolina to dispense with human waste, our humble byproduct and vector of disease. But higher groundwater, more rain deluges and epic flooding from intense storms have been causing systems to leak or become inoperable.

Those same climate forces also risk compromising the aged and deteriorating municipal sewer systems that service mostly urban communities.

“The solution is to fix the system,” Cahoon said. “Generally, the problem is people don’t want to spend the money to do it.”

Costs for public wastewater treatment plant systems are usually borne by the local government, which cover the expense through bonds and hookup fees to the property owner. Some governments, such as Brunswick County’s, have water and sewer systems operated through a separate authority.

In rural Tyrrell County, a northeast county with a high poverty rate, septic systems in the wetlands-dominated communities had been failing for years. Thanks to a grant from the state Clean Water Management Trust Fund, about 65% of the county’s communities have been hooked up to a complex sewer system that has a pump and tank at each property, said county manager David Clegg.

The county completed that first phase of construction in the early 2000s. A second phase was completed in 2011 and a third in 2018. The next phase is in the planning stages and county officials are seeking funding.

Since gravity systems aren’t an option, the waste has to be pumped miles away to a treatment plant. So far, the system has cost about $20 million and needs about $10 million more to be completed, Clegg said.

Tyrrell, ranked one of the most economically distressed counties in the state, could never afford such a costly system without help. But wastewater treatment plants are a fiscal challenge even for wealthier communities.

“Central sewer is hideously expensive,” Cahoon said, “and if something goes wrong, you can’t afford to fix it.”

Older infrastructure typically includes cast-iron pipes, which tend to corrode, he said. As long as the joints are sound, sewer pipes made from PVC are durable and reliable.

Upgrades to corroding systems, however, can be cost-prohibitive, and full replacement would be more so.

“There’s not enough money in the world to do this,” Cahoon said.

Along with Marc Hanke at University of Houston Honors College, Cahoon researched the effects of inflow and infiltration, or I&I, on sewer plants. Inflow is water coming from above ground, such as a manhole. Infiltration is groundwater seeping through breaches, such as cracks in pipes.

One impetus for the research, he said, was the lack of understanding about the impacts of higher mean sea level on the systems: how much saltwater intrusion was evident? What is happening with tidal influences? What effects are heavy rain and higher groundwater levels having on flow and capacity?

According to the study published in 2017 in Water Science & Technology, I&I can cause system overflows and degradation of systems and impair water quality. The research analyzed system flow responses to rainfall and temperature at 93 gravity-collection wastewater treatment plants in eastern North Carolina.

Data on hurricanes was purposely not included.

“I wanted to know what’s going on, on a regular basis,” Cahoon said.

Over two years, the research looked at coastal water gauges and daily tides, as well as data on rates of sea level rise, temperatures, and cumulative and daily rainfall amounts.

Since there’s a limit in how much to design for, even the newest plants are not immune to spills during big storms that overwhelm the system. For instance, a 2-inch rainstorm can produce about 40% extra flow.

“So if that 40% carries you over the capacity of the plant,” Cahoon said, “you probably will have spills, or poor treatment, or both.”

State regulators recognize that the systems’ design can’t accommodate huge volumes of rain and allow up to 1,000 gallons to be spilled before a reporting requirement kicks in.

Often, Cahoon said, the property owners’ pipes that hook up to the public system need repair or replacement.

“The average owner has no clue” about their condition, Cahoon said, adding: “The connector pipes are probably half the system.”

The study found that heavy rainfall, temperature — likely as effects of seasonal variation in groundwater levels — and sea level, expressed as a day’s highest tide, all had significant effects on 90% of the wastewater treatment systems in coastal North Carolina.

“These collective results demonstrate the potential vulnerability of coastal wastewater collection and treatment systems to breaches in system integrity that allow extraneous flows, primarily through groundwater elevation, to drive further infrastructure degradation and environmental pollution,” Cahoon and Hanke wrote.

Last year, another team of researchers began a study, Wastewater Infrastructure Tipping Points: Prioritizing Implementation of Climate Adaptation Plans in Decentralized Systems, focused on septic systems, including single residential tanks as well as “package” systems, onsite treatment plants that serve larger facilities or a group of properties in a neighborhood. Extreme rainfall and high-tide flooding, as well as rising sea levels, have threatened the function and effectiveness of septic systems, especially on the coast, according to the abstract.

The two-year study was funded by a grant of about $300,000 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office.

Working in partnership with the towns of Nags Head and Folly Beach, South Carolina, the team of researchers from North Carolina State University, North Carolina Sea Grant, East Carolina University, South Carolina Sea Grant, the Coastal Studies Institute and the University of Georgia will evaluate existing decentralized, or onsite, wastewater treatment systems and future alternative technology.

The project builds on prior research and will seek input from septic industry experts.

Septic on the Outer Banks has been compromised not only by the higher rate of sea level rise on the northeast coast and its vulnerability to tropical storms, but also by extraordinarily heavy rainstorms that have been happening in recent years.

As a result, there is a higher water table, said Michael O’Driscoll, associate professor at ECU’s Department of Coastal Studies.

O’Driscoll, who also works at the Coastal Studies Institute, said there should be at least 1½ feet of dry soil under a septic system to allow proper drainage and dispersal of nutrients. At the very least, there is less of that space available now, especially in older systems.

“Since the 1980s, it looks like for Dare County that the groundwater level has risen about a foot,” O’Driscoll said. “Some systems may have less soil to treat the waste, some systems have higher groundwater.”

There is also a shorter-term effect from a big storm. One event that dumped 7 inches of rain temporarily raised the groundwater table by 4 feet.

It’s hard to say how long the systems will continue to function, O’Driscoll added. But if it’s wet all the time, septic will fail.

The researchers will review available waste treatment technologies, economic analysis and legal requirements to help communities evaluate suitable climate adaptation strategies. In addition, they developed survey and interview questions to gather input from industry operators and experts.

Interviews will also be conducted with county health departments, which are only required to handle the initial state permit or reports of health concerns.

“That part of our project is to really get a better understanding of the records, permitting and monitoring,” said Jane Harrison, coastal economics specialist with North Carolina Sea Grant.

Two million households in North Carolina use septic systems, and more than one in five nationwide, she said.

At the end of the project, Harrison said, there will be a report with proposals, and hopefully a website to provide public information.

It’s not an issue that people are clamoring to learn about, Harrison said, but the public has become more interested in climate change. And they will soon understand the effect that climate is having on their toilet flushing.

“Septic has been kind of missing piece of the puzzle,” she said.

Still, with climate change happening, it’s become an issue up and down the East Coast: Miami, Florida, and Rhode Island each have done studies on how to address the problem.

“When the population density gets high, the septic systems just can’t work,” Cahoon said.

Before central sewer was available in Brunswick County, he said, Sunset Beach had as many as 10 septic tanks per acre. Restaurants in Calabash were forced to have their septic tanks pumped out every day. When infrastructure was replaced about 10 years ago, it was found that one restaurant’s septic was piped directly into the creek, and the post office’s was straight-piped into the Cape Fear River.

“But this is not unusual,” Cahoon said. “You read horror stories.”

Even though revulsion for the subject has made sewage treatment an “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” issue, Cahoon believes that the public is starting to express more concern about related pollution.

“I think there’s more attention now,” he said. “I think there’s been a shift to some degree. Sewage is like that — until it’s in your face, you tend to ignore it.”

But hurricanes and their effect on sewage treatments, he said, have “whacked us on the head.” Solutions are likely to be complicated and expensive.

“It’s going to take some leadership from people fairly high up,” Cahoon said. “The regulators are not going to do that on their own. Their job is regulation, not innovation.”

North Carolina can expect large changes in climate by the end of the century, much larger than any time in the state’s history, and it’s very likely that temperatures here will increase substantially during all seasons unless the global increase in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere is stopped.

Temperatures warmer than historic norms, disruptive flooding from rising seas, increasingly intense and frequent rainstorms and more and more intense hurricanes are “virtually certain” in the next 80 years.

That’s according to an independent, peer-reviewed report released Wednesday by North Carolina State University’s North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, or NCICS. As a result of hotter temperatures and increased humidity, the state can face public health risks, more frequent and more intense heavy rains from hurricanes and other weather systems, increased flooding in coastal and low-lying areas and severe droughts that are more intense and that will increase the risk of wildfires.

“Increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are most likely causing much, if not all, of the warming that we have observed,” said David R. Easterling, one of the report’s 15 authors, during a press conference Wednesday.

The institute is a multidisciplinary team of experts collaborating in climate and scientific research. The report was assembled, reviewed and revised over the course of eight months beginning in July 2019 and was prepared in response to a request from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality as part of the state’s response to Gov. Roy Cooper’s 2018 Executive Order 80.

While there were no real surprises in the report, which looks at observed and projected climate change in North Carolina and whose findings are consistent with the U.S. National Climate Assessment, it brings the science to the state level and highlights the specific challenges ahead for North Carolina.

The researchers said 2009-2018 was the warmest 10-year period on record in North Carolina.

“It’s about a half degree warmer than the warmest decade in the 20th century, the 1930s, the Dust Bowl era,” Easterling said, adding that as the report was being finalized, 2019 turned out to be the warmest year on record for North Carolina and the second warmest globally.

Also, the past four years saw the largest number of heavy precipitation events on record for the state.

So what does it all mean for folks in coastal North Carolina?

The researchers said government officials should take the report into consideration when planning for new infrastructure, such as roads that will have to be designed to different standards to withstand the climactic changes. Individuals can also do their part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations.

State Climatologist Kathie Dello, also an author of the report, suggested that North Carolina residents should talk about the report with their friends, families and neighbors.

“There are so many folks who don’t think about climate all day like we do on the panel, and I’ve heard a number of times from folks, ‘This is the first time someone’s talked to me about climate change or projections or what I should expect in my town.’ So, have the conversation. I think it’s really effective and people trust you as a messenger because they know you, they like you and trust you about other things,” Dello said.

“There are so many folks who don’t think about climate all day like we do on the panel, and I’ve heard a number of times from folks, ‘This is the first time someone’s talked to me about climate change or projections or what I should expect in my town.’ So, have the conversation.”

Kathie Dello, State Climatologist

Reide Corbett, director at the Coastal Studies Institute, dean of Integrated Coastal Programs for East Carolina University, and another author of the report, said coastal residents should be thinking about more sustainable growth, not just after disasters such as Hurricane Dorian’s flooding on Ocracoke Island, but also as high-tide, or “sunny day” flooding becomes more and more an everyday occurrence.

“That’s something that, locally, many of the communities need to start thinking about, preparing for and responding to likely after an event,” he said. “I think Ocracoke is a good example where, as they’re rebuilding, they’re considering the storm that they just had and rebuilding to new standards, not rebuilding to what it was in the past.”

Different responses may be necessary along the North Carolina coast, depending on where a community lies.

Sea level is rising 1.8 inches per decade at Duck on the northern Outer Banks, but only at a rate of 0.9 inches per decade at Wilmington on the southern coast because land along the northern coast is settling or subsiding more rapidly.

Also, the southern coast of North Carolina experiences more tropical storms and stronger hurricanes than the northern part of the state does, said Rick Luettich, director of the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City and a report author.

“That trend in and of itself will certainly be sustained,” he said, adding that as global mean sea level rise accelerates, the differences will be increasingly less obvious.

“As sea level rise starts going up faster and faster, that difference will become smaller and smaller,” Luettich said.

While the latest report deals mainly with the science of climate change, a risk assessment and resiliency plan are under review. Subsequent reports will deal with the consequences, such as the effects on agriculture, fisheries and other natural and economic resources and how to address those issues.

The authors agreed that examining the challenges specific to the state is an important step.

“The idea that science is being incorporated into policy in North Carolina is a huge step forward, particularly from a sea level and inundation perspective,” Corbett said. “I’m very pleased with the direction that we’re going and this report is the first step for North Carolina and really using it in developing science-based policy.”

Learn more

• Read a “plain language” summary
• Read the full report

National parks on the North Carolina coast are some of the most threatened by rising seas in the nation, but in the context of wildfires, droughts, invasive species and excessive rain events plaguing the parks in the interior states, coastal woes are hardly the only problem the National Park Service is facing from climate change.

“The issue is challenging us like we’ve never been challenged before,” said Cat Hawkins Hoffman, the agency’s national adaptation coordinator, Climate Change Response Program.

“We have a whole bunch of historic structures that are highly vulnerable.”

Dave Hallac, Superintendent National Parks of Eastern North Carolina

A report the program released in May projected sea level rise for 118 park units and storm surge projections for 79 of those parks. Of those studied, the parks in the Southeast region, which includes North Carolina, were projected to be at risk of the highest storm surges. The Outer Banks parks were projected to experience the highest sea level rise by 2100.

But park managers at Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras national seashores have already taken steps to protect their parks from future impacts.

“This confirms to me that we ought to be paying a lot of attention to sea level rise,” said Dave Hallac, superintendent of National Parks of Eastern North Carolina. “The first thing we have done, even in advance of this report, we needed site-specific information. … We have a whole bunch of historic structures that are highly vulnerable.”

Curiously, the shoreline near Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills was named as the park threatened by the highest projected sea level rise. But of all the Outer Banks parks, it is the highest and driest. That is because the projection looked at the level of rising water, but did not look at local topography.

Hallac said it explains why park managers need to also tap all available data to understand how the local landscape will respond to storm surge and higher seas. To that end, a separate report done by Tom Allen, a geography professor and researcher at Old Dominion University, looked specifically at elevations and other details of historic buildings in Cape Hatteras National Seashore to help the park determine mitigation and proactive management strategies to protect resources.

“We learned that Bodie Island Lighthouse keepers’ quarters is one of the most threatened structures,” Hallac said. “That helps us prioritize.”

Similar studies have also been done to look at protection of cultural resources in Portsmouth Village and at the lighthouse village at Cape Lookout National Seashore.

Although sea level rise is an obvious stressor the park system has to address, Hawkins Hoffman said, the report – compiled mostly from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, GIS and the 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data – can help managers assess the threat to their parks. More than a quarter of park units – and their resources – are in coastal regions, she added.

“That helps us hone, even more to focus, our efforts on areas that have the most exposure,” Hawkins Hoffman said in a recent interview. “This is high-level view that simply identifies where exposure is higher.”

Initially entangled in controversy about references to human factors in climate change, the final report does not dance around the accepted science behind the issue. Despite doubts about climate change expressed by some in the current administration, she said the National Park Service, where she has worked for 37 years, has not been obstructive and is moving forward to address the effects of climate change.

“We’re working with all the parks,” she said. “This administration does not have the same approach as the last administration, and that is life. Regardless of the approach, this issue is not going away. It is something we’ll be dealing with for decades, even centuries.”

Considering that cultural resources in 415 park units number in the tens of thousands, ranging from archaeological sites at Jamestown to the Statue of Liberty to the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, all situated in locations under various levels of vulnerability exacerbated by climate change – wildfires, melting permafrost, flooding, insect infestation, algal blooms, intense storms, shoreline erosion, saltwater intrusion – the complexity of their protection can be overwhelming to contemplate.

Not to mention that the agency is also the designated steward of cultural resources through numerous programs including the National Register of Historic Places, the National Historic Landmark Program and American Battlefield Protection Program, among others.

“We are certainly aware of issues in the coastal zone,” said Marcy Rockman, climate change coordinator for cultural resources. “But then I am also very concerned and have been for some time with what is happening with the interior of the country.”

Rockman said there are about 95,000 archaeological sites, thousands of historic structures and hundreds of cultural landscapes – a combination of built and natural environments – identified nationally.

Rockman, currently the sole staff member overseeing cultural resources among the 15 or so staff in the agency’s Climate Change Response Program, said that the program is working with local park managers and academic and community partners to develop vulnerability assessments and a list of priorities for each park.

“I like to think about it as a big family, and all the kids need new shoes,” Rockman said. “We try to figure out which kid needs shoes first, and what type of shoe.”

The first pilot program is close to being completed at Cape Lookout, she said, and the goal is to tweak the model so it can utilized nationwide as a tool for park managers.

Coastal Review Online reached out to Cape Lookout Superintendent Jeff West, but he was on leave and could not be reached for comment.

Many park assets are experiencing threats, Rockman said, but determining which are most threatened is challenging because documentation is lacking to track changes.

How fast are changes happening? How is it changing? Is it moldy, crumbling, flooded, cracking? Sometimes changes are happening, but it takes a while to notice. For instance, one park’s annual lilac festival no longer coincided with the blooming of the lilacs.

Western Carolina University in Cullowhee is working with the park service on assessing vulnerability of park facilities, Rockman said. Subsequent studies are also planned to look at vulnerabilities of natural resources and cultural resources.

Even as debate is ongoing on what measures to take, when to take them and how to pay for them, Hawkins-Hoffman said the park service is working to coordinate the best approach to protect its resources in the future.

“We all need to be aware of the magnitude of this issue,” she said. “It’s so critical to be pulling together in a way that focuses on what people are experiencing, so we can work together on this issue as a community.”

Learn More

• Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy

HARKERS ISLAND – There are 15 photographs on display in the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center exhibition gallery. Dynamic images of coastal North Carolina. Some taken from the sky, some an abstract detail, and others a glimpse into everyday life.

The voices of men and women sharing their stories about their changing environment fill the room from a speaker overhead.

This is “Rising: Perspectives of Coastal Change.” A collaborative multimedia exhibition that looks at first-hand accounts of climate-related change.

The exhibition features the photography of Baxter Miller and 16 oral histories collected by Ryan Stancil, content creator, and cultural anthropologist Barbara Garrity-Blake. Team members also include museum Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher, Alton Ballance, Ben Cahoon, Stan Riggs, Susan West, Jessica Whitehead and Margaret Cheatham Williams. The traveling exhibition will be on display in the museum gallery through Sept. 30.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum is bringing together fishermen, scientists and community representatives Tuesday, Aug. 14, for a “Change: Community Conversation” to talk about relationship with place, the role of change in the region and its impact today and the future.

Check-in for the event is from 9 to 10 a.m., giving time for fellowship and to view the exhibition. Sessions begin at 10 a.m. and will feature community leaders and government representatives, scientists, fishermen and visitors from the Chesapeake Bay to share their observations of changes, the effect of these changes and what adaptive measures have been taken. Organizers ask that attendees register for lunch planning purposes.

Partners and organizations that will have resource tables present include North Carolina Sea Grant, North Carolina Coastal Federation, the University of North Carolina Coastal Resilience Center, the Division of Coastal Management, the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership, or APNEP, and others.

Stancil explained that this North Carolina Sea Grant research project focuses on Beaufort, Dare, Carteret, Hyde, Tyrrell and Washington counties.

“The oral histories explore people’s experiences with change, and their thoughts about it, thoughts about their future and the ways people adapt,” Stancil said. “And this is the outreach component, we didn’t want to just do research to better understand the perspectives of change, we wanted to build some sort of tool around it for communities to use however they see fit.”

He said that the exhibition launched in Chapel Hill earlier this year at UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South.  “Then we wanted to bring it back home to the communities and Core Sound is the first venue.”

Miller explained that each of the 15 photographs is paired with a clip from the oral histories that were collected specifically for the “Rising” exhibition.

“The whole ‘Rising’ project is occurring in the context of a region that is defined by change, period. And always has been,” Stancil said, citing the abandoned Diamond City on Shackleford Banks as an example. “They had to leave because of the way that environment was changing, and storms. It’s a conversation that happens in that context.”

Stancil explained that the oral history participants shared their experiences on adaptive measures and general observations, such as one person spoke about the beach in front of Cape Hatteras before it was moved, others share their experiences with flooding and farmers talk about the way saltwater intrusion caused by sea level rise affects agriculture and the way they’ve adapted.

Miller said that the catalyst for the project rests in a family story.

“My dad’s side of the family is from Buxton, and they’ve been there since the 1700s or earlier,” she began. “So my grandfather had six siblings and one was the postmistress of Buxton, Maude White. She is a famed folklore character of Buxton and she had a piece of land where the Buxton motels are at the time.

“Maude had this piece of land, oceanfront — we haven’t been able to trace how many acres it was but somewhere in the neighborhood of 7-10 acres — that she offered to my grandfather for $3,000 and he said to her, ‘Maude, that land is valueless, no fool would ever build on the beach,’” she said. This was in the ’70s and now there’s nowhere to build.

Miller said that stuck with her, her whole life.

Miller continued on how “Rising” came to be. In 2016, Garrity-Blake and Amspacher asked her to take photographs to be included in their book, “Living at The Water’s Edge: A Heritage Guide to the Outer Banks Byway.” Miller took a series of aerial photos for the book along N.C. 12, Cape Lookout National Seashore and Core Banks.

“I was just struck by the way that this place that I have spent most of my life, that I have such a relationship with, that I have such family heritage ties to, I was just struck by the way it looked from the air and how fragile it seems, but the banks prevail,” Miller said. “Seeing it from the air gave this whole new perspective of rising above the surface, rising above very complex narratives of change that people that live here have been dealing with for generations.”

Stancil continued that after hearing stories from Miller’s father, he became curious about what other stories are out there. “What do people think about this change?”

Stancil said “Rising” opened in late June in conjunction with Core Sound’s “Harm’s Way” exhibit focusing on storms that occurred over the last century, “Which is nice, the two work really well together, because ‘Harm’s Way’ is about storms and adapting and being resilient and our response to natural disaster. The two have a nice conversation together.”

Miller said that though the photos are abstract, “We wanted someone to come into this exhibition and their curiosity to be piqued at the micro level. So it’s a nontraditional approach to even depicting these issues. We really wanted to change the conversation in a way that drew different people in to thinking about planning for it and talking about it,” Miller said.

Stancil added that the hope with the exhibit is that the conversation turns to the future.

Amspacher said that Core Sound has been part of the groundwork over the past several years that has evolved into “Rising” and it has been a meaningful experience.

“Baxter’s striking photography has brought into focus the changing world we live in but seldom see in a larger context of change. This exhibition has helped bring this conversation to our communities in a very ‘close to home’ way that has made all of us more aware of what is happening around us,” Amspacher said.

“This ‘Community Conversation’ is designed to be just that; a conversation across communities who are already feeling these impacts, already adapting – as they always have – to the forces around them,” she continued. “We are looking forward to hearing from all those who share a stake in this changing world where land and water give and take.”

A Community Collaborative Research Grant, a program of North Carolina Sea Grant in partnership with the William R. Kenan Jr. Institute for Engineering, Technology and Science at N.C. State University funded this project.

Learn More

• “Rising: Perspectives of Coastal Change”
• Change: A Community Conversation Registration
• Excerpt from Oral History with Dawn T.
• Excerpt from Oral History with Gabby C.

NORTHEASTERN N.C. – Not quite two years ago, the heavens opened over a sandy strand of land wedged between ocean and sound, drowning yards and roads and buildings – everything – in an epic deluge. In a span of three days in September 2016, more than 13 inches of rain fell on Ocean Sands, a subdivision on the northern edge of the Outer Banks in Corolla.

And that was before Hurricane Matthew blew through the next month and dumped another 18 inches. Hurricane Maria dumped more rain on the saturated ground last year. Not to mention Ernesto and Joaquin before then.

“I had crabs in my cul-de-sac,” said Linda Garczynski, recalling her Ocean Sands neighborhood during one storm.

But it’s not just the increase in monsoon-like rains in recent years that is challenging coastal areas in North Carolina. As water tables are getting higher and shorelines on both ocean and sound sides are eroding faster, tidal flooding is getting worse.

According to a report released this month by the Union of Concerned Scientists, by 2045 more than 15,000 properties in North Carolina, currently home to about 23,000 residents and valued at about $4 billion, are at risk of chronic inundation – that is, 26 or more times per year.  Those properties, the report said, today contribute about $25 million in annual property tax revenue.

Accompanying the report online are interactive maps that show how many homes are at risk by state, community and ZIP code. The maps also show the current property value, estimated population, and the property tax base at risk.

In the lower 48 states, about 31,000 coastal homes with a market value totaling about $117.5 billion in today’s dollars will be subject to chronic flooding by 2045, the report said.

Thirty years from now, more than 700 commercial properties, today worth about $753 million, would also be plagued by frequent flooding, the report said. Valuable coastal property on the Outer Banks and northeastern North Carolina would be especially vulnerable, with about 2,000 homes combined in Nags Head and Hatteras at risk. Numerous communities with low wealth would have fewer resources to address the challenges. For instance, the overwhelming majority of homes in the tiny community of Alligator in Tyrrell County, one of the state’s poorest counties, would be exposed to frequent flooding.

The recent Union of Concerned Scientists report on the potential impact of sea level rise, using maps and data from, among others, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Zillow, a company that collects real estate data, is taking a deeper look into the potentially profound consequences of chronic tidal flooding impacts: increased property damage, loss of tax revenue, decreased property values, lower tax bases, flooded roads and bridges and dislocation of entire communities.

“We wanted to capture when sea level rise is going to cause such a disruption in people’s lives that they’ll make really dramatic changes,” said Erika Spanger-Siegfried, senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate and energy program.

Chronic tidal flooding, sometimes called nuisance flooding, is not new, but it’s starting to get more attention, especially in South Florida, she said.

In some places such as New Orleans and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, people have already made modest adjustments in their lives, such as having an alternate vehicle, one they don’t mind exposing to saltwater, to use on flooded days.

The goal of the report is to encourage communities to start talking about flooding before it becomes a constant crisis, Spanger-Siegfried said.

“This is not something an individual, or frankly a community, can cope with alone,” she said. “The critical thing is we need to know our risks and start to do things … in the time that we have before chronic flooding is really upon us.”

There are choices, depending on the degree of risk, that include the following:

• Defend – bulkheads, levies, living shorelines, beach nourishment, sea walls.
• Accommodate – buildings on pilings, bridged areas, no living quarters on ground floors.
• Retreat – relocate out of flood zones, move to higher ground or leave the area altogether.

“It gets hard when it comes to specifics, because each community is different,” she said. “That’s another reason to start to get a handle on the problem and begin to get ahead of the situation.”

In the process of gathering feedback earlier this year about stormwater flooding in Currituck County, Duke University graduate student Amber Halstead for her master’s thesis found that people’s perception of flooding risks correlates with their experience with flooding much more than the designation on flood maps. Although most people she spoke with recognize the value of flood insurance, she said some say they will drop flood insurance when the new flood maps go into effect because of the high cost.

In a recent telephone interview, Halstead said that about 500 people responded to an online survey and she spoke to others at several community meetings held throughout the county this past winter.

“I do think the majority of respondents do think the flooding is getting worse,” she said. “I don’t think they had specific solutions. They just know that something needed to happen.”

At Ocean Sands, the bowl-like typography of the neighborhood makes it even more subject to flooding than others in the barrier island community. But the challenge is not just that the deluges seem to be more frequent and intense. It’s also that there are more impermeable surfaces and the water table is higher.

Ocean Sands, one of the oldest subdivisions in Corolla, is working with the county and an engineering firm to develop a long-term storm management plan.

“There’s a lot of construction, a lot of cement,” said Larry Landrum, an Ocean Sands homeowner. It’s the over-building. Everybody wants to live on the Outer Banks.”

Front page featured photo of the oceanfront in Nags Head after Hurricane Matthew turned offshore, Oct. 9, 2016, by Catherine Kozak.

Left: Antarctica actually contains two ice sheets: the East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets. The studies released last month concern the glaciers that flow into the Amundsen Sea, the small embayment below the Antarctic Peninsula in West Antarctica. Illustration: NASA. Right: The six glaciers in the first study are shown on a close-up map of the Amundsen Sea sector. The second study focuses on one of them, the Thwaites Glacier, which drains a large area of West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Illustration: Eric Rignot

Two scientific studies on melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were published recently, driving a firestorm of sensationalist headlines in the New York Times, National Geographic, CNN and other websites. Dire warnings of unstoppable glacier melt and runaway sea level rise abound. Is this all media hype? If you read no further, the answer is no — this is real.

What’s Going On?

Three major ice sheets remain on Earth today: Greenland, West Antarctica and East Antarctica. Of these, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, though smallest by volume, is considered the most vulnerable to future melting and collapse. This is because the outer margin of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sits on bedrock that lies below sea level, unlike the other major ice sheets. Such a “marine-based” ice sheet is sensitive to melting both on the top of the ice, from above-freezing atmospheric temperatures, and below the ice, from incursion of high-salinity ocean water.

Today, the flow of warm (relative to ice), salty ocean water beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is constrained by the contact between the ice sheet and the ground beneath the ice. This is referred to as the “grounding line.” The position of the grounding line relative to the topography beneath the ice sheet is critical to determining the stability of marine-based ice sheets in response to warming.

Specifically, if the grounding line is located on a topographic upslope or ridge, the ice sheet is stable after initial retreat, because thinning and retreat of the ice sheet in response to warming is compensated by a shallower grounding line depth. If the grounding line is located behind a ridge or on a downslope, there is no topographic “catch” for the grounding line, so the ice sheet is unstable and will quickly melt and retreat.

The studies found that the grounding lines of the glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctic Ice Sheet have rapidly retreated. Melting from below causes the ice sheet to thin until it is light enough to float. Illustration: Bethan Davies/AntarcticGlaciers.org

Why does this matter? Glaciers from the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica contain enough ice to raise sea level by four feet, and have rapidly melted over the past two decades. The two scientific studies published recently provide complementary approaches to addressing the susceptibility of these glaciers to future melting. Eric Rignot, an Earth science professor at the University of California-Irvine and lead author of one study, and his colleagues provide an updated analysis of the topography of the bedrock underneath glaciers in the Amundsen Sea. The authors find that rapid retreat of these glaciers observed over the past 20 years is closely tied with elevation of the bedrock underneath the ice. Importantly, improved imaging of the bedrock underneath the current glaciers shows that, inward of the ridge upon which the grounding lines are presently located, there are no major topographic ridges or other features that may compensate for a thinning ice sheet. If these glaciers continue to melt as they are today, they will eventually enter a highly unstable regime where the entire glacier is susceptible to collapse.

Ian Joughin, who studies the physics of glaciers at the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues use a numerical model to forecast the timing over which such a collapse will occur. Their model correctly reproduces observed rates of melt and glacial retreat over the past 20 years, which gives confidence that the model accurately describes the timing and magnitude of melting in this glacier system. Projecting forward, the authors find that the Amundsen Sea glaciers reach a scenario of complete collapse within 200 to 500 years, and indeed are likely already experiencing an early stage of collapse today.

“Hysteresis”

Many phenomena in the Earth’s climate system are subject to hysteresis –– the dependency of an outcome on not just the current state, but on previous states as well. Hysteresis is perhaps easiest explained visually, as a variable that does not respond in a linear fashion to changes in a causal variable.

Hypothetical example illustrating the difference between linear responses and hysteretic responses. Note: this represents a major oversimplification of the climate system, and the exact relationships between CO2, temperature and sea-level rise shown here should not be accepted as scientific fact.

In the hypothetical example shown at right, the forcing agent (CO2, orange) causes a linear response in temperature (red). When CO2 rises or falls, temperature follows with a corresponding rise or fall. However, the bottom graph of sea-level rise (blue), which is assumed to be forced by temperature, shows a response that is very different from its forcing. The sea-level rise response has inertia from the previous state (increase in temperature), and so is unresponsive to the change in forcing (decrease temperature). In this hypothetical example, sea-level rise exhibits hysteresis. Even if a future corrective action was applied to ameliorate CO2 levels and force a reduction temperature, the sea-level rise persists.

The example is illustrative of perhaps the scariest aspect of Amundsen Sea glacier melting: its hysteresis. Without shallower bedrock to “catch” the grounding line, there is no known mechanism by which collapse of a marine-based ice sheet can be prevented, or reversed. Although glaciology’s knowledge of ice sheet-bedrock interactions is imperfect, the Rignot and Joughlin studies suggest complete melting of the Amundsen Sea glaciers could happen regardless of any future events.

What Happens Once Glaciers Collapse? Take Miami, Florida as an example. Miami-Dade County has a population of 2.5 million, yet averages a mere six feet above sea level today. With a four-foot sea level rise from melting of the Amundsen Sea glaciers, 40 percent of urban Miami-Dade County will be underwater. Moreover, under such a sea-level rise it would take only a two-foot storm surge to inundate 60 percent of modern-day Miami. A recent study estimated that the Miami region receives a two-foot or larger storm surge every ten to twenty years due to hurricane activity, meaning the majority of modern-day Miami would be flooded on a semi-regular basis due to natural storm activity following collapse of the Amundsen Sea glaciers.

Sea-level effects from Amundsen Sea glacier collapse would extend far beyond South Florida. Globally, an estimated 634 million people, almost 10 percent of the global population, live within 30 feet of sea-level. Although more detailed demographic-elevation estimates are not yet available, a significant fraction of this population would likely be endangered from a four-foot sea-level rise, particularly in heavily populated, low-lying areas of Southeast Asia.

Can This Be Stopped?

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet at 3 a.m. on a December day. Photo: Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Science

With such risks from sea-level rise, halting the melting of the Amundsen Sea glaciers would appear to be of paramount importance. Any approach to engineer a cessation of melting, however, is quickly overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the problem. Melting of the Amundsen Sea glaciers today is driven by incursion of warmer ocean water; ceasing the melting would thus literally require cooling down the ocean.

Alternatively, the melting of the Amundsen Sea glaciers could be counteracted by an increase in ice gain from additional snowfall on the top of the glacier. However, the volume necessary is staggering: 18.6 billion Goodyear Blimps full of water would have to be frozen onto the Amundsen Sea glaciers each year, just to counteract the ~100 gigatons of ice lost to melt each year observed at present. As the ice sheet continues to destabilize in the future, this volume is expected to rise significantly.

If there is any good news, it is that the rate of collapse of the Amundsen Sea glaciers is estimated to be on the order of several centuries. In his blog, Andy Revkin points out the stark difference between geologic and societal meanings of “collapse;” for geology, a “sudden collapse” still requires multiple human generations. So we have plenty of time to prepare.

In addition, science is never settled. If the incursion of warm oceanic waters in the Amundsen Sea slows down, perhaps the glaciers will recover and avoid collapse. Of course, the opposite — increased warming and an even more rapid collapse — is equally plausible. We may yet learn of new mechanisms that lead to stabilization of marine-based glaciers. But with the state of scientific knowledge at this moment, there is little reason to suspect we can avoid, at a minimum, four feet of sea-level rise in the coming several centuries. Take your talents to South Beach soon.

Learn More

• NASA Press Release on Amundsen Sea Glacier Melting
• NASA Primer on West Antarctic Ice Sheet
• Science Journal News Release

BEAUFORT – The state’s long, tortuous and at times rocky journey towards a planning policy to address an expected future of higher seas came through this coastal town yesterday and left a little closer to its destination.

The N.C. Coastal Resources Commission, at its meeting on nearby Pivers Island, charged one of its committees with the task of turning a two-year-old draft policy that met with stiff resistance from development interests and some coastal counties into a friendlier document focused more on education and designed to draw less ire.

Bob Emory

Margery Overton

Robert Young

“Where we are with sea-level rise is in the education and dialogue phase,” Bob Emory, the commission’s chairman, said after the meeting. “We have to get people comfortable discussing this.”

That uneasiness became apparent in March 2010 when the commission’s scientific advisors, its Coastal Hazards Science Panel, completed a requested draft policy on future sea-level rise. The oceans, the panel noted after reviewing the best available science on the subject, are expected to rise at an accelerated rate this century because of a warming climate. Ocean water expands as it warms, called thermal expansion, and melting glaciers will add their volume of water. How quickly and how much the seas rise depend on how warm the climate gets and how fast the glaciers melt.

Because of that uncertainty, the panel offered a broad range of forecasts, noting that the Atlantic Ocean along the N.C. coast could rise 15 to 55 inches by 2100, or more than double the historic rate. That prediction is in line with forecasts made by other states. Delaware, for instance, is adopting a plan for sea-level rise of up to 60 inches by the end of the century. Southeast Florida is projecting a 9- to 24-inch rise by 2060, and the California State Lands Commission is preparing for a 55-inch rise by 2100.

In its draft, the commission’s science panel also suggested several planning initiatives to begin adapting to the expected watery future. It also recommended that the plan be updated every five years to incorporate the best available science and forecasts.

But once the report went public, the backlash came swiftly. NC-20, a group representing some coastal counties and development interests, questioned much of the data in the science panel’s report and the basic science underpinning climate change. It offered evidence that it said refuted the contention that sea level is currently rising. The draft plan, it feared, was the first step toward land-use regulations that would stifle economic growth in the coastal counties, and several of those counties passed resolutions opposing the plan.

In the face of such opposition, the Coastal Resources Commission asked the science panel to review the objections. It did so in an addendum that Margery Overton, the panel’s chairwoman, presented yesterday. She affirmed the panel’s original findings, but noted the uncertainty of its forecasts for future sea-level rise. If the ocean rises at the same rate that it has in the past, the debate is moot, she said.

“If you use the historical data and do the math, you don’t get a one-meter (39-inch) rise,” said Overton, an engineering professor at N.C. State University. “So the forecasts are based on the expectation that sea-level rise will accelerate in the future. Acceleration is the key.”

And it could be decades before that happens, Emory noted. “We need to get our arms around sea-level rise,” he told the commission. “I don’t think we’re at a point where rules are necessary, but we need a policy that focuses our attention on sea-level rise.”

He suggested that the commission’s Estuarine and Ocean Systems Committee fashion such a policy from the science panel’s draft. It needs to focus more on educating people and less on forecasting how high the sea might get in the future, he said.

“If there’s anything in there that we don’t need but will only draw fire, it needs to be taken out,” Emory said. “We’re not through the dialogue phase yet. We’re receiving resolutions from local governments at a fairly rapid pace. I don’t want this policy to be seen as a back-door to regulation.”

None of the other commission members suggested an alternate course.

Overton was pleased with the outcome. “I’m happy with it,” she said. “This is a very difficult problem, and we have time.”

Robert S. Young was less enthusiastic. He’s a geologist who heads the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University. He’s also a member of the science panel and one of the primary authors of the addendum to the original report.

“I agree that this isn’t an emergency, but I don’t think we have 30 years to figure this out,” he said. “Nothing will get better in the next decade. Storm damage will only get worse. Beach re-nourishment projects will only get more expensive. Good planning is about preparing for the future.”

But first people have to get comfortable with the concept, Emory said. “I’m not trying to minimize what we might see 50 years from now,” he said. “But we’re not ready to discuss it yet.”

Editor’s note:The N.C. Coastal Resources Commission at its meeting in Beaufort today will once again consider a coastal planning policy for sea-level rise. The commission’s panel of scientific advisors presented the commission with a draft policy in March 2010. It projected that sea level along the N.C. coast could rise 15 to 55 inches by 2100 because of a warming climate. That forecast and most planning recommendations were removed from a later draft after objections from development interests and some coastal counties. The commission asked the Coastal Hazards Science Panel, its advisors, to respond to the objections. The panel did so recently in an “addendum” to its original report in which the so-called “Science Panel” unanimously reaffirmed its findings. All of the authors, except for Dr. Reide Corbett, are members of the panel.

By Robert S. Young, D. Reide Corbett, David Mallinson, Charles “Pete” Peterson, Stanley R. Riggs, Antonio B. Rodriguez

We would like to take this opportunity to add our own personal perspective to the just completed “addendum” report authored by the Science Panel. It should come as no surprise that the panel unanimously voted to support the science behind the projections in our first report. The Science Panel is composed of very well qualified scientists and engineers, some of whom have spent their careers examining the nature and impacts of changing sea levels in North Carolina. The state is fortunate to have such expertise available for consultation.

Dr. Robert S. Young

Dr. Reide Corbett

Dr. David Mallinson

Dr. Charles “Pete” Peterson

Dr. Stanley Riggs

Dr. Antonio B. Rodriguez

No one wants to think about the potential for a meter of sea level rise, but this projection is clearly the national and international consensus being used for planning the potential impacts of rising sea level over the next century.

Much has been said in the media over the last few months, and we respect the right of all North Carolinians to have their say, and to participate in the discussion. We would like to address a few of what we believe are important misunderstandings or misconceptions:

There is no scientific consensus on global climate change and the expected acceleration of sea level rise:  There is, in fact, clear scientific consensus on global climate change amongst scientists. Every major scientific organization in the United States, Europe, and Asia has produced statements supporting the science behind the human contribution to global warming and indicating an expected acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise over the next century.

There are other viewpoints, but they do not represent the vast majority of scientists. We like to think of it this way. If you had a persistent cough, and you went to 100 doctors for a diagnosis and 98 doctors said you had lung cancer, while two doctors said you simply had a throat tickle, we are guessing that you would take the cancer diagnosis seriously. You might even begin to seek treatment. In the case of sea-level rise, 98 of the 100 scientists are telling you that there will be an acceleration in the rate of rise this century. It is up to you to decide what to do about it.

These scientific organizations embrace climate change so that they can continue to get grant money:  This assertion is a bit absurd. Organizations like the National Academies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union and many others have all supported the science behind global change. Yet, a very, very small percentage of their members conduct funded climate change research. Rather, these diverse groups of scientists have examined the evidence and, based on the facts, found it to be convincing enough to produce scientific statements regarding the need for public action and continued research.

If it is true that these policy statements will lead to an increase in the funding for global change research, then all of the other scientists in these organizations have just “shot themselves in the foot.” There is only so much research money to go around. If it is all going to climate change, then the other scientists in these many organizations are likely to have less funding available for their particular research interest.

A far more likely scenario than a conspiracy to get funding is this: The scientists and engineers in these organizations looked at the peer-reviewed literature and concluded that global change is real, and that an expectation for an acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise is reasonable.

Even talking about one meter of sea-level rise will impact insurance rates and harm the coastal economy:  We find this hard to believe. First of all, the insurance companies are well aware of the science behind global climate change and the prevailing projections of sea-level rise. They have funded much research into the science, hazards and risks associated with sea-level rise, coastal erosion and storms. Nothing in the Science Panel’s report or the discussion at the Coastal Resources Commission will come as a surprise to the insurance industry.

Second, the real and immediate threat along the N.C. coast remains property damage resulting from storms. Some areas of the United State have experienced multiple storm impacts; yet, their coastal economies continue to thrive. Dauphin Island, Ala., has been nearly wiped off the map several times in the last 30 years. Each time the barrier island was rebuilt, and the economy there chugs along. One might question whether or not this is good policy, but it is hard to imagine that something as abstract as a 100-year projection for rising sea level is going to impact the coastal economy when the very real prospect of storm impacts has not slowed coastal growth.

The scientists and engineers who project a one-meter sea-level rise by 2100 are calling for an abandonment of the coast:  This is simply not true. Currently, the rate of sea-level rise does not appear to be accelerating (although scientists do expect that to change in the future). If you are building a single-family home, or a subdivision, you probably don’t need to do anything other than account for storms. In many respects, the best way to prepare for sea-level rise over the next two to three decades is simply to do a better job of preparing for major storm impacts. If you are building a nuclear power plant, an airbase or a major port facility (all of which are expected to last longer than a single-family home), you should take the potential for sea-level rise into consideration.

We may never get to that projected one meter of sea-level rise: We WILL experience a sea-level rise of one meter.  We don’t know if it will be 75 years from now or 150 years from now, but we will get there. As we do, the map of Eastern North Carolina will change. It has already changed dramatically from the last 500 years of sea-level rise.  The uncertainty in the future rate and acceleration of global sea-level rise is the main reason why the Science Panel suggested updating and reviewing the report’s projections every five years. Regardless, it is perfectly reasonable for local and state planners to begin consideration of how the map may change in order to develop very long-term plans for adjusting. This is done in order to preserve and protect the coastal economy, not to plan its abandonment.

One final note, we all have a stake in the preservation of North Carolina’s coastal resources, North Carolina’s coastal economy and the wise management of both. Discussing the potential for future sea-level rise in a frank, polite and constructive manner is our effort to contribute to that wise management. We hope that it will be received as such.

NAGS HEAD — For at least a decade, numerous North Carolina scientists have been warning with increasing stridency about the state’s vulnerability to impending sea-level rise, but policymakers have yet to take heed.

Two reports released this month by a group of independent researchers, however, have only reinforced the dire predictions about the effects of a rising Atlantic on the state’s coast.

Ben Strauss

“Our hope is, really, to provide useful information and help people prepare,” said Ben Strauss, an author of “Surging Seas,” and director of the program on sea-level rise with Climate Central, a nonprofit journalism and research organization based in Princeton, N.J. “The problem is very real. In the scientific community, the only real debate is how fast and how much.”

North Carolina, the report said, has the third-highest amount of land area in the nation that would be inundated by one meter (39 inches) or less of water. It ranks sixth in the number of houses affected and eighth in the population affected.

Of the counties in the state with the largest total population exposed to the risk, Dare County ranks No. 1.

That is hardly a surprise to Stan Riggs, an East Carolina University coastal geologist who has been studying the Outer Banks since the 1970s.

“The bottom line with sea-level rise, this has been going on for 18,000 years now,” said Riggs, whose book The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast, was also released recently.

As he has told anyone who will listen, storm damage on the Outer Banks that leaves roads torn up and houses stranded in the water is only going to increase.

“They’re in the ocean because sea level is still rising,” Riggs said. “This is fact. There’s a train coming down the tracks and it’s getting closer and closer.”

According to “Surging Seas” and a related report by the Environmental Research Letters, the best estimate for the average level of sea rise by 2030 on the Atlantic coast is six inches; by 2050, it’s 13 inches.

The Rising Sea

Hurricane Irene flooded downtown Manteo.

In North Carolina, there is a one in six chance that combined sea-level rise, storm surge and tide will exceed three feet by 2020, flooding 3.5 percent of the state’s acreage and 0.9 percent of the state’s homes.

By contrast, the chances are equal that that same amount of water would flood 65.8 percent of Dare County land, impacting 23.1 percent of the homes. In Nags Head, it would amount to 16 percent of the land and 13.7 percent of the homes; in Kitty Hawk, it would be 53.9 percent and 21.7 percent, respectively; in Hatteras, 71.6 percent and 74.6 percent; and in Ocracoke, 45.4 percent and 80.8 percent.

Dennis Stewart, a biologist with Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge and Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, said he has already seen the effects of rising seas in Alligator River, which is about two feet above sea level. Saltwater intrusion has been gradually killing off trees, he said, and canals running through refuge lands on the Dare County mainland allow salt water to “jet” farther into the interior system.  Over the years, he has seen swaths of land transitioning from pond pine pocosin to salt marsh.

Stewart said that the refuge is working with The Nature Conservancy on ways to adapt and manage for sea-level rise in Alligator River, including planting salt-tolerant trees.

In Pea Island on the north end of Hatteras Island, Stewart said he has observed “tremendous” beach erosion, even on the sound side. Left to nature, the island would be migrating west and widening the sound beach. But maintenance of N.C. 12 and dunes along the ocean side prevents that process.

“So the island is getting narrower and narrower and will continue to do that,” Stewart said. “Our game plan is to manage Pea Island pretty much as we are now.”

But it is clear that one day the ocean will blow out the dikes of each of the refuge’s three bird impoundments, he said. When that happens, whatever is left will be managed as sand flats and marsh.

Hurricane Irene in August tore an inlet through the refuge and breached N.C. 12 at the so-called “S-Curves” on the south end of the refuge. The state Department of Transportation has since restored the road and is working on long-term solutions.

Although Stewart won’t venture to guess what rate seas will rise, he doesn’t question the validity of the science.

Dennis Stewart

“I accept it,” he said. “Only time is going to tell who’s right and who’s wrong about sea-level rise. I want to err on the side of conservation.”

Riggs, on the other hand, expresses no doubt that N.C 12 does not have much of a future on Pea Island.

“Even if you hold Pea Island, the state of North Carolina does not have the money to hold those weak spots,” he said. “No matter what you do there, you’re going to have problems.”

When it comes to fighting geology and the rising ocean, Riggs is confident that sooner or later, the Outer Banks will throw in the towel on N.C.12.  In fact, if another storm like Irene came right now, he said, “we’d already be there.”

But Riggs believes the state should be proactive and plan innovative transportation systems, including high-speed ferries that would preserve the coastal economy.

“These are the most spectacular waters in the world,” he said. “People would come from all over the world to see this place. We have to figure out ways to make that happen.”

An Alternate Vision

Even if N.C. 12 was under water on Pea Island and other weak spots on Hatteras Island — areas he called “wimpy” barrier island — Riggs said the villages are less vulnerable because they’re built on higher, more stable ground.

If the road was allowed to go away, he predicted, the barrier islands would naturally rebuild — by moving like “a tank tread” — and the pollutants in Pamlico Sound would be flushed. The healthy nutrient balance would be restored, the water would become saltier, habitats for threatened species would be renewed and fishing would improve. In essence, the equilibrium of the natural system would be restored.

And if the system was left alone, the Hatteras Flats on the soundside, old flood tide deltas, would help the islands to regenerate.

“I like to think of them as the barrier island retirement system,” Riggs said.

Stan Riggs

The Outer Banks has the potential to be like Core Banks, “a very happy set of barrier islands,” that have been allowed to grow laterally.

Eventually, Riggs wrote in his book, the barrier islands could become “eight Ocracoke-style destination villages, situated like a string of pearls on a vast network of inlet and shoal environments.”

Riggs said that he has received very positive feedback from the public during his recent book tours, but he has seldom heard from any politician.

“It’s like they don’t want to know too much,” he said. “The politicians are thinking short term.”

State Report

A sea-level rise report submitted recently by a state-appointed panel of scientists to the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission has been pulled to allow time for the division to respond to critiques of the report, said Tancred Miller, the coastal policy analyst for the state Division of Coastal Management.

Much of the feedback on the report, which had projected sea-level rise between 39 to 54 inches by 2100, Miller said, came from NC-20, a lobbying group for home builders and some coastal counties. The division has posted a much watered-down draft of the report that reflects changes requested by the lobbying group.

Miller said that North Carolina has not yet established any official policy to address climate change or sea-level rise. But, he said, it is a priority with the commission, which had asked for the sea-level rise report.

“It’s a place to start,” he said, “just to get an understanding if there is a problem that we need to understand and prepare to react to.”

Other states, including Rhode Island, Maryland, Delaware, Florida, California and New York, he said, have some sort of sea-level policy or response plan.

“I think that there are a lot of states that we can look to that are taking it seriously,” Miller said.

Hurricane Irene cut two inlets in the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge on Hatteras Island. Photo: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

HATTERAS — Traveling along the edge of the continent on a two-lane highway built atop a skinny strand of shifting sand just inches above two mighty bodies of water might sound adventuresome in travel guides.

The adventure can turn hazardous on a nasty day in the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge. Sand swirls in angry gusts across the road, vast pools of water — from sky, ocean, sound or all of the above — force vehicles to crawl, turn around or stall. Dunes appear to transform into living things, buffeting a pitiful strip of asphalt from monstrous waves.

But for residents of the Outer Banks, driving on the 65-miles of N.C. 12 on Hatteras and Ocracoke islands is an economic necessity and a transportation challenge. Tourism brought $834 million into Dare County in 2010, and most islanders make their living from tourist-related business.

Two severe cuts in the road in and on the south edge of the refuge inflicted by Hurricane Irene in August were the most recent illustration of the corridor’s vulnerability to beach erosion and storm damage, renewing questions about the futility of fixing such a vulnerable highway, especially in an era of a rapidly rising sea.

“The cost of maintaining Pea Island has been incredibly expensive,” said Stan Riggs, a geology professor at East Carolina University. “If the public knew how much has been spent just to hold that road, I think they’d croak.”

Dr. Stanley Riggs

Riggs has spent his professional life researching the natural dynamics of the N.C. coast. Few people know more about the coast’s geology. Riggs has written numerous books on coastal geology, including The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast. The recently published book argues that the present development and management policies for the coast’s changing barrier island are in direct conflict with their natural dynamics.

Riggs agrees that a transportation route for Hatteras Island is a necessity. But sea level rise is expected to accelerate in the future because of a changing climate, he says. That means only worse problems for N.C. 12, Riggs noted. It’s time, he said, for people to get creative.

“We need a whole new paradigm,” he said.

How High Will She Rise

Oceans rise in a warming climate. Water expands as it heats up, and melting glaciers add to the oceans’ volume.

That much scientists know. How high the sea might rise in the future and how quickly are still open to debate. That will depend largely on how much of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps melt.

Because of its gently sloping coastline, North Carolina is one of the most vulnerable states on the East Coast to sea-level rise, scientists say. Most current scientific estimates put the Atlantic Ocean along our shores about three feet higher than it is now by 2100. That’s about double the historic rate of sea-level rise. A panel of scientific experts that advises the state’s Coastal Resources Commission came to a similar conclusion last year in its original draft report on future sea-level rise. It concluded that the rise would be about 39 inches by 2100. Depending on how much or how little is done to address climate change, the rate could potentially be as low as 18 inches per 100 years, or as high as 55 inches.

A follow-up draft was watered down significantly after intense lobbying by development interests. The commission is awaiting a response from its scientific panel before deciding on a final report.

As policymakers ponder, the ocean continues its inexorable rise, putting that thin ribbon of asphalt known as N.C. 12 in greater jeopardy and its future in greater question.

“We’re not opposed to doing something out there,” Riggs said. “Our point is, we know what the science is.”

Along Comes Irene

Hurricane Irene chewed up N.C. 12 through Mirlo Beach. Photo: Outer Banks Voice

At one breach in Pea Island, about six miles south of Oregon Inlet, Hurricane Irene cut about 150 feet from the road, channeling surging water from ocean to sound.  Further south at Mirlo Beach, she destroyed whole sections of roadbed with a surging tide.

Riggs has long predicted that those areas, especially at Mirlo, could become new inlets, but Irene was a weak hurricane that barely kicked up wave. Even weak storms, scientist warn, can have catastrophic effects as the oceans warm and rise.

“It was all on the backside, and those inlets blew out, not in,” Riggs said. “And all that destruction was because the water couldn’t get out.”

With the blessing of Gov. Bev Perdue, the N.C. Department of Transportation went into high gear to get the road reopened to traffic. Emergency ferries transported supply vehicles, utility trucks and, eventually, some of stranded residents back and forth between Stumpy Point and Rodanthe.

Within weeks, a temporary, $2.6 million steel truss bridge was installed over the breach in Pea Island, and road workers repaired the underbed and repaved N.C. 12 at Mirlo Beach. The highway reopened Oct. 5, but DOT already has had to reinforce the new inlet’s south shore with rock and metal sheet piling to stem erosion that could have undermined the bridge.

Long-term solutions at the north end at Mirlo, where erosion is as much as 15 feet a year, include building a bridge within the easement and building a bridge that extends into the Pamlico Sound. At the Pea Island inlet, options are to build a new road or bridge west of the existing road, or build a permanent bridge where the road now stands.

Permanent fixes proposed by DOT at both sites initially included beach nourishment, either by itself or combined with bridging, But after a December meeting of state and federal agency representatives, DOT decided it was not a viable option because offshore sand sources were inadequate, it was too costly and permits would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.

At the suggestion of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manager of the refuge, DOT agreed at the December meeting to look into the feasibility of a longer, seven-mile bridge that would start north of the Pea Island breach, curve out into Pamlico Sound and tie-in at Rodanthe.

Public comment on the proposals closed in January, and DOT is expected to make a recommendation on an alternative within weeks.

Maintaining the Road

Whatever the choice, DOT remains committed to keeping the coastal thoroughfare open.

“N.C. 12 is just like any of our highways that has its own challenges,” said Victor Barbour, DOT’s technical services administrator. “But I do think from an overall perspective, we have some roads in the mountains that cost as much or more as N.C. 12 to maintain.”

According to information in the final environmental impact statement for replacing the aging Herbert C. Bonner Bridge at Oregon Inlet, DOT spent about $5.5 million to restore N.C. 12 after storms between August 1999 and October 2007. Of that, about $3.9 million was spent within the Pea Island refuge at three “hot spots, ” including at ‘S’ Curves, renowned as a premier East Coast surfing spot.  Most of the costs were related to Hurricanes Dennis, Bonnie and Floyd in 1999 ($1.7 million) and Hurricane Isabel in 2003 ($1.2 million). Over that period, there were six hurricanes, one tropical storm and 13 nor’easters that required clean-ups.But Barbour agreed that maintenance of N.C. 12 is more expensive than an average road. Over the last 10 years, he said, DOT has spent $100 million maintaining 120 miles of N.C. 12 stretching from Corolla to Ocracoke. Although the cost has not been broken out per mile, there’s no doubt that the vast majority of work is concentrated south of Oregon Inlet. So far, Barbour said, Hurricane Irene damage has cost $12 million, much of it paid by federal emergency funds.

Pea Island, the Bonner Bridge

Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge has some of the most pristine beaches on Outer Banks. Not only do residents love to go there, it attracts about 3 million visitors per year.  But it’s not a substantial land— just 13 miles long, the refuge is at its widest only one mile east to west. At its narrowest, it is just a quarter mile across.

In the old days, the ebb and flow of the tide was unrestricted. Now, Riggs said, “the whole system is in danger of being blown out.”

Crumbling supports at the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge.

Environmental groups and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which runs the refuge, favored a 17.5-mile bridge to replace the aging Herbert C. Bonner Bridge over Oregon Inlet that would have bypassed Pea Island and its troublesome hot spots. DOT took the proposal off the table because of its high upfront cost and access issues. Construction of the new bridge just west of the existing one is scheduled to begin in early 2013.

Dennis Stewart, a refuge biologist who is a member of a N.C. 12 coastal scientist panel that has advised DOT, said that Fish and Wildlife is working cooperatively with DOT to find mutually acceptable fixes to N.C. 12. Although Mirlo is mostly outside of the refuge, the hot spot area stretches from ‘S-Curves’ on the south end of the refuge into Rodanthe.

Stewart said he has seen Pea Island narrow over the years. When he first started in 1994, N.C. 12 was located east of a ranger’s building, a 40-vehicle parking lot was east of the highway and a double dune line was east of the lot. All that’s gone now, he said.

The water that came rushing back toward the sound shoreline when Irene passed turned out to be a powerful punch at a weak spot.

“It was almost like a tsunami,” Stewart said.  “Hurricane Irene totally convinced me that it’s a fragile system.”

As a coastal engineer with North Carolina Sea Grant, Spencer Rogers —who is also a member of the N.C. 12 coastal panel — said that despite the overall success of road relocation in the past, Fish and Wildlife will no longer permit that remedy. Another challenge to maintaining the corridor in the future, he said, is the near-impossibility of fixing the road within the 100-foot state right of way, as required by the refuge.

Andrew Coburn, associate director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, said that it all boils down to allocation of sparse resources

“If there’s an unlimited amount of sand and an unlimited amount of money, absolutely you can keep a road open there,” he said. “If you had unlimited resources, you probably wouldn’t have had a breach. But you’d have to deal with the potential environmental impacts of what you did to maintain that road.

“It’s tough,” Coburn said. “It’s almost an impossible situation to be in.”

Riggs, convinced that there will be little other option in the not -too-distant future, supports use of high-tech ferries – an idea that  is anathema to Dare County and one DOT says would be impractical– combined with things like water taxis or float planes that have been used successfully in other coastal regions.

“Right now, we’ve survived just out of sheer luck,” Riggs said “The next big storm is going to be a catastrophe.”

Coming in March: What will the Outer Banks look like?