This is the first in a series of stories about the effects federal budget and staff cuts and the cancellations of programs and services are having in coastal North Carolina.

POLLOCKSVILLE – Jay Bender is rightfully proud of his town hall. Lovingly restored when it was moved to higher ground a few years ago, the old train depot has come to symbolize the grit of this little river town that a hurricane once tried to drown and its government in far-off Washington now has abandoned.

The mayor for 42 continuous years – a record in North Carolina – Bender fashioned his office to look like one that the stationmaster might have used when the depot was built in 1893. An antique rolltop desk anchors the room, accented by sturdy wooden chairs for visitors and framed railroad maps on the walls.

He led me to the handsome town council chambers with its wide-beamed oak floor and huge, sliding, wooden cargo doors that bear names and other graffiti that people scrawled during the building’s lifetime. “All of this was under water,” explained Bender. “We lost everything. We lost our records. We lost our computers. Everything.”

Related: North Carolina among most successful states for BRIC awards

The depot, which even then served as town hall, was a few blocks away, down on the banks of the Trent River, a pretty, usually placid stream that languidly flows northeast a dozen or so miles to its confluence with the Neuse River in New Bern. In these parts it’s known primarily for its catfish and largemouth bass. It was the little town’s biggest attraction.

Until it became the source of its destruction.

That would have been during those three, grim days in September 2018 when Hurricane Florence dumped more than more 30 inches of rain and unleased a biblical deluge. The river had overflowed its banks before, of course – back in 1999 after Hurricane Floyd, for instance – but never like this. Some experts would later speculate that the Trent hadn’t flooded that badly in maybe 1,000 years. It rose more than 25 feet, covering much of Pollocksville to its rooftops. Most of its 300 or so residents had to be evacuated. More than 80% of its buildings were destroyed or damaged, including every town commissioner’s home.

Bender, living in his grandfather’s old place on high ground, was spared. That’s where they ran the town until the river receded and the power was restored 11 days later.

The slow recovery then began.

Aided by state and federal grants, the town moved and refurbished the waterlogged old depot in 2021 and began getting pieces of its sewer and water systems out of the floodplain. Owners raised some buildings, and the town gussied up U.S. Highway 17, its main road, with a bike path, planters and banners.

The place was starting to look almost normal again, and Bender was feeling optimistic about his town’s revival until the Trump regime in Washington suddenly and without warning pulled the rug out from under him.

Killed without warning

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced about a month ago that it was cancelling its major grant program that provided seed money to communities that wanted to be better prepared for the next flood or weather catastrophe. FEMA didn’t contact Pollocksville or the 67 other communities in the state that were awarded grants but had not yet received any money. Neither did it notify the N.C. Division of Emergency Management, which administers the grants, or the media. The agency made the surprise announcement on one of its websites after 5 p.m. on a Friday, presumably to attract the least amount of attention.

Bender didn’t find out about the cancellation until the following week. It was the first time a federal grant program had been killed in midstream.

It would be another 12 days before FEMA clarified that only grant projects that had been completed would be totally funded. Those that have started might receive partial funding. Everything else was dead. In North Carolina, that meant almost $186 million in projects intended to help communities ward off weather catastrophes and save lives would have to be shelved unless the recipients could come up with the money elsewhere. That total includes about $81 million in the state’s 20 coastal counties, including $1.1 million for Pollocksville to raise six commercial buildings to revive its downtown.

“Losing the grant is very disappointing,” said Bender, whose town operates on an annual $600,000 budget. “It would have funded the next step in our long-range plan. Replacing the grant money will be difficult.”

The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants, known as BRIC, was the federal government’s showcase program to help communities help themselves by funding projects to lessen and prevent storm damage. It committed almost $5 billion to communities across the country since it was approved by Congress with bipartisan support and signed by Donald Trump in 2018 during his first term. Local governments had planned to use the money to help raise buildings and roads, relocate vulnerable sewer pump stations, control flooding, strengthen building codes and on similar projects to reduce the damage of future storms. The program was so popular that last year FEMA had to reject nearly 2,000 applicants because it didn’t have enough money to go around.

About $1 billion was allocated to the program as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021. Under President Biden, the BRIC grants were key parts of the government’s efforts to address climate change, and a special emphasis was placed on helping Black and other historically underserved communities. It was those directives that likely put BRIC on the regime’s hit list.

‘Wasteful,’ ‘political,’ fearful

An unnamed FEMA spokesperson said in the April announcement that the agency now considers BRIC to be “wasteful” and “political.” I called FEMA’s “news desk” at its regional office in Atlanta several times to get some examples. Each call disappeared into the ether because the number listed on the agency’s regional website didn’t even generate a dial tone. I sent an email to the address listed on the site. It remains unanswered. As do the emails and phone message I sent to the state’s two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Ted Budd, asking for their reactions.

Many county and town officials also didn’t return emails and phone calls. They watched the bullying of the country’s biggest universities and law firms and heard the threats about withholding federal funds to public schools and museums. They apparently got the message. They would need FEMA someday, and all depended on federal funding for something. Bender understands his counterparts’ desire to remain under the radar. He’s relying partially on federal money to upgrade his water and sewer plants. “We lose this grant and we’re out maybe $20,000,” he said. “But I can’t build half a sewer plant.”

Anna Weber, however, needed no coaxing. She’s a policy analyst for the National Resources Defense Council and helps communities prepare for the violence of an unstable climate. She has a hard time understanding how spending money to prevent death and damage from future storms can suddenly be considered wasteful.

“In fact, investing in adaptation and resiliency against climate change is one of the least wasteful things we can do,“ she said. “It’s actually one of the best investments in preventing future local damage and loss of life from storms.”

She noted that studies have consistently shown that every dollar invested on projects to prevent storm damage results in at least $6 in savings when the pieces later have to be picked up and put back together.

BRIC also seemed to dovetail with the regime’s desire to require states to pay more for cleanup and reconstruction costs after a disaster, Weber said. The grants pay 75% of project costs. The applicant is responsible for the remainder. “These were communities that were doing this right,” she said. “The federal government wanted communities to step up and take some responsibility. These communities did step up and do what the government asked, and now the rug is being pulled out from under them.”

The charge that the grants were doled out as political favors by the Biden administration makes little sense in North Carolina, which Trump carried handily in all three of his elections. The 22 counties, which include the state’s most populous, that Biden won in 2020 received only about a quarter of the grant money, while the 20 coastal counties, many of which Trump won with 60-70% of the vote, received almost 45%.

Jessica Whitehead was North Carolina’s first chief resilience officer and helped evaluate the state’s first BRIC applications in 2020. She’s now director of the Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience at Old Dominion University.

“Politics?” she said. “It never came up.”

No one asked Bender about his politics when the town applied for its BRIC grant.

“This had nothing to do with politics,” he said, “and I don’t know how you can consider it wasteful. This is all about trying to get our town back to normal.”

BRIC and North Carolina were made for each other.

Since the first applications were accepted for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants in 2020, state and local-government officials had developed a keen sense of what the Federal Emergency Management Agency wanted to fund. A steady flow of successful applicants was the result.

“North Carolina was one of the most successful states to get BRIC funding,” noted Anna Weber, a senior policy analyst with the National Resources Defense Council. “As a result, it will be one of states with the most to lose.”

Related: Coastal towns awarded resilience grants see funding pulled

Sixty-eight cities, towns and counties in the state have been awarded grants since that first cycle of funding, according to the N.C. Division of Emergency Management, which administers the grant program. Thirty-three are in the 20 coastal counties. Those grants range from $120,000 to Bertie and Hertford counties for watershed studies to more than $18 million to Fayetteville for stream-restoration and bridge-relocation projects.

About all of it is now gone. FEMA releases BRIC money as work on a project is completed. The agency has said that only projects that have been completed will be fully funded. Those that have started may be partially funded. A living shoreline in Duck is the only completed BRIC project in the state, according to the division, and is the only one that will be completely funded. The project in Princeville to move municipal buildings out of the floodplain has started and will likely be partially funded.

Both projects in Fayetteville, the largest in the coastal counties, are currently being designed to lessen storm damage and flooding, Loren Bymer, the city’s marketing and communications director, explained in an email. He said the city “anticipates” being reimbursed by FEMA for the design work. The grants, however, won’t pay for construction as anticipated, he wrote. To complete the projects, the city would have to find other sources of income, such as issuing bonds or raising property taxes, or delaying other projects, Bymer said.

BRIC funding for all of the other projects on the list below has been killed. That amounts to about $81 million in coastal projects and more than $186 million statewide.

In an undergraduate classroom at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 2017, a group of students sat in front of a plate of sushi from a local restaurant. But it wasn’t lunchtime — the students were attempting to quantify how common the mislabeling of red snapper was across North Carolina. 

By analyzing the DNA from 43 fish samples they’d collected from seafood markets, grocery stores and restaurants across 10 counties, they found that a whopping 90.7% were mislabeled as red snapper. Most often, the substitutions were tilapia or vermillion snapper. 

“It’s really hard to know where the mislabeling is happening, obviously, because a lot of seafood goes through a number of steps; it changes hands like five to seven times,” said Dr. John Bruno, instructor and creator of the class. “So it’s hard to know who’s doing it.”

Bruno was asked by the university to create an undergraduate course that gave first-year students real research experience. The idea was to engage students in science early on, and increase retention and diversity in STEM, or science, technology, engineering and math.

“They’re students that have never held a pipette. They’ve never asked a question, never developed a hypothesis,” Bruno said. “The idea was to develop a question that’s applied, that’s meaningful to them, that they can grasp, and then use that question to teach the basic research techniques.”

According to Bruno, mislabeling — essentially committing fraud — is rampant in the food industry. So diving into the mislabeling of local seafood was something Bruno felt the students could investigate.

Why is mislabeling so widespread? “I think there’s clearly a lack of enforcement and a lack of testing,” Bruno said.

Mislabeling rampant

Based on customer demand, certain fish can be sold for more than others. And this may tempt producers into mislabeling their fish when the desired product is out of season or low in availability.

“There’s obviously a big economic incentive to mislabel,” Bruno said.

Red snapper is a great example. It’s been overfished in the Gulf of Mexico and the southeastern Atlantic. 

“So there’s very little of it available … yet the public demands it year round just because it’s something we’re familiar with,” Bruno said. “It’s not necessarily spectacularly better than other fish. It’s just culturally in demand.”

There are some fishing operations that allow you to buy seafood straight from the fishers who caught it. But often, seafood found in restaurants and grocery stores has a much longer chain of production. It’s easy for information to get changed along the way, but harder to pin down exactly where the deception is occurring.

In Bruno’s course, students went out to restaurants and grocery stores and collected samples of seafood. The students then extracted the DNA and amplified it using PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, a testing method also used for COVID-19. A commercial lab then did the sequencing. Once the students had the genetic code back from the lab, they used online tools to determine what they were looking at.

This isn’t the only evidence of the mislabeling trend. Two other in-state examples include shrimp sold in North Carolina that were mislabeled as “local” when they weren’t, and a corporate officer with a Pamlico County-based company that sold crab meat marked as a “Product of USA” when it was, in fact, imported, who was convicted two years ago. 

In one of the published papers based on work in Bruno’s classes, the students found that in talking to people, many were not aware of the issue, but once it was brought to their attention, it concerned them.

“Once people realize that this mislabeling is there, I think they can pretty quickly get the sense for the impacts it might have on their health and their pocketbook, but also on the environment,” Bruno said. 

People trying to make informed decisions about what they’re eating, both for their health and the environment, may be getting foiled by the issue of mislabeling. Though sometimes, said Bruno, a more sustainable species is being substituted for an unsustainable one. An example is again red snapper. Sometimes fish marketed as red snapper in grocery stores is actually tilapia, which is lower in the food web and therefore has less of an impact on the environment when it is farmed. 

“I’d rather train people to just buy tilapia and be aware of what it is rather than paying red snapper prices for it,” Bruno said.

Choice experiment

By extension, creating more consumer demand for fish species that can be sustainably farmed or harvested has the power to direct the industry, and decrease the motivation for mislabeling.

Jane Harrison, coastal economics specialist for North Carolina Sea Grant, was one of the authors of a report detailing trends in consumer demand for North Carolina seafood.

The authors sought to find out how often respondents ate seafood at home and at restaurants, where they got it from, how interested consumers are in knowing where their seafood comes from, and how their perception of that seafood changes based on certain attributes such as product safety and environmental concerns.

Across 1,400 respondents, Harrison and her team conducted a “choice experiment,” wherein people are given several options for seafood from different countries and asked to make decisions.

The results indicated that North Carolina residents would prefer to buy state-sourced seafood over options from foreign countries and even over other states on the East Coast. 

“Most of the time, people aren’t thinking about just one thing when they’re in the grocery store (or) in the restaurant,” said Harrison. “But certainly that local sourcing does have a significant impact on willingness to pay.”

North Carolinians want the money they spend on seafood to support the livelihoods of local commercial fishermen. The respondents valued the flavorful, healthy options from the local market, the local variety and safe handling practices.

“You think about any product, there’s really a series of attributes that are going to affect the price and people’s willingness to pay,” Harrison said. Adding, look at a car, for example. People will pay based on the gas mileage, the color, the make and model. “There’s a variety of attributes that affect your choice, just like seafood.”

That said, the most common factor that would sway respondents from buying local seafood was cost. State-sourced seafood tends to cost more, and that’s a deciding factor for many people.

This makes sense, but starts to fall apart if the fish you are buying is inappropriately labeled from the start. Even if all labels were accurate, there is no one labeling certification that addresses all aspects of environmental sustainability and social responsibility. That’s why some organizations advocate buyers move away from a labels-based approach toward a values-based approach. There are resources online for helping people bypass mislabeling issues and buy direct from fishermen, such as the Local Catch Seafood Finder and Carteret Catch.

The future of food

In a future where the seafood industry is socially sustainable, more direct communication and exchange between consumers and fishermen would likely help a lot. But the industry also has to be viable for those doing the fishing or cultivation.

North Carolina has long been a hot spot for oysters, and various government actions and research have supported this industry. The state joined the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Shellfish Initiative in 2018 with several goals, one being to create stable jobs. Scientists at all the major universities in the state contribute to research helping farmers grow oysters successfully. But making oyster cultivation an economically viable job is still a work in progress. This summer, changes made to the state’s Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program, or NAP, can help oyster farmers in case of emergency. 

The changes increase the payout per oyster in the event of a crisis like a mass mortality or a hurricane to more accurately reflect market value of the oyster, and the size that is in demand. 

“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Chris Matteo, acting president of the North Carolina Shellfish Growers Association and owner of Chadwick Creek Oysters. “It underpins the industry more effectively.”

Matteo says that going forward, he’s hopeful that NAP payouts will more accurately reflect the market value, and could even be adjusted year to year. This would make the oyster cultivation industry more economically secure for farmers in the state.

The goal of USDA programs like NAP, and of these changes, said Matteo, is to make sure growers stay in business.

All of these things will be essential to creating a socially sustainable seafood industry for the future.

This semester, UNC’s John Bruno is co-teaching a new course entitled The Future of Food. There’s a lot, he said, that he wants to cover. No one is unaffected by food.

“It’s the basis of our family lives,” Bruno said. “It’s so important in our cultures, it defines so many cultures and religious practices, and our relationship with nature now is so much just defined by food.”

This is last in a series examining the role and sustainability of seafood in a healthy diet and is published in collaboration with North Carolina Health News.

First in a two-part series.

The sun warms the docks in Morehead City as Rebekah Williams stands on the back deck of Southern Salt, a restaurant on Morehead City’s waterfront that serves fresh seafood.

Before her on a table is a heap of oysters from her farm, Bekah’s Bay Oysters, sorted into two piles. The pile of bigger oysters will go inside and be served to guests that evening on the half shell. The others will go back into a floating oyster bag at her lease in a tidal bay near Cape Lookout.

Oyster farming is one of the United States’ most prominent forms of marine aquaculture, and Williams is one of many shellfish farmers in North Carolina. Aquaculture is an expansive industry that encompasses a lot of things — farming fish and shellfish for food is prominent among them. 

New research out of the University of British Columbia in Canada has indicated that while the marine aquaculture industry has huge potential for feeding a growing world population, a significant amount of that potential will be curbed due to climate change if we stay on our current carbon emissions pathway. 

An economically and culturally important industry in North Carolina, aquaculture has the potential to help us adapt to a changing world. But as things like warmer ocean temperatures, storms and landscape changes become more pressing factors, the industry will have to adapt as well.

Room to grow

Previous research indicates that marine aquaculture has tremendous potential when it comes to feeding the growing world population, which is expected to hit 10.9 billion by the end of the century. But whether that potential ever comes into being is another thing altogether.

Many capture fisheries around the world are either at their maximum yield or are close to overextending their capacities. This means there isn’t much room for that industry to grow in order to feed a higher world population.

Dr. Muhammed Oyinlola, lead author of the study published in Global Change Biology, said that while that food pathway is close to maxed out, the marine aquaculture industry is expanding.

“My recent research looked into marine aquaculture, because marine aquaculture production has been increasing over time,” Oyinlola said. “And most people are seeing it as the panacea for (the) decline of fisheries, particularly from the marine environment — how we’re going to increase food production.”

Oyinlola used modeling techniques to project into the future of marine aquaculture. He modeled two main pathways to see how the industry could be impacted by a suite of environmental and socioeconomic factors.

His results indicated that by the end of this century, climate change will be the driving factor influencing the production potential of the industry.

Under the more pressing of the two scenarios, Oyinlola found that global marine aquaculture production could decrease by up to 16% by the year 2090. This projected decrease was mostly driven by factors like warming ocean temperatures and changes in what areas are suitable for aquaculture.

What he found is that the future of the industry, globally, has vastly different possible trajectories. This study highlights the need for strong carbon emission mitigation measures in order to ensure a climate-resilient and economically sustainable future for marine aquaculture.

Climate extremes

The growing global aquaculture industry includes Williams, who jump-started a career in oyster farming about seven years ago. After a bit of trial and error, she started her own business and never looked back. Now, you can find Bekah’s Bay Oysters on the Southern Salt menu as well as with several regional distributors. It’s also not uncommon to see Williams driving around Morehead City in her truck, making dock to door deliveries herself.

Climate change is not part of Williams’ day-to-day train of thought. Between bar shifts at Southern Salt, tending to her oysters on her lease, and renovating homes for Airbnb on the side, Williams has a full schedule. But that’s not to say climate extremes haven’t affected her.

A few years into her business, Williams, like so many others in North Carolina, had to quickly pivot when Hurricane Florence made landfall in 2018.

“You don’t get a big heads-up on a storm,” Williams said. When she realized Florence was going to impact her oysters, she had to act fast.

She went out to her lease and gathered all of the baby oysters, leaving the more mature ones in place. She used a refrigerated trailer to bring them into the restaurant. It was a risk to bring them in, because reintroducing them to the water later on could cause them to die. 

“You’re taking a chance on bringing them in,” Williams said. But then, she didn’t have a lot of other options. “So we were like, ‘well, we’ll try it.’”

Many of the mature oysters she left at her lease did not survive the storm. But her baby oysters did.

“It’s a lot of work. You’re out there in the sun, no power … and you’re doing all this work to save the oysters, and luckily we did and we didn’t have any huge issues.” 

Others weren’t so lucky. In 2018, Hurricane Florence and Tropical Storm Michael caused nearly $10 million in damage to North Carolina’s shellfish industry.

The storm caused damage to gear, and leases were hit with an onslaught of freshwater, which decreased both salinity and dissolved oxygen. For many oyster farmers, it was a huge loss.

Research has shown that, while hurricanes are not new, climate change results in a heightened risk for more intense and more frequent storms. For Williams and many other small business farmers, these storms threaten catastrophic losses. They are a direct threat to the industry’s stability and security.

“It’s tough if you don’t have the resources,” Williams said. “But luckily, having the restaurant and coolers and refrigerators and stuff, we were able to try it and do it. And it did work. So, at least we know now.”

Next in the series: Seeding a future for North Carolina’s shellfish aquaculture industry

This is the second in a special reporting series on federal infrastructure spending and North Carolina’s navigation needs.

Lacking high-volume marine traffic or large ports, North Carolina’s northeast coast typically qualifies for far less federal funding to help maintain navigational channels and inlets than do the state’s southern coastal communities.

But mariners in Dare and Hyde counties will be getting their fair share of benefits from the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that Congress passed in November, with nearly $60 million of it going to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for eastern North Carolina waterways, according to Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C. 

That’s on top of an additional $22.81 billion provided to the Corps in the 2022 Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act.

It’s also a nice break for the Corps, which has been advocating for funds to address smaller projects that may not rank high nationally, but are important to less populated regions and communities.

“We screamed and hollered up the line for funding, and that’s the reason we got funded,” Bob Keistler, chief of the Corps’ Wilmington District Civil Works Programs and Project Management Branch, said in a telephone interview, referring to the supplemental funds allotted in the infrastructure bill. “We’re getting a chance to come back and do some spring cleaning here on things that we haven’t been able to do in a while.” 

Northeastern North Carolina Projects

Shallowbag Bay

Funding of $6.4 million is set to go to dredge Manteo Shallowbag Bay, the inner channels at Oregon Inlet from the Basnight Bridge to Wanchese Harbor, to Old House Channel, out to the Pamlico Sound.

“We have about, I think, five or six spots that we plan to dredge where the shoaling is an issue,” Brennan Dooley, with the Corps, said in the same telephone interview, adding that the scope of the work is not finalized. 

Oregon Inlet’s inner channels are federally authorized, but the dredge work will be put out for bid to private contractors.

Although the amount of work for industry dredges has created more competition for Corps contracts, Dooley said preparation work is done before the bid is posted so that they can move quickly when a contract is signed. 

“Historically, we’ve been able to get someone in there,” Dooley said.

The main navigational channel that goes under the bridge to the ocean bar is a separate project that is maintained regularly by Corps dredges.

The Corps operates a handful of government dredges year-round to maintain waterways along portions of the Gulf and East coasts and the Great Lakes.

Work in the inner channels has not been funded for a while, said Barton Grover, Dare County Grants and Waterways administrator.

“Typically, they’re done every five to 10 years,” he said in an interview. “I’m not sure when they were last dredged.”

As Keister explained, the available Corps dredge is not always appropriate for the type of work needed, which for the Manteo channels would be a pipeline dredge. 

“We try to contract the majority of our work out,” he said. “If there’s a nonfederal contract dredge availability, we like to put it out for bid. That’s kind of our mantra.” 

The majority of the dredge material for the Manteo channels, Dooley said, will be deposited on a nearby existing disposal area known as “Island H.” Also known as “spoil islands” or “bird islands,” to describe where sand from past dredging projects has built up at certain spots in the waterway, areas such as “Island H” are running out of room for more sand.

Dooley said that with many Corps projects, the nonfederal sponsor has the responsibility for providing easements and right-of-way for disposal sites, which must be done before a project can move forward. “Island H,” he said, typically has been maintained and managed by Dare County and the state.

The Corps is coordinating with the county, which is seeking a permit to increase capacity. Dooley said that he expects no problem with obtaining the permits in time to do the dredge work. 

Dooley added that the Corps tries to deposit compatible sand at other areas where it can create habitat.

“When we can, we always like to do beneficial use of dredge material,” he said. “South of Wanchese, the material is pretty good sand for the most part. So where we can, we’re going to put that sand on adjacent bird islands.”

Silver Lake Harbor/Stumpy Point Bay

Ocracoke’s Silver Lake Harbor project, $4.37 million, and Dare County’s Stumpy Point Bay, $2.58 million, were funded as separate projects, but will be one contract.

Dooley said it is more efficient to do them in a single contract because they’re close together.

“Either one of those projects alone, it’s not a lot work,” he said. “So combining the work together makes it more appetizing for a contractor … We can share the cost between the projects to get the dredge there and then do work at both projects.”

There is an area in the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry channel coming into Ocracoke where there is shoaling north of Bigfoot Island, an old bird island. That is the most important shoal the Corps is dealing with at the Silver Lake Harbor project.

At Stumpy Point Bay, which is one end of the emergency ferry channel between Rodanthe and the Dare County mainland at Stumpy Point, dredging needs to be done at the approach to the channel into Stumpy Point basin.

The state Ferry Division has also requested that while the Corps’ contractor is in Stumpy Point, to have it dredge an approach to the state ferry dock that is outside the authorized federal channel.

The additional work would be paid for by the state Department of Transportation, which oversees the division, under an updated agreement between the state and the Corps.

Avon Harbor

Federal funding of $1.60 million will go to dredge Avon Harbor. For years, the community has been requesting help with shoaling in the harbor, which is not a federal waterway, but it has been hampered by costs.

Even with the infrastructure funds, the project can’t move forward until there is a suitable disposal site for the dredge material.

A disposal area at the entrance to the harbor is currently at capacity, Dooley said.

As the nonfederal sponsor, Dare County has to provide the disposal area, he said. The Corps is working with Dare on finding options, potentially an upland site the material can be pumped to, or even exploring whether the material could be used on public land in Cape Hatteras National Seashore. 

The goal is to award the contracts before the end of the fiscal year, Keister said. But if the Avon issue is not resolved by then, there is still wiggle room, but he does not expect to lose the funds.   

“We don’t want to rush to failure because of a fiscal year,” Keistler said. “We have a little more leeway with (projects) like Avon Harbor that have some additional hurdles to cross that we’re not driven by the Sept. 30 date.”

Rollinson Channel

Federal funding of $1.43 million will go to dredge Rollinson Channel, which has been the only authorized federal channel in Hatteras Inlet for a long time, based mostly on it being the original channel for Hatteras-Ocracoke vehicular ferry, the state’s busiest ferry route.

Historically, charter and commercial fishing fleets had also depended on the route from Hatteras village to the end of the Hatteras spit, where they could turn toward Ocracoke or head out to the ocean.

But dramatic increases in shoaling in the channel, accompanied by rapid erosion of the spit after hurricanes Irene in 2011 and Sandy in 2012 eventually led to portions of the channel becoming impassable, and impossible to dredge. In 2014, the ferry division made a longer U-shaped channel the official ferry channel to avoid the dangerous shoaling.

Since then, additional shoaling in other inlet channels have hindered safe passage for vessels, but complicated agreements and permits were necessary to secure Corps dredging

Soon the Rollinson Channel will be realigned officially, which will expand the federally authorized area in the inlet where the Corps can dredge. Most significantly,  the South Ferry Channel and the Sloop Channel, used mostly by commercial vessels and ferries, respectively, will be allowed to be maintained by the Corps, making it easier for the government dredges to do the work when they’re already working in Rollinson.

Comparing unchecked shoaling to an overgrown lawn, Keister said that more regular dredging will also make it a lot easier to dredge. 

Once the realignment is finalized, he said, “that will allow us to be a little more creative and flexible where we can dredge and open it up.”       

First in the series: Federal dollars now available for North Carolina waterways

This is the first in a special reporting series on federal infrastructure spending and North Carolina’s navigation needs.

Millions in supplemental funds from the federal infrastructure bill signed into law last November will be spent unclogging shoaled hot spots in a handful of North Carolina’s shallow-draft inlets, giving a reprieve to the local beach towns and counties that, along with the state, have been footing much of the bill for dredging projects.

The additional funding is from the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bipartisan bill that President Joe Biden signed into law Nov. 21, 2021. The 2022 Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act pumped an extra $22.81 billion to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ coffers.

A portion of the more than $84 million in additional funding funneled to the Corps’ Wilmington District will go toward cleaning out shoaled areas of shallow-draft inlets primarily from Carteret County south.

“What is cool about this infrastructure bill is we’ve got some projects that the federal government has not funded, has not been able to fund … for many years,” said Bob Keistler, chief of the district’s Civil Works Programs & Project Management Branch. “All those shallow-draft inlets have been federal projects for decades and decades and since about 2005 have not been funded very consistent. Many of these projects are just touching areas that we haven’t been able to touch because of funding availability.”

Shallow-draft navigation channels are defined as inlets no deeper than 16 feet, a river entrance to the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway or other interior coastal waterways. There are more than 10 shallow-draft inlet navigation channels along the state’s coast.

Other projects tapped in the central to southern part of the state’s coast include dredging portions of the Intracoastal Waterway and clearing out the Wilmington Harbor anchorage basin at the state port.

Corps officials are in the process of hashing out the finer details of the projects — prioritizing which channels get dredged first, when they may be dredged and which ones may get pumped out more than once.

“We haven’t finalized the scopes and we also haven’t finalized the schedule,” Keistler said in a late February telephone interview.

And even then, he said, plans can change thanks, in large part, to Mother Nature. If a channel that is crucial to say, a ferry route or the U.S. Coast Guard for purposes of search and rescue, shoals up to the point it creates a navigational hazard, that channel could get bumped up the schedule.

“Every project is not equal,” Keistler said. “We can give you a schedule today and next week something changes and it may adjust. We try hard not to jump around too much.”

There are five North Carolina waterway projects, including Rollinson Channel in Dare County, that will be dredged by one of the Corps’ shallow-draft dredges.

The Corps owns three such dredges for operations from Maine to Texas. One of the dredges is undergoing maintenance in a Memphis, Tennessee, shipyard. It is unclear when that dredge will be back in the small fleet.

Wilmington District has a regional plan with a handful of other districts in the Corps’ South Atlantic Division to help streamline shallow-draft projects and eliminate scheduling conflicts.

“We try to be efficient so while we’re in the neighborhood we try to do projects that are close to each other so we’re not wasting money jumping around,” Keistler said.

Central to southern North Carolina coast projects

Bulkhead Channel

Bulkhead Channel is the federal channel that stretches between Morehead City Harbor to Beaufort Harbor in Carteret County.

A little more than $500,000 has been allocated to dredging the channel, something that will “more than likely” be a one-time event, Keistler said.

Kyle Garner, Beaufort’s planning and inspections director, said in an email that the town tries at least twice yearly to schedule dredging the channel to maintain cost and keep the channel at a consistent depth.

“This channel has been used for over three centuries for mariners and is critical to the economy of the Town of Beaufort,” he said. “Our waterfront docks handle hundreds of vessels each year and without an open channel would be devastating. Also, this is used daily by commercial traffic either heading out for a catch or bringing one in, carrying a long-standing tradition. So, yes, keeping the channel open is important financially and culturally to our community.”

The channel was last dredged in the fall, a project that cost $236,570, according to Garner. The town footed nearly $55,000 of the bill, with the state contributing a little more than $109,000 and the Corps $72,400 from funds remaining from previous dredging, he said.

“The Channel currently is at a depth of 13 feet on average and is permitted to be at a depth of 17 feet, which is what its depth was back in the fall of 2021,” Garner said in the email. “So yes, it has filled in 4 feet (in) a period of a few months and if not dredged will continue at this rate and limit traffic for both commercial (and) pleasure boats.”

Keistler said the channel will likely be dredged sometime this spring.

Bogue Inlet

Funds totaling $1.04 million will go to the dredging of Bogue Inlet.

“That’ll be three or four dredging cycles,” Keistler said. “When I say dredging cycles, it’s similar to cutting grass. You cut your grass today and then three weeks later or two weeks later you may need to cut it again.”

According to information from the Carteret County Shore Protection Office, the Bogue Inlet connecting channel, which links the inlet to the Intracoastal Waterway near Cedar Point’s shore, was dredged last fall.

New River Inlet

The New River Inlet project will entail dredging portions of the federal channel between the mouth of the inlet to Jacksonville in Onslow County.

A total of $3 million has been set aside for this project.

“We were funded to address speed bumps in what we call the channels of Jacksonville,” Keistler said.

Those “speed bumps” make navigation challenging for boaters, including a commercial fleet of fishing vessels based in Sneads Ferry.

This project has been tied into a pipeline contract for work in the Intracoastal Waterway.

Dredged material from this project will more than likely be placed on North Topsail Beach’s shoreline on Topsail Island.

“The scale of material that goes on the beach from this waterway contract would be a tenth of what they need for coastal storm protection,” Keistler said. “It’s a good place to put it, but as far as providing protection to the structures, that’s not what it’s designed to do. We’re dredging because of navigation and that’s a quality to place to put the sand.”

The Corps has permitted locations on which it may place the dredged material – roughly 1,500 feet from the inlet.

“And we start pumping sand away from the inlet until we either run out of sand or money,” Keistler said.

New Topsail Inlet

A little more than $500,000 has been budgeted for dredging in New Topsail Inlet at the south end of Topsail Island.

Those funds may allow for the inlet to be dredged twice, Keistler said.

Topsail Beach Mayor Steve Smith and chairman of the Topsail Island Shoreline Protection Commission said that, right now, the inlet — about 16 feet deep and 400 feet wide — is “in pretty good shape.”

“However, there are some connecting places like Topsail Creek that possibly could use some dredging this year,” he said. “That helps not only Topsail, but it also helps all the boaters docked in Hampstead and that area of North Carolina. We look at this as a one-time event that is going to allow us to take a look at the connecting channels and make sure they stay navigable year-round.”

Carolina Beach Inlet

The $1.04 million in federal funding allocated for the dredging of Carolina Beach Inlet should get that inlet “into really, really good shape,” before tourism season kicks off Memorial Day weekend and as long as the inlet is dredged in April, said New Hanover County Shore Protection Coordinator Layton Bedsole.

“We’re three months behind the eight ball now and so it’s going to be a significant hit on that $1,040,000 to restore that depth and width now,” he said.

The county’s target is to dredge the channel every eight to 10 weeks a year.

The inlet was dredged in December, which means that if it is dredged in April, nearly double the amount of time will have passed since it was last cleared of shoaling.

“The outer reach of Carolina Beach Inlet is the most challenging reach,” Bedsole said. “We still have to clean up the inside, but nothing to the degree of the outside shoals.”

The annual budget for maintenance dredging of the inlet is $350,000 from the county and $700,000 from the state’s Shallow Draft Navigation Channel Dredging and Aquatic Weed Fund.

Each year, the county budgets $350,000 for maintenance dredging of the inlet. That money is paired with another $700,000 from the state’s Shallow Draft Navigation Channel Dredging and Aquatic Weed Fund for an annual budget of $1.05 million.

Having that funding year to year allows the county to get on the Corps’ dredging schedule as soon as possible, which can be challenging.

“The Corps’ limited dredge fleet, and the Currituck (the Corps’ hopper dredge) being in the shipyard for the last year or so, prioritized callings from the Ferry Division, Department of Defense, Coast Guard up and down the East Coast, all play into us chasing the Corps’ schedule for the shallow draft inlet fleet. We’re always chasing the schedule,” Bedsole said, adding, “The Corps works really hard to provide shallow-draft inlet access in New Hanover County.”

Other projects

Funding from the infrastructure bill also includes about $4.5 million for dredging portions of the Intracoastal and conducting inspections and evaluations on upland dredge material disposal sites. The Corps is to identify “speed bumps” in the waterway that impede navigation.

“Usually they’re in the same locations year after year,” Keistler said. “We identify those, prioritize those, and then put them out for contract.”

Funding also includes the following:

• $250,000 to conduct jetty inspections and monitoring at Masonboro Inlet.
• $30,000 for environmental monitoring at Morehead City Harbor.
• $10.25 million to dredge the Wilmington Harbor anchorage basin at the state port and update the harbor’s dredge material management plan. Material dredged from the harbor is not beach compatible and therefore must be placed in a Corps’ maintained upland disposal area.

Money from the 2022 Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act, which includes additional funding for areas that have suffered loss due to hurricanes and other natural disasters, has been earmarked for the Wrightsville Beach Coastal Storm Risk Management project.

More than $11.5 million is being allocated to renourish the beach there to compensate for damage caused during Hurricane Florence in 2018. 

“This (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) is a three-year bill so this is FY22 money we’ve got and we’ve asked for potential projects for FY23 and FY24,” Keistler said.

Next in the series: Shoaling in Outer Banks waterways

This is part of a series of special reports by Catherine Kozak, who attended the COP26 climate conference held in November.

WANCHESE — At the start of year two of the United Nations’ Decade of the Ocean, the Coastal Studies Institute on the Outer Banks has merged into the emerging blue economy as part of a global scientific collaborative to harness the power of waves, currents and tides.

The Coastal Studies Institute, an outpost of the North Carolina university system renowned for its innovative coastal science, is partnered with three other East Coast academic institutions in the new Atlantic Marine Energy Center, or AMEC, one of only four National Marine Renewable Energy Centers in the country.

Although the new center is still being organized, it was officially announced in November. That’s about the same time that Scotland was hosting the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties, better known as the U.N. climate conference or COP26, which included the blue economy as a critical approach towards mitigating climate change impacts.

With its mission to support and expand sustainable renewable ocean energy, AMEC will focus on research and development.

“Us being part of that group, I think, really identifies us as a leader in the U.S. with advancing marine energy,” George Bonner, director of the North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program at the Coastal Studies Institute, said in a recent interview.

Led by the University of New Hampshire, the partnership was awarded $9.7 million over four years from the U.S. Department of Energy. The institute, which is administered by East Carolina University, is also partnering with Stony Brook University in New York and Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

“Really it’s about increasing collaboration on the East Coast, and the focus of the Atlantic Marine Center is on the blue economy,” Bonner said.

Blue economy is a term that broadly describes the sustainable use of marine resources to promote economic growth and social equity while reducing environmental harm.

In opening a presentation during COP26 about funding the blue economy, Peter Thomson, the U.N. secretary general’s special envoy for the ocean, characterized marine energy and other sustainable uses of ocean resources as “part of the huge revolution in technology” on a scale comparable to moving from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.

“It’s just logic, folks,” said Thomson. “Seventy percent of the planet is covered by the ocean. Ninety-five percent of the biosphere of this planet is in the ocean.”

Thomson said it will take “trillions” to fund the blue economy, but he sees it as essential to transformation of consumption and production.

‘We’re at the cusp of that time when we move from linear exploitation of finite planetary resources into an age where everything is circular, where we recycle and understand that we have to live within harmony with nature,” he said.

In December 2017, the United Nations declared 2021-2030 “The Ocean Decade,” to ensure that ocean science can underpin the U.N’s climate goals and policies.

“The Ocean Decade provides a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity to create a new foundation across the science-policy interface to strengthen the management of the ocean and coasts for the benefit of humanity and to mitigate the impacts of climate change,” the U.N. said in a statement.

With its location alongside the Croatan Sound, a part of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary, the second-largest estuarine system in the nation behind the Chesapeake Bay, and within miles from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf Stream, the Coastal Studies Institute is poised to be a valuable partner to advancing the blue economy. 

Bonner said that he envisions the Outer Banks institutes’ focus with AMEC will include aquaculture, seawater desalination and increasing resiliency for coastal communities.

“Our main part of this new consortium is going to be to advance our testing capability that’s at Jennette’s Pier,” he said, referring to the state-owned ocean pier in Nags Head where the institute conducts some of its renewable energy studies. “We’re going to be installing a microgrid, which will allow us to connect scale devices to a microgrid so we can validate the energy production that they’re producing.”

An important gain for the institute from the new partnership will be obtaining accreditation for its marine energy program with the assistance of an AMEC partner, the European Marine Energy Centre, or EMEC, in Orkney, Scotland.

According to the European Marine Energy Centre’s website, the center, established in 2003, is the world’s first and leading facility for demonstrating and testing technologies that generate electricity from marine energy. It has also developed international standards for marine energy and works to promote a global marine renewables industry.

Once the Coastal Studies Institute and the University of New Hampshire’s programs are accredited, Bonner said, it will help innovators and developers, especially since there are still only a few accredited so far.

“If you’re testing in an accredited program, then that helps with advancing your technology and getting investment opportunities as well,” he said. 

In April, the Waves to Water competition, sponsored by the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Lab, is set to be hosted by the Coastal Studies Institute and Jennette’s Pier. The contest requires contestants to build wave-powered desalination systems that could be deployed during disasters.

Each of the four university AMEC partners have well-established marine energy programs, Martin Wosnik, associate professor of mechanical engineering and AMEC director, told Coastal Review.

“We’re going through establishing the center right now, developing the central structure, developing partnerships with industry and engaging with other marine energy efforts around the country,” he said.

Next, test sites for tidal energy conversion technologies and wave energy conversion technologies are to be established, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and off Jennette’s Pier on the Outer Banks, respectively. 

“Those facilities are key to really get technologies in the water in the correct environment at a fairly moderate cost,” Wosnik said.

For practical reasons, the locations in the ocean will allow testing at an intermediate scale, rather than full scale.

“You want to go in with something that has other meaningful scales, so you understand how it operates,” he said. “And then you can take development from there.”

The Atlantic center is also partnering with three national marine energy laboratories in the U.S., as well as the European center. While the European Marine Energy Centre is best known for its wave energy and tidal energy test sites, Wosnik said, the facility is now also getting more involved in the emerging hydrogen economy — hydrogen energy storage, fuel cell technologies — an example of how it’s looking at the bigger energy picture.

Powering the blue economy can be utility-scale marine energy, such as huge turbines deployed in arrays that produce energy that is fed to the grid, Wosnik said. But for now, it will be mostly reflected in smaller-scaled projects that provide energy to isolated communities or for emergency purposes.

“However, what we’re doing with EMEC, and at our test site, is we’re really researching all aspects of these technologies,” Wosnik said. “The center is not engaged in ‘OK, let’s find one thing that works and that’s it.’ There’s many things, many aspects of what type of technology, what type of rotors and what kind of blades work best.”

Then there are issues with corrosion, bio-fouling, operational maintenance, testing materials for resilience to the kind of loading that the ocean inflicts. What oils and lubricants are effective but not polluting?

“It’s a very turbulent environment,” he said. “There are many, many aspects that still need to be sorted out.”

But Wosnik said it’s worth remembering that wind energy, which is now cheaper than fossil fuels, was hardly on anyone’s radar 20 or 30 years ago.

The marine energy industry in the U.S. has been held back by the lack of test sites that allow inexpensive trials and provide in-water experience, he said. And that’s not including the costs for analytical and computer modeling and laboratory analysis and other work that’s required before the onsite testing.

“There’s a lot of work that leads up to maturing technologies to be ready to be tested in open water,” Wosnik said.

With the Department of Energy support, and a global network of researchers and scientists to collaborate with, the timing for diving into the blue economy may be fortuitous. 

“I would say that we are about to get serious about marine energy,” Wosnik said. “That’s really what’s happening right now.”

This is the first in a multipart special reporting series on coastal water quality.

It’s a windy day in October, warm enough for just a T-shirt, and the Neuse River shimmers in the sunlight. As Katy Hunt approaches the bank, however, a foul smell hits her nostrils. And from the dock, she can see the cause: thousands upon thousands of dead, rotting fish.

A fish kill occurs when algae bloom and then die. The decomposition of the algae depletes oxygen levels in the water. Fish suffocate in their own habitat, and some will jump onto riverbanks in one last futile attempt to breathe. Most fish kills in the Neuse River last a few days at most. But October 2020 saw the area’s longest fish kill in decades, lasting an entire five weeks. For Hunt, the Lower Neuse Riverkeeper for Sound Rivers, the sight was disheartening. Every few days she’d walk out onto the dock to check. From there she saw thousands of pale fish floating by like a funeral procession.

“You’ll see lots of little whitish-silver things floating along the surface and washing up by the shores,” Hunt said.

The large algal blooms that cause these massive fish kills are a result of nutrient pollution. The pollution, said Hunt, is directly attributable to human activity.

Fish kills in the Neuse River are essentially an annual event. But waterways across the entire state are grappling with the consequences of excessive nutrient inputs. As North Carolina accommodates a growing population, the state’s waters are paying the price. North Carolina stands at a crossroads between finding ways to mitigate nutrient pollution damage, or seeing it get worse and worse.

‘Too much of a good thing’

The presence of nutrients in the water isn’t inherently bad. In fact, nutrient cycling is a normal part of ecosystem function. Nitrogen and phosphorus are essential contributors to plant growth and the entire food chain depends on these nutrients. But the Earth supplies its own nitrogen. Human activity has doubled the amount of usable nitrogen in the world, and this excess can wreak havoc on ecosystems.

“It sounds so strange, because nutrients are a good thing,” Hunt said. “Except we all know the old adage that too much of a good thing is a bad thing. And that’s very much the case for the Neuse River.”

Often, we see the results of this nutrient excess in the form of an algal bloom.

How many nutrients is too many? That, said Dr. Nathan Hall of the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences based in Morehead City, depends on what the water is used for.

“The cutoff point really depends on what you’re worried about,” Hall said. For example, seagrasses are especially sensitive to nutrient levels because the resulting algae will block their access to light. Without light, seagrass cannot grow. By contrast, recreational swimmers aren’t as sensitive to higher nutrient levels. “We’re not squeamish about swimming around in some water that’s a little bit green or brown — up to a point,” Hall said.

North Carolina does not have an official threshold for what constitutes too many nutrients. There is, however, a limit on how much chlorophyll-a is in the water. Chlorophyll-a is the pigment that gives algae its green color. Chlorophyll-a is essentially a measure of how much algae is in the water, which by extension, says something about nutrient levels in the water. The official level for North Carolina’s slow-moving waters like sounds and estuaries is 40 micrograms per liter.

“Forty is about where you can really start to notice the water’s green,” Hall said.

Waterways that contain more chlorophyll-a than this get placed on the state’s 303(d) list — the official record of all imperiled waters in the state. Once a body of water makes it onto this list, it sometimes stays there for decades.

Nutrient inputs into waterways, or “nutrient loading,” is regulated for waters that are considered nutrient-sensitive. Sensitivity is defined as being highly reactive to nutrient inputs. In other words, the physical conditions of the water facilitate a nice habitat for algae — things like slow water turnover and shallow depths. For example, the Neuse River is considered nutrient sensitive.

But where do the excess nutrients come from? In short, human activity. These inputs come from the fertilizer that people put on their lawns, as well as large-scale agricultural operations. They come from wastewater and sewage. A lot of these pollutants are carried into the watershed by stormwater runoff. That is, when it rains, the water washes pollutants across impervious surfaces and into watersheds. The ground is usually very good at filtering nutrients out of the water, but developed areas include high levels of impervious pavement, which don’t allow water to penetrate the ground. Impervious surfaces are things like roads, driveways and sidewalks. 

All of this is compounded by climate change. When storms get worse and rainfall increases, more nutrients are flushed into the watershed. If storms are followed by dry periods, water flow slows down and allows algae to prosper. Due to the influence of stormwater runoff on nutrient transport, nutrient pollution can be exacerbated by the number of people living in the watershed.

North Carolina’s total population has been increasing for decades. In 1990, the state population was 6.65 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2020, that number had climbed to 10.44 million. When compared to the rest of the country, North Carolina is the state with the ninth highest population.

Not every county in the state has experienced growth — some counties bear the increase in population more than others. For example, the five-weeklong fish kill in the Neuse River last October occurred just outside of New Bern in Craven County. The population of Craven County was 82,096 in 1990, and in 2020 it reached 101,233. That’s an increase of nearly 20,000 people.

And while not every coastal county experienced growth in the past three decades, Craven County wasn’t the only one to grow substantially. New Hanover County, for example, has increased by 115,649 people in 30 years, nearly doubling its population.

This information comes from Carolina Demography, an organization nested within the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. According to Melody Kramer, director of communications and business development, it’s hard to make predictions about the future of the state’s population. But projections from the department indicate that the state will gain about a million new residents every 10 years for the next few decades.

This could spell trouble when it comes to nutrient pollution.

“The more people you pack into a watershed, the more nutrients you release, and particularly for nitrogen that’s true,” said Dr. Hans Paerl of UNC IMS. “But depending on how aggressive management of those issues is, it can be attenuated.”

As North Carolina continues to see population increases and development, Paerl said that there is an opportunity to build in an effective way as opposed to a harmful way. It’s imperative to the health of the water, especially considering that many of the state’s waterways have seen aggressive nutrient inputs for several decades.

“Now, the thing to keep in mind about all aquatic ecosystems is that they don’t improve overnight,” Paerl said. “So the sooner we have an aggressive nutrient reduction management strategy the better.”

Paerl points to Lake Washington in Seattle as an example of how aggressive, proactive nutrient management plans can work. In the 1940s-1960s, Lake Washington began receiving increased amounts of secondary treated sewage as Seattle and its surrounding areas grew in population. This led to unprecedented levels of the nutrient phosphorus — 70 parts per billion in the 1960s.  And while phosphorus levels are impossible to see with the naked eye, the resulting eutrophication (algae blooms) were evidence of impending catastrophe.

Seattle began an aggressive plan to divert sewage away from the lake and through treatment plants. It was superbly expensive ($140 million in the 1960s) but also incredibly effective. The program was able to get phosphorus levels down to 16 parts per billion. Today, Lake Washington has infrequent problems with eutrophication, and water quality and clarity are high considering that the lake rests in the middle of the largest city in the Pacific Northwest.

Change has also shown itself to be possible in North Carolina. Last year’s five-week fish kill in the Neuse River was the longest one in decades. In the 1990s, however, there were a few of comparable length. This and other indicators of eutrophication alerted state officials to the need to decrease the levels of nutrient pollution into the river.

The Neuse Nutrient Strategy went into effect in 1997. It set up special rules and regulations to target nutrient sources like wastewater and agricultural runoff. This mandate was effective in decreasing the amount of inorganic nitrogen in the Neuse River.

“It has led to a reduction in nitrogen inputs from certain sources,” Paerl said. “But we’ve also seen changes in the watershed due to development and changes in agricultural activities and practices, urbanization, etc., that has led to an increase in organic nitrogen loading.”

While these regulations have made enormous strides in targeting some sources of nutrient pollution, there is still more work ahead.

“There’s still a lot of science that needs to be done in terms of understanding the linkage between where it’s coming from, and how reactive it is in our receiving waters,” Paerl said.

Paerl’s lab at UNC IMS operates the Neuse River Estuary Modeling and Monitoring Project, or MODMON, in partnership with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. 

MODMON has been recording water quality data in the Neuse River since 1994. One of the things MODMON seeks to monitor is the total maximum daily load, or TMDL, of nutrients in the Neuse River. The TMDL is equal to the level of nutrients the river can accommodate while still meeting water quality standards.

According to Dr. Dean Carpenter, program scientist for the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership, or APNEP, long-term water quality data sets are crucial for evaluating management decisions going forward. APNEP works with community partners to determine indicators of water quality within the river basins that feed into the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, including the Neuse River.

“I talk often about monitoring and assessment: two pieces of the puzzle,” Carpenter said. Monitoring data creates a baseline that helps evaluate the effectiveness of management strategies, and points the way toward optimal solutions for the future.

“When you’re instituting management actions to support a healthier, in our case, estuarine system, you want to be able to track the condition of that resource,” Carpenter said.

‘In our hands’

So far, there have been no reported fish kills in the Neuse River this year. But, said Katy Hunt, the season of vulnerability is still young. Last year’s five-week kill ran through October, and it’s only August. While Hunt is no longer surprised by fish kills and other harmful effects of algal blooms, she hesitates to call them inevitable. Humans cause them, and therefore they are in our hands.

“I think it is a kind of an unfortunate fact of life,” Hunt said. “But at the same time, we made it a fact. And we can change it.”

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

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?’”

This is the fifth 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.

Twenty-five coastal communities will have money from the state to better prepare for natural hazards.

The funding is geared to drive better-informed decision making at the local level and initiatives that reduce risk and vulnerability to flooding, storms and other effects of climate change.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management announced March 17 a total of $675,000 would be granted through the new Resilient Coastal Communities Program, launched in the fall to provide technical and financial help to governments in the state’s 20 coastal counties to develop resilience efforts. The application deadline was Jan. 15.

“We wish we had the funding to have accepted all interested communities into the program, but we hope to secure additional funding to offer another round of Phase 1 and 2 funding in the future,” Sam Burdick, coastal resilience coordinator with the Division of Coastal Management, recently told Coastal Review. The division received 30 applications representing 32 coastal communities  — one application was submitted by three communities — for the first two phases of grant funding.

“Building resilience to natural hazards is vital for communities to help maintain quality of life, healthy growth, durable systems, and conservation of resources for present and future generations,” Burdick explained. “However, a number of barriers to developing resilience to coastal risks exist, including economic and capacity constraints that have been exacerbated in recent times. Building more resilient communities requires careful, thorough planning efforts using sound, locally relevant data.”

Burdick is from Duck on the Outer Banks and has a background in coastal science, policy, ecology, local and regional planning, and community outreach. Before joining the division, Burdick was the community planner and disaster recovery coordinator for the Eastern Carolina Council of Governments. She has been the coastal resilience coordinator with the division in Morehead City since February 2020 and is tasked with leading the development and implementation of the Resilient Coastal Communities Program.

The program is rolling out in four phases: community engagement and risk and vulnerability assessment; planning, project selection and prioritization; project engineering and design; and implementation. The initial funds are to be used for the first two phases.

Community applications were scored across seven criteria, including the level of risk exposure to vulnerable populations and critical assets, economic status and need, and internal capacity and momentum with related efforts, according to the state.

The towns of Aurora, Beaufort, Belhaven, Cape Carteret, Hertford, Leland, Navassa, Sunset Beach, Surf City, Topsail Beach, North Topsail Beach, Vandemere, Washington and Windsor are to receive technical assistance to complete Phases 1 and 2.

Barnes Sutton, town planner in Navassa in Brunswick County, explained Tuesday that urban planning and design were once guided by the natural forces in a given area, such as navigable waters or the direction of prevailing winds, allowing cities to optimize those natural resources and by extension protect those resources.

“This created unique places that balanced city centers and residential areas with communal space and fields for agriculture,” Sutton said. He added that at some point, urban planning moved away from these principles and began to emphasize consumption over conservation.

“Being selected to participate in the Resilient Coastal Communities Program underlines the importance of natural resources and how to grow with sustainability and recyclability in the forefront, which in time, can undo the damages over-consumption has done,” Sutton said. “Navassa is poised to support exponential growth in residential, commercial and recreational sectors over the next five years, all of which will need healthy and efficient waterways to support it and will only be magnified by the restoration and protection of them.”

Beaufort in Carteret County also received a grant. Town Planner Kate Allen told Coastal Review Tuesday that storm surge and the heavy rainstorms and higher tides of recent years pose acute risks to life and property, particularly during hurricane season.

“In 2018, Hurricane Florence wreaked havoc on the town and surrounding areas. Heavy rains coupled with high tide results in frequent flooding of Front Street. Shoreline erosion, primarily caused by rising water levels and storms, increases the town’s flooding risk. These stressors individually pose risk, but are most impactful when they occur together, and often they do,” she said. “As a small community, town staff lack the time necessary to conduct thorough vulnerability and risk assessments. This grant will allow the town to place more emphasis on the risk and vulnerability assessment included in the ongoing CAMA/Comprehensive Land Use Plan update.”

The division also selected the counties of Beaufort, Craven, Currituck, Dare for Hatteras Island, Hertford, Hyde and Pamlico for the program.

Dare County Manager Bobby Outten said Tuesday that the county received a $30,000 grant through the program to study all risks and vulnerabilities on Hatteras Island. These include economic vulnerabilities, storm vulnerabilities, transportation vulnerabilities and any others that the consultant determines exist.

“Completion of this study would make Dare County eligible for additional grants to determine remedies to resolve or mitigate the vulnerabilities found,” Outten said. “Once the remedies are determined, Dare County would be eligible for yet another grant to begin implementing those remedies.”

Duck, Nags Head, Swansboro and Pine Knoll Shores have shown significant momentum in resilience planning and have been selected to complete the remaining requirements of the first two phases, the division said in the March 17 announcement.

Burdick said big barriers for communities when it comes to planning is the lack of a dedicated resilience budget, an overall reduced budget related to the economic effects of the pandemic, and a lack of capacity to plan.

A more proactive, sustainable and equitable approach to risk planning focuses on mitigating or reducing vulnerability, rather than responding after storms or flooding, she said.

The resilience program is a priority in the state’s Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan and reflects Gov. Roy Cooper’s commitment to building climate change resiliency statewide while promoting economic growth and stability. It’s the product of a series of resilience efforts and events the division led in recent years to address intensifying natural hazards on the coast, Burdick said.

The division worked with five local governments from 2017 to 2018 using a process called Resilience Evaluation Needs Assessment, or RENA, to map critical assets and assess risk and vulnerability to coastal hazards.

After Hurricane Florence in 2018, Cooper signed Executive Order No. 80, calling for the development of the North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan. The state held several workshops in 2019, including in Elizabeth City and Wilmington, to ensure the plan was based on local knowledge and needs, she said.

The 2020 Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan called for the development of the Resilient Communities Program, which was designed to boost resilience building at the local level with a three-pronged approach: local government funding, training and capacity building and an online resilience portal. The Resilient Coastal Communities Program falls under the larger umbrella of the statewide North Carolina Resilient Communities Program, Burdick explained.

The division received about $830,000 in funding from the North Carolina General Assembly and $1.1 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation this year to begin developing and implementing the resilience framework for local governments.

Partnering with the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, North Carolina Sea Grant and The Nature Conservancy, the division tailored a number of resilience plans from other states to needs specific to coastal North Carolina communities.

Division Director Braxton Davis said division partners and coastal communities have been working on various aspects of coastal resilience for a long time, but lacked a clear framework to help organize efforts.

“This new program will help all of us become more efficient and strategic in our investments, ensure that we are identifying and prioritizing the most important projects, and provide more targeted technical assistance that builds on previous planning efforts,” Davis said. “DCM is proud to lead this effort on behalf of our coastal communities and appreciates the ongoing partnerships we have with the N.C. Office of Recovery and Resiliency, The Nature Conservancy, and N.C. Sea Grant.”

The resilience team held two interactive webinars in August 2020 to introduce the Resilient Coastal Communities Program and the funding opportunities targeted to local governments, consultants, academia and nongovernmental organizations. A total of 225 attendees participated in these webinars, including representation from 18 county governments and 39 municipal governments.

A virtual discussion with more than 50 contractors interested in providing services to communities through this program was held in September 2020. There were 24 contractor applications for Phases 1 and 2.

“Understanding the importance of inclusivity and equity in planning processes, participating local governments and contractors will develop a Community Action Team, or steering committee, and a community engagement strategy to involve community members and local leaders throughout the process,” Burdick said. “Local knowledge and feedback are key and will help inform the process and drive the development of sound, feasible projects and action items to enhance resilience.”

Next in the series: Natural and working lands

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

This is the second 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.

EASTERN NORTH CAROLINA — Craig Allen’s memory is a little hazy on the finer details of the coastal storm that pushed the waters of Scotts Creek into his grandmother’s backyard in James City.

He can’t pinpoint the precise year and time the hurricane rolled in – sometime in the early 1970s when he was in elementary school. He doesn’t recall the storm’s name.

But he vividly remembers that it was the first time in his life water flowed over the banks of Scotts Creek and crept alarmingly close to his grandmother’s house on Kennedy Drive.

“Every year since then it’s getting worse,” Allen said. “There’s some trees in the water now that when I was a kid they weren’t in the (Neuse) river.”

Allen also recalls that during Hurricane Florence in September 2018, residents had to be rescued by boat when Scotts Creek flooded the neighborhood.

James City, a community on the peninsula at the confluence of the Trent and Neuse rivers in Craven County, is in a floodplain.

That designation is part of why this community, which has a storied Black history, is one of several throughout North Carolina that has been identified by the state as a “potential” environmental justice community.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or NCDEQ, has created maps that identify potentially underserved populations, ones that meet certain racial and economic criteria.

The state’s June 2020 Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan identifies these communities as either having a population that consists of more than 50% nonwhites or a population of nonwhites of at least 10% higher than the county or state share. And, those with a population that experiences a poverty rate over 20% and households with poverty at least 5% higher than the county or state share.

The maps are designed to be a tool for local governments and organizations to use, if they choose, as a means in helping for the future, explained Renee Kramer, NCDEQ’s Title VI and environmental justice coordinator.

“Of course, there’s not one right or wrong way to use the mapping system,” Kramer said. “We really felt like we could help communities to provide a tool that has this data so that community members and, or, local governments can see what is in their community right now and help plan and envision what they want their community to be in the future. This is a screening tool. It’s not the end-all, be-all.”

The maps were created through a culmination of information pulled from various government agencies then layered to illustrate a community’s compounding vulnerabilities.

“You can’t really plan for these real-life scenarios without taking into consideration the reality of the folks living on the ground.”

Renee Kramer, Environmental Justice Coordinator, NCDEQ

The first layer is collected from across NCDEQ’s divisions identifying where and which type of government-issued permits, such as air quality and wastewater permits, exist. The second layer establishes socioeconomic and demographic characteristics collected from the Census Bureau. And, the third piece includes a community’s health characteristics gathered from the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services and county health departments.

“You can’t really plan for these real-life scenarios without taking into consideration the reality of the folks living on the ground,” Kramer said.

What is the transportation availability in that community? What’s the average income? Are there a high number of non-English speaking residents within that population?

“One thing that we have added from our data version 1.0 that is currently out is the flood layer,” Kramer said. “I think that would be a very powerful layer to consider to turn on if you’re talking about climate change and resiliency.”

James City is a prime example of a community with compounding vulnerabilities in our changing climate. It is a historically Black settlement that lies within a floodplain.

A section entitled “Climate and Environmental Justice” in the Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan states, “Barriers to property ownership have resulted in a number of climate resilience concerns specific to African American homeowners and historic African American communities. A disproportionate share of African Americans live in low-lying areas in the Southeast, which are more susceptible to drainage and flooding problems.”

Located across the Trent River from New Bern, U.S. 70 now divides this unincorporated community named in honor of the Rev. Horace James, a Union Army chaplain who was charged with managing the Trent River Settlement, a haven for former slaves and their families during the Civil War in 1863.

“In 1863 if any African American could make it to that camp they were considered free,” Allen said. “As long as we stayed there, we had a right to stay there.”

By 1865, nearly 3,000 Black men, women and children lived in the settlement. During Reconstruction, James City transformed into an independent community of free Black people.

Roughly 10 years after the settlement was created, the land’s white owners began hiking rent of Black residents in an effort to evict them from the property. The owners turned down an offer of $2,000 to buy the land.

In 1892, the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the property owners in a lawsuit brought on by Black residents.

The ruling prompted some Black families to pack up and move. Others, however, were determined to stay.

For Allen, James City embodies a sense of place, pride and resilience in the face of overwhelming. Community leaders are in talks to incorporate.

“To go back, it’s home,” said Allen, who lives in New Bern. “Home is home regardless of what people say. It’s funny that it’s called a flood zone and other neighborhoods are called waterfront. If all the Black people moved out right now then it would be a resort community because it’s surrounded by water.”

Chapter 4 of the Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan pointedly discusses the connection Black property owners have to historically Black communities.

“Given the barriers to property ownership among African Americans, land often holds particularly high historical and cultural value for Black households. In some cases, land has been in the same family for many generations. The decision to consider a buyout, if offered one by a state or local program, is particularly fraught for these homeowners.”

Naeema Muhammad is organizing director of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and a member of the NCDEQ Secretary’s Environmental Justice and Equity Board.

She knows firsthand the challenges residents of environmental justice communities face.

“It’s about the sentimental and emotional ties and values that people are connected to in their homes and why should I have to give up my home and my family connection to my land to satisfy somebody else,” Muhammad said. “You will hear people around the state say, ‘Well why don’t they just move?’ If it was that easy then maybe people would. You hear their stories and you hear the passion that they’re speaking from. You see and hear their connection to the places they’re at. You know, everything is not always about money. It’s about the emotional ties that they have.”

Elsie Herring does not want to leave the land that’s been in her family for generations.

She’s living on a portion of the land her grandfather purchased in Duplin County in the late 1800s.

He bought the first 150-acre tract in 1891. Before the turn of the century, he had purchased three more tracts. All told, he owned more than 60 acres.

“This has been home for my family since then,” Herring said.

She and her 14 siblings were born in a house the family built in 1921.

By the time she was a teenager nearing high school graduation, jobs in and around the homestead were scarce for Blacks, she said.

She moved to New York where she lived and worked 27 years before returning to Duplin County in 1993 to care for her then-ailing mother and a brother.

The return home has been bittersweet because, for more than two decades, Herring, 72, has been fighting the pork industry.

She is part of a number of nuisance lawsuits filed against the pork industry in recent years.

In the case in which she was involved, an appellate court ruled in favor of the families — mostly Black land owners in rural areas of eastern North Carolina — where industrial hog farms operate.

Herring said she and her family have suffered years of intimidation and threats and dealing with the indescribable smell of hog waste sprayed onto fields next to, and oftentimes directly, on her mother’s land and house.

She alleges that her family’s land deeds were illegally changed for the benefit of the pork industry.

She witnessed hundreds of dead hog carcasses washed out by Hurricane Floyd in September 1999 and remembers the stench of death.

“There were dead pigs everywhere,” Herring said. “They even brought an incinerator down the road to burn the carcasses and that made it even worse. I’m very concerned about climate change. After Floyd there was always the threat of another hurricane coming by worse than Floyd. (Hurricane) Matthew was bad, but none of them were like (Hurricane) Florence.”

“My mother lived on this land for 99 years and she said the water had never been an issue coming up that high.”

Elsie Herring, Duplin County resident

Hurricane Florence’s record-breaking rainfall in September 2018 flooded Rock Fish Creek to the point the family wondered if they would have to evacuate their home.

“My mother lived on this land for 99 years and she said the water had never been an issue coming up that high,” Herring said. “It was an excessive amount of water. We had a strange feeling for the first time that we may need to leave for higher ground. What happens when another one comes? These (hog) facilities are still sitting there. These lagoons are still sitting there. They’re still just sitting there in a floodplain. We’re already dealing with enough pollution. Not only are we dealing with the pigs and their waste, we’re dealing with the chicken houses. Those two combinations right there are a recipe for disaster.”

She remains hopeful, despite a new fight, this one against a proposed facility in Duplin County that would capture biogas from hog waste lagoons at 19 industrial hog operations in that county and neighboring Sampson County.

The project would cap open-air lagoons to capture biogas, which would be transported through some 30 miles of pipeline to an upgrading facility, then injected into an existing natural gas pipeline.

Herring is one of a number of critics of the project who argue it does not address significant air pollution from the 19 operations that would be included or possible groundwater contamination.

“It’s not being treated,” she said. “It’s just being converted. We already have enough poisonous gas in our environment.”

Muhammad said communities like Herrings, overburdened with environmental hazards, are “like ticking time bombs” in a changing climate.

“These environmental justice communities are really just in harm’s way and it grows each hour because we can see how the weather can be 90 degrees in the morning and drop to 40 and 50 at night,” she said. “Any overflow of rain creates a major problem for these communities. One of the things we’ve seen during flooding (from hurricanes), you had a tremendous number of people who didn’t have a way to get out of harm’s way. They didn’t have cars. They didn’t have public transportation.”

“I read that plan and I thought, ‘You’re saying all this, but you’re still issuing bad permits.’”

Naeema Muhammad, Director, NC Environmental Justice Network

She has read the Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan. She’s familiar with Chapter 4.

“I read that plan and I thought, ‘You’re saying all this, but you’re still issuing bad permits,’” Muhammad said.

“We have a long way to go. There have been some gains made, but not a tremendous amount. It’s not because of the will of the people. It’s because our local, state and federal governments don’t have the will to ring in these dirty industries,” she said. “If you are serious about protecting these communities, why are you going to keep dumping these same things in these places. You’re saying you’re going to do better and try to protect these communities but you’re not showing that. It’s wordy stuff that sounds good on paper. We’re not giving up that’s for sure.”

Neither is Elsie Herring.

“I would love to see change in my lifetime, but I don’t believe anything the industry says,” she said. “You can’t let man’s behavior take your joy away because if you do you may as well be dead. There’s no time to get tired when your job’s not complete and this job is not complete because the industry is a bad neighbor. This land means everything to me. We lived off this land. We were born and raised here. It’s a beautiful place. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to stay on it until I die.”

Next in the series: Resilience as opportunity

Last year, a Coastal Review series for the Pulitzer Center’s Connected Coastlines initiative looked at how hurricanes, floods, nor’easters and other major events in recent years significantly dampened any remaining skepticism on the science of climate change.

In this first installment of our latest series supported in part by the Pulitzer Center, we look at how that shift in the debate is changing public policy and what kinds of plans and possible solutions are taking shape.

The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, the most active on record, ended without a major storm, but many communities still reeling from storms of previous seasons continue to struggle to repair and recover.

The relentlessness of tropical storms and severe weather over the past half-decade has changed the dialogue on climate change statewide. State policy has shifted, too, but slowly and unevenly. While there’s consensus about some actions to further protect communities and make them more resilient, leaders are still divided when it comes to other climate-related initiatives such as greenhouse gas reduction.

In June 2020, Gov. Roy Cooper released the North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, an extensive 372-page report on what the science is saying about North Carolina’s present and future, the state’s many vulnerabilities and an extensive set of strategies to address climate-related hazards.

The report followed through with a strategy Cooper launched early in his term to combine the effort to build resiliency with an emissions-reduction strategy organized around green energy.

A brief history

In the wake of destructive hurricanes in recent years, record rainfall in 2018, and sporadic, prolonged droughts, there was broad consensus around the need for resilience, a catch-all term that now seems to encompass every strategy aimed at weathering future storms.

The consensus on resilience has been strong enough to draw significant state funding and lead to policy changes, despite the backdrop of long-running political disagreements and budget standoffs between Cooper and leaders in the North Carolina General Assembly.

The most concrete result of the resiliency consensus is a new state agency, the Office of Recovery and Resiliency, which was formed in late 2018 to manage the massive flow of federal funds coming in the wake of the storms.

In contrast to at least a general agreement on the need to build resilience, the difference between the governor and legislative leaders on climate change mitigation, particularly limits on fossil fuels, could not be starker.

The General Assembly began the 21st century with an eye on a less carbon-reliant energy policy, passing requirements for renewable energy generation and forming a commission on global climate change to develop a state action plan.

After a series of delays and over industry objections, the commission released a 117-page report in 2010 calling for a major statewide effort to reduce emissions.

The year the report came out, Republicans won majorities in the state House and Senate and the leadership of key committees shifted to legislators openly skeptical about the science around climate change.

At the same time, lawmakers and administration officials were being courted by oil and gas exploration companies who saw potential for renewing offshore exploration as well as hydraulic fracturing — fracking — for natural gas in Piedmont shale deposits.

Within a year, the legislature embraced both onshore fracking and offshore drilling. A sweeping energy policy bill passed in 2011 declared that both industries would bring jobs and oil and gas royalties to the state.

In 2012, the legislature launched its notorious effort to limit the science used to determine the rate of sea level rise, and the legislature eventually codified skepticism of any science based on models showing an accelerated rate of sea level rise.

The legislature had a willing partner from 2013 to 2016 in then-Gov. Pat McCrory, who enthusiastically supported fracking and offshore drilling.

But McCrory’s defeat in 2016 by Cooper led to a change in the executive branch every bit as striking as the legislature’s shift in 2011, starting with unvarnished opposition to a Trump administration plan to reopen the leasing program for oil and gas exploration along the Atlantic Coast.

In October 2018, Cooper followed through on a campaign promise to reduce the state’s carbon emissions through Executive Order 80, which signed on to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, and mandated a full review of state government policies and operations to reduce greenhouse gas output.

The order was significant because in addition to calling for numerous concrete steps across state government, it also knit together the concepts of climate change resilience and mitigation. The last “whereas” in the document reads:

“Whereas to maintain economic growth and development and to provide responsible environmental stewardship we must build resilient communities and develop strategies to mitigate and prepare for climate-related impacts in North Carolina.”

A different kind of plan

Coastal Review talked with four longtime state environmental policy experts about the Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, what it means and whether the governor and the legislature can bridge divides on key issues.

Cassie Gavin, director of government affairs with the North Carolina Sierra Club, said the decision to combine resiliency and climate change mitigation into the state’s strategy is a significant step forward, addressing both cause and effect.

“They have to go together. I’m glad that they are and that the state is doing both things at the same time,” she said. “The plan is a good start in that it sets a path for state agencies and local governments to follow and lays out resiliency priorities that the legislature should fund.”

She said it also gives local governments a template to work from in developing their own plans. It includes a scoring system for qualifying risk and other strategies that local governments can use.

“It’s not just the state that needs a resiliency plan,” Gavin said, “every community, especially at the coast or any community near water, needs a resiliency plan of their own.”

Bill Holman, state director of The Conservation Fund and a former state environmental secretary, said North Carolina has suffered from the lack of a long-term resiliency plan.

“Unfortunately, we have a lot of experience dealing with major floods going back more than 20 years,” Holman said. “I think what we’ve lacked is that while we’ve responded to the storms, we really haven’t done much to make ourselves more resilient for the next storm.”

Many communities would like to take action but need technical and financial support from the state to move forward, he said. Success in those communities would likely spur change in other places.

“I’m an optimist about the long haul here, because it’s an imperative and we really don’t have a choice, in particular in eastern North Carolina, where becoming more resilient is going to be critical to its long-term environmental and economic health.”

The choice for many places, he said, will be to become more resilient or wither away.

Will McDow, Resilient Landscapes director for the Environmental Defense Fund, said he agrees that the report could provide a pathway for communities looking to be proactive.

“It does a good job of providing that North Star, providing those guiding principles for where the state should go,” he said.

Attitudes among once-skeptical farmers and residents in rural, eastern North Carolina are changing, he said, and elected officials are beginning to get the message.

“There’s a shift in how people are thinking. They may not believe the science, but they believe their eyes. They’re seeing longer droughts and they are seeing higher flood waters, and that’s beginning to trickle up.”

One concept that’s resonating is using natural and working land to increase resilience capacity, a key part of the plan.

In one of the last bills passed in 2020 legislative session, the General Assembly approved a plan to create an inventory of areas where floodwaters could be diverted to reduce effects on towns and infrastructure downstream.

The bill also expands the Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Mitigation Services to include natural-based solutions for flood mitigation in its grant program and to work with private landowners to provide floodwater capacity.

“Natural infrastructure is going to be a critical component of building the resilience of eastern North Carolina. It’s going to differ by watershed and it’s not a silver bullet, but it’s important,” McDow said. “Resilience is going to take a lot of different actions, diversity in all its different forms. There are going to be places where buyouts and getting people out of harm’s way are going to be a critical part of the conversation. There may be places where levees are actually needed or other gray infrastructure, but for the most part finding ways to make our landscapes more spongy is a critical piece of how we’re going to absorb more water when it comes.”

McDow said the climate report’s strong emphasis on environmental justice and bringing more voices into the conversation are also critical, because of the realities of the region.

The plan devotes a major section to a climate justice strategy, breaking down how aspects of climate change disproportionally affect already vulnerable communities.

It calls for the state to step in with funding and expertise for local communities that don’t have the resources, along with greater effort to add more local voices to the discussion and support locally initiated efforts.

“Historically, resilience efforts have not engaged organizations that interface most frequently with socially vulnerable populations, such as public schools, social service and healthcare providers, houses of worship, faith-based organizations, and public transit systems. These kinds of organizations could be the basis of very successful resilience efforts in the future,” the report states.

“This is the place where more conversation is needed,” McDow said. Policy decisions, he said, must be based on a community’s needs and what solutions are going to work for them.

“Resilience is more than flooding, it’s other longstanding impacts, water pollution, air pollution, economic disinvestment, there’s a lot of aspects to be thought about here, not just the flooding,” he said. “It’s got to be informed by those lived experiences.”

Grady McCallie, policy director for the North Carolina Conservation Network, said there’s broad recognition that low-wealth communities and communities of color in flood-prone areas that are hit repeatedly could get the biggest benefit from resiliency planning. But at the same time, they are often the communities that can least afford the planning and engineering costs that go into proposals.

“If you look at traditionally marginalized communities, they have the least ability to do those kinds of plans ahead of time, so that when the next big slug of money comes around, they don’t have anything ready to go and don’t have competitive applications put in.”

Looking forward

McCallie said the new plan has several important features: it establishes a baseline science on climate change; carries forward resiliency planning throughout state government; and looks to build resiliency in local communities. But without follow-through and without additional support from the legislature, he said, it will only go so far.

“The initiative on climate is all coming from the executive branch right now,” he said. “We need it from the legislative branch and legislative leaders are not leading on climate. There’s a lot of stuff that the executive branch can do and is doing, but there’s a lot that only the legislative branch can do.”

The most important step, he said, would be for the General Assembly to set up a reliable funding stream for resilience, particularly for planning at the state and local levels.

“Resiliency needs a stable, long-term funding source,” he said.

Holman said planning funds are important because having plans in place and a set of shovel-ready projects puts states in a better position to draw down federal support after major storms. He said Florida and the Chesapeake Bay region states have been able to tap federal funds from natural solutions because of forward planning and that’s allow them to suck up federal funds following major storms that could have gone to projects here.

“We’ve been missing out on money for natural solutions,” he said. “Some states were ready to go after those funds and some were not.”

McCallie said that, so far, there seems to be commitment to keep moving forward with Jeremy Tarr, the governor’s main policy adviser on resiliency and climate change, now leading an interagency working group on implementing the plan.

“If all they had done is put out this giant report, we’d be concerned about how it’s going to get implemented, but we’re really glad to see this commitment to staffing,” he said.

That’s important, McCallie said, because the buy-in across state government isn’t the same, and one criticism of the plan is that it is uneven, varying from department to department. “It’s evident some agencies thought deeper about it.”

While there are some steps the state can take now, the degree of meaningful follow-through on the plan and the ideas and challenges it raises will depend how much of it takes root in the legislature. Changes beyond what the executive branch can do, including additional funding and significant changes to law and policy, require legislative participation.

Given the political headwinds and the focus on pandemic response and recovery that could prove difficult.

Gavin said whether that changes and how fast it changes will determine how soon we see a difference in policies and funding on climate issues. So far, she said, climate change has far outpaced the General Assembly.

“The political process has been much too slow for the reaction that we need to see to address climate change in a meaningful way,” she said.

Next in the series: Helping underserved communities

The measures put in place in March to curb the spread of COVID-19 have changed how North Carolinians consume and dispose of waste. This is the fifth installment in a series examining how advocacy organizations, local governments and state agencies are adapting to these changes.

One day about five years ago, Paul Schernitzki of Maysville experienced an awakening of sorts while driving to work. The grass along the road he traveled all summer had just been mowed by roadworkers. It was as if a shaved beard exposed oozing sores.

“I was shocked how much litter there was,” Schernitzki said in a February podcast, recounting the reasons for founding his new educational anti-littering effort, The Litter Pirate. “It blew my mind.”

But safety measures related to COVID-19 have stalled The Litter Pirate’s work, along with other annual or seasonal roadside cleanups organized by the state Department of Transportation and numerous community volunteer groups.

“It just made it a lot worse when the COVID set in, but we were already having budget issues,” Kimberly Wheeless, NCDOT’s litter management program outreach coordinator, said about litter maintenance programs. “The only positive note due to the COVID is, in the beginning, more people were staying home, so there was less litter.”

Both of DOT’s annual spring and fall litter sweeps had to be canceled because of the virus, she said. Cleanups associated with the department’s Adopt-A-Highway program and Sponsor-A-Highway litter sweeps were also rescheduled or canceled.

But with more people hitting the highways as everything is opening up again, Wheeless added, roadside and parking lot litter now include the addition of masks and gloves. Cigarette butts and fast-food trash continue to be the main component of the garbage, along with plastic bags, straws and bottles, as well as aluminum cans and glass bottles.

During 2019, NCDOT spent $21,665,454 removing litter from 80,000 miles of state routes, according to state data.

To offset costs, the agency has programs such as Sponsor-A-Highway, which offers 1-mile segments of highway to businesses to sponsor in exchange for a fee to pay professional cleanup crews and a roadside sign advertising the business, and Adopt-A-Highway, which offers supplies to volunteer groups to pick up and bag litter on sections of road in their communities for DOT to collect.

Funding for most of the state prison crews that did cleanups in the past has been cut in recent years, although some local governments still use inmates to remove litter. Others pick up roadside litter as part of court-mandated community service.

With or without COVID-19 aggravating the issue, litter has been a costly and unsightly plague on North Carolina, from the coast to the mountains.

In 2019, the Sponsor-A-Highway program removed 577,035 pounds of litter, and Adopt-A-Highway picked up 1,020,870 pounds of roadside trash. Other volunteers reported a total of 77,115 pounds, and NCDOT contract litter maintenance removed 7,253,490 pounds. Also, there was a total of 3,154 litter charges issued with 983 convictions. Intentional litterers could face fines of $250 plus costs.

Keep American Beautiful, probably the most recognized anti-litter nonprofit group, has about 650 certified affiliates nationwide and about 30 in North Carolina.

The group began in 1953 when “a group of corporate, civic and environmental leaders gathered to unite the public and private sectors to foster a national cleanliness ethic,” according to a 2018 press release.

The famous “Crying Indian” public service announcement from 1971, depicting a supposed Native American man (who was actually an Italian-American) on horseback, looking at the polluted and littered environment in his midst. As the camera zooms into his face, a big tear welled from one eye onto his cheek.

But critics of the PSA, often cited as one of the most successful in advertising history, accuse Keep American Beautiful of using the campaign to blame consumers, rather than manufacturers, for the blight.

“Not only were they the very essence of what the counterculture was against, they were also staunchly opposed to many environmental initiatives,” Finis Dunaway, author of “Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images,” wrote in a Nov. 21, 2017, editorial in the Chicago Tribune.

Dunaway contended that the “Crying Indian” purposely deflected attention from responsibility for the environmental blight created by disposable packaging and container industries.

“That narrative is fundamentally untrue,” said Keep American Beautiful spokesman Noah Ullman.

Although most of the founding members of the group, initially called the “Keep Our Roadsides Clean Council,” included corporate representatives from, among others, the National Can Corp., American Petroleum Institute and Paper Cup and Container Institute, it also represented the National Council of State Garden Clubs and the National Parks Association.

Ullman cited the group’s 2019 impact report as evidence of the Keep American Beautiful’s value to communities: 11,911,783 hours volunteered; 218,056 acres cleaned or improved; 59,874 miles of trails and roadway picked up; 7,764 miles of shoreline cleaned and $304,952,284 of economic benefit to communities.

In addition to regular cleanups, other events, such as the “plogging” trash blast, which features a long implement that picks up litter, were also sponsored this year by Keep American Beautiful, but were delayed, canceled or held virtually.

“The scale we deliver is impressive,” Ullman said. “It seems obvious to us now, but people didn’t know about putting things in the bin.”

Micki Bozeman, executive director of Keep Brunswick County Beautiful, confirms that most of the affiliate’s varied tasks, including its litter index that assesses the volume of litter at different spots in the county, have been affected by COVID.

For whatever reason, she added, people seem to think nothing of throwing masks and gloves outside — out their vehicle window, or tossed aside after leaving a building.

“It’s everywhere, especially in the parking lots,” Bozeman said. “Which to me just blows my mind.”

Bozeman, who is also the county’s solid waste and recycling coordinator, said the Brunswick affiliate, working in the county for 18 years, focuses more on the rural areas that don’t receive the same attention as the beaches.

But the county places specially designed carts at beach areas, she said, that serve the purpose of a “big ashtray” to encourage people not to put out their cigarettes on the ground or in the sand.

Considering the unfortunate reality that people continue to litter, she said being affiliated with a well-known national organization like Keep America Beautiful encourages people to get involved in cleaning it up.

“I’ve never littered at all, and I’ve never understood at all why somebody throws something out the window,” Bozeman said. “I do think that it’s something good for communities to be part of the effort.”

Schernitzki, a 39-year-old K-12 teacher, was so appalled by the amount of litter he saw just commuting to work that he decided to clean the area himself. It turned out to be more than one person could handle.

“The thing is, if you drive around and notice litter on the side of the road,” he said in an interview, “it’s always way worse than you can see in a car.”

Even after connecting with Adopt-A-Highway and other volunteers, he said, picking up litter off the same roadways over and over again left him feeling jaded.

“There’s a road I drive on called Hibbs Road in Carteret County,” Schernitzki said. “The last time I picked that road, I filled 100 30-gallon bags in 2 miles.”

It soon became obvious, he said, that littering is a complex problem that needs a more comprehensive solution than some unpaid people cleaning up other people’s trash. Policymakers, law enforcers and lawmakers, religious and business leaders and many more representatives from the public and private sector, he said, need to be engaged.

“I see the problem as kind of a pie chart,” Schernitzki said. “I think volunteerism has a place, but it should have an equal share of the pie.”

As a science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, teacher at Roger Bell New Tech Academy in Havelock who does videography on the side, Schernitzki thought he’d start by teaching young people about the waste stream and responsible disposal.

“I think people are assuming that children are getting taught that in school, but they’re not,” he said.

Less than a year ago, Schernitzki, who transplanted to Eastern North Carolina from Seattle in 2015, founded The Litter Pirate, a tongue-in-cheek nod to his outsider status as well as his mission to crew a diverse force of young and old to conquer litter. His website includes links to humorous videos and informative podcasts to help the spoonfuls of litter education go down easy.

“The goal of The Litter Pirate is to do more than pick litter,” he said in the podcast. “It’s to fight littering, not just litter.”

On the Western corner of the state, Gary Chamberlain founded North Carolina Litter-Free Coalition for similar reasons.

Chamberlain, 73, landed in North Carolina from Arizona about four years ago after visiting the state during one of his frequent cross-country bicycle trips.

“Every state has a litter epidemic, there is no state that is immune to this,” he said in an interview. “It’s a problem that nobody seems to be able to get their arms around.”

Roadside litter has served as a sad and alarming illustration of the social crisis with drugs and alcohol abuse, Chamberlain said. He has found liquor and beer bottles, opened and unopened, as well as needles and pill bottles.

The coalition has a “Cash-4-Trash” program, funded by local businesses and residents, that pays people $100 to fill 10 33-gallon bags with litter and answer six litter-related questions.

“It makes it a win-win situation for everybody,” he said. “Businesses love this program because they’re rewarding people who are doing something for their community. And the people who need funding have a way now to earn some funding rather than … begging for money for doing nothing.”

Chamberlain, a Vietnam War veteran and retired pharmaceutical data collection consultant, said he sees littering as a personal responsibility and doesn’t blame NCDOT for the volume of litter on roadsides.

“You, who are aunts, uncles, parents, or whatever, you put that trash there,” he said about his message. “So don’t complain to the NCDOT when they don’t have the time, money or funding to pick up the crap you left on the highway.”

That idea has received the approval of Republican politicians in the state, but Chamberlain said that the insists that the coalition remain nonpartisan. And the coalition’s slogan urging people to “Honor God and His Creation,” is about appreciating the environment, not “pushing scripture,” he said.

No matter a person’s beliefs or background, he said, “there’s something in this for everybody” because everyone hates litter.

“We’re an army of one,” he said, “consisting of many.”

Chamberlain said he hopes that the NC Litter Coalition eventually will be able to expand statewide.

Changing a careless behavior like littering, he agrees, will be a long-term effort.

“It’s a complicated thing,” he said. “I guess to get down to the basic thing is we need to educate the youth in elementary and middle school because they’re going to become the ones that actually make a difference long term.

“In my lifetime, I’m never going to see anything even close to what would make me happy, because we’re so far behind the eight ball.”

The measures put in place in March to curb the spread of COVID-19 have changed how North Carolinians consume and dispose of waste. This is the fourth installment in a series examining how advocacy organizations, local governments and state agencies are adapting to these changes.

Debris that litters the coast has been a longstanding problem for marine life, and coordinators for University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Turtle Trash Collectors program, which previously offered in-person educational activities, have changed how they reach audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Laura Sirak-Schaeffer, grants project coordinator and lead instructor for Turtle Trash Collectors, said in an interview that the program is an environmental education initiative funded by a grant from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration Marine Debris Program.

Turtle Trash Collectors is a project through MarineQuest, the official marine science outreach program for UNCW,  Watson College of Education, and the Center for Marine Science to offer young people with opportunities to explore, discover and value our marine habitats.

The goal of the program is to educate youth about the impacts of marine debris and encourage behavioral changes that will reduce its generation in the future.

“This program combines both my love for sea turtles and my passion for public education. My favorite part of my job is knowing that we are making a lasting impact by teaching everyone how they can stop marine debris,” she said.

Sirak-Schaeffer explained that marine debris has major effects on all kinds of marine organisms, especially sea turtles, which can confuse plastic bags and balloons for jellyfish. The debris can end up in their system and can get stuck, making the turtle feel full so that they stop eating. Sea turtles also can swallow fishing hooks and get caught in fishing nets.

“Since sea turtles are endangered species, we need to find a way to protect them from the impacts of marine debris,” Sirak-Schaeffer said, adding ways to help include reduce using plastic and use reusable water bottles, coffee cups, grocery bags and food containers instead, pick up trash to make sure it doesn’t end up in the ocean and encourage others to help.

Turtle Trash Collectors launched earlier this year new citizen-science program to better understand how COVID-19 is affecting pollution and marine debris.  Volunteers are to pick an area to hold a cleanup, such as a neighborhood, park or beach, and hold three cleanups in the same area, once now, then again when quarantine restrictions are lifting, and once more when everything is reopened and back to normal. Participation information is on the website.

During each cleanup, volunteers are asked to keep track of what they collect using a data sheet and then report data so progress can be recorded.

Sue Kezios, director of Youth Programs and UNCW MarineQuest, is the principle investigator, or PI, for the NOAA grant that funds the Turtle Trash Collectors project.

Kezios said that there already was in place the Turtle Trash Collector badging program to encourage young people and their families to collect certain kinds of marine debris, single-use plastic items in particular.

“But during the early days of the pandemic I started to hear stories about how the environment seemed to be responding to the decrease in human impacts. People in the Indian province of Punjab being able to see the Himalayan mountains for the first time in many years due to a reduction in air pollution, Kezios said. “This got me thinking about litter and whether that was decreasing; and if so, what would we find during beach cleanups?”

Kezios continued that the idea to launch the citizen-science project grew out of this initial idea and the fact that they were starting to hear how kids were struggling with online learning and being quarantined at home.

“Our citizen-science project is a great way to get them outside, engaged in science and helping the environment. We asked them to do a trash survey of the immediate neighborhood surrounding their homes during the early weeks of the pandemic, then a follow up survey once their community started to open back up, and a final survey once the community is fully opened,” Kezios said. “Will the trash increase as people start to spend more time out of their homes? Unfortunately, the data so far seems to indicate this is happening.”

Sirak-Schaeffer said the idea for Turtle Trash Collectors was sparked in the summer of 2018.

She and Kezios were “brainstorming ideas for new outreach programs and thought ‘wouldn’t it be fun to show the impacts of marine debris by simulating a sea turtle necropsy?’ We ran with the idea, applied for a grant through the NOAA Marine Debris Program, and were pleased to receive funding. We spent many hours designing and sewing our life-like sea turtle models, officially implementing programs in schools as of January of 2019,” Sirak-Schaeffer said.

They’ve traveled more than 9,000 miles and reached nearly 12,000 students and 500 teachers in southeastern North Carolina since starting the program, she said. ““We also educated 3,800 kids and 3,000 adults at public programs, mostly at the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center and the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher last summer.”

Kezios said she searched for a life-size and realistic-looking model and found a green sea turtle stuffed-animal toy that was easy to adapt for a necropsy simulation.

“Fortunately, our team is pretty creative, and we have a number of skilled seamstresses. I gutted the stuffed-turtles and reinforced their side walls. Another team member used cross-stitch webbing to reinforce and apply Velcro to the removable plastron,” Kezios explained. “Then we set up an assembly line and started sewing organs – muscles and heart, esophagus, stomach, small and large intestines, then trachea and lungs. The most difficult part was making small resealable openings throughout the digestive tract so we could insert marine debris that a sea turtle might mistakenly ingest.”

This is the third grant Kezios has secured that focuses specifically on the problem of marine debris.

“I think anyone who has seen coverage of a whale or sea turtle starving to death because of the marine debris they’ve swallowed or struggling to swim and breathe because they are entangled by derelict fishing gear must feel some level of responsibility for the problem,” she said. “We all generate trash, the challenge is to reduce it as much as possible and to responsibly dispose of it in an environmentally appropriate manner. Educational programs like ours can help people recognize the small ways they can contribute to a solution for a huge problem like marine debris.”

Kezios said the success of Turtle Trash Collectors was built on a previous project, Traveling Through Trash, funded by a NOAA marine debris prevention grant.

The project involved visiting schools in rural communities throughout the region with life-size inflatable North Atlantic Right Whale classroom, during which time they formed relationships with many of the school systems in coastal and southeastern North Carolina.

“The kids attended a program inside the whale and learned about marine debris origins and impacts, as well as how they can help prevent it. The program was very successful, so we were encouraged to continue our efforts with a second grant that leveraged young people’s interest in sea turtles,” Kezios said.

The idea to create stuffed turtles to simulate a necropsy, or animal autopsy, was based on the Traveling Through Trash project.

“One of the lessons we utilized with the life-sized whale was a simulated necropsy. This was so large it could only be done as a group exercise.  So, we decided to focus on a different marine organism that was equally charismatic, also impacted by marine debris, and would allow for small group interactions. The sea turtle was a perfect fit,” Kezios said.

Sirak-Schaeffer explained that before the pandemic, “we would bring our model sea turtles to elementary schools in southeastern North Carolina and do a hands-on demonstration with third to fifth grade classes. Since that is not possible right now due to COVID-19, we have shifted to a fully virtual experience. We still do our simulated necropsy and help you learn about sea turtles and marine debris, but now we do it via Zoom or other online delivery platforms,” she said.

The free virtual Turtle Trash Collectors programs are hourlong sessions that features a simulated sea turtle dissection, learn how trash can get to the ocean, see how trash in the ocean can impact sea turtles and learn how to help stop marine debris, including how to become a Turtle Trash Collector. Dates are announced on Facebook for the virtual programs designed for third to fifth graders, though all ages are welcome. Younger audiences should attend with an adult if possible. The next virtual program is 11 a.m. Oct. 3. A private program for students, Scouts or network can be scheduled as well.

Since transitioning to virtual programs in March, “we have reached over 750 students, 100 adults, and an additional 300 participants. We are looking forward to a busy fall of virtual programs and would love for you to join in on the fun,” she said.

Kezios told Coastal Review Online that the team “has done a terrific job” pivoting the project to online delivery.

“They created resources that allow students to watch the virtual necropsy on the computer screen while still following along with a dissection guide and flip book. With NOAA’s permission, we’ve been able to expand our geographic delivery area and the team has provided programs to students around the country and even overseas in places like Austria and Uganda,” Kezios added.

To join the Turtle Trash Collector badge program designed for upper-elementary students in the southeastern part of the state, participants will need to sign up to receive a Turtle Trash Collector Handbook that helps identify what kinds of debris to collect for each badge, where to find it, and how to collect the debris safely. Participants will need to collect 20 debris items in each of these categories to earn badges: snack food wrappers and food packaging; drink items such as aluminum cans, plastic bottles, etc.; plastic straws; fast food containers and plastic utensils; and plastic bags.

The Turtle Trash Collectors program has helped young people who don’t live near the coast realize that land-based litter can still make its way into the ocean and harm marine organisms, Kezios said. “Marine debris is everyone’s problem and we encourage our students to choose to be part of the solution.”

The measures put in place in March to curb the spread of COVID-19 have changed how North Carolinians consume and dispose of waste. This is the third installment in a series examining how advocacy organizations, local governments and state agencies are adapting to these changes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how we consume, which is being reflected in the recycling and waste industry.

The Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler in a message encourages Americans to recycle materials from their households to recycle more and recycle right by keeping gloves, masks, other personal protective equipment out of recycling bins and off the ground. 

“Businesses that normally recycle large amounts of paper and cardboard aren’t able to do that right now. Because of this, household recycling is more essential than ever. We are all staying home and getting more deliveries in cardboard boxes and generating more material than normal, much of which can be recycled,” according to the EPA. “Recycled materials are key for everything from making new products to boxes to ship products and other essential supplies for the everyday needs of hospitals, grocery stores, pharmacies and American homes. There are critical needs for all raw materials in the manufacturing supply chain, especially paper and cardboard.”

One concern the state Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Environmental Assistance and Customer Service, or DEACS, has heard from local government and recycling hauler contacts is that contamination in the recycling stream has increased since March.

DEACS Recycling Business Development Specialist Sandy Skolochenko explained in a recent interview that varying factors have led to the contamination problem.

“It ties in to the use of more single-use plastic items and residents placing them in the recycling bin even though most of those items don’t belong. Other factors are more time spent at home and more material generated at the curb,” she said. “In some cases, people are simply using their recycling bin as an overflow trash container. Additionally, unfamiliar materials like gloves and masks are now commonplace in the home and I’m sure there is some ‘wishcycling’ happening with those materials.”

She explained that wishcycling, also known as aspirational recycling, “happens when you put something into the recycling bin without checking whether it’s actually recyclable.”

The division developed a social media campaign to address COVID-related residential waste to help educate the public about what can and can’t be recycled.

Skolochenko added that she’s heard anecdotally that the commercial waste stream has decreased more than 50% and on the residential side, the Solid Waste Association of America reports that volume has increased 20%.

Big picture, Skolochenko said, is that the waste and recycling stream has shifted during the pandemic from the commercial sector to the residential sector.

“Commercial facilities generate quite a bit of cardboard, so the availability of that material has decreased at a time when manufacturers really need it to make essential items like toilet paper, shipping boxes and packaging for food and medical supplies. So it’s very important that we keep our residential recycling programs intact to keep feeding recycled content into the supply chain,” she said.

Matt James is a DAECS industrial development specialist who focuses on recycling business development.

James also noted that the stream of recyclables that goes to material recovery facilities contains much more residential recyclables since the pandemic has forced more folks to stay home.

“As businesses have reduced their hours, the commercial stream of recycling has decreased. Usually, the commercial stream of recycling is higher value and less contaminated,” he said.

Residents can help reduce contaminating the recycling stream by recycling materials that are actually recyclable such as plastic bottles, tubs, jugs and jars, glass bottles, metal cans, paper and cardboard.

A recent survey from his office showed that 80% of the recycling collected in North Carolina went to a manufacturer in the southeast, about 7% of the tonnage went to states outside the southeast and 13% of North Carolina’s recyclables left the country to be recycled in another country, he said.

“The most common and troublesome contaminant in the recycling stream is still plastic bags. The plastic bags and film tangle up the recycling equipment at Material Recovery Facilities. If people want to recycle their grocery bags, they can take them back to the store, but they should not put them in their recycling cart,” he added.

As for beach towns, the trend he’s noticed is that residents demand recycling despite the struggles with the industry.

“Because coastal towns can be located further from some of the state’s material recovery facilities, towns sometimes have difficulty finding outlets for their materials. We’ve seen some coastal communities drop their recycling program only to bring it back after their residents demand that service. Our office has been working with recycling markets to find sustainable solutions for recycling on the coast,” he said.

Shanna Fullmer, public works director for Dare County, said that trash tonnage has gone up overall 7% since last summer, mostly residential trash versus commercial.

“Recycling has slowed due to departmental challenges along with the closure of private recycle company on Hatteras Island,” she said. The only beach town that unincorporated Dare County manages is Hatteras Island and the closure of private company has presented Dare County with overflow issues as well as contamination issues.

She reiterated that following instructions at recycle yards as to what materials go where is vital to keep the recycling stream uncontaminated. “Recycle only the basics — plastic, glass, cardboard, aluminum cans, steel cans, paper. Many items people want to recycle simply are not recyclable in this area due to lack of markets.”

One beach town that has figured out a way to bring recycling back to its residents is Southern Shores.

Town manager Cliff Ogburn explained that because of changes in the market, Bay Disposal, which hauls the town’s recycling, had been taking the material to an incinerator.

“We are pleased to have worked with Bay to find a way to get back to recycling,” he said in an interview in late August. The town council amended the contract with Bay Disposal Aug. 18 and will now be hauling the recycling, including glass, to Recycling & Disposal Solutions of Virginia, or RDS, in Portsmouth.

Bay Disposal notified the town in December 2019 that the company no longer had a place to deliver collected materials. Since then, Bay has been taking the town’s recycling material to a waste-to-energy facility also in Portsmouth, Virginia.

Bay Disposal cannot place any noncontaminated recycling material in a landfill. The change adds $5,701 to the original annual contract amount of $189,500. The town said it serves about 2,800 homes as part of its recycling contract, according to the town.

Across the board, Ogburn said that while he hasn’t noticed an increase in littering, there is more residential trash and recycling than in years past, “Which makes sense due to more people staying home.  It’s also reflected in that trash and recycling costs have increased due to the increased volume.”

Joe Benedetto III, president of RDS Virginia, said he’s looking forward to working with Southern Shores to find creative solutions to the challenges that recycling has, especially with the challenges that COVID-19 has brought.

He explained that RDS is a smaller processor that focuses mostly on recycling, and serves about two dozen local governments in parts of Virginia and is trying to expand to the Outer Banks. He said they take in about 50,000 tons of recycling and about 20,000 tons of trash.

Benedetto said that recycling and the recycling markets have struggled recently with China being out of the recycling market in the Unites States for the last three years — that’s what led to the closure of a lot of recycling facilities. It pushed a lot of the cost structure back toward municipalities. China no longer buying recycling materials contributed to the demise of a lot of recycling programs, especially those on the Outer Banks.

RDS Virginia has been in talks with the state to set up a small facility somewhere closer to the Outer Banks to save on some of the transportation costs, and set up a small operation to do processing.

“The challenge with the Outer Banks is the location and the fact that there really isn’t a dedicated recycling center in that area. And, and that’s partly because of location and partly because of volume,” he said.

His company, having gone through the lack of demand and market, was able “to adjust a little bit over the past few years so that’s at least one big burden that’s been off our shoulders.”

Since March, Benedetto said that because of all the shutdowns, volume on types of paper from commercial and industrial has dramatically decreased and there has been an increase in the material coming out of the households, which makes sense because people are staying at home.

The mixed materials they’re seeing come out of households changed, too. The biggest change is the additional cardboard, which he contributes to the “Amazon effect,” as well as single serve products, tin cans and aluminum cans.

Among the single-serve products he’s noticed an increase in is single-serve plastics, like water bottles, but he said he hasn’t noticed an increase in plastic cutlery.

“It just kind of reflects the shifting of people from an office building to a home,” Benedetto said, and the shift from buying at a store to ordering online and having delivery to your house.

“We have also seen a higher percentage of contamination,” Benedetto said.

He speculated that could be because there’s folks who may not have been actively recycling in the past and are not quite sure what to recycle. He said there have been some gloves and masks but “things like plastic bags and such seem to be a little more prevalent,” he said.

One way he hopes to help lessen contamination in the recycling stream is to put out printed magnets explaining what to distribute to residents. ‘Education is always, in my opinion, the thing that we need to do and continue to do to reduce contamination and improve recycling rates.”

Local and state observations are in line with a recent survey by the Environmental Research & Education Foundation and the National Waste & Recycling Association on how the industry has been affected and how it has dealt with COVID-19 challenges.

The organizations received about 400 responses, mostly from waste haulers, as well as consulting firms, municipalities, government agencies and academic institutions, all of which reported being impacted by the pandemic.

Results indicate that academic institutions were among the most impacted, with government agencies and waste haulers reporting around 90%.

“About 6 out of 10 of haulers/waste managers experienced a decrease in volumes, while nearly 3 in 10 actually managed more material and the remainder were unchanged. This reflects the decline in commercial waste from the closure of offices, retail spaces and restaurants contrasted by the increase in residential waste from being quarantined. Unfortunately, increased volumes do not necessarily translate to attendant rise in revenue as many residential contracts are fixed price,” according to the EREF.

Additionally, close to 70% respondents noted that residential waste was the largest increase, with the remaining consisting of food, yard, commercial, medical, construction and demolition and industrial waste, in that order, while 67% observed a decrease in commercial waste.

Some respondents indicated that there have been changes to recycling, with some being sent directly to the landfill or minimal sorting is taking place, some stopped manual sorting, and others allowed all recyclables to be mixed, stopping all sorting. There were a few instances where recycling was stopped completely.

Respondents observed a decrease in medical waste rather than an increase.

“Anecdotal observations via discussions with medical personnel suggest that while localized COVID-19 ‘hotspots’ could result in increased medical waste volumes, the majority of the U.S. has seen reductions in medical waste,” according to EREF. “Healthcare workers suggest this could be due to a large portion of the population working at home, which may impact the frequency of situations requiring medical care. Elective surgeries were canceled and telehealth services have increased. Many doctors and dentists closed their offices to routine care and are only now beginning to reopen. In addition, COVID-19 patients do not generate significant amounts of medical waste.”

Despite the changes in volume for the different streams, 83% indicated they’re not handling any waste differently.

The Solid Waste Association of America, or SWANA, submitted in July a written statement to the U.S. Senate Committee of Environment and Public Works about the challenges facing recycling in the United States.

The statement is in conjunction with the Committee’s oversight hearing, “Responding to the Challenges Facing Recycling in the United States,” according to SWANA.

SWANA notes in the statement the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic is having on recycling programs and facilities, similar to those being reported by other organizations. There has been a decrease in recovered material from commercial customers such as schools, offices, and stores, meanwhile residential waste and recycling volume increased nationwide in March and April, though it has declined from the peak of about 20% higher than normal, according to SWANA.

SWANA also pointed to operational changes at recycling facilities to keep workers safe, temporary suspension of some curbside collection programs, and additional personal protective equipment provided by employers in response to concerns about exposure expressed by front-line workers.

The measures put in place in March to curb the spread of COVID-19 have changed how North Carolinians consume and dispose of waste. This is the second installment in a series examining how advocacy organizations, local governments and state agencies are adapting to these changes.

Environmental organizations along the coast, which are having to adapt to precautions to slow the spread of COVID-19, are noticing more coronavirus-related litter, from gloves and masks to takeout packaging, which can become hazardous marine debris.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, recommends that everyone wear cloth face coverings when leaving their homes, and many use single-use personal protective equipment, like gloves, wipes and disposable masks.

Another federal agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, Marine Debris Program warns that improperly disposing of personal protective equipment can create marine debris and harm the environment.

“Improperly discarded PPE can enter the environment through ineffective or improper waste management, intentional or accidental dumping and littering, or through stormwater runoff. Even if you’re at home, hundreds of miles from the shore, our trash travels and can adversely affect the ocean and harm the wildlife that share our planet,” the blog states.

Judith Enck is president of Beyond Plastics, a nationwide project to end plastic pollution. During a recent webinar, “Plastics Policy in the Age of COVID,” she explained that the World Health Organization estimates that 89 million masks are needed every month worldwide to deal with COVID-19. The disposable masks are mostly made from plastics, polypropylene, polyurethane, polyester and other polymers.

“These masks and gloves are already showing up in water bodies. There have been litter surveys in Hong Kong, Nigeria and France. An organization called Oceans Asia went to a remote beach just 11 meters (36 feet) long and found 70 masks,” Enck said. “The next week they found 30 on a remote beach. So one option is to use reusables, whenever possible. That certainly may not be possible with gloves and all the masks, although, nonmedical professionals like me can use reusable masks. I’ve been using one since the beginning of the pandemic.”

In addition to her role with Beyond Plastics, which is based at Bennington College in Vermont where she teaches, Enck is a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator appointed by President Obama.

“And now we have a new universe of plastic waste that needs attention: masks and gloves. Let me be clear, everyone should wear a mask in public, but no one should litter the mask. And no one should put the mask or the gloves in their recycling bin because they’re not recyclable,” she said.

“We most certainly have seen an increase in COVID-19-related litter,” said Dee Smith, Carteret Big Sweep coordinator. “I have seen numerous masks and gloves, especially roadsides and parking lots.”

​Carteret Big Sweep is the county’s effort to educate the public on litter and encourages and coordinates year-round cleanups.

Smith said another concerning item is the grocery cart wipes.

“I have seen them all over roads and parking lots as well as sidewalks and just on the floor in stores.  It is like people can’t find a trash can and they just leave them in the buggy and then it gets outside and the wind transports it,” she said.

Carteret Big Sweep has really had to adapt since COVID-19, Smith said.

“We have not stopped our efforts, we just evolved. We have individuals and families cleaning most of the major beach accesses on Bogue Banks every night,” she said.

Big Sweep has had a difficult time recruiting volunteers due to the COVID- 19 pandemic.  The summer solo cleanups were geared toward students needing to complete volunteer hours. The students were asked to commit a minimum of 25 volunteer hours by Labor Day Weekend. The students were assigned sections of busy beaches to clean during the solo effort that provides the needed social distancing, but allows for cleanup actions to continue.

As of mid-August, Smith said there were 137 documented solo cleanups on Bogue Banks.

“It is well over 2,000 pounds of debris. They are finding everything from food and beverage items to shoes, sunglasses and toys. Some notes left in the comments include lots of cigarette butts and the amount of plastic.  People also mentioned they saw an increase in masks with an increase of people,” she said.

Solo and family efforts brought in more than 2,103 pounds of debris over the course of 130 hours cleaning.

Smith said that she is recruiting small groups, families and individuals for the Ocean Conservancy’s 35^th International Coastal Cleanup or ICC, Sept. 19. “We already have a few interested groups. We will follow all of the governor’s restrictions.”

The cleanup is the world’s largest volunteer effort to remove and record trash from local lakes, waterways, beaches and the ocean, according to a recent release from Big Sweep.

“Whether engaging in this year’s ICC from home, or safely throughout the County, you are playing a critical role helping to keep plastics out of our ocean and waterways,” Smith said. “Although traditional, large group cleanups are not possible this year, ocean plastic pollution isn’t going away. It’s wonderful to see people taking action where they can.”

Ocean Conservancy will release a series of online resources to help think creatively about reducing everyday waste footprint, or conduct a small, safe cleanup.

“The International Coastal Cleanup remains one of the most effective ways for individuals to make an immediate, tangible impact for our ocean,” said Allison Schutes, Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup director, in a statement. “The ICC will certainly look a little different this year, but the ocean still needs us. Luckily, there is still plenty we can do to help stem the tide of ocean plastic pollution. We are so grateful for the efforts of Carteret Big Sweep and all the Carteret County volunteers in helping us achieve our shared vision for a cleaner, healthier ocean.”

Carteret Big Sweep cleanup volunteers can log the trash they collect in Ocean Conservancy’s Clean Swell app on their mobile phone. Scientists, researchers, industry leaders and policymakers use the index to inform policy and determine solutions to the growing marine debris crisis.

“Every year, millions of tons of trash, including an estimated 11 million metric tons of plastic waste, flows into the ocean, impacting more than 800 marine species and entering the food chain, the release from Big sweep. “Over the last 34 years of the ICC, 16.4 million volunteers have joined cleanup efforts big and small to remove 344 million pounds (156 million kilograms) of trash from beaches and waterways worldwide.”

In 2019, Carteret Big Sweep volunteers collected and recorded 15,051 pounds of trash from Carteret County, mostly cigarette butts and plastics.

Contact Smith at dee_edwards-smith@ncsu.edu to join the effort.

Surfrider Foundation, Outer Banks Chapter, is not hosting group cleanups or in-person events but is encouraging volunteers to grab a reusable bag or container to collect litter in their neighborhood or on the beach, document the findings by taking a picture or video and tagging the organization on Instagram, @surfrider_obx, with the hashtag #solobeachcleanup.

Bonnie Monteleone, executive director for Plastic Ocean Project based in Wilmington, said recently how surprised she was to see how many masks and gloves the volunteers picked since beginning April 22 for Earth Day. Plastic Ocean Project is a nonprofit organization conducting education through research, outreach through art, and solutions through collaboration.

“Our plan for 2020 was to do monthly cleanups for Route 421, mostly because so much debris ends up on the side of the road from trucks headed to the landfill,” she said.

“We had two cleanups before COVID. Pre-COVID cleanups, we did not find gloves and masks. When we started up again June 14, we found over 20 gloves and eight masks that day and find them every time we conduct cleanups,” Monteleone said.

“I think the more people use reusable masks, the less likely they get lost in the environment. In fact, 99% of the masks we find are the disposable kind,” she explained.

Leslie Vegas, coastal specialist with the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s northeast office in Wanchese, told Coastal Review Online that there’s been a noticeable increase in debris on the beaches and shorelines.

“Restaurants have been advised to use single-use (plastics) whenever possible, so businesses that have typically never used single-use plastics are using them now as a safety precaution. Takeout has also increased, so there have been far more plastic bags and clamshell containers in garbage bins, which we’ve also noticed have been overflowing more regularly,” Vegas explained. “Our local public waste staff noted that they are understaffed due to the virus, but have never seen so much trash here when they do their pickups. All in all, there’s a rise.”

Jan Farmer, a volunteer with the Topsail-area Ocean Friendly Establishments, said that from a trash perspective, she’s not seeing a noticeable increase in takeout containers, cups, food wrappers on the beach or along the road. “I still see and pick up plenty of those items, but not more than in previous summers.”

Ocean Friendly Establishments, which the Wilmington-based nonprofit Plastic Ocean Project launched in 2016, are businesses that voluntarily make environmentally friendly decisions, primarily reducing the use of single-use plastics by only serving straws upon request and eliminating single-use plastic bags and Styrofoam, and become certified through the program.

Katie Trout, marketing manager with the North Carolina Department of Transportation, said that the Roadside Environmental Unit staff, which oversees the Adopt-A-Highway program, has seen a decrease in reported pickups since the onset of COVID-19.

“Our spring 2020 sweep had to be canceled, which affected a huge amount of litter not being picked up,” Trout said.

“We have received some complaints from the public about masks and gloves being thrown down everywhere,” she added. “Adopt-A-Highway pickup reports are a bit slower than we typically see in the summer time. We should probably take into account the weather and temperature at this time, along with the COVID crisis.”

NOAA recommends another way to make a difference and reduce the impacts of all types of marine debris, including plastics, is to encourage others to properly disposing of trash and personal protective equipment and use the Marine Debris Tracker App to keep track of the debris including personal protective equipment.

The app is an initiative between the NOAA Marine Debris Program and the Southeast Atlantic Marine Debris Initiative, operated out of the University of Georgia College of Engineering, provides a way to log trash found on coastlines and waterways. The app records the debris location through GPS, and allows for adding the descriptions of items, attach photos of debris items and view the data on your phone.

Sara Hallas, coastal education coordinator for the Coastal Federation’s northeast office, said that the staff hasn’t been scheduling cleanups, as in the past, but is instead encouraging volunteers to have cleanups on their own and track their trash with the NOAA app.

“In the northeast we’ve been working safely in small groups outside to clean up some trouble areas that needed it, as well as arranging to loan cleanup supplies to groups who may like to organize efforts on their own,” she said. “For example, a Boy Scout was looking for a community service project. So I arranged a time to loan some cleanup supplies and advised him on a site that needed work, and he did the rest to coordinate with the group and lead the actual cleanup itself.”

The measures put in place in March to curb the spread of COVID-19 have changed how North Carolinians consume and dispose of waste. This is the first installment in a series examining how advocacy organizations, local governments and state agencies are adapting to these changes.

In recent years, a program to encourage restaurants and other businesses to use environmentally friendly practices has gained momentum along the North Carolina coast.

But organizers of the Ocean Friendly Establishments program are seeing their efforts come to a halt because of the COVID-19 pandemic, as more restaurants are being pushed to use single-use plastics.

Ocean Friendly Establishments, which the Wilmington-based nonprofit Plastic Ocean Project launched in 2016, are businesses that voluntarily make environmentally friendly decisions, primarily reducing the use of single-use plastics by only serving straws upon request and eliminating single-use plastic bags and Styrofoam, and become certified through the program.

Partners in the effort include the North Carolina Aquariums at Jennette’s Pier, Crystal Coast Waterkeeper, the North Carolina Coastal Federation and Surfrider Foundation.

Gov. Roy Cooper in March signed an executive order to close restaurants and bars to sit-down service, limiting the businesses to takeout or delivery orders only, to slow the spread of COVID-19. As a result, Ocean Friendly Establishment volunteers and businesses have noticed an uptick in use of single-serve plastics.

“With the increase in takeout business, we’ve really gone through a lot more disposable plastic ware,” Cara Godwin, assistant general manager for Blue Moon Beach Grill and Blue Water Grill, both in Nags Head, told Coastal Review Online. The restaurants are certified Ocean Friendly Establishments.

“That’s probably the biggest increase, along with plastic ramekins for ketchup and sauces for take-out. Other than that, we’ve tried to maintain our in-house operations as consistent and ‘plastic-free’ as usual. We do go through more disposable gloves.”

She added that with the lack of employees and COVID-19, “I think all of the restaurants are just trying to survive this crisis.”

Leslie Vegas, coastal specialist with the federation’s northeast office in Wanchese, began working with the Plastic Ocean Project in 2019 to expand the number of certified Ocean Friendly Establishments on the Outer Banks.

During a recent webinar, “Addressing Marine Debris in This New Norm,” Vegas explained that there are 52 businesses certified in the Outer Banks. From 2015-2018, an average of six businesses were certified a year and in 2019, when the federation and Jennette’s Pier joined the effort, 20 businesses were certified. “We saw a lot of growth last year.”

In 2020, only eight businesses were certified before March. Since then, just a handful of businesses have been certified as Ocean Friendly Establishments.

“The program has definitely lost a lot of momentum with the coronavirus happening,” Vegas said. “Restaurants have been the most affected, I think, by the virus in terms of the safety standards and sanitation standards that they have to uphold.”

Many single-use bans had been going into effect pre-COVID-19 across the country but many of those bans were postponed or eliminated completely, Vegas continued. “That’s another thing that we’ve had to sort of look at and consider as we’ve moved forward.”

The Ocean Friendly Establishments coordinators also learned more of what is required of restaurants and businesses from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and what the general guidelines would be.

The top three CDC recommendations and guidelines that most impacted the Ocean Friendly Establishments program were to avoid using or sharing items that are reusable, including menus, condiments and other food containers; use disposable food service items like utensils, dishes and tablecloths; and avoid using food and beverage utensils and containers brought by customers, she said.

“This is straight from the CDC. They’re really encouraging the usage of disposable items to be safe. However, they say that if the items are not feasible or desirable, ensure that they are cleansed and handled properly,” Vegas said.

In addition to encouraging businesses to reduce single-use plastic, Ocean Friendly Establishments encourages consumers to bring their own utensils and containers. “Those are now currently things that are not being recommended and actually being advised against by the CDC.”

Taking those recommendations into consideration, “We have to ask ourselves as we continue to promote the program are reusable safe to use?” Vegas said.

That’s a question Vegas said she’s not qualified to answer in a straightforward way. “The best that we’ve been trying to do is kind of keep up with what the latest research is saying and what we feel comfortable sharing with our local businesses.”

A group of more than 125 epidemiologists, virologists and other health experts from 18 countries recently signed a statement saying that reusables are safe as long as standard health codes and sanitation guidelines are being followed, Vegas explained.

“The CDC has also come out with a statement saying that the transmission of the virus from surface contact has not yet been documented. Right now, it’s only been transmitted from person to person through respiratory droplets that are inhaled, not from surfaces like cutlery, glasses, plates, those kinds of things,” said Vegas.

Plastic Ocean Project Executive Director Bonnie Monteleone reiterated in an interview with Coastal Review Online how important it is to support local Ocean Friendly Establishments to help eliminate single-use plastics. She said she thought the argument for not using reusable bags is contradictory.

“The items are picked up by the customer and then handled by the cashier and placed in a bag. At this point, it doesn’t matter what type of bag. We encourage people to bring their own bag and not let the cashier touch it, bag their own groceries to reduce contact. Otherwise, the cashier is touching both the items and the plastic bag, which they hand the customer,” Monteleone said.

The Plastic Oceans Project placed a radio advertisement encouraging people to support their Ocean Friendly Establishments. “And when they place their order, we asked that they mention if they do not need single-use, to-go ware or condiments. This was our way of helping mitigate the increase of plastic waste,” she said.

At the time of the interview, Plastic Oceans Project is also promising to contribute $2,000 on top of a $5,000 grant through North Carolina Aquariums that will help offset the expense of compostable products for Ocean Friendly Establishments that cannot afford them right now, she added.

Since March when the governor put in place dining restrictions, Monteleone has observed both positive and negative responses to the change back to single-use plastics.

“Positive because it allows our vulnerable business the opportunity to serve in order to stay afloat, so to speak, and negative because so many individuals shifted to bringing reusable containers and are forbidden to use them in many places,” she said.

Monteleone said that they are fortunate to have restaurants reluctantly using plastics and are trying to find workarounds.

“Slice of Life (Pizzeria & Pub in Wilmington) has been hugely instrumental in encouraging the conversation as well as donating time and funds to start a website strictly for OFEs, so more businesses can work together to reduce single use,” she said. “Ceviche’s is another restaurant working with our OFE team to bring to town a reusable to-go container program much like Green To-go in Durham.”

Vegas said in an interview that many people who are passionate about using reusables would still like to be able to freely use them. “However, there are so many restrictions around reusable products that using items like coffee cups and bags at stores are no longer an option.”

As far as the Ocean Friendly Establishments program goes, the advice is to use reusables when possible.

“If ordering to go, request that plastic cutlery is not included, ask for no bag if it’s a single item, and, if you have extra time, order an item for dine in, then place leftovers in your own container that you bring to the restaurant. Additionally, we’re advising in favor of reusable masks that can be laundered vs the single-use options,” Vegas added.

Some businesses have not been able to maintain the cost of the environmentally friendly to-go ware, including the paper-based clamshells that are extremely expensive and have been less available due to high demands, and some business owners are concerned about losing the Ocean Friendly status with the introduction of Styrofoam or single-use items.

“But we understand as a program that it’s difficult to navigate these new circumstances, and we’re hoping to work together to come up with local solutions,” Vegas said.

Vegas said they’ve had to sort of shift their recommendations but the main recommendation is to support the current Ocean Friendly Establishments.

Meredith Fish, educator with Jennette’s Pier and part of the Ocean Friendly Establishments program, added that “Several places in the area still try their best to use eco-friendly packaging options, however, given the amount of packaging that is required to carry out all the takeout orders, a lot of businesses are reverting back to single-use plastic items such as plastic bags, containers and utensils.”

Fish said she recognized that most people are focusing right now on the virus, which is understandable, “but I wish more people would see single-use plastics as a threat as well,” Fish said.

“I know that the Outer Banks is working hard right now to revamp the recycling program but hopefully everyone remembers that reducing your plastic consumption is even more important than recycling,” she said. “This is why it’s so important to avoid using plastic whenever possible, especially single-use plastics, seeing that you only use them once before they can end up polluting our Earth.”

She opts for glass, metal and paper whenever possible, and “I hope that is the mindset that local businesses will adopt as well, even in the midst of COVID.”

Jan Farmer, a volunteer with the Topsail-area Ocean Friendly Establishments, has also observed that usage of single-use plastics is up because of the large increase in takeout business.

“Businesses that were using compostable takeout or compostable straws have sometimes switched to less environmentally friendly products if their normal products ran out and were unavailable, but they appear to have switched back when they could get the better products in stock,” Farmer explained. “I actually have one establishment that has made the shift to paper cups from Styrofoam during this time.”

“I think it’s important to remember to not lose sight of problems that existed before COVID-19. While we may have to make adjustments to our original plans, the work shouldn’t stop and there will always be things we can do to make a positive impact and to reduce our single-use plastic usage while staying safe and healthy,” Vegas said.

National efforts to curb plastic use

On a national level, more than 120 environmental organizations sent letters to seven national food delivery companies — GrubHub, UberEats, Doordash, Delivery.com, Caviar, Seamless and Postmates — in July requesting that that they change their default ordering process to one that does not automatically include utensils, napkins, condiments and straws in order to reduce the amount of single-use plastic pollution entering oceans, landfills and incinerators.

“Takeout orders are up all over the country as a result of the COVID pandemic; however, the vast majority of people eating at home neither need nor want yet another set of plastic utensils, plastic straws, handful of soy sauce or ketchup packets, or pile of paper napkins. Committing to making this small change to their delivery ordering systems would help reduce single-use packaging and save restaurants a bit of money,” said Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics.

The letter suggests that customers would need to request no single-use items when they place their order for delivery, which would reduce costs to restaurants and take a step to reduce plastic waste and pollution. There is also a place to voice support of this initiative, Hold the Plastic, on the website.

As consumers continue to rely on delivery services for meals, the amount of unwanted single-use utensils and condiments are on the rise as well, though a recent study found that 98% of all U.S. take-out or delivery meals are consumed at home or a workplace, where reusable cutlery is typically available and preferred, according to the release.

“Food delivery platforms have the opportunity to reduce the amount of plastic entering our homes while at the same time saving businesses money by moving to an opt-in system for these items. Similar to how customers choose exactly which toppings they want on their pizza, customers should also be able to opt in to exactly which utensils, napkins, condiments, or straws they want,” said Jennie Romer, Legal Associate at the Surfrider Foundation’s Plastic Pollution Initiative, in the release.

Ordering in to support local restaurants & stay safe during #COVID? Urge @Grubhub @DoorDash @Seamless @Caviar @Postmates to follow @UberEats lead & change #singleuseplastic utensils, straws, condiments & napkins to opt-in only to cut #plasticpollution. https://t.co/Crqkr3Cjup

— Beyond Plastics (@PlasticsBeyond) August 3, 2020

Enck addressed in an op-ed April 22 in Newsweek that the pandemic isn’t an excuse to go back to single-use plastics.

“I still believe that. And yet, the Center for Disease Control has put out guidance to restaurants when they’re reopening telling them, even if people are dining on site, the restaurants should use single use disposable items single use plates utensils cups and straws,” she said, adding that if you’re trying to protect the health of the wait staff, it doesn’t matter if they’re going to be delivering and picking up single use disposables or real dishes that are washed.

“My final point is we can tackle more than one crisis at a time. Clearly, the priority needs to be protecting health from the COVID virus, so we can still address plastic pollution and climate change. We can’t return to business as usual. We need adjust recovery, and that includes making environmental protection, a priority, Enck said

This is the 11th 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.

Stormwater that pours onto our roads and drowns our yards has become the most visible and alarming harbinger of what coastal communities are facing with climate change.

As flooding has rapidly worsened in scale and frequency, people are demanding action from their governments. But stormwater management is a costly problem that is not easily solved, even if political will, funding and community sentiment are miraculously aligned.

According to a draft report in March from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Financial Advisory Board, “Evaluating Stormwater Infrastructure and Financing Task Force,” there is no comprehensive, nationally representative numbers on what is required for stormwater capital and operation and maintenance.

“The needs are great,” the working paper said, “and the funding gap is very wide — estimated to approach $10 billion annually.”

Needs, however, are also urgent.

Of the seven highest rainfall events since 1898 in coastal North Carolina, six have happened within the last 20 years, according to recent research from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City.

The study, published July 2019 in the journal Scientific Reports, pointed to catastrophic rain in hurricanes Floyd in 1999, Matthew in 2016 and Florence in 2018 as a consequence of the warming climate creating more moisture. Florence alone dumped an average of 17.5 inches of rain on 14,000 square-miles of the Carolinas, the report said.

To make matters worse, nontropical storms are also now dumping record amounts of rainfall. Existing drainage has been overwhelmed, exposing the inadequacy of often haphazard and poorly maintained systems. But even some well-designed, modern municipal stormwater systems can no longer keep up.

According to a 2019 study published in Geophysical Research Letters, extreme rainfall events happened 85% more often in the eastern U.S. in 2017 than they did in 1950.

“The take-home message is that infrastructure in most parts of the country is no longer performing at the level that it’s supposed to because of the big changes that we’ve seen in extreme rainfall,” Daniel Wright, the study’s lead author and a hydrologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in press release.

Depending on whether it’s an urban or rural location, stormwater runoff can be loaded with nonpoint source pollutants such as nitrogen-rich fertilizers, heavy metals, toxic pesticides and fecal bacteria from waterfowl, dogs and septic tanks. It also can be laced with oil, gas and noxious chemicals washed off streets, buildings, lawns and farmland.

In numerous North Carolina coastal communities, including on the Outer Banks, it runs, often unfiltered, directly through outfalls and pipes into the ocean and sounds, or the bays, creeks and rivers that feed into them.

As a result, big storms with lots of runoff overload estuaries and coastal waters with nutrients, sediment and contaminants. Wetlands and recreational waters can be compromised, resulting in fish and shellfish kills, algal blooms and temporarily closed beaches.

The National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, or NPDES, created by the EPA in 1996 and implemented in parts of North Carolina in 2001, requires larger urban areas to manage stormwater with certain best management practices, or BMPs, to reduce flooding, runoff and pollution impacts on watersheds.

North Carolina’s patchwork stormwater regulations require stricter containment and discharge rules mostly to protect water quality in the 20 coastal counties from stormwater runoff impacts from new development.

But beyond those rules, local governments with smaller populations can decide how to manage its nonpoint source stormwater, that is, discharges that don’t come from a specific source such as a sewer pipe.

The volume of stormwater has become increasingly overwhelming and persistent. In many communities, the largely unseen network of pipes, culverts and ditches that is supposed to take stormwater away from streets and property has been maintained infrequently, if at all. Certainly in North Carolina’s low-lying northeast coast, numerous drainage systems are deteriorating and outmoded. Often, the infrastructure, which could be a century-old ditch attached to half-century-old culvert that’s attached to a series of various sized pipes, crisscrosses and zig-zags over different properties, public and private.

Sometimes, no one knows who is responsible when the system is clogged and numerous properties are flooded. In some areas, drainage is so antiquated, it’s not clear what exists, where it is, what condition it’s in, or who owns it. Regulations to maintain the drainage ditches and structures are spotty or nonexistent.

To complicate matters more, the North Carolina Department of Transportation is responsible for maintenance of all the roadside drainage infrastructure within its right of way. Once water leaves the right of way, however, it becomes the responsibility of the downstream property owner. And severe budget shortfalls have limited the department to mostly piecemeal improvements to its drainage or crisis responses when roads flood.

On the Outer Banks, residents in recent years have been shocked by the amount of water inundating their property even when there is no tropical low. Intense rainstorms have, in a matter of hours, transformed entire neighborhoods into lakes and rushing rivers. Water has flooded buildings that have been dry for decades.

In July 2018, for example, more than 15 inches of rain fell for 10 days straight on Roanoke Island, leaving much of the north end flooded for weeks, even months. An engineer later estimated that 50 million cubic feet of water had fallen.

“The amount of rain we got is crazy,” Brent Johnson, Dare County project manager for grants and waterways, said in a recent interview, referring to the event as a 500-year storm. “We don’t design for that level of water.”

An engineering study of the most affected areas later estimated that drainage improvements would cost about $2.6 million, not including engineering and easement acquisitions.

Dare County has so far dealt with flooding and stormwater on a case-by-case basis. But with more of the unincorporated areas of the county having frequent flooding issues, Johnson said, the county is seeking grant funds to start development of a comprehensive long-term stormwater management plan.

Johnson said that such a plan could manage the watersheds within larger areas to address natural flow and drainage challenges. Realistically, he added, funding for stormwater management would have to be shared between local government, public agencies and private property owners, likely through a combination of bonds, special district taxes and grants.

Roanoke Island illustrates the complexity of draining flooded communities on the coast, where land is flat, water bodies of some form are plentiful and sea level rise is making the water table higher. There is not enough slope or grade in spots, causing water to pool and stagnate. Numerous ditches are routinely clogged with debris, roots and overgrown weeds. Regulations forbid flow to be impeded in ditches, but enforcement is lax. Underground pipes and culverts are often different diameters, broken or improperly connected. What one property owner does or doesn’t do on their land affects whether their neighbor’s property will drain or flood, but even when the issue is addressed in stormwater ordinances, it’s difficult to resolve.

“A lot of the issues we have in our area … you can’t stop the water from coming up from the ocean and the sound,” Johnson said. “That’s what we really have to focus on: How do we get the water back to where it’s supposed to go?”

Each town on the Outer Banks is responsible for its own stormwater management. The town of Nags Head, which is upgrading its stormwater infrastructure in phases, funded through a stormwater fee, got an early start on serious comprehensive improvements.

Farther south, the city of Jacksonville in coastal Onslow County charges a stormwater utility fee, which totals about $5 a month for an average home, to pay for its stormwater management.

Two crews “do nothing but clean drainage,” said Pat Donovan-Brandenburg, the city’s stormwater manager, and other staff are charged with monitoring water quality. Stormwater controls include the slow release of water to prevent flooding and allow it to filter.

Donovan-Brandenburg, who took over the program from the state in 2005, said the city has been steadily making improvements in its infiltration, repairing broken pipes and replacing small pipes with larger ones.

“We’ve been taking care of it little by little,” she said. “No municipality has the money to take care of it all at once.”

The city is in the middle of the New River watershed and is surrounded by wetlands, which is a lot friendlier to flood control than acres of impermeable asphalt and concrete.

“We have probably a lot of storage area,” Donavan-Brandenburg said. Other advantages are that the area downstream of the city is lightly developed, and the city has no heavy industry.

Jacksonville also requires stormwater permittees to renew every January to make sure that everything is as it should be, whereas the state only requires renewal every 10 years.

“Imagine not cleaning their houses for 10 years,”  she said.

Donovan-Brandenburg, who had served for four years as director and is also currently serving as secretary with the Storm Water Association of North Carolina, which supports best practices for stormwater management, said that coastal communities hardest hit by the big storms benefit even more with resiliency measures such as green space that drains and filters stormwater and deep setbacks for waterfront properties. And whether it’s urban or rural, she said, all communities gain by planting and protecting wetlands in the watershed to control stormwater while promoting cleaner water and healthier fisheries.

“Wetlands do much better with flooding and wave energy than a man-made seawall,” Donovan-Brandenburg said.

Also, simple measures as grass alongside roads — such as grassy swales and grass ditches — slows down water to “a nonerosive rate,” she said, adding: “Curb and gutter allows water to pick up speed and velocity.”

The stormwater panel has been urging NCDOT to use some of those kinds of BMPs on Interstate 95 and I-40.

Clearly, the best answer for stormwater management, she said, “even in the mountains, is not taking away the floodplain. One thing that everybody can do is start planting more trees.”

The North Carolina Coastal Federation and The Pew Charitable Trusts in March launched a yearlong initiative, “Advancing Nature-based Stormwater Strategies in North Carolina,” to encourage natural solutions to flood risk.

By merging the expertise of academics, developers, investors, landscape architects, conservationists and others, the effort is working to promote cooperative strategies that allow stormwater to filter into the ground, rather than runoff into the waterways. Permeable pavement, rain gardens, cisterns, living shorelines and preserved green spaces are some ways to engineer roads and landscapes that help reduce runoff and erosion.

The working group is expected to issue recommendations this winter, according to Pew.

Some environmentally sensible stormwater control tactics studied by academic partners include bioretention devices, wet ponds, green roofs, stormwater wetlands, grass swales, sand filters and dry ponds. UNC campuses and North Carolina State University have programs that study stormwater issues.

In 2019, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Environmental Finance Center released a report on stormwater funding. Compared with water and wastewater infrastructure needs, the report said, it has been difficult to quantify costs of stormwater infrastructure needs.

“Recently, however, there has been a change in this trend, and more state and federal entities are starting to focus on identifying stormwater needs,” according to the report. “Communities are going to have to identify dedicated sources of revenue for stormwater and to be more intentional about matching revenue generation with capital needs as the future of the North Carolina stormwater landscape develops.”

Even in extraordinary times of overlapping public emergencies, flooding will continue. Without adequate stormwater infrastructure, communities will be condemned to a future of polluted water and flooded neighborhoods and downtowns.

“Stormwater infrastructure requires funding and it has been neglected, or inadequately funded, for far too long,” the EPA said in the draft stormwater working paper, comparing the investment to the federal highway system.

“Municipalities and local utilities need federal and state help in defining long-term reliable funding sources,” the draft report said. “Funding must be available in all states and be sufficient to support both capital expenditures and long-term operation and maintenance costs.”

This is the 10th 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.

A state assessment of sea level rise compiled a decade ago met fierce political pushback, but in the years since, North Carolina has boosted its efforts to study and prepare for climate change, and some say work to address issues now commonly associated with rising seas had begun years earlier.

In 2009, the state Coastal Resources Commission directed its panel of scientists to put together state-level data and projections regarding sea level rise, rather than relying on international and national reports.

The next year in March, the CRC Science Panel, with contributions from other state experts, released its North Carolina Sea Level Rise Assessment Report. It included high, medium and status quo projections through 2100, along with a recommended planning benchmark of 1 meter, or around 39 inches, of sea level rise by 2100.

Spencer Rogers, a member of the science panel, said that the science had “a rough start” 10 years ago, “when the Science Panel on Coastal Hazards Sea Level Rise report for the Coastal Resources Commission was prohibited by law from application by the General Assembly.” Rogers is on the faculty of University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science and is the coastal construction and erosion specialist with North Carolina Sea Grant.

Jessica Whitehead, who was named last year as the state’s first chief resilience officer said in a recent interview that the science itself was sound, and the expectation was that sound policy would follow.

Ten years ago, Whitehead, who heads the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, or NCORR, was working a split position with South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium and North Carolina Sea Grant, based out of Charleston and serving both states. In her role at the time, she attended and provided input at workshops that led into both the first state sea level rise report and another guide intended for public and private planners, the 2012 Climate Ready North Carolina: Building a Resilient Future report.

“The approaches we took 10 years ago to climate planning were state of the art for the field at the time,” Whitehead explained. “2010 was still the ‘information deficit’ model of climate planning: everyone thought that if you did a climate assessment and provided information on what the ranges of average temperature and rainfall would be under climate change, that would be all decision makers needed to come up with and implement policy to reduce those risks.”

But in response to the release of the 2010 report, two bills were introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly, one that didn’t pass followed by a successful measure that put constraints on what the state could do regarding sea level rise.

The 2012 law forbid adoption of any rule or policy that defined a rate of sea level rise for regulatory purposes. And while it made the CRC the sole state agency authorized to define rates of sea level rise, it was directed to refrain from setting rates for regulatory purposes prior to July 1, 2016.

Rogers said that the report was intended as a planning rather than regulatory document, so restricting any implementation “had little impact.”

Rogers said that to the General Assembly’s credit, the 2012 legislation also required five-year updates to the sea level analysis, “making North Carolina one of the few, if not the only state, with legislation requiring peer-reviewed, sea level rise reporting.”

The final draft of the report was complete March 31, 2015, and the report was finalized March 1, 2016.

Rogers also noted that the 2015 updated report was delivered without apparent controversy in the General Assembly or the Coastal Resources Commission.

East Carolina University geologist Stan Riggs, who was a founding member of the science panel, resigned from the post in July 2016, for reasons including lingering frustration with the General Assembly’s response to the 2010 report. He’s more encouraged with the way the latest required five-year update to the report is being handled.

“The CRC has backed off to allow the science panel to do their (2020) report based on the science, not dictated by the way the 2015 report was. We were told exactly what we could do, what we couldn’t do, who we could talk to, who would review. And that was outrageous. That was just unacceptable,” Riggs told Coastal Review Online in mid-May.

Tancred Miller is the coastal and ocean policy manager with the Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management. Miller said that the updated report in 2015 included regional rates of sea level rise for different parts of the coast, based upon tide gauge data and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, scenarios. Although the prohibition against adopting sea level rise rates for regulatory purposes has since expired, the CRC has not yet considered adopting any sea level rise policies or regulations.

In 2019, the CRC directed its science panel to begin work on the 2020 update, and while the science panel has started, its ability to meet and work has been hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The panel has been requested to update the report for 2020 and work is underway,” Rogers said. Although COVID-19-related restrictions will delay its completion, “the primary observations and recommendations are expected to be improved and more detailed, but are not likely to be much different than in the previous reports.”

Miller said that the sea level rise report shows the state’s continued commitment to study and present the best available understanding of data, trends and projections.

“DEQ and DCM’s perspective and approach have remained consistent, and we continue to provide technical and financial support to local governments to help build resilience to climate hazards,” Miller said. “The state continues to invest time, resources, and importantly, the invaluable efforts of the CRC Science Panel, into updating the SLR Assessment Report on a regular basis. The report is available to state and local governments and all other interested parties as a resource to support planning and decision making.”

DEQ led the development of the state’s first Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan, which was released earlier this month, and worked closely with NCORR, and other cabinet agencies.

“Academic partners, led by the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, stepped up in a huge way, producing, pro bono, the state’s first ever climate science report,” Miller said, adding that the plan is relevant to virtually every part of the state and would be updated on a regular basis.

Miller explained that the Division of Coastal Management has been able to direct federal funds to local government resilience planning and is contracting with North Carolina Emergency Management to increase the number of tide gauges on the coast.

“DCM is also beginning to work with NCORR and other partners with funding from the N.C. Disaster Recovery Act of 2019 and a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to create a grant program to support local government resilience planning and project development to be launched later this year,” Miller said.

Rogers said that a likely surprising observation for most, including the General Assembly and the Coastal Resources Commission, “is that sea level rise adaptation in coastal North Carolina was well underway before the first report and is still actively being enhanced today.”

Most sea level rise adaptation has been implemented at the community level. “It has been more common in coastal North Carolina than in most of the rest of the nation,” he added.

Local implementation has been typically proposed and justified as a response to other coastal hazards, such as increased coastal storm effects during the last 25 years, continuing long-term shoreline erosion threats and higher levels of interest in nuisance flooding, Rogers said.

Common coastal community responses include new requirements for construction, participation in the National Flood Insurance Program’s Community Rating System and an increasing number of coastal water level gages to measure sea level changes, he added.

“Sea level rise is an important component of climate change in coastal North Carolina,” Rogers said. “Although not typically implemented for climate or sea level rise adaptation, actions to address more immediate coastal hazards are often the same actions appropriate for longer-term adaptation. In 50 to 100 years, the communities will not care why they adapted to climate or sea level rise, only if they did.”

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.”

This special video feature is included in our series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. Coastal Review Online has partnered with the Working Narratives’ Resiliency Media Fellowship to present select works from the series, which was originally published by Shoresides, a project of the nonprofit Working Narratives.

WILMINGTON — Nearly two years after Hurricane Florence, community journalists are touring a homegrown documentary series calling attention to underrepresented hurricane stories.

The series, a portion of which is presented here, takes an up-close look at the storm through the lives it changed and through the effects that continue to ripple out.

With rising temperatures brought on by climate change, hurricanes have increased in power and frequency, weakening infrastructures and increasing displacement. The team of community producers hope to use their films to talk about these problems and to lay the civic foundation for building stronger and more resilient communities.

“Mi Casita” tells the story of a family and their struggle to stay in their home after Hurricane Florence. 

This year, the Resilience Film Festival is a project of the Wilmington-based nonprofit Working Narratives, and is being made free for screenings to communities across coastal North Carolina.

The festival films were created by community journalists mentored through the Working Narratives’ Resiliency Media Fellowship. Through the Resilience Film Festival, the journalists will present stories about resilience to audiences across the state.

“When Florence Came to Wilmington” is a look at the impact of Hurricane Florence on one family and their life after.

Resiliency Media Fellowship facilitated a series of workshops training nine coastal residents to be journalists. The media training program was created in 2019 out of Working Narratives’ commitment to underserved communities and underrepresented stories.

“My challenge was to find Latinos who wanted to share their hurricane story, Latinos who are undocumented and fearful of opening up,” said fellowship participant Yolanda House. House, who’s Latinx and bilingual, created a short documentary that focuses on the aftereffects of Florence in a Latinx community in New Hanover County.

“When the Water Was High” explores how families, and communities, stuck together during Hurricane Florence.

“Working Narratives believes that good journalism and good democracy go hand in hand,” said Sarah Sloan, producer at Working Narratives. “As coastal community members use media to tell their own stories, they become an instrumental part of a civic engagement process that helps community members come together to understand, confront, and solve pressing community challenges.”

Working Narratives is an arts and social justice organization. For over a decade it has presented stories amplifying the work, voices and concerns of people of color communities and rural communities in the South. Through its media stories, it works to address historical inequalities, to result in healthier communities and a stronger democracy.

“Not Finished Yet” presents a Hurricane Florence story of the service economy and people who work in it.

Learn more

• Host a screening of the Resilience Film Festival

This is the eighth 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.

Now that the state’s 2020 resiliency plan has been submitted, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency will begin working with other state offices to address vulnerabilities caused by climate change.

“Going forward, our team looks forward to supporting other agencies with guidance and with working across the state on some of these big cross-cutting resilience challenges as part of the North Carolina Resilience Strategy,” Chief Resilience Officer Jessica Whitehead told Coastal Review Online.

The North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan was submitted Tuesday to Gov. Roy Cooper by the state Department of Environmental Quality. The plan looks at climate stressors that include flooding, drought and extreme heat events as well as nonclimate stressors such as population growth, aging infrastructure, public health threats and increased development as well as strategies to move forward.

NCORR worked with NCDEQ to create the resiliency plan, one of the directives in Executive Order 80, North Carolina’s Commitment to Address Climate Change and Transition to a Clean Energy Economy, that Cooper signed Oct. 29, 2018.

“We have a responsibility to mitigate the damage caused by these storms and the shifting weather pattern and to make all of our communities more resilient. We have to rebuild stronger and smarter and ensure that we can withstand the impacts of climate change that we will be seeing in the foreseeable future,” which is why Cooper asked that a statewide risk and resiliency plan be developed as part of Executive Order 80, NCDEQ Secretary Michael S. Regan told the Wilmington Rotary Club during an address earlier this year.

NCORR resilience team had leadership roles writing the “Climate & Environmental Justice” and “The Path Forward for a Climate Resilient North Carolina” chapters for the 2020 Resiliency Plan. The agency will continue working to address climate change by being part of the North Carolina Resilience Strategy, which includes four elements: North Carolina Climate Science Report, State Agency Resilience Strategies, Statewide Vulnerability Assessment and Resilience Strategies, and the North Carolina Enhanced Hazard Mitigation Plan.

A division of the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, NCORR was established after Hurricane Florence in October 2018 to streamline recovery programming and assistance and administer programs for homeowner recovery, affordable housing, mitigation, buyout and local government grants and loans.

So far, the state has spent more than $3.5 billion in state and federal funding in recovery for hurricanes Matthew and Florence.

In anticipation of the release of the resiliency plan, NCORR put out at the end of April a 16-page online document, Natural Hazards Resilience: A Quick Start Guide for North Carolina Communities to help local governments be better prepared to take their own action when the resiliency plan gets published, Whitehead said.

“As we looked at the literature, there’s a lot out there on how to do a risk assessment, but not a whole lot about how to set yourself up for success in building resilience,” she said, adding some rural communities really need help with the coordination and time for data gathering that you need to even start assessing risks, much less deciding what to do.

The team at NCORR synthesized ideas in the Colorado Resiliency Playbook for state agencies with Whitehead’s experience with working with leaders at the local level to create North Carolina’s Natural Hazards Resilience Quick Start Guide, she said.

“Any local government or community group can take these principles and start building teams to be ready to divide up the work and support each other in integrating resilience thinking every day,” she said. “Now that the state published the 2020 Resilience Plan, we can build out the support the state is offering and have more communities ready to take it and run with getting to local action. It’s very much intended as a first step.”

Whitehead explained that the Quick Start Guide was put under extensive review by the resilience practitioner community, local governments, the state Department of Public Safety, other state agencies, the governor’s office and volunteers.

“The feedback we got was constructive, but universally positive – our reviewers thought it was very well done. The guide doesn’t read like a typical government document, and that’s a good thing,’ she said. “I’m so proud of my team because it was a big challenge to produce something easy to read that would also provide expert level guidance on a very bottom-up, local process.”

Though she wasn’t with the state at the time, Whitehead said she understood that plans were in motion for Executive Order 80 before Hurricane Florence hit in 2018.

“Now that the state published the 2020 Resilience Plan, we can build out the support the state is offering and have more communities ready to take it and run with getting to local action. It’s very much intended as a first step.”

Jessica Whitehead, Chief Resilience Officer, North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency

“I would say Florence was less of a catalyst and more of a reinforcement that this work needed to proceed in earnest,” she said. “Another critical way Florence changed the conversation was in helping people to better understand the potential magnitude of what we are dealing with statewide.”

For example, she said, North Carolina Sea Grant, The Nature Conservancy, North Carolina Coastal Federation and the state Division of Coastal Management facilitated Swansboro’s Vulnerability, Consequences and Adaptation Planning Scenarios, or VCAPS, meeting about three weeks before Florence happened. VCAPS is a planning tool to help decision makers look at the effects of climate change and develop strategies.

“When we walked through those exercises with town decision-makers and asked them to think about absolute worst-case scenario rainfall events, it stretched their imaginations to think of 10-15 inches of rain in a single storm. Three weeks and 34 inches of rain later, it wasn’t such a stretch to think about what the impacts could be. It really changed the conversation across the board,” she said.

Before Florence, she said the VCAPS partners would have had to spend time convincing some audiences that this was a discussion worth having.

“Now we almost have the opposite problem – people accept it but want to skip the part where we plan and jump straight to what to do. There’s a danger in that – when we act quickly without planning to make sure that we are doing the most amount of good we can for the broadest variety of people, we run the risk that our action may leave some of our most vulnerable people behind,” she said. “We also run the risk of investing time in actions that make us feel safe without knowing that we are really making the best choices to actually reduce risk.”

Whitehead, who took her role at NCORR after serving as North Carolina Sea Grant’s coastal hazards adaptation specialist from 2013 to 2019, explained that the team’s definition of a resilient North Carolina “is a state where our communities, economies and ecosystems are better able to rebound, positively adapt to, and thrive amid changing conditions and challenges, including disasters and climate change; to maintain and improve quality of life, healthy growth, and durable systems; and to conserve resources for present and future generations.”

She said that there’s a lot of ideas about resilience such as building sea walls and fortifying structures that “overlap with hazard mitigation and imply that we will engineer our way out of disasters. That is not the one-size-fits-all vision we have for North Carolina.”

While those solutions may work and may be the only viable option in some situations, “so are options like figuring out how to live with water, using green infrastructure and in some places where flooding has been too repetitive, offering programs to buy out homeowners at risk and reconstruct affordable housing in lower risk areas so people have somewhere to go,” Whitehead said. “We will continue to build out how we implement that vision, but it will be across all hazards — not just flooding — and include building resilience from the mountains to the coast. be seeing in the foreseeable future.”

Funding challenges

Another challenge with resiliency and climate change is how to fund action, Whitehead explained.

“When we have so many challenging issues in affordable housing, education and health care, it’s just as easy today as it was in 2010 to budget for the next year and put off those long-term issues like disaster planning or climate change for later,” she said. “I think we have a better understanding though that everyone faces that funding challenge – worldwide, not just in North Carolina. Today, we are better equipped than we were a decade ago to network and stay in touch around the nation and the world to learn lessons about innovative or best practices to meet some of those funding challenges.”

Regan explained to the group in Wilmington how the lack of funding affects both the environment and economy.

Since 2010, the portion of DEQ staff responsible for protecting the state’s water quality has been cut by 40% by the North Carolina General Assembly, he said. “And so one could say that in 2010, 11 and 12, the rationale for cutting the enforcement arm — the scientists, the engineers — was because the economy was slow, and there was some that did not want the DEQ to get to reform and quote-unquote overregulate.”

From 2012 on, Regan continued, the state economy has been doing well and with the reduction of staff, his office has not only been unable to protect water quality for the 10 million residents the way they’d like to but the state has had an influx of businesses who are waiting up to two years just to get a permit from the state to operate.

“So, I would argue that prior to my arrival, we were on that downward slope of getting the resources that we need,” Regan said. Since being appointed secretary, he said he’s attempted in a very bipartisan fashion to approach the General Assembly and make the argument that protecting water quality is just as good for the environment, and public health, as it is for the economy.

“As you all know, our robust coastal economy depends on the protection of our beaches and our sounds and the marine life. And we stood with mayors and county leaders along the coast, who oppose offshore drilling and seismic testing,” Regan continued. “Our coastal communities, already have enough to deal with. The science tells us that if we do nothing, climate change means more intense storms. But we’re not just worried about the hurricanes. Climate experts working on North Carolina’s climate science report say rainfall events will be heavier and sea level rise will impact our beach communities.”

“Our coastal communities, already have enough to deal with. The science tells us that if we do nothing, climate change means more intense storms. But we’re not just worried about the hurricanes. Climate experts working on North Carolina’s climate science report say rainfall events will be heavier and sea level rise will impact our beach communities.”

Michael Regan, Secretary, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality

Whitehead explained that what we know about how climate adaptation happens in 2020, or how risk is communicated, is very different.

“We understand better that defining overall trends is just a first step – to get that information to a decision, like how big a pipe should be to convey enough stormwater in 2050, is a lot more complex. You have to translate those projected precipitation scenarios into the intensities, durations and frequencies of rainfall events to be able to successfully design a stormwater pipe,” she said, adding you also need to consider other factors that go into that decision, like how expensive it is to create larger scale stormwater projects today and what is affordable.

“And then you need to prioritize – if you only have so much funding, do you put your efforts into improving stormwater infrastructure in a downstream location, or do you get more bang for your buck investing in a project upstream first? Science doesn’t have a good answer for this anywhere yet – but in North Carolina we are again asking these questions and outlining plans for how to get to answers we can implement, which puts us right back on the cutting edge of climate response,” she said.

Whitehead said that there’s “still no one-size-fits-all solution to climate change, but we know a lot better about how to engage and tailor scientific information. That said, there’s still a lot we have to learn about how to know which solutions are best in each place – or even what a viable solution is in some cases, like long-term land loss due to sea level rise, or how to make sure the rapidly urbanizing Piedmont has enough drinking water in 2050.”

She added that it’s been hard to tell how COVID-19 will impact the way people respond to climate change issues.

“COVID-19 has exposed so many of the ways our social and economic systems are vulnerable to shocks and stressors. A pandemic is definitely a shock, while climate change is a long-term stressor punctuated by shocks. I think we are still in response mode on COVID-19, and it remains to be seen in the long term how we change the ways we understand how widespread or deeply challenging something like a pandemic or climate change can be,” she said.

“I think it will shift how we process risk as a society. Importantly, as we begin to think of pandemic recovery, many of the things we do to improve social and economic resilience – the ways we care for our most vulnerable people, the ways we diversify our economies and think differently about resilience in supply chains or infrastructure so that it’s more able to handle major disruptions – are the things that will also reduce the harms and increase our abilities to adapt to climate change.”

This is an 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.

North Carolina in the last decade has gone from the state that passed a bill in 2012 restricting the use of sea level rise data for regulatory purposes, which drew criticism for “outlawing science,” to introducing this week what the state calls its most comprehensive effort to address climate change.

Submitted to Gov. Roy Cooper by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, the North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan is to serve as a framework to guide state action, engage policymakers and stakeholders and facilitate collaboration across the state, officials said Tuesday. The plan is also intended to focus the state’s attention on climate resilience actions and address underlying stressors such as the changing climate, aging infrastructure, socioeconomic disparities and competing development priorities.

“Climate change impacts the health, safety, and financial stability of North Carolinians, and we must take it head on. A resilient North Carolina is a stronger and more competitive North Carolina,” said Cooper.

One of the many charges the governor gave cabinet agencies when he signed on Oct. 29, 2018, Executive Order 80, North Carolina’s Commitment to Address Climate Change and Transition to a Clean Energy Economy, the plan “is the state’s most comprehensive effort to date, based on science and stakeholder input, to address North Carolina’s vulnerability to climate change,” said DEQ officials.

DEQ submitted the 372-page document on behalf of the Climate Change Interagency Council, which prepared the resilience plan under the direction of the executive order.

In addition to the resilience plan, Executive Order 80 established several goals for the state to accomplish by 2025 that include a reduction of statewide greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 2005 levels, increase the number of zero-emission vehicles to a minimum of 80,000 and reduce energy consumption per square foot in state-owned buildings by at least 40% from fiscal year 2002-2003 levels. The Climate Change Interagency Council was formed to help the cabinet agencies work together to achieve those goals, according to his office.

The plan is an 11-month collaborative effort with the state, federal partners, state universities, local governments, community planners, nongovernmental organizations including The Natural Resources Defense Council, NC Conservation Network, North Carolina Coastal Federation, The Nature Conservancy, NC Councils of Government, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Environmental Defense Fund, climate justice leaders, stakeholders interested in nature-based solutions and other partners.

“As we begin another hurricane season with even greater challenges facing North Carolina this year, the administration’s leadership has better positioned our state to prepare our most vulnerable communities,” said DEQ Secretary Michael S. Regan, chair of the Climate Change Interagency Council. “The Risk and Resilience Plan takes the experience and knowledge of the experts and leaders from across the state to ensure a comprehensive approach to address the risks to our infrastructure and economy.”

The 2020 Resilience Plan puts in place next steps for implementing and updating resilience initiatives and establishes the North Carolina Resilience Strategy. The four elements of the strategy include the North Carolina Climate Science Report, State Agency Resilience Strategies, Statewide Vulnerability Assessment and Resilience Strategies, and the North Carolina Enhanced Hazard Mitigation Plan.

“This plan will be tested repeatedly with every major storm that strikes our coast. Strong and persistent leadership must now translate into meaningful day-to-day policy and management decisions that actually reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather events. Today’s report establishes benchmarks by which the success of this framework will now be measured,” Todd Miller, executive director of the North Carolina Coastal Federation said Tuesday after the report was released. The Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review Online.

Environmental Defense Fund Director Will McDow said in a statement that after devastation from back-to-back hurricanes and in the face of rapidly rising seas, “North Carolina must act with urgency to build meaningful resilience. This plan marks an important milestone towards a more resilient future for our state.”

“The Resilience Plan begins to address protecting vulnerable communities who are bearing a disproportionate share of the climate change burden,” said EDF Manager, Partnerships and Outreach Marilynn Marsh-Robinson. “What’s needed next is additional community engagement and holistic approaches developed hand-in-hand with the communities they are designed to protect. It’s critical to support those most impacted throughout the process and equip them with what is needed to implement long-term solutions.”

“The governor is starting an important dialogue on how best to prepare our state for the impacts of climate change,” added McDow. “We must now work together to move this plan into action to build meaningful resilience for our communities, businesses and ecosystems.”

Yaron Miller, an officer with The Pew Charitable Trusts’ flood-prepared communities initiative, told Coastal Review Online Tuesday that the plan is an important step for North Carolina as its residents face the impacts of frequent flood-related disasters.

“We are pleased that among the many resilience strategies identified, there is a chapter about applying nature-based and low impact development practices across the state, as well as recommendations to immediately incorporate these strategies into planning.  These are important tools to manage flooding and improve water quality,” Miller continued. “Pew and the North Carolina Coastal Federation have convened a diverse group of stakeholders to develop policy recommendations for how these solutions can be employed by state, local governments, and businesses to address flooding in the state.”

The shift in outlook on climate change has not gone unnoticed by state officials.

Regan said that following hurricanes Matthew in 2016 and Florence in 2018, audiences have become more receptive to talking about climate change.

“I think people are really feeling the implications of climate change, both from an environmental standpoint, a public safety standpoint and then from an economic standpoint,” he told Coastal Review Online following a presentation at a Wilmington Rotary Club meeting at Cape Fear Country Club earlier this year. “So our communities are experiencing these changing weather patterns, and now I think more people are open to the conversations about not only what do we do to prevent, but what do we do to recover once these events occur.”

Not only has the conversation shifted but the state’s official response is also different and includes the launch in October 2018 of the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, or NCORR, to “streamline disaster recovery programs statewide and help communities rebuild smarter and stronger.”

NCORR Chief Resilience Officer Jessica Whitehead said that the nature of the conversation about climate change has in the last decade gone from “Is it happening?” to “It’s happening. Now what do we do?”

“What’s stayed the same is that there are still big challenges to defining what we do,” Whitehead said. “We know climate change isn’t just what we saw in the last flood – it’s droughts, and extreme heat, and landslides, and fires, and sea level rise. North Carolina has 100 counties, and they are all different places with diverse populations who will need to recover from and adapt to these diverse hazards.”

Looking to the future, “one of the greatest challenges we face is a changing climate,” Regan told the group during his talk. “As you all know better than anyone, your communities live and work on the front lines of climate change. Less than two years after Hurricane Matthew struck North Carolina, Hurricane Florence ended up being the costliest natural disaster in our history, causing the great state of North Carolina over $17 billion in damage. And last year, Hurricane Dorian hit some of our same communities.”

When Cooper, a month after Hurricane Florence, introduced the executive order to address climate change and transition to a clean energy economy, he was being proactive, Regan explained.

“That executive order is the most ambitious step ever taken in North Carolina’s history to combat climate change and transition North Carolina to a cleaner energy economy, while keeping the economy, front and center,” Regan said, adding that the order was a message that the state could no longer wait on federal government to act, “because our environment, our economy and our way of life could not wait.”

Executive Order 80 calls for every cabinet agency under the governor’s leadership to develop a carbon-reduction strategy. Cooper tasked NCDEQ with developing the North Carolina Clean Energy Plan submitted in the fall of 2019 to serve as “a visionary roadmap of viable policies for North Carolina’s clean energy future,” Regan said.

The plan requires the state’s electric power sector to reduce carbon emissions by 70% by 2030 and be carbon neutral by 2050. Carbon neutral means to function in a way that compensates completely for atmospheric carbon emissions, as through carbon offsets or tradeoffs.

“We know climate change isn’t just what we saw in the last flood – it’s droughts, and extreme heat, and landslides, and fires, and sea level rise. North Carolina has 100 counties, and they are all different places with diverse populations who will need to recover from and adapt to these diverse hazards.”

Jessica Whitehead, Chief Resilience Officer, North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency

Though lauded by many, Executive Order 80 was also met with criticism.

“While arbitrary platitudes might satisfy far-left donors, our state’s energy policies have to account for the real costs they impose on the public,” Senate Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, was quoted in a news report when Executive Order 80 was introduced in October 2018.

“I support an all-of-the-above energy strategy that includes renewables, but I don’t support programs that have minimal positive impact and can only sustain themselves with taxpayer and ratepayer money from those who can least afford it. The key is to find solutions that actually work in the private market, and I’m open to any and all ideas that help get us there.”

A few days before Cooper signed Executive Order 80, Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, announced Oct. 26, 2018, appointees to the joint select committee on storm-related river debris/damage in North Carolina.

“Hurricane Florence’s devastation makes it clear that we need to work in every direction to protect lives and property from future flooding. This committee’s work will be integral to the comprehensive resiliency planning that will take place over the coming years,” Berger and Moore said in joint statement when the committee was announced.

The committee was tasked with studying flood damage mitigation caused by extreme rainfall events and are to submit a report by 2020, according to the October 2018 announcement. The scope of the study will be river basins that experienced at least 10 inches of rainfall during Hurricane Florence. The committee’s webpage on the state General Assembly website Tuesday did not have information about the release of a report.

This is the sixth 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.

RALEIGH — It was not the kind of Earth Day that North Carolina State Climatologist Kathie Dello had imagined.

On April 20, Dello opened a weeklong series of events at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, but instead of an in-person talk with the giant Earth at the museum’s entrance as a fitting backdrop, she joined via teleconference from her Raleigh home.

For the better part of an hour, Dello, on the job since last July, led a virtual walk-through of the findings in the state’s new climate report, an extensive, first-ever compilation of the science, impacts and unknowns about climate change in the state.

The major takeaways from the 236-page report are familiar: a warmer, wetter North Carolina with coastal areas threatened by rising seas and more frequent heavy downpours, along with increased flooding in all parts of the state.

Dello’s job that day and every day is to put that kind of data into context.

“North Carolina is warming and we’re expecting warming unlike anything we’ve seen in our past,” she explained to museum viewers.

Dello is the state’s fifth climatologist and the first woman to lead the State Climate Office, based at North Carolina State University. Before taking the job, she served as the associate director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute and the deputy director of the Oregon Climate Service.

In her talk illustrating the details in the new report, Dello pointed to effects seen around the state, breaking down the impact of warmer nights on public health and agriculture and how more intense rain events spell more frequent urban flooding. Stone fruits, like peaches, and other crops won’t do well without cool nights, she explained. Farmworkers and other outdoor laborers will experience more heat stress during the day, while warmer nights mean no chance to cool down.

It’s important, she said, to recognize that climate change is in our present as well as our future and has to be addressed accordingly.

“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.”

In getting to know the state, Dello said she’s been struck with its diversity, in ecological terms and the human communities within its borders.

For Dello a big part of the job of state climatologist is communicating science in a meaningful way, bringing home to people what a changing climate means. She helped author a “plain language” summary of the North Carolina Climate Science Report, which is aimed at making the science more accessible and useful for the public as well as planners and policy makers.

Creating the complex climate models, the math, is the easy part, she told viewers on Earth Day.

“I’m not being flip, that really is the easy part. The most difficult part is the human component, us, how we’re going to behave, how we’re going to react.”

In plain language

In climate science circles, North Carolina is known both for the intensity of storms and the debate here over climate science. Dello said that when she got here, only one was apparent.

“When I got the job, people were shocked that I would leave the West Coast, which seems to be a friendlier place to talk about climate,” she said in an interview with Coastal Review Online. “But I found the opposite here.”

Dello said she saw much more resistance and organized opposition in Oregon.

“I don’t know if it’s just Southern hospitality or that people are a little bit nicer, but I find that people are ready and willing to talk about climate change here,” she said. “In some cases, they haven’t been engaged at all and are grateful that someone is willing to approach the subject with them.”

Recent storms here likely played a role in that, she said. “I’m finding that folks are open and willing to have the conversation and certainly the weather and the climate over the past few years has probably helped that out.”

“I don’t know if it’s just Southern hospitality or that people are a little bit nicer, but I find that people are ready and willing to talk about climate change here.”

To understand what the future of our climate holds, Dello said it’s important to recognize that we are already seeing what climate change looks like.

“We’re in for more of it. We’re in for worse,” she said. “It’s hotter, it’s wetter, the ocean communities are dealing with sunny-day, nuisance flooding and coastal erosion.”

“Flooding is going to impact the entire state,” Dello said. There’ll be more frequent heavy rain events and more large-scale urban floods, especially when there’s a combination of events, such as a big storm after leaves have just fallen.

“The mechanism might be different — it’s not going to be high tide in Raleigh — but it may be something else.”

What that means for hurricanes is unclear, in terms of where the storms might travel, she said, but wherever they go, more intense wind and rain and more damage are likely.

“We don’t necessarily know where hurricanes make landfall. Climate models don’t reconcile that very well but we’re stacking the deck with more conducive conditions for dangerous hurricanes.”

That outlook is daunting for policy makers, and Dello said the state will have to confront repeated devastation to vulnerable communities and the disparate impact on people who work outside or can’t afford to cool their homes when heat indexes rise.

“I think this is going to take a really close look at some of our inequities across our state,” she said. “The communities that going to be hit the hardest, that have been hit the hardest are just going to keep getting hit. I think we have some tough questions to ask of ourselves.”

She said the coronavirus pandemic is reminder that it is pointless to talk about a “new normal” as if there will be a point where things plateau.

“We talk about a new normal and we were talking about a new normal before all this other stuff started happening,” she said. “But that’s not a great classification, because we’ll check in at a new normal and then there’ll be another new normal and another new normal.”

NC’s opportunity to lead

The new state climate report and its focus on the impact of climate change is one part of a state resilience and mitigation strategy put in place by Gov. Roy Cooper. The climate change report is integral to the next step in the process, a statewide resiliency plan that is due out this month.

“I think North Carolina has a really unique advantage in that we are seeing climate change loud and clear here in this state and we’re recognizing that we need to do something about it.”

Cooper’s strategy represents a considerable shift from his predecessor, Gov. Pat McCrory, who advocated for offshore drilling and inland fracking. But Cooper has been limited mostly to executive action. Following the recent series of devastating storms, the state’s legislature has been willing to back resiliency efforts, but as yet is still unwilling to enact major policy changes, such as carbon reduction goals.

Dello said that often the resistance to changes at the state level is based on the contention that it won’t make a difference.

“What people who don’t want to take action on climate use as an argument is that one individual state can’t do enough on its own. I don’t think the point is that North Carolina is trying to do this on its own. North Carolina is saying, ‘Hey, we contribute to this problem,’” she said. “Sure it’s global, but recognizing our contribution to it and knowing that the atmosphere doesn’t stop at our borders, we’re going to look closely at what we can do.”

Given its reputation, she said, North Carolina has an opportunity to show other states a way forward.

“We’ve seen with policy change in the past in the U.S., it’s the states that make the federal government act,” Dello said. In environmental policy usually those state changes come from places like California and New York.

“I think North Carolina has a really unique advantage in that we are seeing climate change loud and clear here in this state and we’re recognizing that we need to do something about it. The politics may have changed a little bit, but folks don’t see us as the most progressive state around the country. I think that North Carolina can be a leader in showing other states you can do this.”

Lessons from lockdown

“I think one of the things I keep reminding myself is that climate change isn’t stopping because of any of this,” Dello said. “This break in emissions isn’t doing very much for us.”

Still, the early reaction to the coronavirus pandemic in which most people were willing to pitch in and take the stay-at-home order seriously gives her some hope that people are willing to adapt for a common cause.

“I’m seeing folk ask questions of themselves — I’m doing it too — Why do I travel so much? Why do I go to conferences all over when really I could have them online?”

Some of those changes will carry forward, she said, but they’re only a small part of what’s needed and there’s the worry that once things return to some sense of normalcy the collective spirit will fade.

“The problem we have on our hands is really, really big, and watching people struggle with this one, I don’t know” Dello said. “I bounce back and forth between optimism and pessimism.”

This is the fifth 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.

Twenty-seven years ago, an interagency panel of bureaucrats, politicians and scientists gathered for the first time in Atlanta, Georgia, to study how to save a North Carolina coastal highway skirting the volatile waters of the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

No one back then talked about resilience or adaptation, and certainly not retreat. Still, the diverse group turned out to be pioneers of brainstorming and collaborating to solve the multitude of challenges from sea level rise and other climate change impacts.

The two-lane road has been a headache for the state practically from the day the first tire hit the pavement. In 1962, the infamous Ash Wednesday Storm ripped open an inlet in Buxton and destroyed 25% of the dunes that buffered the road from ocean waves.

Still, the extreme and worsening coastal conditions for N.C. 12 serve as both lesson plan and cautionary tale for teams like the Outer Banks Task Force, working against time while begging for funds to maintain vital transportation infrastructure into the future.

Gov. Roy Cooper’s executive order in 2018 directed 10 cabinet agencies and the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to “integrate climate adaptation and resiliency planning into their policies, programs and operations.”  In response, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency was created to coordinate agencies and assist communities facing storm recovery and/or risks of future climate change impacts.

But complex problems that involve many players, a slew of stakeholders and tons of money can become unwieldy — and paralyzing.

At least 10 government entities — federal, state and local — were represented on the task force, in addition to several coastal engineers and scientists from different universities.

“How do we simplify what we’re trying to do so that we get something done?” former Dare County Board of Commissioners Chairwoman Geneva Perry asked the revived task force in November 1998, as quoted then in The Virginian-Pilot. “This thing has been going on forever, and unless we keep kicking it, it dies again.”

Built in phases during the 1950s, N.C. 12 bisects Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge and seven villages. It is also the only route for millions of tourists that contribute to the Outer Banks’ $1 billion tourism economy.

The roadway, with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the massive Pamlico Sound on the other, is inches above mean sea level and crosses numerous weak spots on skinny barrier islands that are subject to severe beach erosion. To add to its vulnerabilities, the islands are close to the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, the “super-highway” for Atlantic hurricanes.

Over the decades, the road has been repeatedly over-washed by ocean and sound tide; undermined by ocean surge; inundated by moon tide and rain deluges; buried by mountains of sand from storm-flattened dunes; broken apart by hurricanes and nor-easters; and covered by telephone poles, trees and debris from destroyed buildings.

Sections of road have been replaced, elevated, bridged or moved further from the ocean. Adjacent beaches have been widened and walkways have been built to protect dunes.

And the dunes between the beach and the road have been built, knocked down and rebuilt, higher, longer and stronger. Then flattened again.

“It’s a very good example of a corridor being impacted by climate,” Jerry Jennings, Division 1 engineer with the North Carolina Department of Transportation, said in a recent telephone interview. “Certainly, from Division 1’s perspective, there’s not another road that has the challenges that N.C. 12 has.”

Located in the northeast corner of North Carolina, Division 1 is a huge, mostly rural territory that encompasses 14 counties. It not only includes the second-largest estuarine system in the nation, its coastal area — the Outer Banks — is one of the most vulnerable regions in the U.S. to the impacts of sea level rise.

Maintenance and repair of the road from Oregon Inlet to Ocracoke village has cost NCDOT about $75 million in the last 10 years, not including N.C. 12 improvements that were part of the recently completed Bonner Bridge replacement project.

Opened last year, the new Marc Basnight Bridge spans the inlet and incorporates phased work on the road to just south of Rodanthe.

The only other comparison in the state to N.C. 12 cited by some transportation officials could be the heavily traveled Blue Ridge Parkway in the mountains, which is subject to costly landslides and intense winter weather.

But a lot of environmental changes generally have been observed over time in coastal regions and in low-lying areas, Jennings said. Shoreline erosion along water bodies, for example, can impact roadway shoulders and potentially threaten the road. Flooding is a persistent problem on roads in Mackey’s Island, Aydlett and Water Lily in Currituck County and on N.C. 94 at Lake Mattamuskeet in Hyde County.

“There’s a number of those out there,” he said. “It’s not just a beach thing.”

An ongoing improvement project on Colington Road in Kill Devil Hills includes elevation of parts of the road vulnerable to tidal flooding, he said, “which seems to be a longstanding problem.”

“That project will attempt to resolve that,” Jennings said. “It’s hard to say what is directly related to climate change.”

NCDOT had been working with the new North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, or NCORR. But NCDOT’s resiliency work has been suspended indefinitely while the agency addresses severe budgetary shortfalls aggravated by COVID-19 shutdowns.

Unspecified cuts are also expected in NCDOT’s Ferry Division, which operates about 20 ferries on seven regular routes on the coast. The passenger ferry between Hatteras and Ocracoke islands has been canceled for the season.

In March, North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies released the North Carolina Climate Science Report, an assessment of current and projected climate impacts to the state. The report is a component of the comprehensive N.C. Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan that is expected to be completed this summer.

The report found that future impacts in the state from climate change — some effects are already apparent — will likely be more intense storms, increased rain volume, more wildfires and drought, more hot days and higher humidity, increased flooding — including sunny day tide — and higher sea levels, especially on the northeast coast.

“For transportation, it means offering people multiple ways to get around, by better connecting roads and sidewalks and providing quality transit services,” the report said.

Jessica Whitehead, chief resilience officer with NCORR, said that NCDOT has been an engaged participant in discussions about such critical needs as building redundancy and updating old infrastructure.

Even with NCDOT’s and other state agencies’ budgetary woes from the pandemic, Whitehead said that resiliency work will continue.

“The thing about climate change in any of this, it’s not going to go away,” she said. “We’re still going to figure out ways to plan for it.”

Transportation projects in North Carolina have already been engineered for environmental changes, said Chris Werner, director of technical services at NCDOT.

“Resiliency is a critical part of how we design and build our infrastructure,” he said. “We work with all our partners across the state.”

Werner said that the agency has an inbuilt culture that fosters innovative and proactive approaches to problem solving.

“We’re always looking for cutting-edge analytics and software,” he said. “Most of us are engineers. The more data we can get, the more analytics we can perform.”

One example is application of the state’s data-rich Flood Inundation Mapping Alert Network, or FIMAN, to not only predict flooding on roads and bridges, but also to design for it by looking at trends in the data.

The agency, he said, is in the process of expanding the FIMAN gauge system from a property-impact focus to provide data specific to transportation infrastructure. For instance, data collection can be tailored so it can be used to prevent future road washouts.

It’s not just a matter of fixing a damaged structure, he explained, the goal is to keep it from happening again by building redundancy and resiliency.

When severe flooding on U.S. 421 in Wilmington in 2018 during Hurricane Florence damaged the road and cut off traffic, Werner said, the agency took the opportunity to “build better and stronger.” After analysis of historic and current data, instead of just replacing ruined culverts, the department replaced them with a new bridge. Another bridge was also built nearby, providing the transportation corridor with both redundancy and resiliency in the event of future flooding.

“Our goal is to build infrastructure that’s durable and safe and resilient as possible,” Werner said. “As civil engineers, we’re constantly improving what we’ve done in the past. That’s what we do. It all stems from field observation and data.”

Other measures NCDOT has put in place, he said, are monitors of water levels at low bridges, and identifying alternative travel routes on its READY NC app. The department has partnered with Google Maps and WAZE to feed their traffic data into the app. Also, DRIVENC.gov shows up-to-date closures and maintenance work on the state’s roads.

In reality, the feats of engineering for NCDOT are not so much in dramatic crane work at bridge construction sites or road restorations after storms. It’s mostly what goes on behind the scene at research centers and laboratories.

“We do a lot of work with our universities,” said Neil Mastin, NCDOT Research and Development manager. “We work with business units and academics.”

In May 2019, the department presented its first Research & Innovation Summit at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to discuss transportation-related innovations and research.

Although it is not often a focus of public discussion, NCDOT has been studying numerous issues that could result in transportation improvements, although its research program for 2021 has been postponed, Mastin said.

Ongoing or planned research projects include the following:

• How to reduce environmental impacts of road construction.
• Building 2-D scour models to improve understanding of water interaction at bridge pilings.
• Monitoring erosion on the Outer Banks going back 20 years, along with an ongoing coastal monitoring program, that gathers data on island width, the size of the dunes and distance of the road to the ocean.
• Documenting stormwater impacts from recent storms (on pause) and studying Neuse River watershed flood abatement study (ongoing).
• Forensic analysis of sections of girders from the old Bonner Bridge that spanned Oregon Inlet to learn how they withstood the harsh coastal conditions.
• Analysis of submerged aquatic vegetation in the Currituck Sound to understand where it is and how to protect it.
• Biologic stabilization of soil to potentially increase resistance to erosion.
• Using dredged material from the Rodanthe emergency ferry channel potentially to build bird or material disposal islands or to fill eroded areas.

Mastin said that NCDOT is also “hyper-aware” of the public concern about drainage issues. The state is responsible for the ditches and culverts within road right of ways, as well as the nine ocean outfalls in the state, all of which except one is on the Outer Banks.

“Water in general,” he said, “is the enemy of transportation networks.”

In the past, locations of all small and medium drainage pipes around the state were mapped, he added, with the ambitious goal — yet mostly unfulfilled — of eventually replacing them. But that’s just pipes — and flooding is getting increasingly worse.

“Eastern North Carolina in particular, with land as flat as it is, makes it extremely challenging,” Mastin said. “We can fix one problem somewhere and it makes it worse somewhere else.”

Drones are being used more often by NCDOT to provide footage of flooded areas and to help manage flood gates, he said.  They’re also used to build wetlands, to identify plant types, to measure elevation and to help determine where to send crews after disasters. Researchers are also studying development of drones to inspect bridges.

Improvements of material — mostly concrete and asphalt — are constantly being studied, Mastin said. One example of research results is the proposed bridge replacement on Harkers Island, which would be the state’s first fully composite reinforced bridge. Rather than using corrosion-prone steel rebar, he said, the structure will be built with a mixture of carbon fiber prestressed strands and “fancy” fiberglass.

“We’ll be monitoring this closely,” he said. “This is really exciting.”

The new Marc Basnight Bridge over notoriously wild and wicked Oregon Inlet was designed to last 100 years and was built with high-performance, less-permeable concrete made to better endure corrosive salt air and water. It is the first bridge project in the state to use stainless reinforcing steel, and the bridge has longer and deeper pilings to withstand scour.

The Outer Banks Task Force, in a significant way, laid the groundwork for the bridge and the N.C. 12 improvements by determining where the problems were and what to do about them. Most importantly, the panel recognized the need for safety and access for both the bridge and the road and linked them together as a single corridor.

Jennings, the division engineer, said that over the last few years, feasibility studies have been completed looking at long-term options for eroded areas in Buxton, Hatteras and Ocracoke, as well as costs of the alternatives and how long projects would last.

Years before the panel was replaced by a “merger team” that worked on planning and permitting for the road and bridge projects, the Outer Banks Task Force had designated six vulnerable “hot spots” between Oregon Inlet and Ocracoke village that were critical to address, and started the planning process on each one.

Predictions about the dire risks at each of the hot spots – from storm surge, beach erosion, road loss, dune breaching, even another inlet cutting through – have since played out all too often.

In 1999, John Fisher, a N.C. State University civil engineer and then-chair of the task force science panel, called a reconstructed dune lost during Hurricane Dennis at the eroding Ocracoke hot spot a “Band-Aid” that wouldn’t last.

“We seriously think you should think about abandoning that whole stretch of road and relocating the ferry system,” he told the task force, according to The Virginian-Pilot on Nov. 7. “It didn’t make sense to us to try to maintain the highway.”

That is exactly what NCDOT is now considering. After storm after storm over the last 20 years wiped out dunes in the same hot spot, it seems Hurricane Dorian last September may end up taking that one off N.C. 12’s list.

This is the fourth 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.

Nearly every year on the Outer Banks brings a new hurricane, storms that wipe out parts of the beach road and flood homes, destroying years’ worth of memories in a single night — experiences that have shaped the perspectives young people on the Outer Banks have on climate science.

“I do believe in sea-level rise,” said Brady Creef, 21, and a rising senior at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

With a mother serving as a county executive and a father who is a commercial fisherman, Creef’s family knows the effects of coastal storms all too well.

“During Hurricane Irene I remember the Albemarle Sound at the end of my street had receded almost a mile out. When the storm surge returned, I remember hearing the water roaring through the marsh outside my house and the water rising to almost 10 feet above sea level.”

Karen Perez, 20, a native of Ocracoke, has seen the way that storms have affected her island.

“The strip of highway on Ocracoke is surrounded by ocean and sound water on both sides, and every year the roads feel narrower as the beach is making its way further back onto the road,” she said. “Over the years and with the help of hurricanes there is no longer sand in between the parking lot (of the ferry terminal) and (the) water.”

In 2010, the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission’s Science Panel on Coastal Hazards released a report finding that sea levels could rise up to 39 inches by 2100. This kind of change would wipe out a great deal of the coast, from homes and businesses to wildlife habitats. In 2012, House Bill 819 passed, which prevented the use of this climate change report in legislation.

Allissa Halker, 21, who was raised in Kill Devil Hills and is a field research assistant for Alternative Cropping Production Systems at North Carolina State University, said she wishes that the government would have handled climate change differently in the past and that they would approach it differently now.

“They will probably handle it poorly in the future if we don’t get out there and vote in people who actually care about the future of our climate,” she said. “Although it might not directly affect your generation, it’s still important to consider how these changes in climate will affect future generations, and we need to be prepared for them — and for us.”

In December 2019, Amnesty International’s Future of Humanity survey of more than 10,000 young adults aged 18-25 across 22 countries found that 41% of respondents see global warming as the most pressing issue facing the current world. However, instead of just silently accepting the way things are, many young people are making their voices heard.

“Recent changes under the Trump administration have rolled back several protections and programs that have been in place for years,” Creef said. Throughout his academic career, Creef has had a passion for government. He has been involved with student government at both UNC and at First Flight High School in Kill Devil Hills.

“We are actively going backward simply because politicians and certain people do not care about, or in some cases deny, science,” he said. “I would want to tell (policy makers) to listen to the experts and for once, it is okay to realize that you do not know all the answers.”

Growing up on Ocracoke, Perez has become keenly aware of climate change and seen the specific ways in which it has impacted the people who live on the island.

“I think that the government, federally speaking, has not really done a good job on enforcing action on this problem,” she said. “Unfortunately, I think it is because they don’t see it as a problem.”

Lupita Martinez, 20, of Ocracoke and a rising senior at Elizabeth City State University, believes that despite agreement on government inaction, those in charge are still doing some things right.

“I think the government has done a fine job with not permitting drilling for oil offshore,” she said. “My hope would be that the government keeps fighting to prevent offshore drilling and protect the wildlife.”

“Laws like the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act … were all great places to start building a sustainable environment,” said Creef. And it is the next generation’s job to continue that sustainability.

In North Carolina, the legislature has taken steps to curb renewable energy development. Measures to limit where wind energy projects can be built have been introduced by legislative leaders in recent years but failed to advance.

Young people here say they have found ways to respond by making changes in how they live.

“I have started to walk or cycle to places on the island,” Martinez said. “The only time I drive is when it’s necessary.”

“My small part to play in stopping climate change has been simple habits like using a reusable water bottle, consuming less meat and dairy products and supporting businesses that have sustainability as one of their key goals,” Creef said.

Halker said she has tried to cut back the amount of waste she produces, as much as possible. “The more trash I keep out of the landfill, the better. I see many people my age caring about this topic, too. It’s enlightening to see people care and put in the same effort. If everyone cared a little, we could do a lot.”

Such commitment to sustainability shows how pressing and important it is to the next generation to have these discussions, said Amnesty International Secretary General Kumi Naidoo.

“Young people are looking for fundamental changes in the way the world works,” he said. “Younger generations deserve a seat at the table when it comes to decisions about them.”

When Hurricane Florence bore down on the coast in fall 2018, “both the volume and the geographic extent were likely to be 50 percent greater than if there had been no climate change,” the New York Times reported.

Halker said she has seen the results of changes in the Outer Banks over the last 10 years. She remembers how Hurricane Irene in 2011 left her house under 5 feet of water.

“Every hurricane we experience seems to do more damage than the last,” Halker said. “You start to wonder when the ocean is going to reclaim the beaches.”

Not only are storms on the Outer Banks more frequent and more intense, the weather seems different too, with more extremes, the young people said.

“Ocracoke’s climate has changed since my childhood because of the temperature,” Martinez said. “The temperature is high one day and the next day it’s rainy and cold.”

Hurricane Dorian in September 2019 hit Ocracoke in a way island residents had never seen. Flooding reached unprecedented levels. Electricity was out at various times and for a time, there was no open grocery store, bank or health center, and tap water needed to be boiled before drinking. Businesses on the island were closed for weeks or months and residents lost treasured personal items. More than 40 structures were destroyed as a result of the storm.

“During Hurricane Dorian water got into my house and destroyed everything,” Martinez said. “I’ve lost many sentimental items and had to reconstruct my home.”

“(Hurricane Dorian) was the worst hurricane on the island with historic flooding,” Perez noted.

Growing up, she never thought of hurricanes as something to fear. Dorian was a different story.

“The house of everyone in my family (five homes) got flooded, and four of those families were displaced,” said Perez, who also lost her own home when it had to be demolished because of the extensive damage.

Usually after a hurricane, residents reach out to help others, but Perez said the difficulty in recovering led to friction.

“A lot of people are under the impression that this hurricane brought the community closer together,” Perez said. “Unfortunately, there has been lots of discussion over disagreements, mostly regarding where and to whom aid is going.”

Perez said that after her experience, it’s easy to feel anxious about the Outer Banks’ future.

“If climate change continues at the rate it is going now, I think there will be more hurricanes like or worse than Dorian,” she said. “I thought about settling down on Ocracoke after my career but after seeing the stress it puts on my family and community, I don’t think I would want to go through that.”

For those who grew up on the Outer Banks, taking  steps to change course is a way to preserve what they love about this vulnerable stretch of coastline.

“Hopefully, there is a future where the world is able to stop some changes that have already occurred,” Creef said. “For the Outer Banks, I simply hope that there is some area left where I can come back and remember my childhood years.”

Halker agreed.

“I know this is cheesy to say, but the beach is my favorite part of the Outer Banks,” Halker said. “It’s truly breathtaking. I miss the ease of driving to the beach to watch the sunrise and then going to get coffee, those little things are definitely moments I took for granted.”

This story is the third 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.

While hurricanes are woven through the history of Down East Carteret County, a remote string of communities on the central North Carolina coast known for its fishing and boatbuilding traditions, Hurricane Florence was a turning point.

Before Florence hit in September 2018, no one ever talked about sea level rise or climate change, but “Florence is the dividing line. Florence caused everybody to look at things differently,” Karen Willis Amspacher explained in an interview.

Amspacher, who has always called Down East home, is executive director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

“Down East starts at the North River Bridge,” she said. North River Bridge connects Beaufort to the about a dozen communities making up Down East, many of which are bordered by Core Sound.

“I say that North River is not only the geographic divide, but it’s the cultural divide,” she continued, adding there are traits shared with other fishing communities like Hoboken in Pamlico County, Sneads Ferry in Onslow County and Hatteras, Wanchese and Manns Harbor, all in Dare County, but, “Down East, to me, is one of the last vestiges of the values of those old fishing communities that still exist.”

The heritage of many of these communities began more than a century ago on Diamond City, which encompasses all the barrier island communities of Shackleford Banks.

These fishing villages were settled by “hardy families who were accustomed to foul weather and remote lifestyles. But numerous hurricanes and northeasters near the end of the century had tested the endurance of the people known as ‘Ca’e Bankers,’” Jay Barnes wrote in his book, “North Carolina’s Hurricane History.” Excerpts of the book are included in Harm’s Way Digital Archive, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center’s online exhibit chronicling more than 100 years of storms that devastated the North Carolina coast, including the September hurricane of 1933, or storm of ’33, Hazel in 1954, Dennis and Floyd both in 1999, Isabel in 2003 and Irene in 2011.

“These storms left drifts of barren sand that replaced the rich soils of their gardens, and saltwater overwash killed trees and contaminated drinking wells. These communities had begun to see a decline in population prior to 1899, largely due to the unwelcome effects of hurricanes,” Barnes continued.

The series of storms forced families to move from their barrier island homes, many landing in the Down East communities of Harkers Island and Marshallberg, as well as Salter Path on the Bogue Banks and established the Promise Land community near the downtown area of Morehead City on the Intracoastal Waterway.

Each of the Down East communities has its own personality, its own strengths and its own characteristics, Amspacher continued, “But there’s a common thread among Core Sounders and Down East about place. And I think that’s the tie that binds us to that land.”

Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center works to preserve this heritage of Carteret County, particularly Down East, the family connections and the lives lived in the remote portion of the coast.

The waterfowl museum, which had been closed for 20 months while undergoing an estimated $3.4 million in repairs to damage caused by Hurricane Florence, was to reopen to the public May 22 but due to COVID-19 restrictions, have had to hold off. Initially the museum was set to open April 1 but that was put on hold because of the restrictions put in place to help manage the spread of COVID-19.

A few months before Florence hit, the museum had installed the “Harm’s Way: How Storms Have Shaped Our Communities, Our History and Us,” exhibit and launched the online resource about the more than a century of storms.

The exhibit will be expanded when the museum reopens to include Florence and Dorian that hit in 2019, Amspacher said, and will incorporate key elements of RISING, a North Carolina Sea Grant-funded, photography-oral history project by Ryan Stancil and Baxter Miller that illustrates sea level rise.

The sub-theme for Harm’s Way is response, recovery resilience because “that’s always been the common theme Down East. You take what comes, you did the best can with it, pick it up and move on,” she said. And on the other side of the museum, put in RISING.

“Both of these exhibitions were hanging in the museum when Florence came. Now they are hanging together with a more long-term theme of Living on the Edge and how storms are not the only force changing our landscape,” she said.

With the two exhibits featuring the landscape changing and hurricane history, “We hoped that somewhere in the process with programming and conversation, people would connect the two, and they did,” she said, adding that the exhibits were well-received and came about organically, though, she had to be careful with how it was presented.

Down East folks often see the science community as a threat because a lot of times, fisheries grant research hasn’t always helped them and it has been equated with increased regulation that’s unfair, Amspacher said.

“That being in the mindset, even more so over the past 10 or 15 years with fisheries regulations escalating, fishermen getting more and more involved in the regulatory process, and more and more academics and researchers coming and, some have been positive and some haven’t, they’re skeptical. she said. “The politics around climate change and sea level rise are very real.”

Since Florence, everybody talks about the impacts. “They don’t call it climate change. They’re not talking about the ice caps melting. They’re talking about the next storm,” she said. Florence was a signal more storms are coming and there’s very little question about it, something is changing. “The question is, how am I going to respond to it?”

She said one response was action. Homeowners raised their houses, put on metal roofs and are cutting down pine trees, because they don’t want them on their house.

When asked why folks stay Down East instead of leaving, she responded, “Where in the hell are you going to go? I’m not leaving. it’s home.

“A lot of people left after Isabel and moved to Morehead City. That’s still a move, that’s still changing your life. But people don’t have the money to move, they don’t want to move, they’ve got families here. This is everything they know and anybody who wanted to leave has already left.”

Michele Nolin stayed in her Marshallberg home during Florence.

Initially, she intended to leave when the hurricane strengthened to a Category 5 storm, but she decided at the last minute to stay, Nolin explained in an interview recorded at the waterfowl museum during a community gathering on the one-year anniversary of Florence. The museum has been working with Duke University Marine Lab students to collect oral histories.

Nolin continued that if it had been a Category 1 storm, they’d have just a few fallen limbs to clean up and that would be the end of it, but she was concerned about the storm surge. Her craftsman-style cottage was built in 1920s and is near water on three sides. Because of this, she looked at the tide chart and knew to expect high tide in the early hours.

At about 2:30 a.m., “the winds were howling and limbs were hitting the house. The storm was really rocking at that point,” and she started watching for tide to come. Every 15 minutes she would climb on a stepstool to shine a spotlight out of the three small windows of her front door, the only windows not boarded up, to see if water was rising. The first few times she checked, she saw green grass but around 3:30 a.m., around the time of high tide, she didn’t.

“I saw black and I was looking and shining the light and I could see water lapping,” Nolin said, adding that she wasn’t sure from which direction the water was coming. “I couldn’t really see. But I knew that I had tide in my front yard. I watched it kind of march across my patio and up to the first step of my house.”

Nolin said that the house is single story and there would be nowhere to go if water came inside. She didn’t know how high the water would reach.

“I had no frame of reference for that. I had been told since 1920, including the 1933 storm, there had never been tide inside that house,” she said. “But this is different, everything’s different now. You know, storms are bigger and wetter and they stay a lot longer and they dump a lot of rain and a lot of wind and a lot of surge in the water seems to be higher and higher every year around us.”

She said that this experience taught her how unpredictable storms are and what the unknowns are, “And if you do choose to stay, at some point you are on your own, it’s going to be you and the tides going to do what it’s going to do, and you may not have anywhere to go. And it is has changed me.”

Louie Piner, who is in his mid-70s and a lifelong resident of Davis in Down East, like most of those interviewed for the project, stayed in his home during Hurricane Florence.

He said that the experience with Florence changed how he prepared for Dorian.

“We had no idea that the tide would be what it was in Florence. Nobody expected that,” he said. “Florence was the one of record and that’s the one that my generation will make reference to. My mom’s generation always reference to ’33 storm. My generation will always reference Hurricane Florence.”

Amspacher told Coastal Review Online that 10 years ago, climate change and sea level rise weren’t even on the radar here.

“Isabel (in 2003) came and it tore up Down East more than Florence, I think, in some ways, and nobody equated that with sea level rise, really. It was just a bad storm, like the storm of ’33 or Hazel (in 1954). so there’s 1899, ’33, Hazel, and then Isabel and now Florence,” Amspacher said. “But now, especially with Dorian coming right behind it, I think all the conversation over the past five, six, seven, 10 years, paid off in that when Florence hit, people realized, well, maybe they were right. it had a name. it had a reason.”

Down East communities are particularly vulnerable to the effects of hurricanes, University of North Carolina Marine Institute of Sciences Director Rick Luettich told Coastal Review Online.

Overall, climate change is causing the impacts of hurricanes to be more severe in coastal areas like North Carolina for several reasons, including that a warmer climate is causing the ocean to warm up, making water expand and glaciers melt, both of which are causing sea levels to rise.

“In areas where the land is already very close to sea level, such as Down East North Carolina, small changes in sea level will cause more flooding on high tides and during storms,” he said.

Another reason is that warm water acts as the energy source for hurricanes. Climate change is likely to cause stronger hurricanes as well as hurricanes that maintain their strength farther north than in the past.

Additionally, climate change causes warmer air temperatures. “A warmer atmosphere is able to hold more moisture. Thus climate change is enhancing the amount of rainfall associated with hurricanes. If a storm moves slowly, such as Florence did in 2018, then greater amounts of rainfall will impact the coastal area,” he said.

“The Down East communities are vulnerable for two basic reasons,” he said. One is that the land is very close to sea level and so it doesn’t take much to make it flood and secondly, due to a variety of physical factors, most hurricanes tend to first move from east to west and then curve to the north.

“While this can and does happen anywhere from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, a number of the storms tend to turn to the north, east of Florida, and come up the southeastern U.S. Atlantic coastline. Eastern North Carolina sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean, especially in comparison to Florida and Georgia, and therefore often ‘catches’ these storms coming north. This isn’t particular to climate change, it’s just a fact of our geography and is the reason North Carolina is one of the states that experiences the greatest number of hurricanes,” he said.

Put together the natural tendency for hurricanes to impact eastern North Carolina and the low land there, “With the effects of climate change, one can conclude eastern North Carolina has been getting the short end of the stick when it comes to hurricanes for centuries, and unfortunately climate change is making this worse.”

Hans Paerl, Kenan Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences at UNC-IMS, said that of all the major storms recorded in eastern North Carolina since 1898, six out of seven of the wettest have occurred in the last 25 years.

Paerl has firsthand experience with flooding caused by Hurricane Florence. He said that he’s been here for 42 years and his Beaufort home, which is close to the North River, experienced flooding for the first time during Hurricane Florence in 2018.

He recently published two papers that “discuss the ‘new abnormal’ of wetter and more frequent tropical cyclones impacting us.”

The Nature Scientific Reports paper shows the increasing trend in wetter storms and is based on a 120-plus year record for the state’s coastal region, he explained. The biogeochemistry paper goes into more detail about the effects of increasing storm activity on water quality and organic matter inputs from coastal watersheds.

He said that the data shows a profound uptick in higher rainfall storms that have impacted the coast over this 25-year timeframe and he doesn’t think there’s any reason to believe that there will be a sudden change in this trend.

“The main cause appears to be due to ocean warming, and that’s not only leading to sea level rise due to more rapidly melting ice caps and glaciers and thermal expansion of seawater, but also at elevated temperatures there’s more water evaporating from the ocean into the atmosphere, generating a ‘rain pump’” he said.

The rise in ocean temperature is driven in large part by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion, methane and oxides of nitrogen from agricultural and industrial activities, and as the ocean’s surface is getting warmer, there is more moisture being generated by evaporation, which is being picked up by storm events and is partly responsible for their higher rainfall content.

“Another factor driving higher rainfall and massive flooding events is that the storms seem to be stalling more along the coastlines due to persistent high air pressure north of us, blocking the storms’ normal tracks to the north and northeast” he said.

Paerl said that the issue of persistent flooding in low-lying areas like Down East is something we’re facing more of and there’s every indication is that it is going to continue for the foreseeable future.

“We shouldn’t let our guard down,” he said, because we are in a region that is very susceptible. “I think we need to be prepared for and accept more flooding associated with these events.”

And if you throw in sea level rise, “It adds a double whammy. As sea level rises, the potential for inundation will be greater.”

Paerl added that “The take home message here is that the recent trends we are experiencing are due to the greenhouse warming effect.”

He said that while we may at times experience very cold winter periods or even an occasional snowstorm, these are short-term, unpredictable or “stochastic” events. “The long-term record is showing us that global warming is occurring at a higher rate than ever and that man-made greenhouse gas emissions play a huge role in this.”

Paerl said the only “knob we can tweak” to slow down this troubling trend is to be committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

This story is the second 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.

A series of record-breaking hurricanes over the past four years has led to changes in how coastal North Carolina residents and state and elected officials talk about climate change and sea level rise.

While the above terms aren’t always part of the discussion, the words “resilience” and “resiliency” have become widely used on both ends of the political spectrum, especially when talking about vulnerable infrastructure here on the North Carolina coast.

“Certainly, resiliency is something that is being talked about a lot more, and is factored into our conversations a lot more than it has in the past,” said Jerry Jennings, the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s engineer for the division that includes the Outer Banks.

From  2002 to 2012, the state spent about $100 million maintaining 120 miles of N.C. 12 between Corolla and Ocracoke. Since then, the costs have continued to climb.

“Over the last 10 years, we spent $75 million on maintenance and repairs of N.C. 12 from Oregon Inlet to Ocracoke Village,” Jennings said, referring to the most frequently storm-damaged stretch of the highway. He added that the amount did not include the $252 million Bonner Bridge replacement project, the second phase of which is still under construction.

Geologist Stan Riggs said the economics of continuing to develop dynamic coastal islands and support and protect that development is anything but resilient.

“The reality is, ‘resilience’ is not the right word there, ‘it’s get the hell out of the way,’” Riggs said. “The human population may be becoming more resilient to this, which I don’t agree with. We’re learning a lot more about it, and we’re learning how to be safer and we’re learning how to build stronger structures, but we are not dealing with a fundamental long-term problem.”

Riggs, who is 83, said he’s seen how the barrier islands have gone from mostly wilderness to a densely built-upon area as the population exploded.

“When I moved here, the Outer Banks was nothing but beach cottages. They were little, you know, one-, two-, three-room things, and we used beach buggies — the old cars, the old junkers that you fixed up,” Riggs said.

He said that at the time, the population along the Outer Banks was still limited to a few small villages.

“It’s a different ballgame today,” Riggs said. “And rather than backing off the beach, we’re building these mega-McMansions out there now and they essentially form a hardened shoreline. It’s a wall of buildings that represents a bulkhead — it’s a house bulkhead. And in order to keep the beach there, we’re now pumping sand on over 125 miles of our beaches every two-three-four years at an incredible economic cost. That’s not resiliency, in my opinion. That’s foolishness.”

The year-round population along the Outer Banks is somewhere around 67,000, but the number normally swells to the hundreds of thousands during the vacation season. All those people have places to go and many have property to protect.

Residents and visitors expect road crews to keep transportation passages clear and safe and drainage systems functioning. Mostly, there is public good will toward NCDOT here but less for the lawmakers in Raleigh who are blamed for underfunding its projects. Storm damage becomes more costly every year and now, with the agency’s budget stretched to the breaking point by the COVID-19 pandemic, many wonder whether the constant rebuilding and repairing is sustainable.

Ditches that run along state-maintained roads are also part of the department’s responsibility and drainage is an ongoing concern, especially in low-lying areas.

Along with flooding, there is growing awareness that septic tanks and wastewater treatment plants have become more vulnerable. During Hurricane Dorian in September 2019, flooding caused untreated sewage from plants in Manteo and Columbia to spill into waterways. But most of the homes and businesses in this part of North Carolina use septic tanks, which are more at risk of leaking during storms because of higher water tables.

Intense storms and flooding will continue to affect coastal North Carolina residents for the foreseeable future, according to a report released in March by North Carolina State University’s North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies. The report finds that temperatures warmer than historic norms, disruptive flooding, increasingly intense and frequent rainstorms and hurricanes are “virtually certain” in the next 80 years.

The report also found that the past four years had the largest number of heavy precipitation events on record for the state. The study’s authors said that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were most likely causing much, if not all, of the observed changes.

On Ocracoke Island, residents continue to rebuild after Hurricane Dorian’s 7-foot surge flooded the village. Mickey Baker, co-owner of Mermaid’s Folly, a clothing shop on Ocracoke Island, said there’s little question what’s going on.

“Climate change is apparent. The icecaps from both poles are in our yard,” Baker said. “I’ve been here for 18 storms in 36 years, not counting nor’easters. We all survived. We all swam through front doors. We all lost pets in front of our eyes. The hard part was that we couldn’t stop what we were doing to help our friends. We were totally frustrated and worried. I got a text from a friend that read ‘in attic.’”

Other coastal residents say the problem is something else.

Christine Voss, an ecosystems ecologist and research associate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, noted that when real estate and other business interests along the coast became concerned that climate science might lead to regulatory change, that’s when the pushback began that led the North Carolina General Assembly to restrict the use of sea level rise forecasting in planning and policy.

“I think people acknowledged what was going on but wouldn’t always admit it,” Voss said.

Voss noted that hurricanes have happened throughout history and are not unique to climate change, but the frequency of flooding in areas along the coast is increasing. Voss’ research into how sea level rise affects coastal habitats often takes her to remote, low-lying areas such as Englehard in Hyde County on the west side of Pamlico Sound.

“There’s only really one place to stay in Englehard, the Englehard Hotel, and they kind of fancy themselves as a bed and breakfast, and in the morning, when you stay there you get a breakfast, and a lot of the town folk get together there and have breakfast. It’s kind of a little place to exchange some news,” Voss said. “We would go up to sample, usually on spring tide events because we were trying to trap fish in the marsh where there were higher water levels and to see how far into the marsh those various organisms would go and what size they were. And I remember coming up and just seeing indications of sea level rise and talking about it with some folks, and even though I had been acquainted with these folks for about a year, they were like, ‘Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no such thing as sea level rise or climate change.’”

Voss said that while discussing the changes using those terms created a sharp division, their observations were similar.

“Two weeks later, when I went back and — I believe it was in the fall — and they were talking about, ‘You know, there’s still standing water in the parking lot,’ or ‘We’re seeing marsh grass growing in the ditches,’ and somebody else was saying what else he’d seen, like “Yeah, this area just hasn’t drained and it’s killing the grass,’ and somebody else was complaining about salt on the edge of their field. Somebody else was talking about their well water wasn’t as good anymore.

“We could discuss all these different things that are impacts of, in this case, mostly sea level rise, and as long as it wasn’t labeled as climate change, they were OK, they would acknowledge it and they would tell me about it. But two weeks earlier when I had called it climate change, there was an automatic response saying ‘no.’”

Voss said the experience was a lesson in how to communicate with the public on climate science. She also learned to ask residents how they explained the changes they were seeing, such as how privately owned land that was taxable by the county was turning into marshland.

“I asked, ‘how do you explain that?’ And they said, ‘Oh, that was the earthquake of — I’m not sure what year was, I’m thinking was around 1896 — and I looked it up to be sure, and apparently there was indeed a big earthquake, I think it was based in South Carolina. They said that overnight, the land dropped about 18 inches in that part of the county.”

Voss said the earthquake probably did cause a significant shift or decrease in elevation there.

“And it taught me that it’s important, as scientists, for us to realize that there are other things that may happen in an area, or there are ways that people would justify this to themselves. And it doesn’t explain everything, but it was interesting because I think people do look for answers when there’s not a clear answer.”

Riggs said he’s has given up on trying to change minds about the threats to the Outer Banks. He’s instead turned his attention across the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds, and created a nonprofit group to help economically distressed communities along the “inner banks” capitalize on the region’s natural resources and cultural history in ways that are sustainable.

“I can honestly say, it varies from county to county because of the leadership in those counties, but I am working with some counties there and they get it. They get it, and they’re working like crazy to develop a sort of a new economy involving ecotourism sustainably that’s built around the natural waters,” Riggs said.

Riggs said that rather than trying to bring in industry that wouldn’t likely come anyway, the group is working to change the way business is done, to be more adaptive as sea level starts to impact more and more and as storms affect more and more communities.

“Ocracoke was wiped out bad enough that they’re going to come back a little better off for doing it,” he said, adding that villagers who are there are raising their houses and adapting, but the island will probably never become much like other of North Carolina’s barrier islands.

“One of the nice things about Ocracoke was that they didn’t have all the franchises there, because they couldn’t make enough money and it wasn’t guaranteed. Well now, this will make sure that there won’t be a McDonald’s or whatever else, and what’s there, it has to live within that system.

“The old timers that live there, they’ll be there. They’re going to survive. Ultimately,” Riggs said.

Voss said it’s also up to young people to bring the change.

“I hope they realize that they do have the power to affect change in the way we do things, the way we look at things. For their sake, I hope that all of us, young and old, will be considerate, be less greedy and be open to what we need to do to adapt to our changing climate. Yes, I hope the younger generation comes through. We’re counting on them.”

Catherine Kozak and Dylan Ray contributed to this report.

With the Atlantic hurricane season set to begin June 1, Coastal Review Online is examining how attitudes toward climate science in eastern North Carolina have changed during the past decade. This story is the first in a special series that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. For more information, go to pulitzercenter.org/connected-coastlines.

Start a discussion of climate change, sea level rise and the associated effects with residents of the North Carolina coast and reactions and responses will be mixed, but according to polling, attitudes and perceptions here have shifted over the past 10 years.

A decade ago in North Carolina, a panel of scientists that advises the state Coastal Resources Commission released a report that found sea levels could rise up to 39 inches by 2100. The report, to be updated every five years, was intended to guide North Carolina’s planners and policy makers. The panel’s findings however, created a backlash and prompted the North Carolina General Assembly to pass a law restricting the adoption of any rule, ordinance, policy or planning guideline that defined sea level or a rate of sea-level rise in coastal counties.

“The legislature threw out our 2010 report. They said it’s not acceptable,” Stanley Riggs, a retired coastal geologist at East Carolina University and a founding member of the science panel, recalled in an interview last week.

When it came time for the panel to do its five-year update, the commission restricted the science panel in how far out its projections could go. A 30-year outlook, based on the life of a typical home mortgage, was the imposed limit. Riggs said that despite the limits, the science behind the report didn’t change.

“When we did the 2015 report, it came out exactly the same, except we knew the numbers even better, because a lot more people had been working on it. What the legislature and what the public never understood was, it was the same damn report,” Riggs said.

Now, as the science panel works on its 2020 report, the Coastal Resources Commission, which has new members now, has removed the previous restrictions, with 30 years now set as the minimum outlook going forward.

Christine Voss, an ecosystems ecologist and research associate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, said the reaction to the initial report was the result of a push by real estate and other business interests to discredit the findings.

“I think that when folks felt like their livelihoods could possibly be threatened by acknowledging sea level rise and climate change, I think that there was a public effort of disinformation, quite frankly,” Voss said.

She said that the science panel’s report didn’t necessarily influence what the public thought, but the reaction to it changed the messaging, right down to materials displayed in state museums and aquariums.

“I found it very interesting that there was actually a push to administratively try to not even acknowledge what was happening,” Voss said.

Riggs compared the reaction to the report to the current coronavirus pandemic.

“This divided population, that half is willing to accept the science and believe the science and the other half doesn’t want anything to do with the science, it’s exactly the same issue because what they’re doing is projecting how this system is going to work, and people don’t want to hear that. And it’s an anti-science attitude that goes way beyond sea level rise,” Riggs said. “We’re seeing the same story play out with respect to the coronavirus, and with time, if it gets bad enough, more and more people may come around to accepting, but it doesn’t mean they’re glued to the science.”

According to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the average global change in temperatures over land and ocean surfaces for 2019 was the second highest since recordkeeping began in 1880.

Here on the North Carolina coast, the effects are visible and often disruptive, although some residents attribute what they say they’ve seen to factors other than a changing climate influenced by human behavior. Still, the past few years, with a series of storms that include hurricanes Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018 and Dorian in 2019, have sharpened the focus for many and possibly changed minds.

“I think that probably one of the biggest things that has changed attitudes along the North Carolina coast regarding climate change was really Hurricane Florence. I think that was a big turning point,” Voss said.

Voss, who studies the environmental changes occurring on the North Carolina coast, said it’s important to realize that for millennia, coastal areas have been dynamic places. She said signs of change such as frequent flash flooding, heavy bouts of rain and rising groundwater elevation, along with saltwater encroaching farther landward, fouling wells, killing forests and changing the landscape in other ways, are compounding with time.

Saltwater intrusion into freshwater aquifers, the main drinking water supply for much of eastern North Carolina, is potentially a significant result of sea level rise that’s happening now, Voss said. She said the changes are visible when using the historical images feature of Google Earth, which can delineate where saltwater intrusion has affected farm fields.

“If you go up Route 70 (near Beaufort), just south of East Carteret High School, in those areas it’s pretty darn evident,” she said. “In other areas Down East, you can see where the marsh has just kind of encroached, you can see the ghost forests. You can see where that line of trees versus marsh has changed.”

“Ghost forests,” or stands of dead trees, are clearly visible from along the Cape Fear River near Wilmington on the southern North Carolina coast up to the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on the northern coast. The refuge is a low-lying area, so the effects of sea level rise have been especially dramatic – formerly marshy areas are now open water and once-dry land is now marsh.

On North Carolina’s barrier islands, and on the mainland in coastal Carteret, Pamlico, Hyde, Dare, Currituck and Tyrrell counties, anywhere from a quarter to three-quarters of the land is at sea level, Riggs explained. Here, adaptation options are limited.

“We’re not going to engineer our way out of that,” he said. “We can’t do what the Dutch have done and build dikes around 10,000 miles of estuarine shoreline. You know, we can build it around Swan Quarter. But what do you do with Columbia, Engelhard and all the rest of the towns that are essentially 1-foot above sea level, 2 feet above sea level? They have no place to go.”

Voss said the politicization of science creates the biggest obstacle to the public’s understanding of the changes they are seeing.

“I think people are realizing that, yes, those things that we were told 30 years ago, 20 years ago that we would be seeing, we’re seeing it,” Voss said. “I think we’re gradually starting to realize that climate change isn’t something we’re thinking about as far as the future, but that the climate is changing now and we’re living in it. I think that is hard for people.”

Riggs agreed. He compared the environmental changes to what’s happening with COVID-19.

“It’s just like counting deaths right now. Now that we’ve got the 90,000 deaths in this country, people are starting to realize that something’s really going on,” he said.

But understanding is not the same as dealing with the fundamental, long-term problem, Riggs said.

The state’s worst natural disaster

Hurricane Florence, a deadly Category 1 storm that made landfall near Wrightsville Beach early in the morning of Sept. 14, 2018, was the state’s worst natural disaster, totaling somewhere around $22 billion in property damage. Rainfall and flooding levels across eastern North Carolina were unprecedented because of the slow-moving storm, and not just on the immediate coast.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, a state record rainfall total of 35.93 inches was set in Elizabethtown in Bladen County, breaking the previous record for rainfall from a tropical system of 24.06 inches, a four-day deluge measured during Hurricane Floyd in 1999 in Southport, in coastal Brunswick County. Florence followed another record-breaking storm: Hurricane Matthew in 2016 also made landfall in southeastern North Carolina as a Category 1 storm, was blamed for 25 deaths in North Carolina and caused catastrophic flooding across the coastal and central parts of the state.

USGS hydrologist Toby Feaster said in December 2018 that record flooding during Florence was measured by stream gauges in the state that had decades of data. Feaster led a study that showed 45 stream gauges in North Carolina and four in South Carolina recorded flows that ranked among the top five on record. There was more than 70 years of historical data at some sites with record-breaking flooding. Peak stream levels at nine locations indicated that Florence was a greater than a 500-year flood event.

“Since several of the (sites) we analyzed had more than 30 years of historical data associated with them, it was interesting that a majority of the number one and two records were from back-to-back flooding events,” Feaster said at the time, referring to Matthew and Florence.

For many along the North Carolina coast, the hurricanes of the past few years were the first natural disasters they had experienced. This is especially true for young people, including Daniel Van Skiver of Brunswick County on North Carolina’s southern coast. Van Skiver is one of several Brunswick Early College High School students who submitted essays on their experiences for this series.

“Florence left me in a state of helplessness and, being one of the many people in Brunswick County with financial problems, there was no way out,” Van Skiver writes. “My home was left in an almost unlivable state, my bed was soaked through from a hole in my bedroom roof, and the problem did not stop witha the passing of the hurricane. The water damage brought infestations of bugs and rotted away other parts of the house that had been untouched. If I had not been able to stay with my brother, I would have most likely been out on the streets, a living arrangement that would last the next seven months as me and my dad looked for a house.”

Lindsey Clark, another student at the Brunswick County school, also writes of her family’s experience with Florence, which flooded her home.

“It has almost been a year and a half since it has happened and we still feel the effects of it today,” Clark writes. “It hurt each part of the family differently and was so heartbreaking. We lost all of our old family photos, clothes and our home. It was difficult to build back up again and to try to get back on our feet. We felt stuck and felt like we had nowhere to go and did not know where to turn. You really do not realize how much you have until it is taken away from you.”

Not only young people, others in coastal communities are seeing unprecedented floods during storms.

In a recently compiled series of recordings by the Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort and the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers Island, a partner with Coastal Review Online in this reporting project, Louie Piner of the unincorporated Carteret County community of Davis said Florence was unlike any storm he’d seen. Folks in the low-lying Down East part of the coastal county are accustomed to weathering storms.

“Well, I’ve been through quite a few hurricanes. I’ve lived in Davis all my life. And we’ve had quite a few. But Florence is the only one that the house I live in has ever had water in it. The house was built in 1946. And we’ve seen a lot of storms, but it has never had water in it until hurricane Florence,” Piner said.

A poll conducted by Elon University in October 2018 sought to gauge how Hurricane Florence affected North Carolina voters and how they viewed threats to coastal communities and policy questions related to climate change. The poll found that opinions had shifted since the university conducted a similar poll in 2017. The poll found that 51.5% of North Carolinians believed that climate change is very likely to have negative effects on coastal communities, with 31% saying it is somewhat likely.

That’s compared to 45% who said the negative impacts were very likely and 28% who said they were somewhat likely in the 2017 poll. Pollsters said the shift appeared to be driven by attitude changes held by Republican voters.

The 2018  poll also found that nearly 54% believed hurricanes were becoming more severe and that 62% believed that climate science should be incorporated into local government planning and ordinances.

A year later, Dorian

Almost exactly a year after Hurricane Florence, another Category 1 hurricane made landfall on the North Carolina coast. Again, the wind-speed category was no indication of the damage to come.

Hurricane Dorian flooded the village on Ocracoke Island Sept. 6, 2019, ultimately resulting in the destruction of 47 structures, county officials said earlier this month. The number caught even villagers by surprise, Peter Vankevich, copublisher of the Ocracoke Observer, another partner in this series, said recently.

“The Ocracoke Preservation Society’s museum next to the big (National Park Service) parking lot had never been flooded,” Vankevich noted in October 2019. “’If that building ever gets flooded, this island will be in big trouble,’ someone once remarked.”

The museum suffered extensive flood damage with 5 inches of water inside.

About 400 of the island’s roughly 1,000 residents were displaced and nearly every structure on the island was damaged when the storm surge reached 7.4 feet at 8:30 a.m. Sept. 6, 2019. Ocracoke’s storm surge during Hurricane Matthew was 4.7 feet.

Mike Riccitiello, a structure specialist with the North Carolina Emergency Task Force, was part of six crews on the island after the storm to document structural damage, Connie Leinbach, the other co-publisher of the Ocracoke Observer reported.

“One gentleman I talked to has lived on the island 65 years and said he’d never seen storm surge this bad,” Riccitiello said at the time.

Jade Lopez is a co-owner of Taqueria Suazos on Ocracoke Island. She said that when Dorian came through, her family had to be rescued.

Doug Eifert, co-owner of Dajio Restaurant, on Ocracoke Island also suffered significant damage at his business. He said nobody expected the storm to be so bad.

Charles Temple, an English teacher at Ocracoke School, described Hurricane Matthew as the worst storm to hit Ocracoke since the 1944 Great Atlantic hurricane, and Dorian’s floodwaters in the village reached 18 inches higher. He called the storm’s devastation “a gut shot.”

Despite the extensive damage, federal officials determined that villagers didn’t qualify for individual assistance, the form of disaster aid that provides financial help and services for people to do home repairs and cover costs of temporary housing, clothing and medical needs.

Ocracoke’s economy is tourism. Its restaurants, small shops and accommodations largely remain closed since Dorian. The storm’s damage led officials to keep the island closed to all but residents for more than two months after the storm. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has compounded villagers’ troubles as they try to rebuild and recover from Dorian.

For those who can reopen, many are apprehensive, and some are choosing to remain closed as summer vacation season begins, Vankevich said.

“First of all, people are going to be coming to a different Ocracoke,” Vankevich said, adding that the many businesses wouldn’t be open, either because of concerns about the coronavirus or because they were damaged or destroyed by Dorian.

“All these kind of wonderful landmarks that have people coming here are not going to be there,” Vankevich said.

Jennifer Allen and Dylan Ray contributed to this report.

Next in the series: Communicating, understanding and responding

The following is a series of essays by students at Brunswick Early College High School in Bolivia on their personal experiences during Hurricane Florence in 2018 and their perceptions of climate change. This is part of a series for the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. For more information, go to pulitzercenter.org/connected-coastlines.

A State of Helplessness

By Daniel Van Skiver

Hurricane Florence truly put the “disaster” in natural disaster when it tore through in 2018. Many felt the destruction and were left with nowhere to turn after their homes were ripped apart or flooded. I am one of these people.

Florence left me in a state of helplessness and, being one of the many people in Brunswick County with financial problems, there was no way out. My home was left in an almost unlivable state, my bed was soaked through from a hole in my bedroom roof, and the problem did not stop with the passing of the hurricane. The water damage brought infestations of bugs and rotted away other parts of the house that had been untouched. If I had not been able to stay with my brother I would have most likely been out on the streets, a living arrangement that would last the next 7 months as me and my dad looked for a house.

This kind of damage is tragic, but it seems to be more common with every year. As a coastal area this kind of water damage occurs almost every year during hurricane season and displaces more and more people who cannot afford that kind of a loss. The storms seem to get worse by the year as temperatures globally continue to become more unstable and the environment gets mistreated and ignored. These disasters may be rough, and I would know firsthand, but they might only be a small part in a larger-scale issue that not enough people are concerned with.

Climate change is a very real and very dangerous threat, and not only due to hurricanes. With rising global temperatures comes droughts and extreme heat waves and rising sea levels. For agricultural-based areas, this means an endangerment of an entire way of life. Crops will shrivel and die, leading to more poverty and less preparedness for the next storm season. Furthermore, rising sea levels will lead to worse flooding than we have ever seen before. These floods do not only hurt us, but our wildlife as well. As water washes onto shore and destroys more areas, it also contaminates our water supplies. This hurts the plants and animals that make our community so beautiful and only worsens the effects of climate change.

Florence took my house away, just as many storms have done to many people before, but if we don’t act to undo our part in these worsening disasters then we might end up losing entire communities.

A Life-Changing Event

By Bella Digiacomo

Webster’s definition of a hurricane is, “a tropical cyclone with winds of 74 mph or greater that is usually accompanied by rain, thunder and lightning and that sometimes moves into temperate latitudes.” I believe this is correct, but does not include any of the emotions people feel during a hurricane, or details about the effects and damages of a hurricane.

Hurricane Florence was a life-changing event that really opened my eyes toward reality. Florence, although devastating has taught me many life lessons, it showed me the good and the bad of situations. How did one event cause a whole chain reaction in my life? In sum, it all started when my Mom had called a family meeting deciding if we should evacuate or stay put, the vote came to an even split. We ended up evacuating to Winston-Salem where it was so peaceful, it was as if no one knew there was a hurricane. Seeing how peaceful Winston-Salem was, we made plans with our family that was going to get hit by Florence to meet up at our hotel. We all met up for dinner at Five Guys, and honestly it was such a great way to end a stressful day. After a few days of stressing and exploring Winston-Salem, mom decided to finally go back home, but once we got there we realized it was not such a great idea.

Our whole street was flooded with muddy water, it was up to my aunt’s hips, so around 5 feet of water, and it was only going to rise over time. After continuous warnings to not drive through the muddy water, mom thought she could do it, but halfway there the car began to sink and water began to rise. My siblings rapidly grabbed their life jackets as my grandpa began to jump out of the window to push the car out, he tried but didn’t succeed until our neighbors walked into the water to help.

The engine gave out so the only thing mom could do was steer the wheels to face straight ahead. The struggle continued after we got out. People were crying about such little things, everyone was so emotional. The next mission was to get out of our house due to the muddy water still rising, luckily our grandmother lived down the road at a higher platform, so the water would take longer to reach us. Days later, the whole neighborhood was evacuated, people were standing on the roofs of their homes to avoid the water from getting to them. We all had to squeeze into small trucks, and boats to get passed the flooded highway, but once we finally got settled in and it all ended, we were forced to fix our homes and sell them. This should have taken about a year, but with everyone’s help it only took months. This taught me that sometimes the people you would think would be there for you won’t be there in your most desperate times. It also showed people come together in a state of emergency and will try to help in any way.

Climate change was such a large factor in this hurricane, and according to Science Daily, “They predicted Hurricane Florence would be slightly more intense for a longer portion of the forecast period, rainfall amounts over the Carolinas would be increased by 50 percent due to climate change and warmer water temperatures, and the hurricane would be approximately 80 kilometers larger due to the effect of climate change on the large-scale environment around the storm.”

Climate change made an increase in flooding, and instead of just wind damage it became water damage as well. If climate change continues in the future, a normal rainy day could become another flood warning and hurricanes would be a constant unavoidable loop.

Still Feeling the Effects

By Lindsey Clark 

In the late summer of 2018, Hurricane Florence ripped through the Carolinas and devastated many homes, including my own.

There was 7 feet of water on the inside and 14 feet of water on the outside.

It has almost been a year and a half since it has happened, and we still feel the effects of it today. It hurt each part of the family differently and was so heartbreaking. We lost all of our old family photos, clothes and our home. It was difficult to build back up again and to try to get back on our feet. We felt stuck and felt like we had nowhere to go and did not know where to turn.

You really do not realize how much you have until it is taken away from you. Thankfully a family friend allowed us to stay at their house until we got back on our feet, which took months. It was crazy to see the people taking advantage of the ones that were without homes; because while we were searching for houses to rent, the prices were extremely outrageous. Even though some were taking advantage of others, there were many who donated and helped out ones who lost their homes.

My sister school, Bolivia Elementary set up these stations for people to go into the school and get cleaning supplies, food and clothes and it really helped us out. It was just amazing for them to do that! It is very nerve racking for me when there is a bad storm or another hurricane because I always think that there is going to be some freak accident where my house gets damaged again and we will have to start all over again. On top of that, my dad is in law enforcement — so when there is a storm he has to stay and wait it out with the rest of his team. That is scary because he is out in horrible conditions and something could happen.

In these past years I have been able to see a difference in the amount and strength of the hurricanes. They are happening more and more, and they are becoming more powerful due to the rising temperature of the ocean due to climate change. They are coming in one after the other, causing major damage to our infrastructure and it cost so much to fix these issues. During Hurricane Florence, the rain washed out many of our roads, and Highway 17 still has damage to it. There are still roads that we cannot go through because they are so damaged.

We need to do something about this before it is truly too late, because it is only going to get worse from here. This is especially important to people who live on the coast because it is our way of life and hurricanes disrupt that. Hurricanes cause erosion of the beaches which is not good for the sea life as well. We need to take care of what we have before it is gone.

Florence Shook Me Mentally

By Corban Cardenas

In August through September 2018 came catastrophic Hurricane Florence. The hurricane caused over 23 billion dollars in damage with a little over 50 fatalities. The hurricane flooded many parts of the Carolinas including a town in North Carolina, Leland. This was where I was when the major flooding and strong winds were taking effect. Florence not only completely destroyed my first home in North Carolina but it also shook me mentally.

Florence poured into a small community called Stoney Creek and with the strong winds combined with the powerful rain, it destroyed the septic tank in the community and flooded the community with a mixture of sewage and rainwater. Over the course of five days, through my bedroom window I watched as Florence tortured my mind by slowly filling the neighborhood with water. It started as puddle to lake-deep water that drifted my car off.

After the water, the power had finally gone out when we ran out of gas for the generator, my family decided to leave to my grandma’s house a couple streets down. Overnight, out of curiosity, I left to check on the house and soon found myself staring at my house completely underwater. This destroyed me because this was my first house in North Carolina, so many memories were formed and saved here. All the Christmases and birthdays now gone in 24 hours. My mission was to keep my family happy and smiling so I did everything in my power to make them laugh, from filming dumb videos to doing mini stand up. My mother however did not like this and we would argue because she saw me as heartless for not showing any remorse for what was reality. I still pushed through the pain and kept my reasons to myself. I stuffed all the sadness and confusion down and continued my mission to make them happy. After one week and a half of missions to spark smiles and in return receiving arguments, the water was completely gone. I could finally stop thinking about how the house could be and actually find out myself.

I ran to my street only to find myself in a post-apocalyptic wasteland; cars flipped in the street, broken windows and torn walls, papers flying everywhere. While walking through the silence, I stumbled across a notebook. The notebook was mine, the book contained all the songs I have ever written. It was drenched and torn up. This shattered my heart, this notebook had years of memories, now gone. I kept it and searched for my house.

I found my home, the front door was wide open, the fridge was in the living room. Picture frames shattered on the floor and tables flipped. Luckily, the water did not reach the upper floor, but the first floor was destroyed. I went upstairs and thought to myself about what had happened and everything I saw and took in. I thought to myself, everything and anything will come to an end eventually. The smiles I was creating on my little sisters faces had a beginning and an end. I was yelled at and argued with my mother who I worked hardest to make happy. Those arguments came to an end. A building that I called home, came to an end. I tried so hard to keep the smiles alive, that when the fell to a frown it hurt worse. The more arguments I tried to end quicker the more took place. Finally, the home I kept telling myself would be okay, was demolished from the inside.

I realized that the most important thing to understand in life is that you should not go through so much pain to keep things alive before the end, you should appreciate and enjoy every moment while it is still alive. The notebook served as a realization that memories are a past and not present. I should work on the present and enjoy every moment. Ever since Florence, I have been enjoying every moment with everyone and everything. I have been writing, producing, and helping people produce music. Florence had such an impact on my mentality, I have changed how I view the world and how I should live my life. Life is short, time is fast, there is no replay or rewind. Enjoy every moment as it comes.

Read more

• NC’s Turning Point For Climate Science

Second in a series on the Clean Water Act revisions

TYRRELL COUNTY– Farmlands and wetlands in the flat coastal plain in the northeast corner of North Carolina are often overlapping neighbors. And as pressures increase from environmental and economic forces, they’re proving to be competing assets.

The Trump administration’s new law that replaces revisions in the Nixon-era Clean Water Act, known as the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, strips away protections for ephemeral waterways that link watersheds, such as a creek that flows into a sound only during the rainy season, as well as isolated wetlands.

“The way our drainage is set up with all of our ditches,” said Jeff Sparks, president of Black Land Farm Managers Association, “if you have to have 100-foot buffers around ditches, a 20-acre field would become an 8-acre field.”

Sparks, owner of 6,000-acre Green Valley Farm, located 7 miles south of Columbia in Tyrrell County, said that farming in the region is “an astronomical” driver of the local economy, but the industry can’t afford having ditches or “mud puddles in your driveway” regulated like waterways.

Farmers support — and comply with — numerous environmental protections for land and water, Sparks said. Regulations include buffers around natural waterways and nutrient monitoring. If people are concerned about pollution of waterways, he added, they should focus more on runoff in more populated areas.

“You can have 2 inches of rain now and the Neuse River rises a foot,” he said. “If you’re going to regulate (farmland), that needs to be regulated.”

The new rule will be “workable” and “clearly defines” federal jurisdiction, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said in a January press release.

“The Waters of the U.S. rule created under the Obama Administration was a massive government overreach that led to confusion and imposed crippling red tape on North Carolina’s farmers and small businesses,” Tillis said in the statement.

But the newly revised version is only the latest reiteration in the troubled history of the law. Although the much-lauded Clean Water Act of 1972 is credited with cleaning up the nation’s polluted waterways, such as the Cuyahoga River in Ohio that had caught fire in 1969, it was considerably weakened by loopholes created by a 2006 Supreme Court decision.

The 2015 rule proposed by the Obama administration was tied up continuously by lawsuits and an injunction. The Obama-era rule was meant to provide clarification of the Clean Water Act in light of the confusion created by the Supreme Court decision, except the 2015 rule didn’t actually go into effect in many states before it was repealed in September 2019 by the Trump administration.

With the new rule, polluting could be permitted in upstream waters, potentially contaminating downstream waterways, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center, which represents numerous environmental groups that will be challenging the new law.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review Online, is one of the groups bringing the lawsuit. Todd Miller, the federation’s executive director, said that if the new rule takes effect, it will severely degrade coastal estuaries and fisheries.

“It rolls the clock back to the 1970s when more than a hundred thousand acres of wetlands in eastern North Carolina were ditched and cleared prior to enforcement of the Clean Water Act’s wetland provisions,” Miller said. “The consequence of this new rule will be “No wetlands, no seafood.”

Blan Holman, senior attorney at the Charleston, South Carolina, office of the SELC wrote in The Guardian in January the repeal represented the single largest loss of clean water protections that America has ever seen – and the timing couldn’t be worse.”

“From lead contamination in drinking water to the proliferating threat of toxic industrial chemicals, new threats to water quality are emerging daily.”

The Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit that has worked on numerous water quality protection projects in the Albemarle-Pamlico region, also worries about the new rule.

“Streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands are critical to the well-being of people and nature,” Chief External Affairs Officer Lynn Scarlett said in a statement. “These resources provide valuable — and often irreplaceable — sources of drinking water and habitat for fish and wildlife, and they power local economies and thriving communities. All of these benefits depend on the foundational safeguards embodied in the Clean Water Act.”

Rick Savage, president and founder of Carolina Wetlands Association, a Raleigh-based nonprofit group, said that the impact of the Trump rule is still unclear. For instance, the way the rule seems to be written, he said, it appears that “if a landowner says it’s not a wetland, it’s not a wetland.

“It’s hard to make any on-the-ground assessments until these things are understood better,” Savage said.

But in northeastern North Carolina, he said, the boggy coastal lands will certainly bear the brunt of less protection.

“I think the main thing with a lot of the pocosin is they tend to be isolated,” Savage said. “And if they’re isolated, they’re not going to be protected.”

Savage said that the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge recently has been chosen by Carolina Wetlands Association as a 2020 “Wetlands Treasure.”

A spokesperson with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages several refuges in the northeast, including Pocosin Lakes and Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, was unable to respond to an inquiry about wetlands and the rule’s impacts by Monday afternoon.

One factor in the region’s favor, Savage said, is that more coastal wetland and watershed areas tend to be connected than they would be in more inland areas.

“We have felt that up to 50% of the Carolinas would be affected,” Savage said, referring to the contiguous states. “What the new rule is doing is it is really rolling it back — way back — to the (Supreme Court’s) Scalia decision.”

Still, Savage didn’t seem to think the new regulation will see the light of day anytime soon.

“It’s going to go to the court, and it’s going to be stayed,” he said. “And then we’ll have a new administration and we’ll start all over again.”

First in a series on the Clean Water Act revisions

The new definition of federally protected waterways will soon go into effect.

Revisions to the “waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, rule addressing federal authority under the Clean Water Act will likely be buffeted by lawsuits from environmental organizations that argue the changes roll back water quality regulations by drastically scaling back wetland protections.

The repeal, finalized in January under the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, omits streams that only contain water during or after rainfall, groundwater, most roadside and farm ditches, converted cropland, stormwater control features and waste treatment systems.

Federally regulated waters are now identified as traditional navigable waters, tributaries to those waters, certain ditches, lakes and ponds, impoundments of jurisdictional waters and wetlands adjacent to jurisdictional waters.

The revision clarifies the Obama-era 2015 rule, one that gives federal agencies near unlimited, subjective regulatory authority over everything from farm ditches to small, isolated wetlands that are not connected to “navigable waters,” supporters say.

But opponents argue the new rule ignores research by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency showing ephemeral streams and isolated wetlands affect downstream waters. The EPA’s Science Advisory Board said in a Feb. 27 comment letter that the proposed revision “lacks a scientific justification, while potentially introducing new risks to human and environmental health.”

The EPA and Department of the Army signed the proposed rule revisions last December under a 2017 executive order of President Donald Trump to replace the 2015 rule and pre-2015 regulations.

The Trump administration said the new rules clarify which projects require federal permits, which will cut down applicants’ costs on engineering and legal professionals, but protect navigable waters.

State opposition

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and state Attorney General Josh Stein submitted comments last year to the federal government opposing the changes, noting that the new rule would roll back wetland protections.

In its 14-page letter dated April 15, 2019, to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler and R.D. James, the assistant secretary of the Army for Civil Works, DEQ noted that North Carolina has an estimated 5.7 million acres of wetlands, which make up about 17% of the state’s land area.

State Division of Water Resources Public Information Officer Sarah Young Perkins said in a March 17 email responding to questions that the new federal rule will mean fewer of the state’s wetlands will be considered waters of the United States.

“Wetlands that are not WOTUS will not require a federal permit to discharge dredge or fill material within the wetland,” she said.

DEQ officials raised several concerns about the WOTUS revisions, including the following:

• Increased flooding risks in low-lying areas as nearly 95% of all wetlands in North Carolina are in eastern North Carolina.
• Negative effects on wetlands’ ability to filter the water supply and increased stormwater runoff.
• Economic concerns regarding certainty for farmers and developers employing responsible environmental practices around the state’s wetlands.
• Negative effects on species dependent upon wetlands.
• Threats to the recreational and commercial fishing industries’ products, such as shellfish, blue crabs, fish and shrimp.
• A drastic decrease in federal wetland protections creating a huge regulatory gap that would need to be filled by new rules, laws and personnel to protect wetlands.
• An increased burden on underfunded, understaffed regulatory agencies that work in partnership with the federal government to protect wetlands nationwide.

The state does not have a database of ephemeral streams or ditch streams.

“DEQ is still evaluating the proposed final rule, it’s implications in North Carolina and options moving forward,” Perkins said.

‘Devastating impacts’

Cape Fear River Keeper Kemp Burdette did not reply to a request for comment, but in a video posted in February 2019, he warns listeners about the effects the WOTUS repeal will have on water quality in the Cape Fear.

“Those rollbacks would have devastating impacts here in the Cape Fear,” Burdette said. “Here in rural parts of the Cape Fear basin tens of millions of animals are confined in industrial meat operations producing staggering amounts of waste. Swine farms are more heavily concentrated here than any other place on earth. Many streams in this area have been channelized into ditches. These rollbacks that the Trump Administration is proposing would specifically exempt these ditch streams from protection under the Clean Water Act.”

The repeal, he said, will benefit industrial swine and poultry meat operations in the state while threatening public trust waterways downstream that are a source of drinking water, fishing, recreation and swimming.

“Loss of clean water protections upstream has far reaching impacts downstream,” Burdette said. “Dangerous pathogens will threaten human health. Drinking water supplies will be a risk from harmful algae blooms. Communities of color will suffer even greater injustices when compared with whiter and wealthier communities. Important fish habitat in the Cape Fear River estuary will be at risk with clear negative impacts on local and statewide economies.”

‘Clarifying’ regulations

The American Farm Bureau Federation, which has been a staunch supporter of the repeal, argue the 2015 rule “make it impossible” for farmers and ranchers to identify whether ditches and ephemeral streams on their land are WOTUS.

“The rule will make water and land protection, management and planning more efficient and effective by drawing clearer lines between areas subject to federal versus state jurisdiction and clarifying that usually dry areas should no longer be considered federally regulated waters,” according to the AFB website.

Farmers and ranchers have enrolled millions of acres of land, including wetlands, under the Conservation Reserve Program, according to the website.

Next: What’s at risk on North Carolina’s coast 

Cape Fear River Keeper Kemp Burdette, in a video posted in February 2019, warns about the effects the WOTUS repeal will have on water quality in the Cape Fear. Video: Waterkeeper Alliance

MOREHEAD CITY – There was a definite “no” from one of the 15 undergraduates who spent the fall studying Town Creek’s water quality when asked if they’d swim in the Beaufort estuary for a half an hour.

The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill student told the audience during the December presentation of their findings at UNC-Institute of Marine Sciences that while she did get in the water when they began the research project to collect oysters, she was very careful not to put her head underwater, and doesn’t know if she would do that now after the testing. “I wouldn’t, personally,” she added.

“As long as you’re not ingesting the water, then perhaps. If you’re not drinking it or you don’t have any open wounds, then for a half an hour, I would consider swimming in Town Creek,” said her classmate, while another student added that if you do go swimming, you should make sure you disinfect any cuts after getting out of the water.

A part of the UNC Institute for the Environment’s Field Site program, the students set out at the beginning of last semester as their capstone project to figure out how contaminants get into Town Creek, which is surrounded by the two new bridges leading into town, two marinas and the county airport, and what happens once the contaminants are in the water. Professors Johanna Rosman and Nathan Hall were the program instructors.

Student Hayley Russo began the presentation of “An Integrated Assessment of Water Quality in Town Creek, an Estuary in Beaufort, North Carolina” by explaining that Beaufort, the client for the research project, plans to develop and improve existing sewer and stormwater infrastructure.

“So, a detailed assessment of the water quality in Town Creek will provide them with a baseline dataset that encompasses the overall potential contaminants within Town Creek, as well as the existing state of the system,” she said.

The students found that water flushes out of the system too rapidly for nutrient loading to cause eutrophication and harmful algal blooms. Fecal indicator bacteria are present and exceed state-regulated standards at some stormwater locations. Vibrio bacteria are highest near stormwater outfalls. And oysters and marshes do not have sufficient time to remove nutrients and microbes because of the quick flushing time.

Hall told Coastal Review Online following the presentation that, under the direction of Beaufort Mayor Rett Newton and Town Manager John Day, the town was very interested in learning more about the factors that affect fecal pollution and nutrient pollution in Town Creek.

“The team hopes to provide the Town of Beaufort a baseline data set of water quality measurements and an improved understanding of the sources and fate of pollutants in Town Creek,” Hall said. “This information will be critical for assessing, predicting, and managing changes in water quality, positive or negative, associated with expected future increases in development pressure but also planned improvements to waste/stormwater infrastructure.”

Newton said after the presentation that the town appreciates the collaboration with UNC-IMS as the effort continues to clean up town waterways.

“We know there are some challenges in Town Creek. This capstone research effort was professional, thoughtful, thorough and will help us find and mitigate or eliminate the sources of contaminants. We will continue to look for opportunities to work with the spectacular marine science capabilities in Carteret County to improve our community and the surrounding areas,” he said.

Day explained that the next step is underway for the town.

“We are currently working with USDA Rural Development on a funding package for utility improvements in the $15 million range,” he said, referring to the U.S. Department of Agriculture program. “The information from the UNC-IMS water quality analysis will assist us in prioritizing the improvement projects, and, very importantly, help us qualify for grant funding by illustrating the need to mitigate water quality issues through sewer line improvements.”

Hall explained that previous capstone projects at the institute included investigating the role of living shorelines in stabilizing property loss due to erosion, effects of marine debris on coastal ecosystems, potential for wind energy development along the North Carolina coast, impacts of marinas on water quality, ecosystem services of oyster reefs, and factors influencing water quality in highly developed canal systems in Pine Knoll Shores and Atlantic Beach.

“This year’s project on the factors influencing water quality in Town Creek in Beaufort was modeled around the latter two studies, which had successfully provided useful information to Pine Knoll Shores and Atlantic Beach regarding water quality of their canal systems,” he said.

About the project

Hall told Coastal Review Online that the goal for the students with the project was to assess the current water quality in Town Creek and to learn about the factors and processes that affect it.

Primarily, they were interested in nutrient pollution that can cause eutrophication, or an excess of nutrients, and pollution by microbes that can cause illness, he said.

The students split into groups to address different aspects of the problem.

“One group mapped potential sources of nutrients and fecal contamination within the watershed, and conducted a survey of Beaufort residents and businesses to learn how Town Creek is used — boating, fishing, swimming, etc. — and what water quality issues are seen as most important,” Hall explained.

Two groups of students collected water samples throughout Town Creek, including near marinas and stormwater outfalls, which are potential sites where pollutants could enter the body of water, Hall continued. “The students then analyzed the samples at IMS to determine the concentrations of bacteria species indicative of fecal pollution, nutrients (fertilizers) that can stimulate algal growth, and different types of microscopic algae in the water.”

A third group used GPS-equipped sampling devices called drifters to measure how fast or slow pollutants in the creek are flushed by the tides and two other groups looked at Town Creek’s marshes and oyster beds to estimate the ability of these habitats to remove algae and nutrients from the creek, he said.

“The students combined results from these project components to assess the main sources of pollutants to Town Creek, and the extent to which they are removed from the system by tidal flushing and filtration by marshes and oyster reefs,” Hall explained.

The findings

The students presented their findings Dec. 6 to an audience of about two dozen in a second-floor meeting room on the Morehead City campus.

Russo explained early in the presentation that the students determined that within a 1-mile radius of  Town Creek, the potential contamination sources include 16 dockage sources, 44 stormwater sources, seven wastewater sources and five housing subdivision sources. Additionally, there are four areas of concerns, with three located adjacent to the public access site next to Town Creek Marina.  Seven sampling stations were used to check the data.

After assessing potential contamination sources for Town Creek, the students worked to find where the pollutants go once they enter the water. Students, to better understand circulation in the system, calculated the flushing time, or how long it takes for all of the creek’s water to be completely refreshed with new water, and residence time, or how long it takes for a specific section of water to leave the system. They determined that contaminants are flushed out between 25 to 52 hours, overall. The residence time was calculated to be about four hours or less.

Contaminants near the back of the embayment are likely to remain in the system longer but overall, the students found that Town Creek is a well-flushed system.

Student Rebecca Williams explained that a group looked at samples from Town Creek and Gallants Channel, which feeds Town Creek, and found that chlorophyll a, an indicator of the algae growing in water, and nutrient concentrations were low in Town Creek compared to North Carolina standards and likely flushed out before they can accumulate. The students also concluded that the system is not experiencing algal bloom.

Overall, stormwater drains showed consistently higher nutrient concentrations than other site types, which suggests that stormwater outflows are a source of nutrient input into the system, Williams continued. The significantly lower nutrient concentrations in the channel sites suggests that nutrients and chlorophyll a are being flushed out of the system at a fast flushing time.

The students looked at the impact of rainfall events on nutrient concentrates in stormwater outflow sites. Although rainfall increased nutrient concentrations in Town Creek, it is not reflected in the channelsites due to the fast residence time .

The fecal indicator bacteria, or FIB, such as E.coli and enterococcus, which are not naturally occurring in estuarine systems, serve as a proxy for pathogens like norovirus, salmonella and hepatitis a, which can be very expensive to monitor and quantify, Williams said.

The high FIB concentrations are potentially entering Town Creek by way of the stormwater outfall pipes, as well as possible other nonpoint sources of pollution and are influenced by tide fluctuations, Williams added. The naturally occurring vibrio populations behave similarly to FIB but are not entering through pipes.

Eric Von Amsberg explained that the group that looked at how marshes and oysters can change the concentrations of nutrients estimated that the marsh grass removal rate of nitrogen is about 20 days and phosphorus is around 90 days. The group calculated that the best estimate for clearance time is 6.6 days for oysters, significantly longer than the flushing time of about two days.

In Von Amsberg’s summary of the findings, he explained that due to the short flushing and residence time, water leaves the system very quickly. Nutrient concentrations, fecal indicator bacteria and vibrio are high nearest stormwater outfalls while chlorophyll a concentrations were low.

FIB, which are not native to the estuary, exists in high concentrations around stormwater outfalls, and because they do not exist in nature, the input of that is likely due to stormwater, he continued.

The high natural concentration of Vibrio near stormwater outfalls could be due to the addition of nutrients as well as other qualities of the water like the stagnation of water near stormwater drains.

“Because the flushing time is one to two days and a lot of these marsh and oyster processes take a number of days, they do not have sufficient time or coverage to effectively filter the water in Town Creek, however if the areas of marsh and oyster reef were expanded, it may make a more significant impact on water quality,” he said.

FIB are present at some stormwater locations, where they often exceed state-regulated standards. Stormwater might be the largest area to look at in the future, as well as Vibrio concentration near stormwater outfalls. “And as mentioned earlier, oysters and marshes do not have sufficient time to remove nutrients and microbes due to flushing, however if the areas were larger, they might make a significant impact,” he added.

Hall told Coastal Review Online that as instructors, “We hope that the team has gained an appreciation for how different parts of natural ecosystems are connected, how people pollute but also value and protect ecosystems, and how working as a team can simultaneously be challenging and rewarding.”

Second of two parts. Read Part 1.

“Seagrasses are like ‘Canaries in the coal mine,’” Jud Kenworthy, a research biologist, said. “The status of seagrasses can warn us about the health of our coastal ecosystem.”

The Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership and its partners are working to better understand the status of the submerged aquatic vegetation or SAV along the coast of North Carolina and have been mapping the extent and density of SAV, which Kenworthy said will “help tell the story in space and time” of the seagrasses.

APNEP in September published a map of imagery years 2012-2014 that updates the higher salinity areas of the 2006-2008 SAV map, the first effort to record the location of underwater grasses along the North Carolina and southern Virginia estuarine coastlines. The update will allow APNEP and its partners to study if the region’s SAVs are growing, declining or stable, according to APNEP.

Kenworthy, who also serves as team co-lead, said that the maps developed for the period between 2006 and 2013 indicate that the high salinity seagrass beds are in much better condition than what is being documented in many other coastal ecosystems around the world that are experiencing severe declines.

“While it appears that widespread declines are not evident in North Carolina, there are some local declines that deserve attention by resource managers, especially in areas experiencing the most coastal development,” he said. “We need to focus on the conservation and protection of this resource because restoration is difficult, uncertain, less than the probability of a coin toss, and very expensive.”

Mapping SAV in the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary was done through a combination of aerial flights and ground truthing with boat-based surveys, conducted by APNEP SAV team members, which includes federal and state agencies, academic institutions and nongovernment organizations, according to APNEP.

Kenworthy explained that using the seagrass maps for the two different years enables them to assess the geographic distribution of the SAV resource and determine its status. “Basically, where it is and how much there is growing in the estuary,” he said. They can also assess any changes in the abundance SAV between the two years.

“For the spatial extent of the SAV resource we are monitoring, the maps provide us with information at a scale, which is appropriate to the enormous size of the resource,” Kenworthy continued. “The maps are a large-scale picture of the resource and ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ when you place it into the context of the entire APNEP region.”

APNEP plans to follow the release of the 2013 map with a more extensive analysis of the extent and density of the region’s underwater grasses later this year. A set of aerial flights and boat-based surveys took place this summer that will be used for a third SAV map to provide a more complete picture of the state of submerged aquatic vegetation in the Albemarle-Pamlico region, according to APNEP.

Kenworthy said he’s inspected the aerial photography from this summer and commented that if you had expected to see changes associated with Hurricane Florence, it appears that your expectations were met in some areas of the coastline.

“Storms can have substantial effects on benthic habitats like SAV. Truthfully, I did expect to see some changes. But I am also impressed by the resilience, given the large amount of wind and rain we experienced,” he said. “It will also be interesting to see how the cumulative effects of Florence and Dorian impacted the seagrass beds, given that many of the climate change forecasts suggest increased ‘storminess’ in the future. For this, the maps will be extremely useful.”

SAV mapping involves three major tasks: aerial image acquisition, boat-based surveys and photo interpretation,” explained Dean E. Carpenter, program scientist with APNEP. “All tasks require the coordination and collaboration of multiple APNEP partners.”

APNEP contracted with partner, North Carolina Department of Transportation’s photogrammetry team, for aerial images from White Oak River north along the Outer Banks to Highway 64 near Manteo and Nags Head.

Carpenter said they target the May-June time period, when the overlap in the distribution of the three high-salinity species is greatest.

“Because of the strict environmental requirements, such as water clarity, sun angle, cloud cover and low tide, and a narrow optimal biological window coupled with the extensive target area, the flights occur over multiple days and if necessary, multiple years,” he explained.

While SAV beds occur in many other parts of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, SAV cannot be detected from aircraft in those waters because of generally poor water clarity.

“Even within the target flight areas, water clarity can be impaired by sediment runoff from heavy precipitation events on previous days. Thus, APNEP established a network of volunteers along the coast who provided daily water clarity readings,” Carpenter said.

The days where the weather forecast and water clarity readings are favorable, the actual weather encountered may feature unfavorable conditions. “One example is the phenomenon of ‘popcorn clouds’ that prevented the acquisition of interpretable imagery over Core Sound during 2013 and a revisit flight in 2014,” he added.

In concert with the aerial mission, APNEP coordinated boat-based SAV surveys with partners, primarily the state Division of Marine Fisheries and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Beaufort Laboratory.

“Over 650 stations were surveyed in the target area. The resulting ‘ground truth’ data is important to support photo interpretation,” Carpenter explained in an email. With access to the aerial images and boat-based data, an APNEP photo interpreter worked over 150 hours to delineate SAV beds of differing spatial cover classes (e.g., continuous or patchy beds). A NOAA remote sensing specialist provided additional time in providing quality assurance on the interpretation.”

The Environmental Protection Agency provided APNEP funding and the Division of Marine Fisheries, the NOAA Beaufort Lab and numerous volunteers provided field and technical support.

First of two parts. Updated with map link, boundary clarification.

The Albemarle-Pamlico estuary is one of the largest and most productive estuaries on the Atlantic Coast, with the second largest submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV, resource in the continental U.S., said Jud Kenworthy, a research biologist who is currently adjunct faculty in the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s department of biology and marine biology.

Researchers recently have begun tracking SAV trends on the state’s coast and stress that it’s best to maintain and preserve SAV, which are home to hundreds of thousands of fish and invertebrates, rather than try to replant and restore SAV once it’s gone. This two-part series will examine the effort and its role in monitoring the health of the coast.

As Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership Director Bill Crowell said, “Understanding the status of our SAV habitats allows us to be better informed for the management of this resource and understand how our actions may affect its health,” which is why APNEP has coordinated and published two maps of submerged aquatic vegetation in the Albemarle-Pamlico region.

APNEP works with citizens and organizations to identify, protect, and restore the resources of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system.

With funding from APNEP and field and technical support from the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, Beaufort Laboratory, digital data of coastal SAV was mapped for imagery years 2012-2014. This is the second effort led by APNEP to map the distribution, abundance and change of SAV in North Carolina, according to APNEP.

The SAV Team published the first map, a baseline map, of SAV in 2011 using data from aerial flights taken between 2006 and 2008 along the North Carolina and southern Virginia estuarine coastlines. This included the coastal zone that lies within the APNEP regional boundary, which is from Bogue Inlet north to Back Bay, as well as Bogue Inlet south to Masonboro Inlet.

Because the aerial surveys were conducted infrequently due to funding and could only monitor changes in large areas that did not have diminished visibility due to turbid waters, APNEP in 2014 began coordinating a SAV Sentinel Network that combines boat-based sonar and video technology with in-water observations to track SAV in the sounds, according to APNEP. The 2012-2014 map provides an update to the higher salinity areas of the 2006-2008 SAV map in the regional boundary.

Visitors to the online resource can compare the SAV extent and density on the map by clicking the check boxes in the “Layers” block on the right side of the map to toggle the 2013-2014 or 2006-2008 map data on and off. More information about how the data was collected, as well as the map data itself, is available on the DEQ ArcGIS Online website, Crowell said.

Crowell explained that the Albemarle-Pamlico region has more than 136,000 acres of submerged aquatic vegetation – putting it in the top three states in the country for SAV abundance. This estuarine system also contains half of the juvenile fish habitat from Maine to Florida, making the status of its SAV an issue of regional and perhaps national importance.

“SAV plays a crucial functional role within our coastal ecosystems. One study stated that a single acre of grasses may support as many as 40,000 fish and 50 million small invertebrates,” he said. “Additionally, these grasses improve water quality by absorbing excess nutrients, generating oxygen, and reducing the sediment moving about in the water column. In some areas they help to protect shorelines from erosion, by decreasing wave energy.”

Kenworthy, who retired in 2011 from the NOAA Beaufort Lab after 33 years of federal service, focused during his research career on the ecology, habitat utilization, conservation and restoration of seagrass and SAV habitat. After retiring, he continued to work with APNEP as co-lead of the SAV monitoring and assessment team.

Kenworthy explained that submerged aquatic vascular plants are that have adapted to live almost exclusively underwater in both seawater, more commonly called seagrasses, and lower-salinity brackish and freshwater environments, more commonly referred to as SAV.

“This is why we find two personalities of SAV throughout coastal North Carolina, SAV and seagrass, but we often refer to them all as SAV,” he said. However, unlike their submerged counterparts, macroalgae, SAV have roots and rhizomes that anchor them in the substrate and a leaf canopy that slows currents and baffles wave energy.

“They function much like the grasses that live on your front lawn. SAV trap and stabilize the soil they grow on, as well as protect adjacent emergent shorelines,” Kenworthy said. The productivity and biomass of SAV store large amounts of carbon and other nutrients and, along with the sediment stabilizing capabilities, they serve to maintain and promote superior water quality, benefiting the entire estuary.

“Ecologically, SAV provide shelter and food to an incredibly diverse community of animals, from tiny invertebrates to large fish, crabs, turtles, marine mammals, shorebirds and waterfowl. Seagrasses provide many important services to humans directly and indirectly, but many seagrass meadows have been impacted by human activities,” he added.

Crowell explained that before APNEP started coordinating efforts to map and monitor the region’s submerged aquatic vegetation, there were no long-term SAV-monitoring programs in the state that could provide reliable information about how this resource has been changing over time.

In 2001, APNEP established the Albemarle-Pamlico SAV partnership with various state and federal agencies to collaborate, with the long-term goal of determining where the region’s underwater grasses are located and if their overall extent and density is changing over time, according to Crowell.

Additional partners from nongovernmental organizations and academic sectors joined to further the mission of the open-membership group. The effort was boosted with the development of Coastal Habitat Protection Plan, a document used by the state Department of Environmental Quality to guide habitat decisions as they relate to fisheries.

In 2004, APNEP created a memorandum of understanding to formalize partner interactions to move forward with the joint effort to address the identification, status and restoration of SAV habitat.

The memorandum was signed in 2006 by all participants, which includes nine state agencies, nine academic institutions, two nongovernmental organizations and four federal agencies, thus formally creating the “SAV Partnership.”

Crowell explained that the initial priority has been mapping the region’s SAV to determine if and where action needs to be taken.

“APNEP/SAV partnership released the first map in 2011 for images collected 2006-2008. Given the dynamic nature of the habitat, we are still trying to get a good understanding of its distribution and condition. We then want to document how things were and how its changing. Protecting the region’s SAV is far less expensive that it is to replant and restore SAV once it has disappeared,” he said.

Crowell said to protect estuarine water quality, “Avoiding overuse of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides makes a difference in water quality far downstream. Boaters can avoid tearing up shallow grass beds with boat props, avoid bottom-disturbing fishing gear that rips up SAV, and utilize the N.C. Clean Marina Program. State and local government efforts to reduce nutrient and sediment pollution, as well as stormwater runoff, also go a long way towards creating the conditions SAV needs to flourish.”

The Clean Marina program is a nearly 20-year-old state effort to show that marina operators can help safeguard the environment by taking steps that go beyond regulatory requirements.

Crowell said that it should be noted that the SAV partnership was necessary to generate the funds and personnel necessary to start the mapping efforts.

“Today, we still rely on numerous partners to do this work. This spring, many volunteers provided daily water quality reading and weather reports to us so we could schedule the flights under the right conditions to capture the images,” he said.

In addition to aerial mapping, Cowell said there has been an effort over the past decade to develop protocols for coordinating data collection across the region.

“Since 2014, researchers from East Carolina University and other SAV Team members have monitored SAV in the low-salinity waters of the sounds via boat-based surveys that use underwater sonar, cameras, and square quadrats to collect SAV data at ‘sentinel sites’ over time,” he said. “In the long term, the goal is for the combination of semi decadal aerial surveys of the higher salinity waters near the barrier islands and more frequent boat-based surveys throughout the region to allow the SAV Team to obtain an ongoing assessment of how the state’s submerged aquatic vegetation is changing over time.”

Next: Canaries in the coal mine

Third in a series

WILMINGTON – A former Florida-based Army Corps of Engineers employee who pleaded guilty earlier this year to lying to investigators about getting paid by an environmental consulting firm in assisting with contract negotiations and sharing sensitive internal government information did not have a hand in the Wilmington harbor improvement project, according to an official with North Carolina State Ports Authority.

Tracey Jordan Sellers, a civilian employee with the Corps’ Jacksonville, Florida, District, pleaded guilty in July of making false statements to Department of Defense investigators about working part-time for a private firm on a handful of projects, two of which were in North Carolina.

The Joint Factual Statement filed July 12 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida does not identify the company or the specific projects in which Sellers was involved.

Bethany Welch, the ports authority’s senior manager of communications and business outreach, said in an email that Dial Cordy and Associates, which has a regional office in Wilmington and is headquartered in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, helped prepare the ports’ draft feasibility study and environmental report for the proposed harbor project.

“Tracey Sellers was in no way involved or contacted for any information in the feasibility study by Dial Cordy,” Welch said.

Dial Cordy President and CEO Steve Dial did not return a call seeking comment.

In comments submitted to the Corps’ Wilmington District, lawyers representing the Village of Bald Head Island question whether Sellers may have worked on the project.

“While none of the Plea Agreement, Joint Factual Statement, or news report say that Dial Cordy & Associates was the environmental consulting company for whom Ms. Sellers worked, given that Dial Cordy was involved in Florida and has offices in Wilmington, North Carolina, and may have been involved in the North Carolina projects (especially in light of the dates of the referenced projects), we believe these questions merit further investigation,” the letter states. “If in fact she worked on this project, this omission in the Draft Report disclosures should also be investigated and explained,” lawyers for the Brooks Pierce law firm wrote.

“… we believe these questions merit further investigation.”

Brooks Pierce law firm’s letter to the Corps

Sellers, a biologist, was contacted in November 2014 via email by a senior member of the unidentified company offering her a part-time job, “related to a bid proposal that COMPANY planned to submit to a state agency in North Carolina,” according to her statement.

Sellers, without seeking or getting approval from Corps ethics officials, provided her resume to the company and “reviewed and made suggested edits” to part of the company’s bid proposal, the statement said.

“Because the state project would later be reviewed by USACE’s Wilmington District, Sellers agreed to limit her participation to ‘technical writing support only’ and suggested that she not attend any meetings with USACE,” the statement said.

Sellers did not receive pay for the work.

She was offered a second part-time job on another project in North Carolina by the same senior member of the company in October 2018.

This project would also be reviewed by the Corps’ Wilmington District, according to the statement.

Sellers, again without authorization from the Corps, “provided advice about the project and asked for a contract for her services,” the statement said.

The company agreed to pay her up to $9,000 over six months at a rate of $50 per hour.

Sellers, who was sentenced in September, also worked with the consulting firm on major dredging projects in south Florida and negotiated a contract for a job with the company on a proposal for a project in Louisiana, the statement said.

“All of the foregoing issues potentially bear on the reliability and credibility of the materials being submitted to the Corps for consideration in its evaluation of this project,” Brooks Pierce lawyers said in their letter to Wilmington District.

They conclude by asking district officials to disregard the entire draft report and investigate and determine the circumstances under which the report was prepared.

The Wilmington District did not respond to questions from Coastal Review Online by deadline.

Lawyers for the island have expressed a number of concerns about the proposed project to widen and deepen with harbor channel to make way for larger container ships operating out of Asia.

Those concerns include the potential impacts dredging the channel to a deeper depth will have on Bald Head’s beaches.

The Corps of Engineers Wilmington District is in the beginning stages reviewing the harbor project through the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, process.

Second in a series

WILMINGTON – Dredging, sandbags and sand-filled tubes, beach renourishment projects and a terminal groin – all have added up to millions spent to combat erosion on the Village of Bald Head Island’s beaches.

Within the past 15 years, more than $47 million has been spent on a multitude of erosion mitigation projects on Bald Head’s shores where, island officials maintain, sand loss has been exacerbated since 2000 when the Cape Fear River’s navigation channel was deepened, widened and realigned closer to the island’s west and south beaches.

The village took the fight to protect its beaches to court in a December 2010 lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers. The lawsuit alleged the Corps was in breach of contract of its dredge-and-sand-disposal schedule to return dredged, beach-quality sand every two years during a six-year cycle onto the island’s shoreline.

A district court judge dismissed the lawsuit. In 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4^th Circuit upheld the district court judge’s ruling.

The North Carolina State Ports Authority is initiating another harbor project, one that proposes to further deepen and widen the river channel to accommodate larger ships sailing from Asia to the East Coast.

“We do know that the channel, to date, has done a lot of damage to the beaches and we’ve had to spend $47 million protecting those beaches,” said Bill Cary, an attorney representing the island. “The current draft report does not commit to placing sand on the beaches. It does not evaluate any erosion impacts. And, now they’re making it bigger, deeper, wider?”

Meaningful public involvement

Cary, who is with the law firm Brooks Pierce, said island officials have not been given the opportunity to adequately voice their concerns through the process under which the ports authority is pursuing federal authorization and congressional approval for the harbor project.

Under amendments signed into a law a year ago for Section 203 of the Water Resources Development Act of 1986, ports can pay for project feasibility studies and environmental reports rather than wait for federal funding to cover the costs of those studies.

Nonfederal sponsored projects have to get federal authorization before moving forward and, in order to receive federal funds, projects must complete the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, process, which is headed by the Army Corps of Engineers.

NEPA includes soliciting public comments.

But Cary argues that the public should have been given the opportunity to provide input throughout the Section 203 study process.

In a letter dated Aug. 29 to North Carolina State Ports Authority Executive Director Paul Cozza, Cary wrote that the ports authority’s report “was prepared essentially behind closed doors, without public input.”

“The lack of public input affects the analyses and conclusions of the entire NCSPA Report,” he wrote. “An after-the-fact NEPA review (as NCPA now proposes) cannot cure the failure to involve the public from the outset.”

“The lack of public input affects the analyses and conclusions of the entire NCSPA Report.”

Bill Cary, attorney

Cary goes on to write that the ports authority should withdraw the report and “fully involve the public in the scoping and analyses required, as contemplated by the Section 203.”

“Given the history of the Channel’s impacts on Bald Head Island, the exclusion of the Village and the public from any meaningful input into the design and plan of NCSPA’s proposed project is all the more troubling,” Cary said.

The ports authority hosted a public information meeting on the proposed project on Aug. 8, 2018.

“There was no speaker,” Cary said. “There was no question and answer period. We had fully expected that public scoping and public involvement means public meetings. There weren’t any other subsequent public meetings.”

Bethany Welch, the ports authority’s senior manager of communications and business outreach, said in an email that the ports made multiple efforts to reach out to elected officials in surrounding communities throughout the Section 203 study process.

Welch said that in February the ports executive team met with Bald Head Island officials to talk about the Section 203 process and “create an open dialogue, and to answer any questions or address any concerns.”

Village Manager Chris McCall said that meeting was the first and only one island officials have had with ports officials.

“They talked about the project, but they were still in the working stages of the feasibility study and at the time they didn’t have much in the way of details,” McCall said. “Up to this point there hasn’t been much in the way of public involvement and that needs to happen as this thing moves forward. For folks to think that the channel has zero effect on Bald Head Island is not accurate to say. We’re not looking to fuel any flames on this. We just want to make sure the process is followed correctly and that we have opportunity to work with them. If it happens we just want to make sure there are things in there like the mitigation funding that will help with costs of things down the road.”

Audubon North Carolina Executive Director and National Audubon Society Vice President Andrew Hutson said in a statement that the project could be an opportunity to create and protect bird habitat.

“As we saw from a similar harbor project in 2000, this effort could have significant impacts on birds,” he said. “But there’s a huge opportunity here to turn lemons into lemonade. Dredged material and other long-term mitigation measures can create and protect bird habitat. We will be following the process closely to make sure we don’t lose this opportunity.”

The ports authority has established the email address WH203study@ncports.com for the public to submit questions, comments or concerns.

The ports will continue to update its website with up-to-date information as it becomes available, Welch said.

“It is our goal to be as transparent as we can throughout the duration of this project,” she said. “We encourage any and all public feedback.”

NEPA process just beginning

During a public scoping meeting hosted Sept. 26 by the Corps of Engineer’s Wilmington district, Cary pressed Corps staff about the Section 203 study process.

Jenny Owens, the district’s environmental resources section chief, told the crowd of roughly 30 people gathered in a room of the Coastline Convention Center in downtown Wilmington that the Corps is at the very beginning of the NEPA process.

She said the Corps is waiting for the ports authority’s response to the Office of the Secretary of the Army for Civil Work’s review of the Section 203 report.

The Corps last month opened a 30-day public comment period on the proposed harbor project.

Those comments will be reviewed as part of the preparation for the draft environmental impact study, or DEIS.

The DEIS will identify resources that exist in the proposed project area, including fisheries and river bottom habitat, threatened and endangered species, and human and cultural resources. The study will examine the potential impacts the proposed project to those resources, water and air quality, and potential hazardous and toxic wastes.

Comments will be accepted at WHNIP203@usace.army.mil through Oct. 12.

The Corps will continue to solicit public input throughout the NEPA process, which could take at least a year or more to complete.

Learn more

• Read Part 1: Federal Review Finds Port Study Deficient

Next: Was the draft report credible?

First in a series

This story has been updated to correct a misstatement regarding the Wilmington port’s 2017 cargo statistics.

WILMINGTON – The Wilmington Harbor Navigation Project is the first in the United States to be funneled through a national review process that gives ports more flexibility in building their projects.

Ports are allowed under the amended Section 203 of the Water Resources Development Act signed into law a year ago by President Trump to kick off projects more expeditiously by paying for their own feasibility and environmental studies rather than waiting for federal funding.

Under Section 203, nonfederal projects have to receive federal authorization and go through the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, process in order to receive federal funds.

As it stands, the North Carolina State Ports Authority’s draft feasibility study must be heavily revised before it would pass muster, according to a federal review of the study.

The feasibility study and the process under which it was conducted are also being criticized by at least one beach town questioning how the proposed project to widen and deepen the harbor channel might affect its beaches.

‘Needs significant revisions’

Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works R.D. James would not likely make a “positive determination of project feasibility” based on the current draft study, according to the secretary’s office and Army Corps of Engineers’ headquarters staff.

Without James’ recommendation for approval by Congress, the project cannot move forward.

His office in July released a review summarizing the ports’ feasibility study/environmental report as one that needs “significant revisions before it would be considered to be legally and policy sufficient.”

The 15-page review details deficiencies in the ports authority’s report, including the lack of a thorough economic analysis.

“North Carolina Ports is in the process of writing its comments to the Office of the Secretary of the Army for Civil Work,” Bethany Welch, the ports’ senior manager of communications and business outreach, said in an email.

The draft feasibility study calls for deepening the main shipping channel through the Cape Fear River from 42 feet to 47 feet and the ocean entrance to the river from 44 feet to 47 feet. The plan also recommends widening the channel in multiple areas.

Those new depths and widths would allow the Wilmington port to remain competitive with other East Coast ports by making room for larger container ships coming to the East Coast from Asia.

Ports officials say the changes would accommodate vessels that can carry 14,000 20- by 8-foot shipping containers.

Ships of this size can now be navigated through the Panama Canal, a newly expanded portion of which opened in June 2016.

In order for these larger ships to call at the Wilmington port, the width of the port’s turning basin also needs to be expanded by 124 feet, ports authority officials say.

The North Carolina Division of Coastal Management earlier this year rejected the ports authority’s application for a Coastal Area Management Act major permit modification to widen the turning basin.

The ports authority appealed the denial and, last April, the Coastal Resources Commission granted a variance for the project, which includes dredging 17.76 acres designated primary nursery area, or PNA, and the excavation of a little more than one acre of coastal wetlands.

In its variance request, the ports authority said that without the turning basin expansion, the Wilmington port “would lose the ability for North Carolina to maintain presence in the global container shipping market,” which would, in turn, adversely impact the state’s economy.

That argument is one of several points of concern discussed in the federal policy review assessment, which states that the planning objectives in the draft feasibility study are unclear and “could potentially lead to the pre-selection of an alternative plan.”

The review goes on to state that the ports authority’s feasibility study lacks documentation from shipping companies supporting the argument that those companies would not use the port.

The study appears to overestimate future shipping projections from the Asia route, according to the review.

The ports’ economic analysis assumes that by 2025, 272,615 vessels from the Asia route would use the Wilmington port. That’s nearly double the number of ships – 179,713 – from non-Asia routes projected to call at the port within that same time period.

The Waterborne Commerce Statistics Center, or WCSC, indicates that the Wilmington port handled 178,865 TEUs, or twenty-foot equivalent units — a measure of shipping container volume, during 2017.

The ports authority’s study projects a 137% increase in shipping traffic between 2017 and 2025.

“It appears that the commodity forecast has been significantly overestimated,” the review states. “Correcting that error would result in a dramatic reduction in project benefits.”

The review also calls into question the study’s assumption that 100 percent of the shipping fleet from Asia will transition to the largest shipping container vessels, a presupposition that the review says is “unrealistic.”

Environmental considerations

The feasibility study also lacks information about alternative dredging depths, the potential implications of those alternative depths to the environment, and the effects of sea level rise.

Maintaining the port for the next 50 years to accommodate larger ships from Asia “seems to be a corporate objective rather than a planning objective,” and that “it seems that depths between 42’ and 46’ were eliminated from consideration due to flawed objectives,” according to the assessment.

Jerry Diamantides, senior economist with contractor David Miller & Associates, told the authority’s board of directors in August that the feasibility study showed that deepening the channel to 47 feet would have only minor environmental impacts.

But the study should look beyond channel depth increments and include detailed alternatives such as relocating facilities, according to the federal assessment.

Federal reviewers also said the report understates environmental effects of the project, including its impact on river bottom habitats. The study needs to more accurately describe the long-term or permanent effects the project will have on that habitat, according to the assessment.

The port authority’s environmental study also needs to fully integrate impacts of sea level rise, including future changes in water levels, saltwater intrusion, and induced flooding.

It is unclear when the ports authority will turn over a revised study to Washington. Ports authority officials have said they hope James will recommend the project to Congress before November 2020.

Next: Lack of public input at issue

This is another in a series of reports on coastal resilience.

CURRITUCK COUNTY — For more than 100 years, the Pine Island Hunt Club was one of the premier hunting lodges on Currituck Sound. It’s now the Donal C. O’Brien Jr Sanctuary and Audubon Center, the first Audubon Center in the state, thanks to the 1979 land donation to the National Audubon Society from the last private owners of the club, the family of Winston-Salem developer and avid duck hunter Earl Slick.

The family managed the property until 2009 when Audubon North Carolina assumed responsibility. The 2,600-acre sanctuary that straddles the beach, marsh and wetlands of Currituck Banks is home to 170 bird species, seven amphibian species, 17 reptile species, 19 mammal species, more than 350 species of plants and a two-story hunting lodge built in 1913, according to Audubon.

There is a wide, tamped-earth trail along the sound that was once the road to Corolla. The guardhouse is still there, just north of the Sanderling Resort in Duck. At one time its guards decided who would get to drive the sand road to the village.

The sanctuary is a place where the wind paints waves of color in the marsh grass. In the maritime forests, the gnarled live oak creates a dense canopy where sunlight dapples the ground in shades of yellow. It’s also ground zero in North Carolina for the effects of climate change, a vulnerable barrier island where work is underway to adapt the infrastructure to the changing climate and create a hub of conservation, restoration, scientific research and resilience planning.

Conservation group Audubon North Carolina hosted an open house and tour of the hunting lodge and grounds Friday to highlight how climate change is affecting Currituck Sound and the Outer Banks and the ongoing work to adapt as part of its resilience initiative. Officials on hand stressed the urgency and the need to work together.

“I think deep down in the inner side of all of us we all have a great appreciation and love for nature. But we just don’t take the time. It’s something we’re going to get to. We take it for granted. And that is dangerous,” said Sen. Bob Steinburg, a Republican whose district includes Currituck County, during his remarks at the event.

Steinburg was joined by North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Michael Regan, numerous northeastern North Carolina elected officials and Audubon representatives.

As part of the event, state and local officials participated in a ceremonial purple martin house raising near the impoundment pond west of the hunting lodge. Heavy rains the night before and a strong southwest wind had raised the water table almost to the surface, making the ground spongy, with water seeping out under participants’ every step. The pond’s surface was inches from the top of the impoundment.

Sanctuary Manager Robbie Fearn explained what was happening.

“These soils are getting softer and softer,” he said. “One of the big challenges that has really not been addressed about barrier islands is that you have the ocean coming up on one side and the sound on the other side. The water table sits on this pocket of saltwater underneath. As that come up, every time it rains, like it did buckets last night, that water has no place to go.”

Earlier in the day, those who spoke highlighted the need to work together to mitigate the effects of climate change.

“The marshes are critical habitat for thousands of wintering waterfowl and other wildlife,” said Andrew Hudson, executive director of Audubon North Carolina. “Audubon scientists have identified this place as in the top 2% of places in the hemisphere to protect for birds.”

He went on to explain how he felt Audubon North Carolina could protect the sanctuary and its neighbors from what’s happening along the coast.

“Through a combination of practical research, new hires and staff, on the ground conservation, restoration work and resilience planning, all made possible through the deep cooperation with our partners here. Our goal is to secure a bright future for the birds and the communities here,” he said.

DEQ Secretary Regan agreed. “Scientists have marked Currituck Sound as one of the most important points we have left for the study and preservation of many species of birds.”

Reagan also offered a cautionary message.

“These places remind us all of what an important job we all have to protect them. It’s easy to forget about the sacred trust of ours when we are sitting in an office or when we’re preoccupied in Raleigh,” he said.

In Steinburg’s call for greater cooperation, the senator noted that the lack of cooperation in the past had led to many problems that exist today.

“There has really been an ignorance and a failure on the part of a lot of folks to work together as stakeholders to try and address the many concerns we have in preserving what we know is beautiful and satisfying,” Steinburg said.

Hudson of Audubon North Carolina pointed to a large living shoreline project on the property south of the dock on Currituck Sound. A state Clean Water Management Trust Fund grant provided much of the funding for the project.

“We’re grateful for lawmakers continuing to support the trust fund. We think it is one of the most powerful tools we have,” Hudson said.

Numerous ongoing projects at Pine Island were designed to offset the effects of sea level rise.

“On the north end of the property, the gathering pavilion is being placed on a 4-foot dune,” Fearn said, adding that over time, the 4-foot elevation would be inadequate to stave off rising waters.

Fearn then pointed to where a new building would be placed. At one time, guides and employees were housed where there is now bare ground. The new building, once built, and the hunting lodge are to be designed for a much longer life.

“This beautiful 1913 building, the clubhouse … will go up on pilings. They (the two buildings) will go up 7 feet,” he said. “Sixty years from now this will all be salt marsh.”

The buildings, though, are designed to remain accessible with a boardwalk connecting them.

The vision of creating a resilient place for education and research is consistent with what Regan said he saw as the future for Pine Island.

“This sanctuary has over 2,000 acres … that serve as a living classroom for both current and future generations,” he said. “Both students and educators can come here and see hundreds of species of birds, plants, and it is at those moments that we either affirm or we spark an interest in science and discovery inspiring a lifetime of learning.”

This is another in a series of reports on coastal resilience.

HAVELOCK – In the bigger picture, the most resilient communities are those that forge a connection with the water, Hunter Freeman told a crowd of nearly 300 Wednesday during the two-day North Carolina Coastal Resilience Summit.

Freeman, who leads sustainable stormwater management planning and implementation projects for civil and environmental engineering firm WithersRavenel, and three others were on the panel, Helping Nature Help Us: Co-Benefits of Environmental Solutions, that focused on using natural solutions.

The state Division of Coastal Management and the North Carolina Coastal Federation organized the summit held Tuesday and Wednesday in the Havelock Tourist and Event Center in response to Gov. Roy Cooper’s Executive Order 80. Cooper signed the executive order last fall directing his cabinet agencies to prepare a state climate risk assessment and resiliency plan by March 1, 2020.

The personal connection to water that Freeman sees in coastal and mountain communities is “what drives the resiliency,” he told the roomful during the summit, adding that there has to be a will to recover or a need, or both, “and where both of those exist are those areas that have that connection.”

He used downtown Wilmington’s Water Street as an example and showed a photo of the flooded street that runs along the Cape Fear River.

“This is one of the most at-risk areas for flooding but yet it continually rebounds from flooding,” which he said could be because of business, tourism, development and that connection to the community driving the recovery effort.

Freeman emphasized that the public should be included in projects that promote natural solutions and conservation to demonstrate the value and forge that connection with water. Freeman said this can be done in a number of ways, such as designing a man-made pond as a destination that adds value to a facility, rather than simply fulfilling a permitting requirement.

“That’s the approach that most developers take … there’s almost a hesitancy to allow people to connect to water because it’s viewed as a risk instead of an asset,” he said. Sites need to be designed to treat water as the asset it is, and part of that process to connect communities with water is making the language used in design more accessible.

Forty Years of Flooding

While Freeman is looking ahead, Brian Kramer, Pine Knoll Shores town manager, is working to remediate “horrible drainage plans” that have caused flooding in the Bogue Banks town for decades.

He said that the first area that was developed in Pine Knoll Shores in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the part of town closest to Atlantic Beach, is “a stormwater and flooding nightmare.”

“It’s been going on for 40 years, and what we’ve been doing for 40 years is pumping raw stormwater coming off state highways … inundating septic fields and properties, we’ve been pumping it into the Atlantic Ocean, the Pine Knoll Shores canal and the sound. We’ve been doing that for 40 years,” Kramer said.

The town has been trying to find ways to manage stormwater for some time, but Hurricane Florence in September gave the town a sense of urgency, he said. The town has worked with the Coastal Federation on mitigation projects and trying to infiltrate stormwater where possible.

Pine Knoll Shores plans to apply next year for funding under a federal Clean Water Act program to address flooding in the eastern areas of the town. Officials have also applied to the state Clean Water Management Trust Fund to treat stormwater before it is released into the surrounding bodies of water, he said.

The town also encourages its homeowners to keep a tree canopy, rather than remove trees from the property.

“Trees help protect your house,” Kramer explained.

Kramer said that he drives through Emerald Isle to work every day and through Atlantic Beach often, noting that Pine Knoll Shores has fewer blue tarps covering damaged roofs on houses than any other town on the island. “And I believe that’s because of the tree cover,” he added.

“We have tree-density requirements. We have (homeowners) tell us what they’re going to remove and what they’re going to keep,” he said, adding that the town wants all homes to have as much tree coverage as possible. “Even the smaller homes in the older areas are tree covered and we want to keep it that way.”

Green Solutions

Burrows Smith, managing partner of the 300-acre River Bluffs residential development in Castle Hayne, used trees for a different natural solution. When he and his partners began developing the property near Wilmington, Smith said he pushed to use the state’s low-impact development guidelines issued in 2010. He decided on putting in the center of the development a park that retains stormwater and allows it to infiltrate, or soak into the ground.

“Our infiltration basins are parks,” he said, where people utilize the 2 acres 99% of the time as a park, except for the about 1% of the time when it rains.

Smith said it’s not a typical infiltration basin because he said regulatory agencies don’t want trees in basins, but he found that the trees help improve infiltration.

Smith said he also had built a living shoreline, a more natural alternative to erosion control than bulkheads, on a part of the development’s 3,000 feet of riverbank. Although there was a bit of trial and error with the plants, he did see some success with the living shoreline once completed. The rock sill held and gained material during severe weather and, even though the plants died, Smith said it held up better than another section of the river where there was no living shoreline. There, the bulkhead built by a previous owner caved in.

Smith suggested that the regulatory agencies be more flexible to allow experimentation. He said agencies should provide resources and advice to developers and property owners on low-impact development, such as how to properly create a living shoreline.

Tools for the Public

There is support for waterfront homeowners in Carteret and Onslow counties who are looking to build a living shoreline but are unsure if the location is suitable: There’s an app for that.

Lora Eddy, coastal engagement coordinator with The Nature Conservancy in North Carolina, said the Natural Solutions Toolkit, part of the Coastal Resilience program that examines nature’s role in reducing coastal flood risk, is designed to help communities plan for coastal hazard risks and determine the best natural solutions. This includes an online Living Shorelines app for the Onslow and Carteret counties showing where conditions are best suited for a living shoreline.

“To enable communities to tap into some of our experience, we developed our Coastal Resilience program and our Coastal Resilience tools,” Eddy said.

In addition to the online toolkit and contributions of international experts, the Coastal Resilience program consists of a four-step approach: assess hazard risk and community vulnerability, identify nature-based solutions, take conservation and restoration action, and measure the effectiveness of actions to reduce flood risk.

Eddy added that the Coastal Flood and Sea Level Rise app allows for individuals to help identify areas in communities most at risk to coastal flooding from storm surge now and into the future, Eddy said. Communities can use this information to modify their floodplain management standards, for example, or start a discussion at the state level. Other tools include the Restoration Explorer to help identify the best places to build oyster reefs.

This is another in a series of reports on coastal resilience.

HAVELOCK – Adapting to living with rising seas, larger, slower, rain-dumping coastal storms, flooding and extreme heat is going to take forward thinking, collaboration and money.

“The planning for resilience, there’s no right way to do it,” said Jessica Whitehead, chief resilience officer of the recently formed North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resilience.

Whitehead moderated the first in a series of panel discussions held Tuesday, which kicked off the two-day North Carolina Coastal Resilience Summit in Havelock.

The summit drew some 270 participants, who listened as national, state and local officials discussed the realities of the changing climate and how to effectively build a resilient North Carolina in the face of climate change.

“Climate change is not just about the water,” Whitehead said. “It’s about heat. It’s about rainfall. Climate is changing as we increase greenhouse gases, period. It’s happening.”

As a result, the risks of flooding, drought and extreme heat events are on the rise and their impacts are likely to be far reaching.

“This has a potential impact on even labor in our country,” Whitehead said.

Working hours for outdoor laborers in the agriculture, forestry and construction businesses may have to be cut back to ensure safe working conditions.

Higher-than-normal bouts of hot days like the ones the state recently experienced where spring temperatures topped above 95 degrees will impact hundreds of North Carolinians on fixed incomes.

Scorching temperatures boost demand on air conditioning units, which equates to higher electric bills.

Nights when temperatures do not dip below 75 degrees affect certain crops.

“Resilience needs to be equitable and inclusive, especially for those who are the most vulnerable.”

Jessica Whitehead, N.C. Office of Recovery and Resilience

“So, it’s not just ecosystems,” Whitehead said. “It’s impact on people. It’s impact on our economy. Resilience needs to be equitable and inclusive, especially for those who are the most vulnerable.”

Resilience about more than bouncing back from a storm or other weather-related disaster, she said.

“It’s also about building beyond and becoming stronger,” Whitehead said. “It’s actually thinking about planning and building and responding and managing adaptively. There are going to be things that we as a state need to innovate.”

Statewide Effort

Gov. Roy Cooper’s establishment of the Office of Recovery and Resiliency under the Department of Public Safety is among the state’s latest climate adaptation initiatives. The office was created to oversee the recovery and rebuilding from past and future natural disasters and to administer federally funded grants for victims of Hurricanes Matthew and Florence.

Last October, the governor signed Executive Order No. 80, a comprehensive statewide effort to address greenhouse gas emissions, mitigation, adaptation and resiliency programs.

Florence was a Category 1 hurricane when it came ashore near Wrightsville Beach Sept. 14, 2018. The storm lingered for four days, dumping more than 35 inches of rain in some areas, claiming dozens of lives and leaving behind an estimated $17 billion in destruction in the state.

North Carolina, like many other states, is becoming more vulnerable by the day to extreme storms, said N.C. Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Michael Regan.

“Folks, this is personal for us,” he said.

DEQ is to submit a coastal resiliency and climate risk plan that lay out ways to rebuild smarter and stronger to the governor by next March.

“To do that we need your ideas,” Regan said. “Folks, we’re creating a strategic road map so we’re not putting Humpty Dumpty back together the same every time.”

To achieve this, DEQ officials are looking at what other states and countries are doing to adapt to climate change.

“We don’t try to reinvent the wheel,” said Tancred Miller, coastal and ocean policy manager with the state Division of Coastal Management. “We try to learn best practices from around the country.”

He shared three key messages:

• Focus on finding solutions to the problems climate change pose to the state’s coastal areas.
• Plan for tomorrow’s storms, not the storms of yesterday.
• Think about what and where we are building and how we are building it.

Rebuilding Smarter, Stronger

Building infrastructure designed to adapt with climate change decades out, moving existing infrastructure, relocating and, even the highly unpopular topic of retreating, need to be part of the discussion to rebuilding smarter and stronger, some argue.

Managed retreat allows the shoreline to move inland rather than using structural engineering to hold the shoreline in place. In order for this to happen on developed shorelines, some structures would have to be removed.

Rob Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, said one sensible alternative to consider is buyouts.

“In some places not only is it practical, it is the best option in the long run,” Young said.

“(The buyout of vulnerable properties) is not abandoning the coast. It’s preserving the coast.”

Rob Young, Western Carolina University

Young announced Tuesday the program he heads will release a study in the coming days that explores the benefits of targeted buyouts in erosion hot spots in coastal North Carolina.

“It’s not abandoning the coast,” he said. “It’s preserving the coast.”

Under a buyout program, willing buyers pay fair market value for the property then demolish the structure. The newly vacant land would then be preserved as a protected public area.

“The idea is that hopefully these are voluntary,” Young said. “This can’t really work where you’re condemning properties. It has to be something that benefits everybody at the end of the day. That’s just the way the world works right now.”

Front page featured photo: A Marine assigned to Combat Logistics Group 8 drives past a church to a fire station to evacuate civilians in Jacksonville Sept. 15, 2018, after Hurricane Florence. Marine Corps photo: Pfc. Nello Miele

This is another in a series of reports on coastal resilience.

WILMINGTON – Coastal towns and counties can now access an online tool that pinpoints areas where resiliency projects would best help communities in the face of storms, floodwaters and rising seas.

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation earlier this month released its Regional Coastal Resilience Assessment along with a new Coastal Resilience Evaluation and Siting Tool, or CREST, that identify and rank potential project sites along the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Pacific coastlines in the lower 48 states.

The assessment uses standardized, nationwide data that establishes an apples-to-apples comparison when it comes to evaluating potential resiliency projects, explained Mandy Chesnutt, NFWF’s director of program operations.

CREST takes the initial guesswork out of potential project areas by identifying so-called “resilience hubs.”

These hubs are areas of open space that surround dense population centers, are immediately accessible to infrastructure and host natural resources and habitats that provide protection to humans. They are also areas that are at the highest risk of flooding from coastal storms and sea level rise.

“It is one tool in our arsenal,” Chesnutt said. “The assessment is a starting point. It can give you a few of these hubs that you can go and check out. What we’re saying is, ‘use this tool as a starting point. You need to go out and investigate these places.’”

What makes NFWF’s assessment unique is that it targets areas where both humans and wildlife would receive the most benefit from natural resiliency projects, such as living shorelines and wetlands restoration.

Researchers, including those with the University of North Carolina Asheville’s National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NatureServe, delved even deeper to identify potential project sites through targeted watershed assessments.

North Carolina’s Cape Fear watershed is among eight coastal watersheds from Maine to Florida and California included in the targeted assessment.

The Cape Fear watershed in 2015 was the first to be evaluated.

This watershed supports more than a third of the state’s population – more than 2 million people – and stretches through nearly 30 counties and 114 municipalities, including Greensboro, Fayetteville, Durham, Chapel Hill and Wilmington.

The Cape Fear watershed is home to a wide array of habitat that supports juvenile fish, crabs, shrimp and a host of migratory fish as well as some of the oldest cypress trees in the world.

This was the testing ground on how to develop resilience assessment models, identify resilience hubs and rank those hubs.

One of the areas identified within the watershed is a patch of wetlands west of Wilmington International Airport.

Chesnutt said the wetlands’ proximity to a densely populated area paired with the fact it is host to a number of species, makes it a good spot for a restoration project that would create protection from storm surge and, at the same time, providing important wildlife habitat.

The idea behind identifying such sites is to give communities a starting point as to where to look for areas that would most benefit people and wildlife, said Dawn York, senior coastal scientist with Moffatt & Nichol and Cape Fear River Partnership coordinator.

“It’s work that’s already been done, so coastal communities can move beyond that first stage,” she said.

NFWF will use the assessment tool to evaluate proposed projects submitted annually from communities throughout the country for a piece of the National Coastal Resilience Fund, Chesnutt said, but towns and counties are by no means restricted from working outside of the areas identified in the assessment.

Each year, NFWF evaluates dozens of project ideas from communities vying for grant money from the $30 million fund.

“We have a really good sense of what we’re looking for,” Chesnutt said. “The competition is really fierce. We do try to distribute it evenly around the country.”

The foundation is not interested in projects that would include sea walls, jetties or other hardened structures, she said.

“It’s really focusing on those green solutions,” she said. “I think, in general, we are seeing a greater willingness to look at those natural solutions and not just hardened structures.”

Take the project initiated by Battleship North Carolina executive director, retired Capt. Terry Bragg.

The project known as Living With Water entails creating space for water pushed up the Cape Fear River by coastal storms and rising seas.

“They are taking action and that’s what we need to do,” York said.

The Cape Fear River Assembly has submitted a preproposal grant application for $125,000 from the National Coastal Resilience Fund for Creating a Resilient Wilmington planning project.

This is a stakeholder engagement project that will include Cape Fear River Assembly, the city of Wilmington, civil engineering firm Moffatt & Nichol and New Hanover County to “prepare for Wilmington’s next steps in the creation of its resilience strategy by improving upon its nature-based infrastructure including its wetlands, rivers and coasts.”

“We want to bring this urban planning effort to the city, but utilize that NFWF CREST tool,” York said.

This is another in a series of reports on coastal resilience.

ALLIGATOR — It was a full house at the Alligator Community Building, where folks came out on a late October evening because they were sick to death of floodwaters sitting for months in their yards.

Alligator, a speck of a community in the Tyrrell County swamplands, is no stranger to flooding. But their land doesn’t drain like before, residents told public officials. Ditches are clogged, and water seems to be coming more than it’s going.

“What happens to the landowner who is flooded out and doesn’t have a pump?” a lifelong Alligator resident asked officials with the state forestry service, state coastal management, the U.S. Corps of Engineers and the county who were in attendance.

Suggestions and promises were made, and some people from the agencies came back later and drove around to look at problem areas.

More than six months later, with the storm season looming, nothing appears to have changed, except that the land has finally dried out, said Michael Combs, one of the meeting organizers.

“We really would like to know what can be done,” Combs said in a recent interview. “I can’t say it will be (ditch) cleaning alone. There really needs to be extensive work done, elevating the roads and probably elevating the homes.”

But Combs, 55, who serves as associate minister at Alligator Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, worries that Alligator is too small – 70 or so people, he guessed – and too poor to even get attention, no less the help it needs.

“There’s not many resources at all,” Combs said. “We strive to get things done, but we can only do so much.”

Resilience in Tyrrell County is a built-in character trait of people in this rural county, but that term in the context of climate change is not common talk here. Sea level rise was part of a presentation at the beginning of the community meeting, but that was the only mention. The concern, simply, was flooding.

“When I was a child, I rode bicycles all over this land,” one older man said. Then there was his neighbor, he recalled, who had “kept his yard like a golf green. And now you can’t walk on it.”

As one of the state’s poorest counties, and its least populated, Tyrrell is already disadvantaged. But according to a 2016 report in the journal Nature Climate Change, Tyrrell has earned another unfortunate ranking: It is the No. 1 county among 319 U.S. coastal counties facing long-term risks from sea level rise.

By 2100, the report said, 94 percent of the Tyrrell’s projected population is expected to be vulnerable to inundation. The study, led by Mathew Hauer at the University of Georgia, was unique for looking at a combination of projected sea level rise and projected population.

And the Alligator Peninsula, which encompasses the communities of Alligator, Fort Landing, Goat Neck and Pledger Landing, is the most vulnerable area in the county.

Tucked in the northeast corner of Tyrrell between U.S. 64 and the Albemarle Sound and intersected by the Little Alligator River, the peninsula, at only about 1 foot above sea level, depends on an old and barely maintained network of ditches and canals for drainage. Gravity is useless; any water movement is wind-driven.

“We are dealing with sustainability issues at all levels here and climate is just one part of it,” David Clegg, the county manager, said in an interview after the study was released. “Places like Tyrrell County need to exist and we need to build economic development that celebrates what we are.”

Tyrrell’s 600 square miles is about 50 percent public land, including Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge and Pettigrew State Park, making its tax revenue paltry at best, Clegg said. Many of the county’s 3,600 residents – only 1,900 of whom pay taxes – work in farming, timber and fishing, all industries with decreasing opportunity. The average annual salary in the county is about $30,000, the state’s lowest. Young people routinely leave and rarely return, diminishing its population.

But public land means more to the county than decreased tax revenue, the manager added. It also means the county has no control over that land – or its drainage. In the Alligator area alone, the state owns the 10,000-acre Palmetto-Peartree Preserve, the 14,178-acre Alligator River Game Lands, the 1,441-acre Texas Plantation Game Land water impoundments and the 2,100-acre J. Morgan Futch Game Land. Elsewhere in the county off Highway 94, there are state-owned Buck Ridge, privately-owned Cherry Farms and the federally-owned Pocosin Lakes.

“You’ve got competing interests, literally looking at each other,” Clegg said. On one side of the road, water may be drained, which ends up flooding the other side, or one entity is trying to lower the water table, he said, while the entity across the road is rewetting the land.

“Then you’ve got 12,000 bears galloping all over it. Then you’ve got the wolves. Then you’ve got the foxes and the alligators,” Clegg said. Hunters, conservationists, government officials, farmers, private property owners, he said, all “earnestly” believe they’re doing the right thing.

“I’m in the middle of it, saying I want economic development,” Clegg said.

Still furious over the state wind moratorium that killed a wind project that would have provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax revenue to the county, Clegg said he is proud of the “innovative” agricultural technologies used by the county’s farms that produce potatoes, corn, canola, lavender, timber and soybeans at high per-acre production levels. But until the tax base increases, he said the county cannot afford to provide the services they want to provide.

Clegg, who was Tyrrell’s first-ever county manager, had served 20 years in the Commerce Department under former governors, Hunt, Easley and Perdue. Tyrrell is so small, it is a statistical anomaly in the state – “significantly insignificant,” as Clegg put it. It is even too small, he said, to fit the state’s small school model.

“If something other than aquaculture or agriculture is going to move the needle, it’s going to have to be ecotourism,” he said.

Clegg adamantly objects to offhanded suggestions that people “should just leave.” Not only does he support people’s desire to stay in Tyrrell County, he insists that the county deserves help from the government to raise their houses or improve their drainage systems and infrastructure. But he acknowledges that there are many pressures and competing forces that may defeat even the best of intentions.

“It all comes down to economics – is it economically feasible to do it?” he asked. “At some point, I think you reach a point where you’ve gone as far as you can go.”

And finding solutions will take persistence, Nathan “Tommy” Everett, chair of the Tyrrell County Board of Commissioners, told community members at the October meeting.

“What we’ve got to do is find out what the problem is, “ he said. “We’ve got to document it. I can tell you, it ain’t going to happen overnight.”

This past winter, some people were walking through sewage in their yards, Everett said in a recent interview. And he confirmed that the ditch systems are overgrown with weeds and filled with sediment and debris.

“My guess is they haven’t been maintained since Jim Hunt went out of office,” he said, referring to Gov. Hunt, who left in 2001. And since then, more farmland has been developed, he said, meaning more water is being pumped off the land rather than draining on the land.

Plus, flooding has been exacerbated in recent years by more intense rainfall.

The county, with the help of various grants, has already replaced well water with a municipal water system, and is in the process of hooking up Alligator and other communities to its new municipal sewer system, Everett said, adding that the county’s goal is to eventually extend the system to all areas.

Everett, 67, who has lived his entire life in the county, agreed that people are noticing a change in flooding. But he said it’s hard to pinpoint the reason.

“I think almost everyone realizes that for some reason tides are higher and that flooding is more prevalent during storms,” he said, adding, “Only the strong survive here.”

Some people do blame climate change, he said, but many believe that “it has a great deal to do with Oregon Inlet” because the Albemarle Sound goes out through the inlet. And it seems that work on U.S. 64 by the state Department of Transportation may have altered the hydraulics in Piney Marsh west of the Scuppernong River bridge, he said. Before, floodwater would go through the marsh. Now it to go around it, and the highway acts like a dike. As a result, flooding has gotten worse in Columbia, the county seat.

Everett said that the folks in Alligator see a stormwater management district as their salvation, but he said that the community does not have the finances to maintain such a costly dike and pump system. And being bordered by the Albemarle Sound and Alligator Creek might make it impractical.

“You pump one place and it comes in from somewhere else,” he said.

Ty Fleming, the county soil and water conservation district manager, said that he has lived in Tyrrell “forever” and he has observed that there’s more water and it’s standing for longer periods, especially in Alligator.

“There’s some really old folks down there – in their 80s – and they say ‘It used to not be like this’,” he said. “And I just don’t have an answer for them.”

Alligator’s drainage is worsened by a layer of clay about 15 inches below the sandy surface, Fleming said. In 2007, he said the county installed floodgates in some canals and replaced 30 drainage pipes under driveways. But maintenance of the county’s ditches – some of which may be centuries old – is complicated by jurisdictional issues. The DOT, for instance, claim that some of the roadside ditches are not within its right of way, he said. Ditches may be on private property, or on property managed by a nonprofit, or an unknown entity, or inaccessible.

“Really, the only thing the county is able to do is we’re spraying the ditches to kill the invasive aquatic weeds,” Fleming said.

Combs said the more frequent and long-lasting flooding has put even more stress on Alligator. “There’s been times we can’t even get to the cemetery to a have a funeral,” he said. “During the winter months, my yard never dried out.”

Economic stress, he said, has hollowed out what is one of the state’s oldest historically black communities. Today, Alligator is a mix of black, white and Hispanic residents, many of whom fish or farm for a living. With young people leaving for better jobs and education, Combs said, the elders left behind no longer have the tight family connections.

Combs said he’s still optimistic that things will improve for his community, and that Tyrrell will have development that helps the economy. If not, he fears that Alligator won’t be able to survive, and “everyone just goes their different ways.”

But East Carolina University coastal geologist Stan Riggs, however, sees a flip side to the gloomy prospects. Tyrrell County, in fact, is blessed with some of the most “spectacular” blackwater bodies and wild lands in the country, said Riggs, who has recently released two studies on ecotourism in the Albemarle Peninsula and the Scuppernong region.

Riggs has studied the Outer Banks and northeastern North Carolina since the 1970s, and to him, resilience for Tyrrell communities means making water work for them, and looking at their resources as golden opportunities.

“You have to learn to live with the dynamics of the system,” he said in an interview. “If the dynamics are changing, then we have to change with them.”

Sometimes people will have to relocate, he said, but if people plan ahead, they may open up more options. Young people need to learn to be comfortable on the water like the older generations, and to appreciate the value of the richness that’s surrounding them.

Take blackwater, the somewhat sinister-sounding name for its coffee or tea color. The water takes on its various dark shades from draining through the vast swamp forests, marshes and pocosin lands. Although it’s dark, it’s sediment-free and clear.

Indeed, the region, with its abundant wildlife, expansive lands and vast estuarine waters,  has been referred to by some as the “Yellowstone of the East,” Riggs said.

“All these economic councils, everybody’s looking for an IBM or a Weyerhaeuser,” Riggs said. “The whole point here is they have natural resources that can represent an economy. They have this incredible resource.”

This is another in a series of reports on coastal resilience.

HAVELOCK – Hurricane Florence, which made landfall Sept. 14 near Wrightsville Beach as a Category 1 storm, directly caused 22 deaths and was a factor in 30 others, according to the National Hurricane Center Tropical Cyclone Report on Hurricane Florence released Friday.

Of those 22 deaths, 15 were in North Carolina, four in South Carolina and three in Virginia, with freshwater flooding causing 17 of those deaths, four by wind and one from a tornado, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Wind and water damage caused by Florence totaled about $24 billion, with freshwater flooding causing the most damage to homes and commercial buildings. Most major roads and highways in the southeastern part of the state were left impassable for days.

Storm surge and exceptionally high rainfall totals produced catastrophic flooding across much of southeastern and eastern North Carolina. The hardest hit areas included New Bern, Newport, Belhaven, Oriental, North Topsail Beach and Jacksonville, along with portions of Carteret County, according to the report, which also details the extensive wind damage from Cape Lookout through New Hanover County and widespread power outages.

NOAA scientists have said in previous reports that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere prevents heat from Earth’s surface from escaping into space like it used to, and since the ocean absorbs most of that excess heat, upper ocean temperatures have risen dramatically during the past two decades. Warm ocean surface temperatures are the key ingredient in the recipe for hurricanes.

Advancing Preparedness

Researchers, nonprofit environmental groups, state agencies and others are set to meet for two days next month to discuss coastal climate risks and management strategies to better prepare for storms like Florence. Registration is open for the North Carolina Coastal Resilience Summit, June 11-12 at the Havelock Tourist and Event Center. Cost to attend is $45.

The state Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management has partnered with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, co-host of the summit, in coordination with the Eastern Carolina Council, Cape Fear Public Utilities Authority, Albemarle Commission, Mid-East Commission, The Nature Conservancy, North Carolina Sea Grant, University of North Carolina School of Government and Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership.

The summit is being held in response to Gov. Roy Cooper’s Executive Order 80 signed last fall and directing his cabinet agencies to prepare a state Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan by March 1, 2020.

“A strong clean energy economy combats climate change while creating good jobs and a healthy environment. With historic storms lashing our state, we must combat climate change, make our state more resilient and lessen the impact of future natural disasters,” Cooper said in a news release about the executive order.

According to the Coastal Federation, the summit will provide information on developing the North Carolina Coastal Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, “so as to propel the coastal region’s preparedness for the effects of climate changes including rising sea levels, increased frequency and severity of coastal and riverine flooding, increasing extreme weather, changing groundwater conditions and other shifting natural conditions. The summit will also showcase a gamut of existing solutions to address the identified challenges.”

The agenda includes panels that are to address a range of topics such as state support for developing a resilience plan, transitioning coastal communities toward resilience, climate change in relation to coastal hazard risk, maintaining climate-ready and productive estuaries, environmental justice and other climate-related issues.

Coastal Federation Senior Policy Analyst Ana Zivanovic-Nenadovic explained that the state Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan “is intended to guide state agency actions, and help local communities address the consequences of climate change. The goal of the plan is to identify cost-effective strategies to protect human life and health, property, natural and built infrastructure, cultural resources, and other public and private assets of value to North Carolinians.”

Zivanovic-Nenadovic said that the federation is partnering with the diverse group of coastal community stakeholders to coordinate the summit to highlight and evaluate the utility of potential strategies that could be included in the state’s plan, especially as it applies to the coast of North Carolina.

“The DCM is providing funding and we are organizing, coordinating the agenda, speakers and planning the entire event,” Zivanovic-Nenadovic said.

During the summit, attendees will discuss prioritizing current and anticipated climate risks to the coast that will need to be addressed in the resiliency plan; Lessons from recent extreme weather; evaluating existing and potential policies and management measures that address climate risks to coastal communities and the environment; identifying the cost-effectiveness of potential mitigation and adaptation strategies and practices that the plan might include; and determining research and policy gaps that need review and analysis, according to the federation.

Patricia Smith, public information officer for divisions of Coastal Management and Marine Fisheries under the state Department of Environmental Quality, told Coastal Review Online that the North Carolina Coastal Federation approached the Division of Coastal Management in November 2018 with the idea of holding a summit on coastal climate risks.

“Division staff thought that this idea fit well with Gov. Cooper’s Executive Order 80, which had been issued in late October, and that such a meeting would be a great outreach tool for reaching coastal stakeholders,” she said. “Part of the EO80 requires the Department of Environmental Quality to include stakeholder engagement in preparing a North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan to be submitted to the governor by March 1, 2020.”

Smith added that staff had already been in contact with representatives of coastal towns and counties wanting the division to hold regional workshops to help with land-use planning.

“Division staff decided to meet first with local government, managers, planners and emergency management coordinators to discuss the resiliency challenges they are facing and ideas they have for the future. These ideas will be discussed at the June summit, and stakeholder may give their input on them and bring up other ideas they have for resiliency planning,” she said.

Greg “Rudi” Rudolph, with the Carteret County Shore Protection Office, will be on the “Resilient Coastal Tourist Communities: Climate Ready Infrastructure and Land and Water Uses” panel along with Plymouth Mayor Brian Roth; Dawn York, Moffatt & Nichol; and Eugene Foxworth, Carteret County’s planning director.

Rudolph said that the term “resiliency” had been in the coastal lexicon for some time, “but it’s only been recently a base understanding of what this term means for coastal communities and businesses has really begun to crystallize. The adaptation component is also resonating as evidenced by the reception the North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan has received, and the governor’s executive order as a whole,” he said.

“Understanding the impacts of climate change with respect to the stresses it is placing on the environment, and therefore to the fabric of our coastal community is a key component in developing a path forward, and I‘m looking forward to participating in the summit in all of these regards.”

Jessica Whitehead, North Carolina Sea Grant’s coastal communities hazards adaption specialist and a member of the state’s coastal resiliency work group, told Coastal Review Online the summit will “Be a great overview course on the topic of resiliency for coastal communities, with a focus on case studies and options that are being implemented.”

Whitehead is to participate during both days of the summit, including as moderator for a discussion on climate change and coastal hazard risk and on a “next-steps” panel.

“While earlier meetings have focused on technical audiences, the June summit will provide information in formats that will be accessible for local elected and appointed officials, residents and business representatives, and others interested in the topics,” she said.

Whitehead and other Sea Grant staff regularly work with communities facing challenges related to adaptations for a range of climate impacts, “from today’s flood to tomorrow’s high tide.”

For more information about the summit, contact Zivanovic-Nenadovic at anaz@nccoast.org or 252-393-8185.

The front page featured image for this story is from the cover of the NOAA report and is a panoramic view of Florence Sept. 10, 2018, when the hurricane was at Category 4 strength, as captured by International Space Station Astronaut Alexander Gerst.

This is the second installment in a special reporting series on coastal resiliency. Read Part 1.

As Category 4 Hurricane Florence plowed toward the North Carolina coast last September, an all-hands weather code red reverberated throughout the eastern part of the state.

Mandatory evacuations ensued. Universities closed. National news reports warned travelers to steer clear of driving through the state’s I-95 corridor. Administrators and emergency personnel of towns on barrier islands braced for the worst as they moved inland to ride out the storm, one that as of Sept. 10, 2018, packed winds of 140 mph.

Three days later, Florence was downgraded to a Category 1, a storm that, according to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, would bring dangerous winds likely to damage roofs, shingles, vinyl siding and gutters, snap large branches and topple shallow-rooted trees, and cause power outages.

Moving at a snail’s pace, moisture-packed Florence did much more after coming ashore near Wrightsville Beach Sept. 14, 2018.

Over the course of four days, Hurricane Florence’s record-breaking storm surge – 9 to 13 feet – and rainfall amounts that exceeded 35 inches left a wake of devastation that included dozens of deaths and an estimated $17 billion in destruction in the state.

Say hello to the poster child of what a newly released Zurich North America study calls the “new normal” of hurricanes, storms that researchers say require bucking current storm preparedness methods, taking a holistic approach to addressing risks and changing the terminology we use to communicate possible post-storm consequences.

Florence and the 2016 Hurricane Matthew, researchers warn, are not anomalies.

Large, slow-moving, catastrophic flood-causing rainfall – these are the ingredients of a new recipe of hurricanes coastal residents, policy makers and governments can expect in our changing climate.

Unveiling Weaknesses

With each hurricane comes a series of lessons.

“Every disaster provides ample learning,” said Michael Szönyi, flood resilience program lead for Zurich and one of the authors of the study, “Hurricane Florence: Building resilience for the new normal.”

Included in the study, a collaborative work of Zurich North America, the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, and the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition-International that was published in April, are highlights of real-life experiences and some of the lessons taken from Hurricane Florence.

After a new generator failed three times during the storm, New Hanover County emergency management personnel were forced to switch to a backup generator and move the emergency operations center to the other side of the building.

The 911 call center was offline for eight hours during the move.

In New Bern, a man confident he had prepared well to ride out the storm in his home was getting to ready to escape rising floodwaters and hunker down on the second floor of his house when firefighters knocked on his door.

The house adjacent to his was in flames, set ablaze by a generator that caught fire, and firefighters could not guarantee his safety.

The man told researchers the experience taught him to heed future evacuation notices.

These are just some of the stories the study’s authors collected during interviews with local and state government officials, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, business owners, nonprofits, academics and private property owners.

Hurricane Florence further served as a reminder the ongoing risks posed by coal ash ponds and large-scale hog farm waste storage facilities in flood-vulnerable areas, according to the study.

More than 39 million gallons of raw or partially treated human sewage from inundated wastewater treatment systems and other sources spilled into the Cape Fear River from Greensboro to New Hanover County.

“Hog and poultry waste, fertilizers, and pesticides were flushed from thousands of acres of land,” according to the study.

On the socioeconomic side, Florence is a testament to an imbalance in storm recovery between the haves and have-nots.

Home and business owners with the assets and insurance are generally recovering better than those without, the study found.

Smaller communities with higher poverty rates in North Carolina’s coastal plain were still recovering from Hurricane Matthew when Florence struck the coast.

“This pattern of shortened recovery time and limited recovery support from various authorities exacerbates existing disparities in recovery,” the study states. “Higher income, better resourced and insured communities recover and rebuild faster, and more likely in time for the next storm, than their lower-income, resource scarce neighbors.”

That evidence, those stories – they help researchers identify the lessons learned from Hurricane Florence, use them to come up with recommendations to enhance flood resilience plans and share those recommendations to flood-risk prone communities around the world.

The idea, Szönyi said, is to shift the needle for communities to move from being less reactive to putting more preventive measures in place so they are best prepared for future storms.

Getting Ready for the Worst

ISET-International research associate and fellow author Rachel Norton said North Carolina put into practice some of the lessons learned after Hurricane Matthew.

“The state and local governments had learned from that event and they did collaborate and put in best practices from what they saw,” Norton said. “I think it’s a process to build those relationships ahead of time. It’s something that we see as important and needs to be worked on.”

Working together to address systemic risks is one of the recommendations made in the Zurich study and will likely be discussed at next month’s North Carolina Coastal Resilience Summit in Havelock.

.@battleshipnc is facing its next challenge head-on. Check out our report on #HurricaneFlorence to learn about the measures in innovation and #resilience to preserve the #WWII battleship. #HurricaneSeason @ISETInt https://t.co/ilqssMZe9U pic.twitter.com/Biuq2sQgeT

— Zurich (@ZurichNA) May 2, 2019

“We came up with these recommendations through talking with people,” Norton said. “It’s not that we magically came up with these. There is a way forward. It can seem challenging.”

Norton is in the lineup of speakers at the June 11-12 summit.

Participants of the event, hosted by the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management and North Carolina Coastal Federation, will learn about and discuss the development of the state’s Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan. The plan is being designed to boost the coastal region’s preparedness for everything from sea level rise and coastal and riverine flooding to increasing extreme weather and changing groundwater conditions.

Christian Kamrath, a coastal resilience specialist with the division, said that getting people to think clearly about long-term preparations is difficult when they’re in midst of a slow recovery.

“Some places are in a constant state of recovery,” he said. “There’s a lot of stress on everyone, particularly staff at the local level.”

But Kamrath said there is a shift in thinking and more is being done in pre-disaster mitigation planning.

It’s going to take working outside of the normal silos of work state and local governments have done in the past and addressing difficult topics, including critically assessing building in high-risk areas and discouraging development in those areas.

“Acknowledging this, communities should plan for the impacts of eroding shorelines, disincentivize development in areas of risk, and plan in advance so that if state or federal buy-outs are offered in the future they have already begun the discussions necessary to inform decisions,” according to the study.

Retreating is one of the least popular options discussed in coastal communities, particularly those dealing chronic erosion at inlets.

“There’s a lot that goes into thinking about where we build,” Norton said. “I think that one, yes, it’s a recommendation, but it is going to take a lot of thinking about how we take that recommendation and put in on the ground.”

Szönyi said that, big picture, looking at further coastal expansion raises questions about financing constant beach repair and recovery, if there is a limit to that and, if so, what that limit is.

Another way in which communities can help private property owners and business owners prepare is by helping them understand which insurance is best for them.

And, there is a better way in which to communicate storm threats, according to the study.

In other words, hurricanes can no longer be judged alone by the Saffir-Simpson scale, which was introduced in 1973.

“Trying to explain a natural event with one parameter or one number is generally challenging,” Szönyi said. “We’ve seen this not just in hurricanes. It also happens, for example, with earthquakes. I think we need to look at how to communicate all the components of the hazards. It’s changing and it’s going to be more frequent and it’s going to be more severe.”

Kamrath agrees that more effectively communicating the risks is a challenge.

Weighing storm risks primarily on the Saffir-Simpson scale has “been ingrained in our culture for decades,” he said.

North Carolina now has the online Flood Inundation Mapping Alert Network, or FIMAN, that monitors weather radar and stream, sound and river gauges. FIMAN predicts floods and breaks down different scenarios of flood severity and projected community impacts.

“Seeing is really telling a story,” Kamrath said. “There’s some great visualization tools coming out. I have hope in the promise of certain technology being able to communicate that risk.”

This is the first installment in a special reporting series on coastal resiliency.

MANTEO – Resilience, mitigation and adaptation are trending terms that have recently migrated into state policy discussions in a big way through the North Carolina Climate Change Interagency Council, which is set to hold its third meeting Friday in Raleigh. A focus of the agenda will be a state climate assessment, a critical part of building resiliency to the effects of climate change.

To some extent, the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission had stolen the new panel’s thunder with presentations and discussion on sea level rise and coastal resiliency during its meeting April 17-18 in Manteo. Still, it was the CRC’s baby to begin with, going back to its pained early efforts in 2010 to address rising seas and other effects of global warming by requesting a study from its science advisory panel.

But the CRC report that year predicting a 39-inch sea level rise by 2100 was rejected by the North Carolina General Assembly, and progress on climate change policy in North Carolina essentially took a long, politically induced nap.

Since then, with record rainfall, dramatic increases in flooding and increasingly vicious storms besetting the coast as well as the rest of the state, the new climate change council and the well-established Coastal Resources Commission not only have overlapping missions, they are on the front lines of a profound challenge to confront the future North Carolina is just starting to see: ghost forests; drowned farmland; inundated drainage systems, roads, streets and parking lots; eroded shorelines; an overheated ocean; and algae-fouled waterways.

In a state with more than 10 million people living in 100 counties divided into more than 550 incorporated cities and towns and split between urban and rural divides and conservative and liberal politics, it was apparent at just the second climate council meeting in February that the state has a formidable task, which Gov. Roy Cooper set out in the executive order he issued last fall.

“We need to plan for tomorrow’s planet, not yesterday’s planet,” said Tancred Miller, coastal and ocean policy manager with the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management during the climate council’s meeting Feb. 19 in Elizabeth City. “We need to be inclusive and transparent.”

The Department of Environmental Quality is leading the development of the state’s climate science assessment, which will include identifying risks and creating a resiliency plan to guide agencies and local governments. The assessment is to encompass guidance from recent reports, including the Independent Advisory Committee for Applied Climate Assessment, or IAC, report and the National Climate Assessment.

And proponents say the public needs to get on board, not only by acknowledging that there is a problem, but also by buying in to the proposed solutions.

“These local communities are really in need for help from the state to really understand their risks,” said Brian Boutin, director of The Nature Conservancy’s Albemarle-Pamlico Sounds Program, who spoke at the meeting in February.

In addition to Boutin, panelists at the meeting discussed the myriad effects on communities, ecosystems, infrastructure and businesses that threaten regions of the state and suggested remedies and strategies to begin to address them.

“We need to have a long enough planning horizon where the investments we make are … enduring,” Boutin said. The council can serve an important leadership role in bringing partners together and finding funds, he added. “It will require investment from all of us to be able to accomplish these goals.”

Cooper’s executive order directed each state agency to assess its energy use and find ways to increase efficiency, but reports from four agencies only served to illustrate the massive scale of the adaptation the notoriously clunky bureaucracy must make. For instance, the state Department of Transportation is analyzing use of electric vehicles in the state’s motor vehicle fleet, as well as the efficiency of its buildings and equipment and emissions from the ferries.

“What we’re doing here is extremely important,” said Colin Mellor of NCDOT’s environmental policy unit. “It’s complex and it’s far-reaching. And it’s worthwhile.”

Holly White, principal town planner with Nags Head, said that although her community has begun to address the significant issues that rising seas and climate change have created, “water doesn’t understand municipal boundaries.”

“There needs to be ongoing dialogue between agencies, governments and communities,” she added. “And financial assistance is needed for data collection and research.”

But so far, each community and state agency in North Carolina is scraping together money for projects from wherever they can. There is no plan yet for a dedicated budget or to create a funding stream, Miller said, although there are some federal and state sources that he said could be tapped. Also, a risk-benefit cost analysis is to be part of the state climate assessment.

As the state’s regulatory body over North Carolina coastal policy, the CRC has been dealing for years with climate change-related issues and their multifaceted effects and connections.

With the Climate Change Interagency Council’s focus on four strategies, avoidance, defense, accommodation and relocation, there is an organic relationship to coastal policies, Miller told the CRC during its meeting last week.

“There are many ways where the CRC rules touch on these policies,” he said.

But Miller suggested that it would be beneficial for the commission to change its regulatory perspective to allow for “mainstreaming” of adaptive and resiliency management strategies.

“Rules tend to look backward at what has been,” he said.

Indeed, the immensity of the challenges demand fresh approaches, said Skip Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch in Norfolk, Virginia, during a presentation to the CRC. For instance, Stiles said, combining forces across state lines and with nonprofits and government at every level would be a practical way to pool resources.

The lack of resources, especially financial resources, is a huge hindrance for every community that is trying to cope with climate change on multiple fronts, he said. It would behoove states like North Carolina and Virginia with flat coastal plains to regularly share data and information, Styles said. Virginia Beach already has issues with flooding from bodies of water in North Carolina.

Both states are today seeing effects from sea level rise, from saltwater intrusion on farm fields and in private wells to failing septic systems. Roadways, the “skeletons of our public body,” are flooding more frequently, and more severely, Styles said.

“I think one of the issues is the retrospective nature of our policies and our professions,” he said, referring to engineering and science. “The problem is the extremes we threw out is what we now need to build to.”

“You have a box with all these jigsaw pieces. You need a box top to tell you how to put it all together.”

Skip Stiles, director, Wetlands Watch

Virginia is also late to the party in establishing a statewide climate change plan, although its draft plan is expected to be finalized this year. But Styles said efforts such as North Carolina’s climate change council are important for coordination and implementation of strategic plans.

“You have a box with all these jigsaw pieces,” he said. “You need a box top to tell you how to put it all together.”

Jessica Whitehead, coastal communities hazards adaptation specialist with North Carolina Sea Grant, is one of the scientists working on the North Carolina climate assessment. She described the timeline for such complex work, which pulls together large amounts of data and hundreds of scientific reports, as ambitious. The hardest part was getting everybody on the same page, but Whitehead was optimistic that everyone is now focused on reaching the March 2020 deadline.

“I think it’s coming out of a sense of urgency,” she said. “I’m really pleased with the progress we’ve made so far. I’m very glad to see there’s an enthusiasm and a real desire to do it right.”

The tide has turned, so to speak, on the public’s recognition that climate change is affecting their lives already, and their concerns are being conveyed to their elected local officials.

“We’re hearing a lot more from communities who want to do this,” Whitehead said. “Our hope is the state-level assessment will help them.”

Members of the Coastal Resources Commission said they support the Climate Change Council’s efforts.

“The question becomes, are we proactive, reactive or inactive?” said Jamin Simmons, a CRC member from Hyde County, to his commission colleagues. “People say, ‘We can’t afford it.’ We have to afford it. The economic loss is too great. We keep kicking the can.”

Next: New Normal Demands New Approach

Second of two parts

An organization dedicated to protecting North Carolina’s natural resources has established a Butterfly Highway throughout the state as a way to restore pollinator and wildlife habitats.

Angel Hjarding, pollinator and wildlife habitat programs director for the North Carolina Wildlife Federation, explained that a backyard pollinator garden helps provide valuable food and habitat for pollinators and wildlife.

“They help us build a connected ‘highway’ of safe places for pollinators to eat and raise their young,” she said, which is the purpose of the Wildlife Federation’s Butterfly Highway. To help create corridors across North Carolina for butterflies, birds, bumblebees and all of the native pollinators in the state.

“The goal of the Butterfly Highway is to bring together a coalition of public and private land owners committed to protecting and conserving habitat for pollinators and wildlife across North Carolina,” she said. “These partnerships are critical to achieving our long-term conservation goals.”

The Butterfly Highway began with several communities in Charlotte wanting to beautify their environment through planting gardens, according to the federation’s website. “Through the Butterfly Highway, these communities are transforming community gardens, backyard gardens, public spaces and park fragments into new pollinator and wildlife habitats. The Butterfly Highway has also provided capacity for communities to participate in a community based citizen science project that tracks butterflies and bumble bees. No garden is too small to make an impact and all together they are a part of the Butterfly Highway.”

Since the program’s inception, the Butterfly Highway has achieved success across the state, Hjarding said. “From rural lands in Eastern North Carolina to urban cityscapes in the Piedmont, the Butterfly Highway is working to protect habitat and build advocacy and awareness for pollinators. More than 2,000 pollinator pit stops have been registered on the Butterfly Highway protecting over 30,000 acres of land for pollinators.”

To become part of the Butterfly Highway, visit the website, www.butterflyhighway.org, take the Butterfly Highway pledge and become part of the community. There are Butterfly Highway signs available on the site to post at a pollinator pit stop to help educate friends and neighbors on the importance of the pollinator garden.

Hjarding explained that the declines in monarch and honeybee populations have made national news headlines and brought attention to the troubles facing insect pollinators.

“The iconic monarch butterfly has faced a significant population decline, and in the winter of 2014-2015 reached an all-time low in their overwintering locations in Mexico,” she said. “Monarch butterflies were once commonly seen in the spring and fall migration through North Carolina but now sightings have become rarer due to the declining population and available habitat.”

She explained that the decline has been attributed to numerous factors that include forest loss in overwintering areas, loss of breeding habitat due to agricultural practices, urbanization, increase pesticide use and the effects of climate change.

“Adult monarchs rely on a variety of nectar plants to provide energy for their long migration to Mexico as well as milkweed to lay their eggs on, as milkweed is the only plant that monarch caterpillars will eat,” Hjarding said.

Hjarding added that without these flowers and plants, monarchs will not be able to survive. Species of wild bees and bumblebees have also declined during the last 50 years because of many of the same issues that are affecting monarchs and other pollinators.

“Pollinators such as bumblebees, butterflies, and other insects are critical to North Carolina’s biological diversity and agricultural economy. Our native pollinators face numerous threats including loss of native plant habitat that provides vital nectar and pollen resources,” Hjarding said.

The coastal areas of North Carolina are important for pollinator conservation, especially for monarchs.

“Monarchs use the sea winds during their fall migration and rely on fall blooming plants such as seaside goldenrod to fuel their journey south. You can help by planting native flowers, trees, shrubs and grasses that provide food and habitat for pollinators,” Hjarding said. “We have some ideas on our website to help you get started. We will also be offering a newly redesigned native pollinator seed mix on our website that people can order.”

Nancy Lee Adamson, senior pollinator conservation specialist with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service’s East National Technology Support Center in Greensboro, emphasized that the coast is especially important for some migratory pollinators such as monarch butterflies and the Gulf fritillary butterfly.

Xerces Society is a nonprofit invertebrate conservation organization. Invertebrates are animals without backbones such as insects, spiders, mollusks such as mussels and crustaceans like crabs.

“While it’s important to include milkweed and passion vine plants to host their caterpillars, the adults need nectar plants,” Adamson said.

Some of the most important nectar plants are found along the coast including groundsel and seaside goldenrod. Other coastal plants include blanket flowers, dotted mint, seashore mallow, vanilla leaf, golden asters and sweet pepperbush, Adamson continued. A full list can be found here.

Hjarding added that the Wildlife Federation is a leading partner in the newly established North Carolina Pollinator Conservation Alliance, or NCPCA.

“The mission of the NCPCA is to provide public and private landowners guidance and resources to best support the health and diversity of pollinators in North Carolina through protection, restoration and creation of pollinator habitat,” Hjarding said. “NCPCA is comprised of almost 30 partner organizations, agencies, universities, and corporations. NCPCA recently published an in-depth technical guidance document for the creation of pollinator habitat on solar farms.”

First of two parts

While planning your spring garden, consider adding native plants and more diversity to make your yard a haven for pollinators and wildlife.

“As agriculture has intensified and our populations have grown, a lot of habitat has been lost, so even a pot of flowers on the front porch can make a big difference by supporting hundreds of pollinators,” said Nancy Lee Adamson, senior pollinator conservation specialist with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in Greensboro.

The Xerces Society is a nonprofit invertebrate conservation organization. Invertebrates are animals without backbones such as insects, spiders, mollusks such as mussels and crustaceans like crabs.

If you’re adding plants with pollinators in mind, you’ll want to include a diversity of plants that bloom throughout the year, Adamson explained. “Ideally, include native wildflowers, shrubs, trees and even grasses. Native plants are best for butterflies and bees … but many other plants can benefit pollinators,” she said, adding that Xerces and other conservation organizations encourage avoiding invasive plants, a list of which can be found at the North Carolina Native Plant Society.

Pollinators are important because, besides pollinating 90 percent of wild plants and 75 percent of crops, “pollinators ensure the growth of plants that provide oxygen, clean water, materials for shelter, medicines, shade, reduce wind and noise, support the other wildlife we love to see like birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and amphibians, either as food themselves or the seed, fruit, or structure provided by plants,” she said.

One way pollinators support other wildlife is by being a food source for hatchlings. Audubon North Carolina Field Organizer Kim Brand said that large native trees are ideal larval host plants for butterflies and moths, which baby land birds survive on.

“Caterpillars are the most important food for baby land birds. A nest full of chickadees needs more than 5,000 caterpillars just from hatching to the time they leave the nest,” Brand said. Large native trees such as oaks, hickories and pines are an excellent source of caterpillars because so many species of butterflies and moths lay eggs on them.

“For example, more than 500 species lay eggs on oak trees native to North America; for comparison, fewer than 10 species of native moths and caterpillars lay eggs on ginkgo leaves. The ginkgo is a food desert as far as caterpillars and parent birds are concerned,” she said. “We can also support a lot of caterpillars – and therefore feed the baby birds – with native perennials like goldenrods, asters, and joe-pye weed. All species that also feed adult pollinators, doing double-duty.”

Adamson recommends Doug Tallamy’s “Bringing Nature Home” and Sarah Stein’s “Noah’s Garden” as resources for understanding connections between native plants, native pollinators and other wildlife, including many birds. Xerces offers online plant lists and planting guides.

Edible plants or plants with fragrant leaves are pollinator plants that are also fun for kids.

“Strawberries, lavender, mint, parsley, dill, blackberries, black raspberries, onions, okra, squash, and passionfruit are all very easy to grow,” Adamson added. Just remember that caterpillars are butterfly larvae and eat the plants. The black swallowtail butterfly depends on parsley family plants, such as fennel and dill.

Eliminate Pesticides

Another simple way to provide habitat is to eliminate the use of pesticides, including herbicides, and leave unmown areas, dead trees or brush piles. Adamson recommended placing signs in your yard to help others understand that an unmown area or brush pile is intentional and help start a conversation about pollinator conservation.

“If no pesticides are used, the plants also support diverse predatory and parasitoid insects that eat the insects we consider pests, such as aphids and whiteflies. We might not think of ladybugs as pollinators, but they do some pollination, and depend on the same diverse flowers that bees and butterflies do, while their larvae are also voracious aphid and insect egg eaters,” she said.

An added benefit of using native pollinator plants is that the plants help protect soil. The roots and the microorganisms they support help water infiltrate deeper into the earth and reduce flooding.

“The plants not only help slow the movement of water, hold soil in place, and create deeper channels for water to reach underground, but the microorganisms that live in connection with the plants help clean the water,” Adamson explained. “Besides adding beauty to your landscape, native pollinator plants can also provide shelter from wind and shade.”

She recommends evergreens such as wax myrtle, inkberry holly, yaupon, sweet bay magnolia and eastern red cedar to support diverse pollinators, including one of her favorite butterflies, the juniper hairstreak butterfly.

“Many of our shade trees like red maple and black gum produce huge quantities of nectar and host diverse caterpillars. Even native grasses are vital, sheltering bumble bee nests when they lodge over, keeping the colony dry and out of site from predators like hawks.”

Proper Viewing

Adamson reminds you that if you get too close to bees, wasps or other insects on flowers, they will fly away.

“Only bees and wasps with colonies, like honey bees and yellow jackets, become defensive if you get too close to their nests, but not flowers. Most of our bees and wasps are solitary, “she said. “Unlike honey bees and yellow jackets that have colonies with a queen, young and food to protect, most bees and wasps are single moms, collecting food to place in a nest cell underground or in a cavity where she will lay an egg and never see her young hatch,” she said.

An example is the mud dauber wasp that collect spiders to lay eggs on. “Even though several tubes may be placed close together, single wasps are making each tube, so will either hide or fly away if you get too close. You can buy a wasp-deterrent paper lantern to keep yellow jackets from nesting near your door or paint your porch ceiling blue to keep them from nesting close to your house.”

She explained that if you place a bee observation box for solitary bees by your front door, “It is fun to watch them depositing pollen and nectar, laying an egg, then sealing the cells. Remember, your plantings stewardship can help support pollinators while also contributing to the well-being of your whole community,” she added.

“We just joined up with Bee City and Bee Campus USA a wonderful group that started in Asheville, NC www.beecityusa.org, so we hope to be able to support more urban greening work and fun art related efforts in future.”

Adamson pointed out that riparian areas and wetlands are especially important for pollinators. “During droughts they may be the only places where pollinators can find nectar and pollen producing plants. As urban areas grow, protecting riparian corridors is vital for pollinators and other wildlife, and can also help ensure green space for our own well-being. More and more research is highlighting the importance of green spaces on our health, cognitive abilities and creativity.”

Some folks think that pollinator gardens could cause allergies, but only wind-pollinated plants cause hay fever, she said. “Plants that require a pollinator have sticky, heavy pollen and are never listed in pollen counts, only wind-pollinated plants like oaks, pines, ragweed and grasses.”

Next: The Butterfly Highway

Coastal towns and counties have addressed on the local level managing navigable waters through ordinances that typically grant authority to remove derelict and abandoned vessels and other debris.

The state does not have a formal program or legislation to regulate the removal or disposal of abandoned and derelict vessels, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s marine debris program, but there are laws allowing for a person to obtain ownership over abandoned vehicles, including vessels.

There is a general statute, 153A-132, that gives coastal-area counties the authority, by ordinance, to prohibit the abandonment of vessels in navigable waters within the county’s ordinance-making jurisdiction, and essentially treat abandoned vessels in the same manner as abandoned and junked cars. The state first granted Dare and Brunswick counties the authority in 2013 to address abandoned vessels. The general statute was amended in 2015 to include all coastal-area counties: Beaufort, Bertie, Brunswick, Camden, Carteret, Chowan, Craven, Currituck, Dare, Gates, Hertford, Hyde, New Hanover, Onslow, Pamlico, Pasquotank, Pender, Perquimans, Tyrrell, and Washington.

Hyde County Board of Commissioners passed earlier this year an ordinance prohibiting abandonment of vessels in Ocracoke’s Silver Lake and Currituck County board of commissioners adopted in July 2016 an ordinance prohibiting the abandoning vessels in navigable waters.

In 1981, the state General Assembly authorized Beaufort, in Carteret County, to regulate navigable waters within its boundaries. In September of this year, the Beaufort Board of Commissioners approved an ordinance to remove debris from waters in the town’s jurisdiction.

Beaufort Mayor Rett Newton explained that the issue of boater accountability has been ongoing for decades in Beaufort, as well as in other coastal communities, which prompted the town to move forward with its navigable waters ordinance.

“The management of abandoned and derelict vessels, particularly after storms, elimination of gray water and black water discharge, and identification and removal of illegal moorings are some key components of the ordinance,” Newton said in an email response to Coastal Review Online. “This effort is a great first step toward consideration of a more formal — and safe — mooring area and also helps us progress toward the goal of becoming North Carolina’s first publicly-declared Clean Water Coastal Community.”

The ordinance Beaufort commissioners adopted Sept. 24 has “received tremendous support from Beaufort citizens who have frequently seen boats negatively impacting our amazing coastal ecosystems, either drifting up on the Rachel Carson Reserve marsh habitat during a storm or sunk in our waterways,” Newton said. “It is also well-recognized that we have been very fortunate that we have not had a storm push an illegally moored vessel into private and public docks, causing significant damage to the docks and boats that are legally secured to the docks.”

Newton added that the town also received support from the much larger Beaufort boating community that he said abides by established boating laws and regulations.

John Day, Beaufort’s town manager, said that putting this ordinance in place after so many years without regulation meant there was a great deal of accumulated debris, “Everything from fishing gear to illegal moorings, to sunken boats to derelict and abandoned vessels.”

Between approval of the ordinance in late September and Monday morning, 123,958 pounds of debris have been disposed of, mostly from Taylor’s Creek. The total included 11 vessels, seven of which were partially or fully submerged, 34 boat moorings, or unpermitted permanent anchors, and seven car tires.

“We still have one vessel and two large mounds of fishing net to be removed,” Day said, adding that those were expected to be removed next week.

“Fortunately, we were able to begin implementation of the new ordinance with a $67,000 grant from NOAA and a $5,000 contribution from community members to begin the marine debris cleanup effort,” Day said. “We partnered with the Rachel Carson Reserve on the grant, and contracted with TowBoatUS to remove the debris.”

The Beaufort Police Department is responsible for enforcement of the ordinance and has worked closely with TowBoatUS to remove moorings and derelict vessels.

“Beaufort (Police Department) also informed boat owners who were in violation of the ordinance of the new regulations — most complied by moving their boats from the regulated areas. Others relinquished ownership and their boats, which had little or no value, were removed and destroyed,” Day said.

He added that three boats that washed ashore on the Rachel Carson Reserve were removed by the Coast Guard, which also removed all hazardous material, and TowBoatUS towed the vessels to be destroyed.

“Additionally, five boats were slammed into the Duke Marine Lab dock by Florence. Duke paid the town for the removal costs of the boats, and the town exercised its authority under the ordinance to remove and dispose of the boats,” he said.

What has been most surprising about moving forward with the ordinances is the support, Day said. “Unlike many initiatives, I have not encountered any opposition to this effort, only very strong support.”

Wrightsville Beach has in place an ordinance, “Abandoned Vessel Unlawful; Removal Authorized,” which states “A. It shall be unlawful for the registered owner or person entitled to possession of a vessel to cause or allow such vessel to be abandoned as the term is defined herein. B. Upon investigation, the authorized town official may determine that a vessel is an abandoned vessel and order the vessel removed.” The ordinance was passed in October 2002 and amended August 2011.

Wrightsville Beach Town Manager Timothy Owens said that the New Hanover County town rarely had to deal with abandoned and derelict vessels until this year. Owens said he couldn’t explain what changed.

Unoccupied, anchored vessels are more common in the summer months. “The town is looking to strengthen its current ordinances and work with other governmental agencies that may have some jurisdiction,” Owens said.

In the nearly six years Owens has worked for the town, most removals have been voluntary, once the owner was contacted or citations written, he added.

Currituck County Manager Daniel F. Scanlon said that over the past couple of years, Currituck has dealt with about five abandoned vessels.

Currituck’s ordinance was adopted to address enforcement and ultimately the county’s right to mediate the issue and attempt to assess vessel owners, Scanlon said.

“The county does not have the resources to address this issue so we always have to contract the work. In order to address potential abuse — we have had a couple of vessels that have been stripped of identification and either set adrift, sunk, abandoned or simply tied up to private property and left — the vessel has to be a hindrance or danger to navigable waters before the county will engage.”

Scanlon added that some of the challenges have been access, both physical and legal, Coastal Area Management Act, or CAMA, regulations and possible environmental impairments.

Brunswick County put in place an ordinance early last year to manage abandoned and derelict vessels.

Capt. Mose Highsmith with the Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office said that when the ordinance was enacted 22 vessels were documented and tagged.

He explained that of those vessels, 14 were removed by the owners, three by the Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office and two by commercial salvage companies. One could not be removed, but was demolished in place by a commercial salvage company to eliminate any hazard to navigation. The remaining two vessels were large shrimp boats that were too costly to remove.

“The current mission of the (Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office) marine patrol, as it relates to abandoned and derelict vessels, is to monitor boats that are discovered at anchor to avoid further abandoned boats,” he said. “This is done daily as part of the normal marine patrol activities.”

There are a handful of situations that would warrant boats to be tagged and monitored: if the boat is anchored or moored in the waterways for 10 days or more; is within 75 feet of another vessel; is aground, capsized, sinking or sunk or in danger of the previous; and if the vessel appears to be neglected and unfit to be used for navigation as intended.

Vessels will also be tagged and monitored when not displaying a Coast Guard-approved anchor light while at anchor after sunset or a valid state registration or Coast Guard-documented number.

Highsmith said that in the year and a half since the ordinance was put in place, the number of abandoned and derelict boats has been substantially reduced.

“The process to get an ordinance enacted and a fully functioning program in place is challenging. There was a substantial financial commitment by the county manager and commissioners to remove a number of boats so that owners were convinced that we were serious. Maintenance of the program, however, is extremely reasonable,” Highsmith said.

“Boat owners are now aware or quickly learn that mooring and leaving boats unattended is no longer an acceptable practice,” he said, adding that communication between vessel owners and maritime law enforcement, including the county sheriff’s office, Marine Fisheries and the Coast Guard, and compliance have greatly improved.

There has been positive response to the ordinance and decrease in vessels in the waterways, Highsmith said. “The boating public has expressed appreciation for the reduction of vessels that create navigation challenges. The citizens with waterfront properties have expressed appreciation (for) the reduction of vessels that create an eyesore to the community. Travelers who use popular anchorages have expressed appreciation for the increased safety and space available for overnight transient vessels and day recreation boaters.”

During hurricanes, owners tend to seek safe harbor for the vessels in a protected anchorage, Highsmith explained, adding that there was an in increase in mooring in the creek adjacent to Fish Factory Road during Florence though most of the vessels moored for the storm were removed immediately after the storm.

“Two vessels remain unattended and we are following the ordinance to monitor and encourage the owners to remove the vessels,” said Highsmith.

The Lockwood Folly River was a safe harbor for many commercial fishing vessels during the storm. All of them were removed and returned to their docks when it was safe to navigate.

“Only one vessel, which was a private cabin vessel, sunk while at its mooring on the side of the river. Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office is in communication with the owner to resolve this situation,” Highsmith said.

He said several steps must be taken before a vessel may be relocated, starting with giving the owner 10 days to respond with a plan to repair or remove the vessel after the boat has been posted as a derelict vessel or a vessel in danger of sinking. The owner then has 20 days to move forward with the plan and complete removal. If there’s no response from the owner or the removal or repair is not completed within 30 days of initial posting, the boat will be tagged and documented as abandoned.

Attempts to contact the owner are made by phone, delivering or posting a notice at the owner’s residence, and certified mail by Brunswick County Sheriff’s office Marine Patrol. If all attempts to contact the owner are unsuccessful, the vessel will be deemed abandoned and sold at public auction. The highest bidder is presented a sheriff’s bill of sale that can be presented to the North Carolina Wildlife Division to enable them to register the vessel.

Read Part 1: Hundreds of Derelict Boats in Storm’s Wake

Read Part 2: State Law Dictates Displaced Boat Response

Second in a series.

There were hundreds of derelict, abandoned and displaced vessels found in coastal North Carolina waterways after Hurricane Florence, and about half remain where they were found, though the hazardous material was removed.

Seven vessels of the 362 flagged by the U.S. Coast Guard were relocated because the vessels were in environmentally sensitive areas and 126 were moved or handled by the owner or a third party, such as a salvage company or through insurance, according to information provided by state Emergency Management, part of the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.

The Coast Guard shared with Emergency Management a little more than a week ago the details on the disposition of the 362 vessels, which were assessed by the Emergency Support Function No. 10, or ESF-10, Unified Command, consisting of the Coast Guard as the incident commander, the state Wildlife Resource Commission and the state Department of Environmental Quality.

ESF-10 Oil and Hazardous Materials Response, when activated, provides federal support in response to an actual or potential discharge and uncontrolled release of oil or hazardous materials.

Keith Acree, public information officer with Emergency Management, responded to Coastal Review Online in an email Wednesday, saying that the state determined which vessels were moved. Pollutants were removed from each boat and some were moved to pre-determined locations by the Wildlife Resources Commission and DEQ. Best management practices were monitored and followed for the duration of the operation, he said.

Coast Guard Chief Jeremy Thomas, incident management division supervisor, said in an interview that the ESF-10 mission was successful.

“The Coast Guard did what the state asked it to do … mitigate pollution threats,” he added.

During the ESF-10 mission, the Coast Guard works for the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he said, adding the Wildlife Resources Commission did a great deal of work to find the owners of the displaced vessels, though not all could be located.

Acree said that the 362 vessels that were assessed by the ESF-10 Unified Command’s Task Force North, composed of Beaufort, Craven, Hyde and Pamlico counties, which assessed 197 total targets, or vessels, and Task Force South, made up of Bladen, Brunswick, Carteret, New Hanover, Onslow and Pender counties, which assessed 165 total targets.

While no vessels were removed by Task Forth North, Task Force South moved seven vessels from environmentally sensitive areas to less-sensitive areas.

Of the Task Force North’s 197 total targets, no ESF-10 action was taken on 47 vessels, which means these boats were assessed and deemed pre-storm derelicts or no oil or hazardous materials were on board. Oil and hazardous material were removed from another 79 vessels, which were returned to the general area where they were found, as long as the location did not present a hazard to navigation. Owners, salvage or insurance managed the mitigation or removal of 71 vessels, which required no further ESF-10 action.

With the 165 vessels marked by Task Force South, no action was taken for 62 vessels deemed to have been in place before the storm or to have no oil or hazardous material on board. Oil and hazardous materials were removed from 41 vessels and then returned to the general area.

Capt. Christian Gillikin of Atlantic Coast Marine Group during a presentation to the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Agriculture and Natural and Economic Resources meeting Nov. 13 in Raleigh recommended an assessment and scope of work for the removal and disposal of the vessels that remained in place after the removal of hazardous materials. He also suggested that owners of state-registered vessels carry liability insurance in an amount sufficient to cover any future expenses related to salvage, recovery and damage from storms, operator error and neglect, to keep state taxpayers from being stuck with the bill.

Gillikin explained that Atlantic Coast Marine Group was a point of contact for the removal of derelict vessels after the hurricane for those that involved ESF-10. He told legislators that during a statewide survey performed by the Coast Guard, that the more than 350 vessels were flagged for hazardous materials response. The Coast Guard affixed red stickers to the vessels found to have hazardous material to notify the party responsible for the boat.

Gillikin estimated that about half of the boats could not be traced back to the owners because some vessels were too damaged to find the information, or their registration numbers were incorrect. Also, sometimes when the proper owner is identified, those individuals are unwilling to take responsibility.

The ESF-10 program does not provide for wreck removal or disposal of vessels deemed an environmental threat, he said. That requires simultaneous implementation of another program, EFS-3, which “activates and develops work priorities in cooperation with state governments to further and complete the cleanup process.”

Gillikin said that under ESF-10 the federal government raises the sunken, damaged or derelict boat after a storm, removes all the hazardous materials and then leaves the wreck for the state to manage the disposal. He gave four examples of vessels that, after removing hazardous materials, were left in place or were sunk again.

“If a vessel was sunk, we used airbags, whatever type of salvage gear we needed, lifted the vessel, all the hazardous materials were removed, and then the vessel was sunk back down,” Gillikin explained.

He said that over the long term, submerged, derelict and abandoned vessels could cause navigation hazards in and around marinas and impact fisheries, cause sea habitat issues, negatively affect public perception of tourism destinations and lead to complaints by nearby homeowners. Vessel decomposition is another long-term environmental effect, he said, using a fiberglass sailboat to illustrate. He said fiberglass will delaminate or fall apart over time.

When Gillikin suggested to the legislators that an assessment be performed at a cost of no more than $50,000, he estimated that about half of the original number of boats remain in waterways.

He said once the assessment has been made of the remaining vessels, a total project cost could be determined. “For example, removal fee would be $395 per foot … if we took an average 32-foot vessel, $395 per foot, would be $12,640.” The total project cost can be more accurately determined after the assessment is completed.

Gillikin said Friday during a follow-up interview that he was waiting to see if funds would be approved by the legislature to move forward with the assessment.

Acree told Coastal Review Online Wednesday that the Unified Command considered implementing ESF-3, “but based on North Carolina law, decided it did not have the authority to remove and dispose of the vessels, which are private property.

“It was their understanding that the legislature has given authority over abandoned vessels to local governments, if those governments decide to pass an ordinance pursuant to NCGS 153A-132(i),” which is called the “Removal and disposal of abandoned and junked motor vehicles; abandoned vessels.”

“Given the decentralized and localized authority for derelict vessels, they believed there were significant legal authority questions related to utilizing ESF-3 by the state,” he said.

Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, a member of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Agriculture and Natural and Economic Resources, said in an interview Wednesday that she was shocked to learn the number of vessels flagged during the statewide survey by the Coast Guard after Florence.

Harrison, who also has a home in Beaufort, said she’s noticed that derelict and abandoned vessels have been an issue for some time.

She explained that at the meeting Tuesday, the committee supported recommending that boat owners carry liability insurance to help fund ridding the waterways of the debris.

One point that was discussed Tuesday that did concern her, she said, is that boats were not removed but instead were sunk after the hazardous material is removed.

The General Assembly is scheduled to convene Nov. 27 to consider, among other things, hurricane relief and Harrison said the issue may be raised at that time. If not then, the oversight committee will recommend the issue of derelict and abandoned boats be addressed at a later meeting, she said.

Next: How local officials are addressing the problem

Read Part 1: Hundreds of Derelict Boats in Storm’s Wake

First in a series.

BEAUFORT – Paula Gillikin, central sites manager for the North Carolina Coastal Reserve, was on hand in late October to monitor a salvage company remove a displaced houseboat that Hurricane Florence had washed from Taylor’s Creek onto the marsh of Rachel Carson Reserve’s Carrot Island.

Gillikin oversees the Rachel Carson Reserve, one of 10 North Carolina Coastal Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve sites, a part of the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management, under the state Department of Environmental Quality. The North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserve is managed through a federal-state partnership between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the state Division of Coastal Management.

After Hurricane Florence, the U.S. Coast Guard during a statewide survey flagged 383 vessels requiring salvage for hazardous materials response. Over the long term, these vessels can affect fisheries and marine habitats, lead to complaints about wreckage and garbage waste and hurt coastal tourism, according to information presented Tuesday to the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Agriculture and Natural and Economic Resources.

The presentation noted the Emergency Support Function 10, or ESF 10 – Oil and Hazardous Materials Response, which provides federal support in response to an actual or potential discharge and uncontrolled release of oil or hazardous materials when activated, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency website.

Legislators in attendance Tuesday agreed with the presenters from Atlantic Coast Marine Group who suggested the state should look into requiring boat owners to carry liability insurance sufficient to cover the state’s cost of salvage and environmental mitigation.

Gillikin, on that brisk Saturday morning in late October while standing watch over the vessel relocation, said that the large-scale salvage company, Resolve Marine Group, had been working with the Coast Guard on vessel removal for the post-Hurricane Florence FEMA-funded effort. She noted the company’s expertise and equipment to protect the environment from pollution threats.

“The company uses what we call a number of environmental best management practices wherever they can,” she said.

The crew from Resolve spent the morning situating large, ship-launching airbags under the houseboat to inflate and then lift the vessel for removal, with the goal to limit further damage to the sensitive habitat.

“We’re making really careful decisions about what we’re doing with vessels,” Gillikin said.

Coast Guard Petty Officer 3^rd Class Brandon Hillard, who spent time with Gillikin on Carrot Island during the salvage operation, explained that the state requested the Coast Guard relocate several vessels that were displaced or sunken in environmentally sensitive areas.

The Coast Guard worked with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, DEQ and other agencies including NOAA, and Resolve to provide federal oversight, personnel and portable work spaces.

“The Coast Guard-contracted salvage group provided crews, air boats, barges, excavators, salvage equipment, dive teams, tug boats and a 225-ton crane,” Hillard said. “The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission provided wildlife officers and law enforcement boats to supervise the operations, and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality provided personnel, expertise and boats.”

Sarah Young, public information officer with DEQ, said that of the 10 reserve sites, vessels are most often grounded at the Rachel Carson and Masonboro Island reserves, given the proximity of these sites to heavily used waterways and local anchorages.

“Vessels commonly come ashore at one or both of these sites during storm events, including hurricanes, nor’easters, and king tide events. If vessels are displaced in larger numbers, it is usually associated with a hurricane,” she said.

The burden on state resources varies depending how the vessel was displaced, Young said.

“For example, vessels were removed from the sensitive habitats of reserve sites post-Hurricane Florence primarily through FEMA hurricane response funding for the declared disaster,” she said. “If a vessel is displaced outside of a declared disaster, the state uses more resources, including staff time and sometimes funds to hire a salvage company to remove the vessel if it has officially been abandoned.”

There are several steps that must be taken to have the vessels removed from the reserves.

The reserve first collects information about the vessel and its location, especially if it’s in a sensitive habitat, and often works with municipalities and the Wildlife Resources Commission to find its owners, determine their salvage plans and to advise them that salvage should be conducted to minimize environmental impacts, Young continued.

“If the owner is unresponsive and gives up interest in the vessel, the vessel can eventually be removed from the reserve property if funding resources are available. However, this process can be a long one because the state does not have a specific policy that governs removal, disposal, and dedicated and sustained funding to support such efforts,” she said.

Young explained that the state has granted authority to counties and towns to pass ordinances related to waterways within their enforcement boundaries. “Fortunately, some reserve sites are located within local jurisdictions that have specific ordinances about handling abandoned vessels, which makes the process of removing them more efficient.”

Young added, “Displaced vessels are a management challenge for the reserve sites, as they often damage habitat and can pollute the environment.”

Hillard said that the Coast Guard acted in support of the state, under the ESF 10 mission, “to oversee the mitigation of pollution from those vessels that were sunken or displaced in the disaster-declared counties after Hurricane Florence.”

The mission of ESF 10 is to prevent, minimize or mitigate the release of pollutants and hazardous materials in the environment, which sometimes includes vessel relocations as determined by the state.

As the federal on-scene coordinator for the ESF 10 mission, the Coast Guard supervised the response to pollution threats aboard these vessels, Hillard explained. “In support of the state, the Coast Guard then verified through documentation that the removal of pollutants was complete.”

These pollutants included gasoline, diesel, oil, flares, fire extinguishers and chemical containers.

“Vessels that were actively discharging pollutants such as fuel were, of course, a top priority to be mitigated,” Hillard said.

The state then decides how and when the vessels themselves may be removed if they are not claimed.

Hillard said that the ESF 10 Unified Command, which is made up of state and federal agencies including the Coast Guard, was given up to a $10 million mission assignment through FEMA and has acted in support of the state to mitigate pollution threats, but not to remove debris.

“Salvage is a complex operation and many factors can affect the cost of operations, such as the size of vessel, sensitivity of habitat, amount of pollution on the displaced vessel, ease of access to the vessel, assets available and weather conditions during operations,” he said.

The state may determine certain vessels to be in an environmentally sensitive area and prioritize removal of those vessels if they are unclaimed and cannot be removed by an owner, marina, harbormaster or other government entity, Hillard said. “This is to help ensure that fragile habitats in those environmentally sensitive areas are protected from further damage over time.”

Legislative reporter Kirk Ross contributed to this report.

Continue Reading

• Part 2: State Law Dictates Displaced Boat Response

Last of three parts

This story has been updated to include additional comments from Bill Norton, a spokesperson for Duke Energy.

WILMINGTON – A Duke University study of three former coal ash discharge lakes in North Carolina found Sutton Lake to have the highest levels of selenium before Hurricane Florence. Now researchers are turning to the long-term effects of the coal ash breach here.

Selenium is an element found in coal ash that can cause deformities and impair growth and reproduction in fish and other aquatic life.

Published last year, the study, led by environmental scientist Jessica Brandt, included Mayo Lake near Roxboro and Mountain Lake Island near Charlotte. Samples of surface water, bottom sediment and fish were collected from each lake in 2015.

Tests showed 85 percent of all fish muscle samples examined from Sutton Lake contained selenium levels above the Environmental Protection Agency’s, or EPA, threshold.

A Duke Energy spokesperson points to the company’s own testing as well as that of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

“Duke Energy has conducted a continuous robust sampling program at Sutton Lake following Hurricane Florence assessing a wide range of trace elements, including selenium, in both the total and dissolved forms,” company spokesperson Bill Norton said in an email. “Both Duke Energy’s fisheries sampling program and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources sampling program continue to show Sutton Lake has a healthy and sustaining fish community, despite what others who have not conducted continuous sampling in the lake may claim.”

Sutton Lake’s year-round mild water temperatures have made it a popular fishing spot for anglers throughout the years.

The 1,100-acre lake is one of a few places where largemouth bass may be caught throughout the winter.

Heat from the plant creates a long growing season in the lake, which is also popular among recreational boaters.

The reservoir was formed in 1972 after Carolina Power & Light impounded Catfish Creek to create a cooling source for its coal-fired L.V. Sutton Power Station.

Though the lake was for years classified as a private cooling pond, it has been open to the public since its creation thanks to an easement between the state and CP&L. The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission manages a boat ramp at the lake.

Nearly four years ago, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, reclassified the lake from a private cooling pond to a public resource, a move aimed to protect the lake with more stringent water quality standards. Sutton Lake has the same classification as the nearby Cape Fear River.

The state also raised the classification to “high hazard” for two dams that are part of the coal ash impoundments next to Sutton Lake. State officials annually inspect both dams.

The dams were inspected within a month of Hurricane Florence’s Sept. 14 landfall in Wrightsville Beach. No major problems were found, state officials reported.

Understanding the Potential Long-Term Effects

Duke Energy has closed public access to Sutton Lake since the storm.

When access is reopened, environmental scientists plan to begin testing Sutton Lake’s sediments, a method they say will be most effective in revealing any potential long-term effects from the coal ash breach.

Brandt plans to examine whether sediments were stirred up by the storm and what impacts that disturbance to the sediments may have in the lake.

“In a lake we’re not seeing the same flow rate as in a river so water that comes into that system stays in that system longer,” she said. “That allows contaminants that are attached to particulates more time to settle. Some elements can be released over these disturbance events.”

Duke University professor Avner Vengosh said water quality will continue to be monitored, but he did not expect to see a huge amount of coal ash contaminants from those tests. He too plans to collect sediment samples.

“We’ll have to get samples of sediments at the bottom of the lake and try to determine if there’s coal ash in the sediment,” he said.

Vengosh’s research has found that cooling lakes receive the highest levels of ash contaminants.

“You have a long-term accumulation of sediments with coal ash,” Vengosh said. “If you go into a few centimeters of sediments you find huge concentrations of arsenic. That’s the chronic thing that’s happening all over North Carolina.”

Scratching the Surface

Duke Energy does not plan to test sediments in the lake or the river and state officials did not respond to questions by press time about whether the state would conduct further sediment tests.

“We’ve (Duke Energy) found that water testing is much more informative than sediment testing in determining potential ash impacts,” Norton, the Duke Energy spokesperson, said in an email.

“We’ve found that water testing is much more informative than sediment testing in determining potential ash impacts,”

Bill Norton, Duke Energy spokesperson

He pointed to the company’s experience in testing water following the 2014 coal ash pond spill in the Dan River.

Duke Energy found that the heavy metals that turned up in post-spill sediment samples taken from the river were most related to garden soil, not coal ash, Norton said.

“Sediment testing in the Dan River following the 2014 ash release showed that the substances we tested for were present throughout the river, both upstream of the release and below it,” Norton said. “Because these same elements are naturally occurring, sediment testing did not provide definitive data to establish the presence of coal ash. To be sure, the Dan River incident was catalytic for Duke Energy in terms of accelerating our basin closure plans. But in terms of the river’s health, the Dan River returned to normal in a matter of just a few days after that 2014 incident.”

Tests conducted by a team of Appalachian State University researchers tell a different story.

Using canoes to gather samples with a trowel and corer, researchers collected sediments from the riverbed and center channel of the Dan River on Oct. 5, 2014, upstream and downstream of the power plant.

Sediment samples were collected again in mid-May 2015 in five locations.

“In the Dan River research we were able to identify coal ash in the bottom sediment using magnetic methods as well as microscopically,” said Ellen Cowan, the project’s lead researcher and professor at the university’s Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences. “From the ash composition we were able to identify ash from the initial release as well as subsequent reworking from upstream. Coal ash particles are in the silt size and therefore they settle from the water column to the bottom.”

The ash basins at the Sutton plant remained stable throughout the flooding, Norton said, and company officials have “not observed that ash from our basins was displaced.”

“Thus it’s entirely reasonable to conclude – as the state’s and our water samples scientifically prove – that the Wilmington-area public and environment are safe from coal ash impacts,” he said.

In the case of Sutton Lake, Cowan said, contaminants can re-contaminate the water column as they are released over time.

“It is therefore important to test samples from the lake and river bottom for the presence of coal ash and its associated contaminants,” she said.

Vengosh agreed.

His work in the 2008 Tennessee Valley Authority coal ash spill, “clearly demonstrated that the river sediments fill with coal ash was the major problem, not the river water.”

“That is why TVA worked to take out the coal ash from the river bottom sediments,” Vengosh said. “I am afraid that Duke Energy is not revealing the true information here. The bottom line is that there is no any other way but testing the river bottom sediments for evaluating possible coal ash migration from the landfill to Sutton Lake and also to the Cape Fear River.”

Second of three parts

WILMINGTON – Duke Energy will collect and test water samples in Sutton Lake and the Cape Fear River through November.

“We will extend that effort if data demonstrate it’s needed,” Duke Energy spokesperson Bill Norton said in an email statement.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, approved Duke Energy’s monitoring plan. State officials did not respond to questions by press time about whether it has plans for further testing.

‘No Evidence’ of Harm

Duke Energy maintains that only a small amount of ash and ash by-products escaped and no significant harm had been done to the lake or the river.

In a Sept. 19 update the company posted on its website, Duke Energy reported inspectors at the site had identified cenospheres in the lake, “but water sample results show no evidence of a coal ash impact to the lake or the water entering the river.”

Cenospheres are lightweight, hollow beads made primarily of alumina and silica that are produced as a byproduct of coal combustion.

The company collected water samples over a period of a few days beginning Sept. 16. The test results showed no arsenic reading above 1.11 micrograms per liter.

Testing from three locations in Sutton Lake showed that coal ash contamination was higher than in the river, with arsenic levels reaching as high as 7.37 micrograms per liter.

Coal ash contamination levels are routinely higher than those found in the Cape Fear, according to the company.

DEQ has validated Duke’s test results.

DEQ’s Division of Water Resources took water samples at the breached lake dam Sept. 22 and again on Sept. 25, 26 and 27. The division also took water samples about 1 mile downriver daily between Sept. 25-27.

The lab analysis showed all metals, including arsenic, selenium, boron and other heavy metals associated with coal ash were below state water quality standards.

The one exception was dissolved copper, which “showed a slight elevation” that could be a result of extreme area flooding, according to the state. The agency pointed out that copper levels were the same upstream of the breach.

“A lot of pollutants were released in the flood waters,” said Donna Lisenby, global advocacy manager for the Waterkeeper Alliance.

Junkyards, poultry and hog farms and wastewater treatment plants were among a number of pollution sources swept up by floodwaters that poured into the river.

Waterkeeper Alliance was there Sept. 21, the day the coal ash pond breached, releasing its contents into Sutton Lake and spilling into the river.

“That day was when the pollution levels were at its highest,” Lisenby said. “We think the highest coal ash pollution load went into Sutton Lake.”

Waterkeeper Alliance took its samples to Pace Analytical, a certified lab based in Asheville, that showed arsenic levels at 71 times higher than the state safety standard for water quality.

A water sample collected from the largest breach of the lake had an arsenic level of 32.8 micrograms per liter, three times higher than the state’s fish consumption water quality standard of 10 micrograms per liter.

Test results also showed selenium levels of 22 micrograms per liter, more than four times the state Aquatic Life and Secondary Recreation standard, according to the alliance.

Duke officials continue to refute the environmental group’s test results.

“We are pleased that the state’s test results align well with the extensive water sampling Duke Energy continues to perform, demonstrating that Cape Fear River quality is not harmed by Sutton plant operations,” Norton said in an email. “These results, combined with dozens of data points gathered by Duke energy over many days, make it clear that the three samples shared by environmental groups (Oct. 3) are extreme outliers that fail to paint an accurate picture of river quality.”

No Better, Perhaps Worse

Dennis Lemly has been studying environmental risks and aquatic impacts of coal mining and coal-fired industries for more than 35 years.

The focus of his research is selenium, a naturally occurring element that is present in sedimentary rocks, shales, coal and phosphate deposits and soils and concentrated in coal ash.

Exposure in juvenile fish and aquatic invertebrates can cause deformities and stunt growth and reproduction.

In 2013, Lemly, an environmental consultant specializing in ecotoxicology and former research biologist with the U.S. Department of Forest Service, collected and assessed juvenile fish from Sutton Lake during a five-month period.

That was the same year more than 40 years of coal-fired operations ended at the Sutton power station, which has since been converted into a 625-megawatt natural gas plant.

Lemly’s biological assessment showed that discharges from the plant were causing selenium poisoning in young fish and reducing their chances of survival.

Lemly looked at the Duke Energy’s September water sample lab results.

“There’s a big red flag there,” he said. “Selenium in Sutton Lake is higher now than it was in the recent past. It’s not improved since my study years ago. Nothing has improved. Conditions now are no different. The waters are the same.”

More troubling, he said, is the fact that the levels reported by Duke Energy are substantially higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s water quality standard for aquatic life.

The EPA in 2016 updated its selenium threshold for aquatic life. The state has not adopted the EPA’s new standard.

“There’s a major flaw in the premise that Duke can say that they’re meeting the state guidelines,” Lemly said. “The state is behind the curve. The state of North Carolina has not come to the realization for the need to revise their standards and Duke can still claim plausible deniability. Fish are being poisoned and Duke walks away. That whole place is in the Cape Fear River floodplain. It just makes no sense logically. There is no legitimate basis in terms of environmental protection to put a landfill in a flood plain.”

Next: Selenium levels, before and after the flood

First of three parts

WILMINGTON – As a monstrous Hurricane Florence closed in on North Carolina’s coast, Duke Energy launched its largest-ever mobilization of resources and announced it was taking steps to storm-ready its coal ash basins and cooling ponds in the east, including one just outside the city in the bull’s-eye of the storm.

Spokespeople for the Charlotte-based energy company rebutted statements made by environmentalists last month who raised concerns about the storm’s potential to breach open ash basins, spilling mucky, gray sludge into nearby waterways.

The company’s ongoing efforts to close its basins by either removing water to cap the ponds or excavate them reduced the flooding threat, Duke Energy officials told news reporters.

“We got a head start on a lot of the industry,” one company spokesperson said to the Los Angeles Times. “We think that positions us well going into the storm.”

Less than a week after Hurricane Florence made landfall Sept. 14 in Wrightsville Beach, the company reported that about 2,000 cubic yards of soil and ash – enough to fill about two-thirds of an Olympic-sized swimming pool – spilled from the landfill at L.V. Sutton Power Station near Wilmington.

After the Category 1 hurricane’s strike, one that dumped around 9 trillion gallons of water on North Carolina over four days, water samples were collected in Sutton Lake and the lower Cape Fear River.

Duke Energy, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, and environmental activist group Waterkeeper Alliance have all collected samples on various days, in various locations within the river and the lake.

The results have ultimately pitted those of Duke Energy and the state against the Waterkeeper Alliance, equating to a he-said, she-said that has unfolded in daily news reports, leaving readers unsure of where the truth lies.

To get to the answer of how much, if any, environmental harm has been caused by coal ash spilling into the lake and river, sample collectors must literally dig deeper, according to several academic researchers who’ve been studying coal ash for years.

The ‘Real Danger’

Disputing the water sample test results that have been published by the energy company, the state and environmental advocates put the focus solely on whether the levels of ash contaminants in the lake and river exceed government limits.

“It doesn’t tell you whether or not there’s been a large transport or not of coal ash into the river,” said Avner Vengosh, a Duke University professor who specializes in geochemistry and water quality. “That’s the real danger.”

He called the sample test results, “noise playing into the hands of Duke Energy.”

“The likelihood to find anything in a flooding event is very, very low,” Vengosh said. “The ability to measure the coal ash contaminants in river water during flooding is limited because the mobilization of contaminants from coal ash to the water as dissolved constituents would be very small compared to the large volume of the flood water that would dilute any signal. Even if there is some organization of metal, it’s not going to immediately coalesce. It doesn’t tell you whether or not there’s been a large transport or not of coal ash into the river.”

Coal ash is a toxic cocktail, the recipe of which includes mercury, arsenic, lead and chromium – chemicals that can cause cancer, irreversible brain damage and other diseases in people and wildlife when found in high concentrations.

Sediment testing will determine whether coal ash contaminants have settled at the bottom of the Cape Fear River and Sutton Lake, Vengosh said.

His work with a team of researchers in Tennessee following the largest coal-ash spill in history demonstrated that the major problem was not coal ash in the river water – it was coal ash in the river sediments.

The Dec. 22, 2008, catastrophe occurred when a dike failed at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant, releasing 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash into the Emory and Clinch rivers. The release in Roane County, Tennessee, about 30 miles west of Knoxville, also covered about 300 acres outside the coal ash dewatering and storage areas.

As part of the massive, multi-year, billion-dollar cleanup, workers dredged more than 3 million cubic yards of ash from the Emory River.

Less than six years after the TVA spill, a pipe at a coal ash pond at Duke Energy’s retired Dan River Steam Station near Eden, North Carolina, collapsed, dumping up to 39,000 tons of coal ash into the river.

Ash from the Feb. 2, 2014, spill spread as far as 70 miles downstream.

By the spring of 2014, the energy company hired a contractor to vacuum-dredge about 2,500 tons of coal ash sitting on the riverbed of the Dan River.

Duke Energy retrieved about 10 percent of the ash from several deposits by dredging and “similar measures,” according to a February 2015 Greensboro News & Record article.

A year after the Dan River spill, Duke Energy officials referenced scientific surveys that showed evidence the levels of coal ash contamination in the sediment downstream were diminishing based on sediment samples.

But results of one sediment study published last year tell a different story in the Dan River and Vengosh warns against comparing the spills that occurred in Tennessee and the Dan River with the breach last month near Wilmington.

“It’s different than a spill like the one at the Dan River or TVA, which were normal conditions where a huge amount of coal ash was moved in the river system,” he said. “Here we’re talking about flooding, which contained a huge amount of sediment and coal ash. Even in the TVA coal ash spill (without a major flooding event) the open river water quality was only slightly affected as compared to water under restricted flow or water entrapped within the river bottom sediments.”

Next: Continued testing, long-term risks 

Last of two parts.

MOREHEAD CITY – The Shellfish Sanitation and Recreational Water Quality Section has been short its third lab the last few years.

Shannon Jenkins, section chief, explained that back in 2014 when the Nags Head lab was closed, they also lost three of the five positions that handled recreational waters and shellfish sanitation in the northern part of the state.

“The legislature did add funding to re-establish our northeastern shellfish lab and added two positions back,” he continued. “Obviously we’re very happy about that … it’s going to have a lot of benefits to us and potentially to the industry up there.”

Jenkins said with having the northeast lab re-established, there’s the possibility of reopening about 54,000 acres of shellfish waters that have been closed since the lab was shuttered.

“It’s going to help us meet our required sampling (for bacteria) mandates in the National Shellfish Sanitation Program, where we were struggling to meet those challenges logistically during this time period since it’s closed down,” he said. “It’s also going to allow us more effective response up in the northeast after temporary closures. We can get out and sample sooner and hopefully get them reopened back earlier after hurricanes at times when we have to close the waters.”

J.D. Potts, Recreational Water Quality Program manager, added that right now they’re only sampling two sound side sites in the northeast – Colington and Jockey’s Ridge — and the lab being reopening will allow for more sound side sampling for recreational waters.

Jenkins said they do not have a date for when the Nags Head lab will open but hope for a winter opening if all goes well.

Jenkins explained that shellfish sanitation is a public health agency. With shellfish, the section’s main role is to ensure the safety for consumers of mollusks. The section monitors shellfish harvesting waters by testing for certain bacteria and works with handlers to ensure proper treatment to make sure the shellfish are safe to eat prior to hitting the retail market.

“We do a lot of inspections and certification of shellfish dealers that handle shellfish,” he said.

With the recreational program, they try to monitor the public swimming beaches and notify the public when bacteria standards are exceeded, Potts added.

Potts said that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration oversees the National Shellfish Sanitation Program, which the North Carolina Shellfish Sanitation Section is a part, and has its own criteria for classifying shellfish waters while the Environmental Protection Agency has its own criteria for classifying recreational waters.

The biggest difference between recreational waters and shellfish sanitation is how the bacteria is introduced to the body, he continued, with shellfish, the bacteria is consumed but with recreational use, the bacteria is introduced by contact.

Potts explained that oysters and clams are filter feeders that filter up to 100 times the concentration of bacteria in their viscera that’s in the water column above.

“People eat the whole animal raw,” he said. “With shellfish waters, if someone were to eat eight to 10 clams they’re potentially going to get a lot higher levels of bacteria ingested than it would be if you swallowed water.”

According to a division fact sheet, there are more than 200 swimming sites tested along the coast for enterococci, a type of bacteria found in the intestines of warm-blooded animals such as birds, dogs and humans. The bacteria will not cause illness but the EPA found that enterococcus closely relates with occurrence of human illness.

“We’re seeing if enterococci or fecal coliform are present, then there’s a likely chance that there’s other fecal microbes that will make you sick,” Potts said.

“It’s an easy way to monitor for potential pathogens without having to monitor for every single pathogen,” Jenkins added. “We’re checking to see if there’s bacteria from the gut of warm-blooded animals, that’s really our concern, which then you could assume there is E.coli or other pathogens in there.”

Commercial shellfish harvesters know to check for shellfish closures after the rain, but many visitors to the area do not know that water quality affects shellfish.

Jenkins said that the staff hears of a number of visitors that come to the area and have no idea they can’t go clamming in a certain spot. “They don’t make a connection between water quality and shellfish being filter feeders being potentially hazardous to consume from the wrong areas.”

Regarding recreational shellfish harvesting, folks need to know there are regulations for size, season and areas where they can shellfish. They can contact the Division of Marine Fisheries or Shellfish sanitation for more information.

Jenkins added that one other thing to remember for recreational shellfish harvesting is that after harvest, bacteria can multiply rapidly if left in the heat. It’s important to keep the shellfish cool and refrigerated prior to consumption.

A big issue with shellfish is naturally occurring bacteria, vibrio, which can cause illness, and there are many different species of the bacteria that have nothing to do with pollution that are present in greater numbers in warmer months, Jenkins said. Someone who is immunocompromised, such from diabetes or cancer, should avoid eating raw shellfish.

Stormwater and wastewater are two big inputs that affect water quality, Jenkins said.

Major impacts would be stormwater and the associated runoff from the land, which would include failing septic systems, sewer breaks, sewer discharges, manhole overflows, wildlife and domestic pet waste, “Anything like that on the land, when it rains hard is for sure rushing right into the water with little or no treatment.”

Jenkins said municipal wastewater would be another potential impact. With infrastructure issues associated with wastewater treatment plants, such as failures of collection systems, lift stations and mechanical or disinfection systems, “there’s a number of things with municipal systems that can cause discharge of partially treated or untreated water that would be a real big issue with both recreational swimmers and shellfish.”

Potts added that while they don’t have monitoring sites adjacent to all waters near urban areas, “Any place you have a lot of dockage and boats with heads, those are good places that people may not want to fish or swim.”

For the most part, Potts added, ocean beaches aren’t really affected by stormwater, “Sound side (areas) are typically more affected by rainfall and runoff than the ocean side.”

There are spots ocean side that are permanently posted such as where storm drains discharge in both Nags Head and near the Bogue Inlet Pier in Emerald Isle. There is a sign posted to let beachgoers know that if the pipe is discharging, to stay at least 200 feet away on either side of it. They advise that children should not play in the discharge.

Potts said after heavy rainfall, folks shouldn’t go swimming immediately. “I would wait for a couple tidal cycles to exchange before swimming again,” That goes not just for estuarine waters; that goes for inland bodies of water as well. They have the same stormwater issues here.

“The rain is basically rinsing the landscape and all of that ends up in the body of water,” Potts added. “The problem is that when you have runoff, all the little particles and all the sediment going in with the stormwater has got bacteria connected to it.”

One way to slow bacteria and viruses from going into the water is infiltration into the soil. Infiltration basins are good treatment options to manage stormwater, Jenkins said. With infiltration basins, there’s a thin layer of water that should soak in within a day or two and help improve water quality.

During heavy rains, they “make temporary closures and then wait for it to clear up after several days or weeks and go resample the waters to make sure it’s returned to normal before reopening the harvest,” Jenkins said. “It affects the industry, but we have to do it for public health aspect.”

First of two parts.

MOREHEAD CITY – The torrential rainfall last month did more than drench communities along the coast, it set a record.

“In regards to July 2018, we saw the heaviest rainfall in the latter half of the month. Our office in Newport recorded 12.95 inches of rain for the month, making last month our wettest July since records began. Coastal North Carolina was hammered with rain,” said meteorologist Morgan Simms with the National Weather Service office in Newport.

“Some areas saw up to 8 inches above normal. Billy Mitchell Airport in the Cape Hatteras area reported 20.31 inches of rain for the month, which is the second wettest month ever for the region since records began — only June of 1949 was wetter,” Simms continued. “For the year, the Cape Hatteras area has received 57.60 inches of rain as of Aug. 14. Normally we should be seeing around 33 inches of rain by now, which means we are nearly 2 feet above normal year-to-date. For some context, normal annual rainfall at Cape Hatteras is 58.04 inches.”

In addition to setting records, as a result of the deluge and the subsequent stormwater runoff, many of North Carolina’s waters were closed to harvesting shellfish and recreational use by the Shellfish Sanitation and Recreational Water Quality Section of the Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Marine Fisheries.

The Shellfish Sanitation and Recreational Water Quality Section “is responsible for classifying coastal waters as to their suitability for shellfish harvesting, monitoring and issuing advisories for coastal recreational swimming areas, and certification of shellfish and crustacean processing plants,” according to the website.

Water samples are collected no less than six times a year from each growing area. The samples are tested for fecal coliform bacteria, an indicator that human or animal wastes are present in the water. The shellfish almost continuously filter water through their gills to gather food particles, but they also collect during the filtering process bacteria, viruses or other pollutants in the water. If shellfish that contain high concentrations of bacteria or viruses are consumed raw or undercooked, they could cause severe illness, according the website.

The rains during the past several weeks have not been typical, said Andy Haines, environmental program supervisor II with the section.

Haines said that some of the areas that were closed, such as the Outer Banks, Roanoke and Croatan sounds and areas in Hyde and Pamlico counties, are rarely closed.

“Typically once or twice a year, if at all,” he said.

“The duration of these closures, because of both the volume of rain as well as the continuous nature of these storms, has been longer than normal,” he continued. For example, portions of Brunswick County have been closed continually since July 8, as of Aug. 20, and portions of Stump Sound were closed from July 13 to July 20 and then again on July 21. Several other popular areas like White Oak River, Newport River and North River were closed as well, although some have since reopened.

On Aug. 9, a portion of Croatan Sound around the Dare County Regional Airport was closed due to the pumping of floodwaters to the sound.

Recent openings include the following:

Stump Sound/Alligator Bay and around Rodanthe, Waves and Salvo on Aug. 10; the Newport River Aug. 15; Intracoastal Waterway around Ocean Isle, Shallotte River, Lockwood Folly River, Queens Creek and Ward Creek Aug. 16; Myrtle Grove Sound, Masonboro Sound, Greenville Sound and Bay River Aug. 17; and a portion of the White Oak River up to the northern tip of Jones Island Aug. 18.

Still closed as of Aug. 18 were Tubbs Inlet, the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway around Holden Beach, a portion of the White Oak River upstream of Jones Island and a portion of Croatan Sound closed because of the stormwater pumping.

The Shellfish Sanitation Program posts proclamations with closures and openings of shellfish waters and has a new app that shows real-time shellfish closures.

North Carolina Shellfish Growers Association President Jay Styron, who owns Cedar Island Select Farm Raised Oysters, said that just about every grower in North Carolina was affected at one time or another during the recent rainfall.

“(The closures) are always a safety measure,” he said, adding the shellfish growers understand the closures and why they occur.

Growers do take into account when selecting their site how much development there is around the area, which will affect water quality due to stormwater runoff, and take a look at historic data from shellfish sanitation.

Styron said that consumers can learn a lot about their shellfish by looking at the harvest tag. He said the oysters they sell all come with a harvest tag that includes the lease number, date and time, which would show how long the oysters have been out of the water.

“You get some good information right off the bat (from the harvest tag) … that’s really going to tell you the most about your shellfish,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt if you know a grower and can buy directly from a grower.”

J.D. Potts, Recreational Water Quality Program manager, said that recreational waters were affected by the recent rainfall as well.

Recreational Water Quality Program officials sample 209 sites each week throughout the coastal region from April to October for a type of bacteria called enterococci found in the intestines of warm-blooded animals such as birds, dogs, raccoons and humans. The bacteria does not cause illness but the Environmental Protection Agency found that enterococcus closely correlates with incidence of human illness, according to a water quality FAQ.

Swimming in contaminated water could lead to diarrheal diseases caused by bacteria, viruses and parasitic protozoa as well as ear, nose, throat, skin and respiratory infections.

“In the Northern Outer Banks where we had the most intense rainfall, the beach towns and communities did a great job communicating to the beachgoers that a precautionary swimming advisory was in place,” Potts said. “Lifeguards were making sure that people on the beach were informed and the communities that were pumping flood water to beach posted signs advising against swimming.”

The Shellfish Sanitation program adheres to the guidelines of the National Shellfish Sanitation Program Guide administered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The recreational water quality swimming water quality levels must comply with standards set by the EPA and the state.

Next: State Set to Step Up Water Quality Testing

Second of two parts

Geologist Roger Shew doesn’t have to go far to get to what he considers the best example of the challenges along North Carolina’s beaches.

Shew, a University of North Carolina Wilmington researcher and lecturer who teaches coastal geology, said there’s no better place than the stretch along the southern reaches of Pleasure Island where Fort Fisher abuts Kure Beach, the coquina rocks and The Riggings condominiums.

“I tell people if you want to see most of the issues on the coast we face, I can take you to Kure Beach and show you most everything that is going on, on the beach,” he said. “You have structures, seawalls, longshore (sand) transport and re-nourishment.”

Then there’s the Atlantic Ocean. The southern point of the island has intense wave action and, with it, much higher erosion rates.

Shew said that just south of the Fort Fisher seawall, erosion rates run about 9½ feet per year, compared to the re-nourished beaches at Carolina Beach and Wrightsville Beach, which average about 2 feet per year.

Shew has been studying nuisance flooding in the Cape Fear region, its effect on infrastructure and the implications for planning given environmental changes like sea level rise. He’s been documenting the perigean spring tides and other high tides in the area and was at Kure Beach for the new moon on July 13, about an hour before the peak of the most recent maximum tide.

“I was standing in front of The Riggings condominiums and waves were lapping well up onto the sandbags,” he said. He collected photos to use this fall when he talks about erosion, development and processes on the beach.

Shew said that while any location proximate to the beach comes with risk, what’s happening at The Riggings is no surprise.

“In this particular case, it was obvious that it was a risky location,” he said, citing the need for a sandbag wall to protect the buildings within just a few years of construction. “Most people realized that the erosion rate was high to start with.”

Shew said he understands the difficulties the property owners have had in reaching an answer.

“You’ve got to sympathize with them, they’ve invested in something. They (the condos) would be worth a lot more if they were not jeopardized.”

The North Carolina General Assembly may have offered a temporary solution by allowing the state Coastal Resources Commission the option to approve repair or replacement of the sandbag wall, but long term, Shew said there aren’t a lot of options, given that federal funds have dwindled and another buyout to retreat across U.S. 421 is unlikely. Also unlikely is a hardened structure such as a groin, which would also require extensive studies as well as a change in state law.

“Without being able to retreat or put in hardened structures, re-nourishment is really the only game in town,” he said. But given the conflict with the coquina rock outcropping, any project would face a potential deal breaker.

Shew said he believes the outcropping, which was declared a state Natural Heritage Area in 1982, should be protected.

“If you go down there at low tide, extreme low tide, it’s just like a rocky tide pool up in New England, where you can see sea anemones, starfish, lipids up on those rocks,” he said. “It’s really a classic kind of area and the only one in North Carolina and for a long ways where you can actually see a rock on the beach that’s naturally occurring.”

Preparing an application for a new re-nourishment project would take time and money and require new environmental studies.

Shew said trucking in sand for spot placement, another re-nourishment alternative being considered, is also unlikely to work, even if it’s placed outside the coquina rock area, he said.

“In this particular case, it was obvious that it was a risky location.”

Roger Shew, UNCW geology professor

“Because it is such a high-energy area, much of that sand would be removed relatively quickly,” he said, referring to the wave action.

Another rock wall or a groin would only exacerbate the sand flow problem, he said, and set a precedent that would allow for more hardened structures. Shew said it is doubtful one would be approved for The Riggings area and to do so would require a change in state law.

“I just don’t believe any of those things would work,” he said of the options. “I would hate for North Carolina to go back on the rule (against hardened structures).”

The reality on the coast is that anything you do has to be repeated, Shew said. “If you do anything on the beach you have to keep doing it. If you’re going to re-nourish, you’re going to have to keep re-nourishing if you’re going to put in structures, you’re going to have to put in more structures and/or keep re-nourishing to protect that structure”

Rules in Flux

Like the sandbags at The Riggings, the state’s rules on temporary erosion structures have been shifting around.

In recent years, the legislature has required rule changes to extend the time limits for the structures and widen the types of locations where they’re allowed.

During its meeting Sept. 19-20, the commission is expected to get its official first look at the new law aimed at The Riggings.

Mary Lucasse, a special deputy attorney general and counsel for the CRC, said commission members are to be briefed on how the law changes state law repair and replacement of the structures. But the discussion won’t dig into the specifics of The Riggings case, since it could later come back to the CRC for review.

Lucasse said the commission is being careful to separate the review of the new law from the specifics of The Riggings case since another variance request is likely. She’s advised commission members not to signal how they might rule if asked for a variance.

Lucasse said the next steps would be for The Riggings homeowners association to file an application for the repair or replacement of the sandbag wall with the state Division of Coastal Management. If rejected, the HOA could then request a variance from the CRC, which would be able to review the additional language in the new provision in making its decision.

She said it would be up to The Riggings HOA to provide any proposals and those would have to move through the permit process.

Meanwhile, HOA president Candice Young said she understands the CRC has a job to do, but the association is hopeful that the commission will ultimately grant another variance for the sandbag wall, given the new legislation.

“We will respectfully wait for the meeting of the CRC to see what recommendations they have for The Riggings,” she said in an email reply to Coastal Review Online. “We are hoping they will cut The Riggings a break and let us keep and maintain our (sand)bag line without the strings that were previously attached to our variance. Whether they will be charitable remains to be seen.”

Learn More

• Read Part 1: New Rule Latest Effort to Save The Riggings

First of two parts

If you watch the tide go out near the south end of Kure Beach, where the town ends and the man-made rock revetment at the Fort Fisher State Historic Site begins, you’ll see emerging an irregular assemblage of well-worn coquina rock.

At low tide, the sedimentary rock outcropping stretches along the coastline in uneven clusters in various degrees of exposure, parts of it sunbaked and dry, other parts green with algae. On just about any day, beachgoers are drawn to them, looking for what’s hidden in the well-worn bowls and crevasses.

Although it is not unusual to see large rocks here and there along the North Carolina coast, this rock structure is naturally occurring and, because of that, incredibly rare.

Kure Beach’s intertidal coquina rock outcropping is the only natural marine rock exposure on North Carolina’s beach system and one of only a handful of such places along the Southeastern coast. Composed of shell fragments, sediments and fossils cemented together with calcite, it was formed in the late Pleistocene Epoch, or ice age, according the 1982 agreement designating it a Natural Heritage Area.

“The potholes, cracks, and abrasions bowl of the coquina exposed during low tide offer prime habitat for various species of marine algae, sessile animals, and other forms of marine life,” the document states. The outcropping’s value, it says, is both as an educational resource and an important habitat for fish and invertebrates. But decades ago, it served another purpose.

County commissioners back in the 1920s gave a contractor permission to remove from “a considerable length of the beach” a 50- to 100-foot-wide strip of coquina rock, or about 6,000 cubic yards, to use in building a local section of U.S. 421, according to a history of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Wilmington district.

“The excavation of the coquina coincided with the reversal in the erosion cycle that occurred around 1926,” according to the document. “The board offered no definite conclusion concerning the role the coquina removal played in the erosion of the fort, saying only that ‘It is conceivable that this, by reducing the quantity of resistant material at a critical point, has accelerated the erosion.’”

This year, in addition to its twice daily tide-driven exposure on the coast, the intertidal marine outcropping that remains at Fort Fisher also emerged much farther west in Raleigh during the windup of this year’s short session of the General Assembly. It was included as a description in a provision aimed at loosening sandbag rules that was written so tightly it could only be one place.

The provision was part of a multi-section regulatory bill passed in late June amid a flurry of legislation in the last week of the session. It amends state statues on temporary erosion-control structures, giving the state’s Coastal Resources Commission new authority to “repair or replace” a sandbag wall under certain conditions, specifically that it had to have been permitted prior to July 1, 1995, and it had to be adjacent to an intertidal marine outcropping designated a State Natural Heritage Area. As stated above, there is only one such location.

For the homeowners and investors at The Riggings, a four-building, 48-unit condominium complex hugging the shoreline just in front of the coquina rocks, the provision means a potential solution to one of the longest-running battles over sandbag walls and with it, the salvation of a set of structures threatened with destruction almost since they were built in 1985.

Candice Young, president of The Riggings Homeowners Inc., said in an email response to Coastal Review Online that there is finally hope that some solution can finally be reached.

“All the Riggings ever wanted was to be able to protect our homes, foundations and property legally,” she said. “We are hoping that after many years of contentious exchanges that we can finally exhale.”

New Chapter, Old Story

The story of The Riggings’ erosion problems started not long after the development was built in 1985. Coastal storms quickly threatened to undermine the new development and a sandbag wall was erected under an agreement with the town.

When the jurisdiction of temporary erosion-control structures moved in the 1990s from local governments to the state’s Division of Coastal Management and the Coastal Resources Commission, the wall at The Riggings was expanded. It became even more critical after a series of active hurricane seasons in the late 1990s further eroded the beach.

Under state law, hardened structures are generally not permitted on the North Carolina coast. Sandbag walls, which cause erosion problems when left in place permanently, are supposed to be temporary and must be removed after two or five years, depending on the structure’s size.

Like many hot spots along the coast, the sandbags at The Riggings were allowed to stay in place through a series of variances granted through the commission. The extensions bought The Riggings time, but no permanent solution.

In 1995, the situation got worse after the existing revetment protecting Fort Fisher, built before the hardened structure ban, was expanded. The state granted an exception to protect the fort because of its historical significance. The expanded rock wall added to the disruption of the flow of sand to the beach in front of The Riggings.

Also, in the mid-1990s attempts to add The Riggings area to the federal beach re-nourishment plans approved for Carolina Beach and Kure Beach were dealt a blow when the Army Corps of Engineers rejected the idea citing policy that would not allow them to approve a plan that covered the Natural Heritage Area. Re-nourishment of the beach begins to taper off roughly 1,500 feet north of the coquina rocks and ends about 600 feet north and The Riggings.

Pre-disaster Plan

With few options left in the early 2000s, Kure Beach, under then-mayor, the late Betty Medlin, worked with then-Rep. Mike McIntyre, D-N.C., to secure a Federal Emergency Management Agency pre-disaster grant to cover most of the cost of relocating The Riggings. Under the plan, the town would buy the oceanfront area, the existing buildings would be demolished and a new complex built on a parking lot already owned by The Riggings on the other side of U.S. 421.

In 2004, the town was awarded a $2.7 million FEMA grant to purchase the oceanfront property. The rest of the cost of the $3.6 million project, roughly $904,000, was to be covered by property owners. But the project, which required unanimous consent of the owners, was voted down by The Riggings homeowners association partly over the cost, about $125,000 per unit, as well as potential difficulties for some property owners to get approval from mortgage holders. Concerns were also raised about access and use of the oceanfront property once it was taken over by the town.

On May 1, 2007, The Riggings HOA informed Kure Beach officials of the association’s vote and that its members had opted to decline the federal grant.

Soon after receiving official notice from the town that the FEMA grant had been terminated, the state’s Division of Coastal Management notified the association that under the terms of the variance approved to give The Riggings time to work on the relocation project, the refusal of the grant meant the sandbag wall would have to come down. Homeowners lost a subsequent appeal to the Coastal Resources Commission and took the case to court.

In August 2007, the division sent The Riggings notice of violation over the sandbag wall. A second notice was sent a month later.

The Riggings filed an appeal to the Coastal Resources Commission asking for time to work on an alternative beach re-nourishment plan. In early 2008, the commission reviewed The Riggings’ appeal and denied a new variance and the HOA filed for judicial review in New Hanover Superior Court.

In 2012, the trial court ruled that the commission had erred in its ruling. The state appealed the ruling and The Riggings HOA filed a cross-appeal.

In August 2013, a three-member panel of the state Court of Appeals agreed with the trial court in a 2-1 decision, finding that The Riggings’ “substantial private property interest outweighs the competing public interests” considered by the commission.

“With a rock revetment to the south, and depleted coquina formations to the north, The Riggings truly is caught between a rock and a hard place,” the majority wrote. “In this scenario, we must balance The Riggings’ private property interest with competing public interests to determine whether a variance is consistent with the “spirit, purpose, and intent” of CAMA’s framework. Without a variance, The Riggings’ condos will likely be destroyed by erosion. We believe this private property interest outweighs competing public interests.”

The ruling sent the request for a variance back to the commission, which then granted a variance in December 2015 to allow the sandbags to remain in place while the HOA studied alternatives.

Since then, HOA officials have been required to update the commission yearly on the status of the sandbag wall as well as a search for other solutions. That search has proven difficult, mainly because the top alternative, beach re-nourishment, faces a number of legal and logistical hurdles.

In its responses to inquiries from the HOA, Corps officials have said that adding the area could require redoing the Carolina Beach-Kure Beach re-nourishment plan entirely, which would ultimately require congressional approval.

Adding just the area not already covered by the existing federal project would require costly studies and plans for implementation. Under federal rules, funds for that work and the matching funds for the studies and any possible re-nourishment project would have to come from either the state or local government. To date, neither has shown an interest in picking up the tab.

A memo from the Division of Coastal Management’s legal counsel to the commission in February said that in discussions between Kure Beach officials and the HOA, Kure Beach’s former mayor Emilie Swearingen had said that extending the re-nourishment project would require dissolving the current Carolina Beach-Kure Beach project, which has been authorized through 2047. According to the memo, Swearingen had said the town would not be willing to take on the risk of losing the entire project.

Follow-up conversations between the Corps and Division of Coastal Management officials confirmed the finding.

“Based on this contact, DCM agrees that it is unlikely that the southern end of Kure Beach, at least in the short-term, could successfully be included in the existing federal project,” the memo states. “This is largely because of current funding levels for such projects, the eventual need for Congressional authorization, and because the environmental concerns of federal and state resource agencies, like those raised previously about the coquina rock formations, remain.”

The memo suggests that the main alternative would be to work on a separate re-nourishment project focusing on the area not covered, but it acknowledges that the idea has a slim chance of succeeding in part because of federal funding limitations and because of the environmental concerns over the Natural Heritage Area.

It also throws cold water on the idea that removing the Natural Heritage Area designation would clear the way for re-nourishment. Even if the state were to remove the designation, the environmental concerns about covering it with sand would remain and make it difficult for the project to be approved.

“While removal from this program could be attempted, the site’s de-designation as a Natural Heritage Area would not necessarily alleviate the environmental concerns of resource agencies, including the Corps,” according to the memo.

The next steps for The Riggings are unclear until at least September, when the CRC is expected to review the new provision and how it would impact any future decision.

Until then, as the high tides continue to work away the sand around its only defense against the Atlantic’s relentlessness, The Riggings remains where it has always stood: between a rock and hard place.

Learn More

• Read Part 2: Test Case for Oceanfront Development Risks

Last of a series

WILMINGTON – Kemp Burdette gestured behind him to one of the newest additions in his office, which sits just a few dozen yards from the Cape Fear River and close enough to its eponymous Memorial Bridge that the low thrum of truck traffic trundling overhead often accompanies conversation.

Among his other duties as riverkeeper at Cape Fear River Watch, Burdette offers suggestions to people looking to reduce their impacts on the environment, and he strives to serve as an example.

“We used to tell people to drink tap water,” he said. “That was one of our top five things you can do to help the environment, to drink tap water, because we have a really good water treatment plant in Wilmington. It’s one of the best in the state, probably among the top 10 percent in the country.”

That was before last summer, when news broke that GenX and other substances from the Chemours plant about 100 miles upriver had contaminated the Cape Fear and drinking water sourced from it by the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, whose state-of-the-art filtration technology proved unable to remove the fluorochemicals.

Ongoing state and federal investigations revealed the chemicals have been discharged to the river since at least 1980. Regulators subsequently found similar substances from Chemours, such as byproducts of its Nafion production, also have polluted the river and that the company’s air emissions contributed to the tainting of hundreds of private wells around the plant.

During an interview late last month, Burdette cocked his head toward a water dispenser in a corner of a conference room. “I installed this water tank here. I’m in this position now that I can’t tell people to drink the tap water. We know GenX is there at levels below the state’s health standard, but all this Nafion stuff is in there at levels a bit higher. I’m not comfortable drinking tap water. I occasionally drink it, but my water intake from taps has gone way down. I think people in Wilmington are drinking a lot less tap water.”

‘Partisanship Is Still a Helluva Drug’

Many residents affected by the contamination have taken similar personal steps, installing home water-filtration systems or buying bottled water.

Some have done more. Ad hoc groups coalesced around the issue. Mary Alice and Skip Hinshaw are among about 340 New Hanover County residents enrolled in the first research effort on GenX and similar substances in humans. Mike Watters of Cumberland County has taken on a citizen-scientist role, working with researchers to study the potential uptake of GenX in his homegrown vegetables.

But has water quality become an issue with enough priority to affect how people may cast their votes and what they expect of the state’s elected leaders in terms of protecting their drinking water?

Aaron King, a professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, said he and his wife started buying bottled water at the local Costco after last summer.

“I have a newborn at home and toddler,” King said. “When everything first broke, a lot of people were really concerned. To the extent somebody was going to take action, we’ve seen that. Some people would attend meetings. Some would get reverse-osmosis systems for their homes or buy bottled water. If all this went down in August of this year, it would be a different situation. But once people have adjusted to what they feel like is safe for them and their family, I just wonder how much staying power this issue will have.

“If you went on the street and asked people if they care about GenX, people will say they care about it,” he said. “But that’s a whole different story than caring about it enough to vote or to vote for someone you might not otherwise have voted for. If you are a Republican, I don’t know that this is the issue where people are going to say, ‘Oh, I’m going to support a Democrat now.’ Partisanship is still a helluva drug.”

‘People Who Are Passionate Can Move the Needle’

A few weeks ago at Cape Fear River Assembly’s 45^th annual meeting in Wilmington, GenX dominated discussion. Among those presenting was Detlef Knappe, a professor at N.C. State University and a member of the team of scientists who found Chemours’ fluorochemicals in the water.

“I put a bunch of chemical names on a slide, and I said, ‘Which of these has gotten the most attention?’ Well, of course GenX. I said, ‘Here’s all this other stuff that’s out there, some of it in higher concentrations and of similar health concern.’

“I think the percentage of the people who embrace the larger issue is pretty small. I think if you were to survey the people in Wilmington about 1,4-dioxane or bromide or perfluoro-2-methoxyacetic acid (PFMOAA), I don’t know how many people would really immediately say, ‘I’m as concerned about those as I am about GenX.’”

Like GenX, the chemicals Knappe mentioned are considered to be emerging contaminants, a growing list of unregulated substances ranging from pharmaceuticals and personal-care products to pesticides and endocrine-disrupting compounds that have turned up in drinking water in the United States and worldwide.

“I think if you were to survey the people in Wilmington about 1,4-dioxane or bromide or perfluoro-2-methoxyacetic acid, I don’t know how many people would really immediately say, ‘I’m as concerned about those as I am about GenX.’”

Detlef Knappe, Professor of civil, construction, and environmental engineering, N.C. State University

“I’m amazed at the energy that some people have put into this and the amount of research they’re doing,” Knappe said. “Certainly, there is a good segment of the population that has devoted a lot of time and energy to that. They have become very well-educated on the topic, mostly through their own research and reading. That’s probably a minority. I think there’s a large number of people who have heard about GenX and are worried about GenX, but they may not be as aware of the other contaminants that are in the water.”

Burdette said he believes the experiences of the last year eroded the largely unchallenged and widespread assumption that water people drink is safe.

“I do think the public has realized around here that there’s not this elaborate, well-funded system out there that is designed to look at drinking water supplies, protect them, do checks on them, monitor them on a regular basis. Before all of this, I and other people just kind of imagined that our water was going to be protected, because, you know, you have to have water, so you think it’s going to be clean. We have a Department of Environmental Quality that’s probably doing all kinds of things to protect our water supply.

“Now, I think what people realize that’s not the case, that water is not a resource that’s particularly well protected. It’s treated, and there’s a fair amount of effort that goes into water treatment, but we’re treating for the same things we were treating for 100 years ago. We’re trying to get out bacteria and get out things that affect taste and odor, but we’re way behind on treating for the kinds of things that are being produced now, really complicated molecules that stick around for a long time and interact with other stuff.”

Typically, midterm elections such as November’s draw far fewer voters than those that include presidential races. That factor, Burdette said, may amplify the impact of water quality on the outcome of some contests.

“It’s that rule, that not many people are voting,” Burdette said. “The people who are passionate about things can move the needle. When whatever pollsters do their work, I suspect GenX and water quality and water issues will be factors.

“I don’t know if it would change the mind of somebody who votes Republican to vote Democrat. It might convince somebody who was pretty ambivalent about politics to vote, to start to make the connection and demand that their elected officials take the actions they think are needed to address this problem.”

First of two parts

WILMINGTON – For a time it seemed as though last year’s revelation that GenX had tainted the Cape Fear River and downstream drinking water supplies might be a wake-up call for North Carolina to look more closely at the water its residents drink.

Reports had surfaced in recent years detailing high levels of contamination by substances such as 1,4-dioxane, with health threats far better defined than GenX’s, yet legislators devoted far more attention to paring or weakening environmental regulations and cutting funds for its enforcement.

This time – as GenX-related contamination grew to encompass a host of other fluorochemicals, with pollution found in air and rain, groundwater and private wells, and turning up in a jar of honey – lawmakers seemed poised to take tentative steps toward understanding the scope of water contamination, not just from GenX and other per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, but from emerging contaminants in general.

Certainly, they would not provide funding sought by the governor to begin rebuilding North Carolina’s regulatory agencies, but Senate and House bills responding to alarms about GenX did allocate money to take a broad, open-ended look at contaminants in North Carolina’s drinking water statewide.

At the end of May, though, the North Carolina General Assembly pressed the snooze button on that notion. Lawmakers approved and sent to Gov. Roy Cooper a bill that includes $9.3 million to assess drinking-water contamination but, after learning industry found the original scope “most troubling,” they took care to restrict efforts solely to the class of chemicals that includes GenX.

‘Very Little Has Changed’

A week before that legislative wrangling, North Carolina State University professor Detlef Knappe sat down for an update from state regulators at the Department of Environmental Quality.

Knappe has been among the most visible of those involved in scientific research to define the scope of contaminants such as GenX emanating from the Fayetteville Works, a 2,150-acre riverside industrial site owned by Chemours. He has spoken at multiple public forums, testified at legislative hearings, conducted further research on filtration methods and contamination in groundwater and food near the Chemours plant, and tried to keep up with torrents of emails from concerned residents seeking information.

This recent meeting with DEQ, however, was not about GenX and the Fayetteville Works. Instead, Knappe wondered where things stood regarding the state’s efforts to address a different emerging contaminant called 1,4-dioxane.

An industrial solvent used in a range of products including paint strippers, pharmaceuticals and shampoos, 1,4-dioxane is “likely to be carcinogenic to humans,” according the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has established a lifetime health advisory of 0.35 parts per billion in drinking water, a level exceeded in testing at water utilities in several North Carolina communities. Water drawn from the Cape Fear River watershed accounted for seven of the 20 highest 1,4-dioxane concentrations found in the United States as part of the EPA’s most recently completed round of testing for unregulated contaminants in drinking water.

Before GenX grabbed headlines and his attention last summer, Knappe had spent years researching 1,4-dioxane and working with DEQ on steps to identify sources of the contamination and try to reduce their levels. With obvious, sometimes dramatic progress regarding GenX, Knappe was curious: What has happened in the meantime with 1,4-dioxane?

“There was a perception that things had become better,” Knappe said in a recent interview. “I think that perception was maybe the result of some data that suggested that at the known discharger locations Greensboro, Asheboro and Reidsville, that two of them were self-reporting changes that industry had made. And all of that appeared to result in dramatically lower levels of 1,4 -dioxane discharges from Greensboro and Reidsville.”

Last November, having developed a method to analyze 1,4-dioxane to conduct its own testing, DEQ restarted its monitoring program, Knappe said.

“When the state shared those data, I focused primarily on what’s going on in Pittsboro compared to the data we had four years ago,” he said. “My conclusion was that very little has changed. I think they agreed.”

‘There Is Not Yet a New Philosophy’

DEQ has had “very solid” accomplishments regarding the Fayetteville Works and GenX, Knappe said. Since last year, state regulators have issued three notices of violation regarding Chemours contamination and filed a civil complaint in state court.

Under pressure from the state, the company ceased discharging its manufacturing-related wastewater into the Cape Fear, capturing it instead for transport to Texas, where it is injected in deep wells.

In April, regulators told Chemours to “show to DEQ’s satisfaction that they can operate without further contamination of groundwater or we will prohibit all GenX air emissions.” In May, Chemours announced that it had installed carbon bed adsorption technology, part of a promised $100 million investment the company says will eliminate at least 99 percent of air emissions. DEQ has connected those emissions to contamination of hundreds of private wells, some of them miles from the plant, and recently told Chemours to devise a “permanent” solution for people depending on those wells.

“On the GenX front, I think they’re doing a super job,” Knappe said. “All the things I see the Division of Air Quality is doing and Division of Solid Waste is doing and the Division of Water Resources is doing, it’s very solid. They’re trying to cover many bases. I think they’re thinking through all the different aspects of how the contamination is spreading and trying to get as much information with the limited resources they have.”

Knappe said he’s less sure whether similar issues get the same level of attention or what might have happened regarding GenX had it not been reported in the media.

DEQ knew researchers had identified the GenX in the Cape Fear as early as June 2015, when department staff met with company officials to discuss it. What it planned to do with that information remains unclear during the two years that elapsed until June 7, 2017, when the StarNews published the first story online. Requests to interview DEQ Secretary Michael Regan and Assistant Secretary Sheila Holman for this article went unfulfilled.

“One lesson learned is some researcher like me publishing a paper and distributing the paper widely is insufficient. It really takes the media to disseminate the information and then the general public and elected officials all pulling on the same string.”

Detlef Knappe, Professor of civil, construction, and environmental engineering, N.C. State University

A review of DEQ records regarding its work at the Fayetteville Works during those two years revealed none of the GenX-focused water sampling, site visits and other enforcement-related measures that started in June 2017. In a letter to the EPA, Gov. Cooper wrote that state regulators launched their investigation into the matter June 14, 2017.

By September, after GenX turned up in several of Chemours’ monitoring wells, DEQ had issued the first notice of violation and filed a civil complaint against the company.

“One lesson learned is some researcher like me publishing a paper and distributing the paper widely is insufficient. It really takes the media to disseminate the information and then the general public and elected officials all pulling on the same string,” Knappe said.

By revisiting the situation with 1,4-dioxane, Knappe sought to “test the waters a little bit to see whether anything has really changed. I’m not fully convinced it has, not in a proactive way. There is not yet a new philosophy that’s pervasive in DEQ or DHHS (Department of Health and Human Services) or in the legislature.”

‘It Often Takes a Big, Ugly Crisis’

Others have different perspectives. Robin Smith, a Chapel Hill environmental lawyer, spent 12 years as an assistant secretary for the environment at DEQ’s predecessor, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

“I will say, from what I know about how this bubbled up initially from the results of the study being reported to DEQ and EPA, my sense is there was not a lot of context for the information in the beginning,” Smith said, referring to the scientific research study on GenX in the Cape Fear. “GenX was not something that was in the (discharge) permit. It was not something the regulatory staff was looking for. When the study was done, because there was not a health study or drinking water standard for GenX, there was not a context to put the issue in.

“Ultimately, the health advisory levels were developed by DHHS, which gives you a benchmark to figure out: ‘Well, is this a good number or a bad number?’ If you don’t have a standard to compare it to, it’s a little difficult to know what to do with it.

“I don’t think they had lost track of it entirely,” Smith said. “There was an intention to go back and pull together folks to try to understand what this meant. And then this thing took off.”

“I recognize that DuPont’s permits have been issued by Democratic-controlled DEQs just as much as Republicans, so in that regard, we failed on those permits across the board, no matter who was in control.”

Kemp Burdette, Cape Fear Riverkeeper

As for DEQ’s approach before last summer and after, Smith said, “I don’t know that I have seen changes so much. Enforcement, especially on a big complicated issue, is a progression through a number of steps, like in this case, when they discovered that air emissions were a big part of the problem. They seem to be following all the normal steps, pursuing groundwater contamination and air emissions. It’s typical for a messy enforcement situation.”

Cape Fear Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette said he’s “pretty pleased in general with the way DEQ responded from last September on. I think they’ve started to take this situation pretty seriously.

“I recognize that DuPont’s permits have been issued by Democratic-controlled DEQs just as much as Republicans, so in that regard, we failed on those permits across the board, no matter who was in control.

“I haven’t seen any kind of memo that’s been sent around that says, ‘we’re going to re-evaluate all these permits,’ but I feel like the agency has been rocked by GenX. I think, in general, the folks at the agency think this is a problem that they are behind on, and they need to be thinking about it.”

Smith said DEQ’s overall approach to regulation largely reflects the political environment in which it operates.

“It’s often less about the agency staff than it is about the signals being sent by legislators and sometimes the governor’s office. The agencies know who they work for. This is rarely about what they personally would like to see happen than it is about the political universe,” she said.

“At what point is the majority of that political universe willing to do something significant? It often takes a big, ugly crisis to get there.”

Knappe acknowledged political pressure is the “other elephant in the room. I’m sure there are a bunch of people (at DEQ) who would be more proactive if the repercussions wouldn’t be so bad.”

Regulators in North Carolina function in a fluctuating political environment but one where lawmakers, overall and in a fairly bipartisan way, have tended to look sympathetically on the interests of business.

“Democratic or Republican, it’s always been a business-friendly legislature,” Smith said. “Governors and to some extent legislators have differed in terms of their willingness to take tough steps, but those tough steps almost always came in response to something approaching a crisis situation like GenX.

“We went through something very similar with hog farms back in the 1990s. I think generally there’s a desire on the part of the legislature to be business-friendly and concerned about the economic impacts of cracking down on an industry, especially if it employs a lot of people. Then a situation blows up, and it becomes clear that there’s a need to take strong action.

“We’ve been down this road before. It’s an interesting case study in how a legislative philosophy bumps up against a real-world problem.”

‘Many Chemicals in Those Water Supplies’

That business-friendly approach was on display last month as measures to deal with GenX evolved in legislative negotiations.

Before incorporating the GenX-related measures into the final budget-adjustment bill, lawmakers agreed to changes urged by the North Carolina Manufacturers Alliance, WRAL.com reported.

The alliance is a lobbying group of more than 50 companies, including GenX manufacturer Chemours. It requested the removal of references to the state’s 140-parts-per-trillion health advisory for GenX. It wanted clarification on a provision requiring companies to release detailed information about the chemicals they discharge into state waters under permit. The alliance also singled out the portion it deemed “most troubling,” one that would have taken a broad snapshot of drinking water statewide and scrutinized its contents.

In a letter to legislators obtained by WRAL, alliance President A. Preston Howard Jr. wrote: “Possibly the most troubling provision of the bill is the provision that tasks the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory and DEQ with sampling all of the local government water supplies and conducting non-targeted analysis on those samples. I feel comfortable saying with some certainty that this high-resolution analysis will most assuredly reveal that there are many, many chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and other consumer products in those waters supplies. Most will be detected at very low levels. But just as was the case with GenX, there will be very little information about the toxicity of those substances, resulting in the same or similar controversies over whether the concentrations pose any significant risk to public health or the environment. The expanded scope does nothing more than open a Pandora’s box on emerging contaminants.”

All three requests are reflected in the final text of the budget-adjustment bill, which makes clear its fluorochemical focus and other restrictions in several sections. For example, the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory will receive $5 million to coordinate research at the state’s universities, but only on PFAS such as GenX.

DEQ will get a mass spectrometer capable of conducting “targeted” analysis rather than the one it had sought, which would have been capable of “non-targeted” testing.

Targeted analysis involves looking for a specific, known substance. It answers the question: Is this in the water? Non-targeted analysis is more flexible, revealing substances in water samples even when researchers may be unsure what they are looking for. The question is more open-ended: What is in the water?

“While I am disappointed that the language in the bill was changed from the broader focus on emerging contaminants to the more narrow focus of PFAS, I can argue that it is a first step in the right direction,” said Knappe, who is helping lead a collaboratory-funded program announced in April to determine resources needed to establish what he called an “observatory” for water contaminants.

“The bill provides universities across the state and DEQ with funding to establish a collaborative framework to study PFAS occurrence in drinking water sources. By studying all public water systems across the state, residents will learn whether PFAS are present in their drinking water sources. Non-targeted analysis is becoming more and more routine, meaning it will become impossible to keep one’s head in the sand.”

For Smith and others, the provision makes clear that the legislature remains reluctant to invest in the state’s regulators.

“The provision in the bill that has to do with obtaining a mass spectrometer has specifications that are not as sophisticated as what DEQ asked for,” Smith said. “It doesn’t seem to be a money issue, but there continue to be ways in which the GenX provision keeps holding back funding (from DEQ) or sending it in another direction. That’s been a very clear trend throughout the past year.

“To me what’s happened over the last year has looked for a while like tension largely between the House and the Senate, but the Senate seems to be particularly wary of authorizing additional actions by the department and appropriating additional funds to the department. They’ve moved somewhat in terms of GenX, but it’s hard to see that carrying over more broadly into water quality issues.”

Next: Partisanship and public health

Last of three parts

WILMINGTON – Oh, the mighty oyster.

They filter and clean our waters, play an important role in our economy by providing food and jobs, build reefs that help prevent erosion and provide habitat for hundreds of marine species.

Yet, oyster populations are at historic lows, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, Fisheries.

The loss of wetlands, pollution, erosion from development, outdated harvest methods and overfishing have resulted in the great oyster population decline.

“As oysters decline in health and numbers, their remarkable ability to filter water is diminished, resulting in poorer water quality,” according to NOAA Fisheries. “The cycle is difficult to reverse.”

That’s why the next of the four goals identified in the collaborative planning effort led by the North Carolina Coastal Federation known as the Lower Cape Fear River Blueprint “is a complex and ambitious” one.

The Third Goal: Oysters

There are signs that the oyster population can be revived in the lower Cape Fear River.

Vast oyster reefs that once thrived in the lower river are either no longer existent or buried under mud, but “there remain viable pockets of oyster reefs supported by an abundance of oyster larvae each year,” the blueprint notes.

Shellfish harvest is open from the area of the Fort Fisher Basin to the river’s mouth.

“While many challenges remain, these factors indicate the potential for a revitalized oyster population and fishery in the lower river is great,” according to the blueprint.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation has for the past 15 years worked with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, or DMF, and other partners to restore oyster populations in the state.

Based on evidence that a million oysters are restored for every acre of oyster sanctuary created, the federation has been aiding DMF to restore at least 50 acres of oyster reefs coastwide by 2020.

That number of oysters will filter an estimated 2.5 trillion gallons of water each day, according to the plan.

A focus area for oyster restoration sites, reef sanctuaries and cultch planting areas in the lower river extends from Snows Cut down to Bald Head Island.

The Fourth Goal: Managing Invasive Species

The non-native, invasive plant species phragmites australis, or the common reed, grows as high as 10 to 12 feet tall, choking out native habitats. This aggressively spreading plant is hard to destroy and it’s growing in the lower Cape Fear River.

Under the blueprint, existing populations of phragmites and migration patterns would be identified through research conducted by the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

The next step is to study effective ways to manage and eradicate the invasive plant species and examine current scientific research on the possible negative effects on the ecosystem and human health from pesticides used to kill the plant.

Based on that research, the federation and researchers will set up a plan to manage phragmites in a way that is safe to the ecosystem and human health.

Funding will then be sought to initiate a pilot program to manage the invasive species. That program, if successful, would then be expanded to the rest of the lower river region.

Upstream benefits

Though the goals mapped out in the blueprint pertain specifically to the lower river, the work implemented as a result of that document will have impacts upstream.

“I’m encouraged by the Coastal Federation’s desire to focus a lot of their resources on the lower Cape Fear,” said Dawn York, Cape Fear River Partnership coordinator. “I think it’s a motivating factor. The work the Coastal Federation is doing and has been doing is like a platform to leverage all the effort that the Cape Fear Partnership and all the partners within the partnership has been working on.”

One major initiative of the partnership is the installation of fish passages at the Cape Fear River’s lock and dams.

These manmade rapids allow migratory fish such as American shad, river herring, striped bass and Atlantic and shortnose sturgeon to travel upstream to spawn.

The first of these passages that allow anadromous, or inland-spawning fish, to swim over during their voyage upstream, was completed in 2012 at Lock and Dam No. 1 near Riegelwood.

The partnership, a coalition of public and private groups, is pulling together funds to design and start building similar fish passages at Lock and Dams No. 2 at Elizabethtown and No. 3, just below Fayetteville.

The lower estuary is primary nursery area for ocean-living anadromous fish including river herring and shad so enhancing and protecting the quality of water in that portion of the river will only aid in efforts to increase migratory fish populations, York said.

Building up eroded shorelines will help protect primary nursery areas habitat, which, in turn, will also be beneficial to the ecosystem that supports migratory fish. Oyster reefs provide habitat to commercial juvenile fish, forage fish, and other marine life such as blue crabs and shrimp.

“(The blueprint goals) all have fairly big impacts,” York said. “It’s not just from a drinking water perspective. It’s help to bring fisheries back to the region, to open up oyster harvest. I hope to be a part of making it successful and supporting the Coastal Federation and doing what the partnership can to bring it all together.”

Second in a series on the Lower Cape Fear River Blueprint

WILMINGTON – More people, more development, more frequent and intense storms, and localized sea level risk – these are the pressures facing the lower Cape Fear River.

The river’s surrounding watersheds span more than 9,000 square miles and encompass more than 6,600 miles of streams and tributaries.

To address head-on these issues that threaten the river’s vulnerable natural resources, the Lower Cape Fear River Blueprint, a collaborative planning effort being led by the North Carolina Coastal Federation, identifies four goals and strategies. Those goals include: protecting and restoring water quality; implementing living shorelines along the river’s banks; boosting oyster habitat; and protecting native coastal wetlands free of invasive species.

The First Goal: Water Quality

About $100 million to $120 million is spent each year in the Cape Fear River basin on fishing, hunting, boating and other natural resource related activities, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The North Carolina Division of Water Quality, or DWR, classifies all surface waters in the state.

A majority of the lower Cape Fear estuary is classified as SC, or waters identified as tidal salt waters for secondary recreational activities like fishing and boating where skin contact with the water is minimal.

Class SC is the least stringent water quality designation.

One of the objectives in the blueprint is to get the state to reclassify the waters between Carolina Beach State Park and Bald Head Island to SB, a designation that would make the waters primary recreation and provide the river an additional level of protection.

The process of getting that reclassification would entail petitioning the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission, or EMC, to a study how the river is primarily used. If the EMC rules to move forward with the request, the decision then goes to the North Carolina Rules Review Commission.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ultimately determines whether to approve the reclassification request.

Meanwhile, work could get underway to develop watershed restoration plans that call for reducing the amount of stormwater runoff flowing into the river.

The federation studied eight watersheds spanning more than 30,000 acres in Brunswick and New Hanover counties and determined that the current volume of runoff during storms can be reduced to levels recorded in 1993, according to the blueprint.

More than 600 sites have been identified as potential locations to reduce stormwater runoff throughout the lower Cape Fear River.

Runoff may also be reduced through wetlands restoration.

The federation has evaluated potential wetlands restoration sites to help restore and enhance the river’s water quality.

A study is underway to identify a list of restoration project sites with work in those areas to begin next year, according to the blueprint.

The Second Goal: Living Shorelines

The largest living shoreline project in North Carolina is underway along the banks of the Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson State Historic Site, a pre-Revolutionary port roughly halfway between downtown Wilmington and the mouth of the Cape Fear River.

The multi-million-dollar shoreline protection project combines the protection of reefmakers with the construction of a living shoreline.

As storms, changing tides and the brunt of waves created in the wake of shipping traffic ripped chunks of the historic shoreline away, fort officials decided to pursue a more natural way to combat erosion.

A major initiative of the federation is the education and implementation of living shorelines as an alternative to bulkheads, which can destroy wetlands and other habitat for marine life.

Living shoreline projects are built with various structural and organic materials, such as plants, submerged aquatic vegetation, oyster shells and stone. These projects generally work best along sheltered coasts such as estuaries, bays, lagoons and coastal deltas, where wave energy is low to moderate.

Mounting research shows that living shorelines hold up better through storms than hardened structures, enhance intertidal habitat for fish and other marine resources, and better defend against sea level rise.

In early 2017, the Army Corps of Engineers authorized its first nationwide permit for living shorelines, a move that solidified on a national level the value of living shorelines and helps streamline the permitting process.

Nationwide Permit 54, which became effective in March 2017, addresses the construction and maintenance of living shoreline projects.

The federation and researchers with the University of North Carolina Wilmington have identified areas of estuary shorelines in the lower Cape Fear River particularly vulnerable to erosion from commercial shipping traffic and effects from sea level rise.

That study revealed that Brunswick County’s shorelines along the river have suffered more erosion that New Hanover County’s river shores.

The federation is taking the results of that study to identify shoreline areas at the most risk for erosion.

The blueprint calls for pinpointing at least 10 potential living shoreline project sites within those areas and initiating funding and construction for those projects next year.

Next: Oysters and Invasive Species

First in a series on the Lower Cape Fear River Blueprint

WILMINGTON – Long before GenX became a household name synonymous with danger lurking in the waters of the Cape Fear River, pollution from development, shipping and industry degraded the river’s quality and natural habitat.

Now, an ambitious, long-range plan called the “Lower Cape Fear River Blueprint” sets out to restore and protect the river’s coastal area, nearly 35 miles stretching from downtown Wilmington to the Atlantic Ocean.

The recently debuted blueprint pinpoints a specific set of goals and maps out how to tackle each goal in an effort to enhance and preserve the lower portion of the 202-mile-long river.

The blueprint, a culmination of about two years of work spearhead by the North Carolina Coastal Federation, is already being hailed as a beacon for educating an array of audiences from nonprofits, government bodies, various industries and private residents.

Bringing in those groups will only bolster the ongoing efforts of groups like the Cape Fear River Partnership, a coalition of federal, state, local and academic organizations working to restore migratory fish stock in the river.

“The partnership, we realize that we’re not working in a bubble,” said Dawn York, the partnership’s coordinator. “There’s so much going on as a river basin. The work the Coastal Federation is doing and has been doing is like a platform to leverage all the effort that the Cape Fear Partnership and all the partners within the partnership have been working on. What they’re going to be doing is engaging stakeholders that may not be familiar with what the critical needs are for the river and the habitat. That, for me, is huge. The blueprint is just one small piece of a very large puzzle, but it’s a significant piece that is moving us forward.”

The blueprint, heavily laden with research conducted by the University of North Carolina Wilmington, evolved in the wake of the victory against Titan America, a cement manufacturer that wanted to operate a plant off the river bank in Castle Hayne.

During the nearly decade-long fight to keep Titan from opening a plant in New Hanover County, the federation, working hand-in-hand with community activists, grassroots organizations and other environmental nonprofits, recognized the power of collaboration, said Tracy Skrabal, coastal scientist and the federation’s Southeast Regional Office manager.

“This blueprint, if you hold it up to you, you should hear it breathe,” Skrabal said during the May 22 launch of the blueprint at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science. “It’s meant to be collaborative.”

The blueprint is designed to be a web-based interactive resource that lays out an action plan, links to resources and provides full access to studies highlighted in the document.

A River of Issues

The lower estuary experienced drastic changes going back to the 18th century, when settlers cleared, drained and diked freshwater swamps for rice production and land development.

So-called unsustainable development practices, such as clear-cutting forests and draining wetlands to make way for intense urban development, have marred natural habitats.

The lock and dam systems created to facilitate commercial shipping traffic up and down the river and provide water supply systems for the region also obstruct migratory fish routes.

A steady increase in shipping traffic and larger vessels traveling through the channel to the port of Wilmington have caused substantial shoreline erosion along the lower river.

Sea level rise and more frequent and increasingly intense hurricanes only exacerbate shoreline erosion.

Compounding the problems affecting the lower Cape Fear River is a threat only recently identified – drinking water contaminants, including GenX, a chemical compound that has, for years, been released into the river.

The presence of GenX was discovered in the river basin just last year.

That discovery has launched research efforts to identify everything from the chemical’s presence in the ground and air, to its possible effects on humans and ways to identify other perfluorinated compounds.

The GenX issue is heightening awareness about the importance of restoration, enhancement and protective measures within the river basin, York said.

“I feel like we’re just sort of at a tipping point,” she said. “I just hope to be a part of making [the blueprint] successful and supporting the Coastal Federation and doing what the partnership can to bring it all together.”

Reeling in various stakeholders – the general public, regulatory agencies and local governments – to work together to put the blueprint into action will help protect a river that is not only economically important for the area, but a source of drinking water for thousands.

The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries estimated in 2014 that the lower Cape Fear River supported more than 450 jobs, $14.2 million in income and $35.7 million in business sales.

About 20 percent of North Carolina’s population lives within the Cape Fear River basin.

Currently, residents within the region and more than 1.6 million people upstream depend on the river for drinking water.

The drinking water demand is expected to increase as population projection estimate more than 500,000 additional residents to the region in the next 25 years.

Learn More

• Lower Cape Fear River Blueprint

Next in the series: Goals and strategies

Second in a series

CHAPEL HILL – If you’ve seen Matthew Lockett, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina, explain his research, you’ve seen an analytical chemist in constant motion.

This is especially true while he is discussing pregnancy tests, how they work and how they communicate scientific results in a clear, direct way.

Take one apart, he says, and what you find inside is that the test, which retails around $12, is just a thin strip of paper somewhat like a paper towel. The simple device, which costs about 32 cents to make, is also incredibly effective.

“The pregnancy test, according to the World Health Organization, is the easiest to read test of any point-of-use diagnostics,” he said. Taking the simplicity and accuracy of paper-based tests into other areas is the focus of Lockett’s lab. They’ve developed studies for devices to test for bacteria in food and the presence of metals like lead and hexavalent chromium in drinking water.

Last month, Lockett’s team began working with a group led by Professor Marcey Waters, an innovator in capturing specific molecules. The two are working on creating an easy-to-use test to help address public health concerns about emerging contaminants in North Carolina. Their goal for the next year or more is to develop one for a molecule known by its trade name: GenX.

In early April, Lockett and Waters explained their concept to the advisory board of the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory and how it might fit in the organization’s new initiative on GenX and emerging contaminants. Their project received $50,000 in this year’s round of collaboratory grants.

Lockett said the goal is to make an inexpensive test that will allow someone to check their water for the presence of GenX with the same simple readout as the two lines in a pregnancy test.

“The pregnancy test, according to the World Health Organization, is the easiest to read test of any point-of-use diagnostics.”

Matthew Lockett, assistant professor of chemistry, UNC-Chapel Hill

“It’ll be the exact same idea for GenX,” he said. “The first line that says the test is working correctly, the second line to say was it there or not.”

The test, he said, could be mass-produced at a low cost. An early estimate put the cost per test for a run of 1 million tests at 50 cents each.

Waters said the capture and detection expertise, coupled with technology to amplify the signal of what’s detected, makes it possible to use the paper test even for molecules in very small concentrations, like GenX. It could also be adapted to target other other per-fluorinated compounds.

The researchers plan to compare paper tests results with results from top-of-the-line mass spectrometry. Using that gold standard, Lockett said, is aimed to give people using the tests confidence in them.

The idea driving the study, Lockett said, “is how do you detect low concentrations of a molecule and how do you detect it in a way that anyone can feel comfortable using?”

Lockett who has also worked on medical tests that can be read through cell phones apps or by telemedicine, said it’s also possible to create databases and location information using readouts uploaded by test users.

A GenX Strategy

Studies on the home GenX test are among the latest round of research grants announced this spring by the policy collaboratory, which was set up at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2016 by the legislature to coordinate university environmental and health research to help guide policy makers. They are part of $430,000 in collaboratory grants for projects on emerging contaminants and GenX.

Studies mandated by the legislature and administrative expenses use about half of the collaboratory’s $1 million annual budget.

Last year, a change in collaboratory funding provisions expanding matching grant options allowed the organization to also tap additional state funds.

One of the tasks in the collaboratory’s early stage is to figure out how to best use money not specifically tied to legislative requests.

At the collaboratory advisory board’s meeting last month in Carrboro, Jeff Warren, the collaboratory’s research director, said last year the organization issued an open call for general proposals to university researchers.

This year, Warren said, it was clearer to collaboratory leadership what the needs were.

“We decided this year we’d like to do a more targeted approach now that we know what the issues are,” he said. The result was the focus on emerging contaminants and GenX. The largest grant of the group leverages matching funds from federal research to draw down $300,000 in state funds for studies on emerging contaminants in private wells as part of a larger, Environmental Protections Agency project, being led by Gillings School of Public Health associate professor Jacqueline MacDonald Gibson.

Her work focuses on the effectiveness of household filtration systems on GenX and other per-fluorinated compounds as well as work on how to increase regular water quality testing by private well owners and improve communications on groundwater by health officials.

In explaining her research last month to the advisory board, Gibson said surveys of well owners in Wake County raised concerns after researchers found that only about 12 percent got their wells tested at the frequency recommended by health officials.

In North Carolina, where more than 3 million people rely on well water, the recommended tests are once a year for total and fecal coliform bacteria; every two years for heavy metals, nitrates, nitrites, lead and copper; and every five years for pesticides and volatile organic compounds.

The state Department of Health and Human Services estimates that less than a fifth of groundwater wells in the state are regularly tested.

With so few residents testing wells and new concerns about GenX and other compounds, Gibson is looking at ways to improve reminders and encouragement for testing as well as how health officials communicate concerns about well water safety.

“In these houses where we were finding all these contaminants people just weren’t aware of the risks,” she said. “People aren’t testing, so how can we encourage people to get their water tested so they know there is a problem?”

She’s been working with a cognitive psychiatrist to study barriers and how to better communicate risk.

In another study, Gibson and North Carolina State University engineering professor Detlef Knappe are leading a group of public and private college researchers to create an inventory of GenX research and looks for ways to improve coordination and close research gaps. The group, which received an initial $80,000 grant from the collaboratory, is also charged with designing and developing cost estimates for a statewide emerging contaminant monitoring plan.

Warren said the project “brings in the cast of academics that are really at the forefront of this issue.”

They plan to also work with the Department of Environmental Quality to identify study needs and data gaps and assist the agency in making regulatory decisions or policy recommendations.

Warren said the group is expected to release an initial report on June 1.

In addition to the focus on GenX, the collaboratory is also funding research on long-term planning by water utilities; whether local government investments in flood plain buyouts are effective; lead in state surface waters with an emphasis on major rivers; a study on the economic impact of the Hemlock Wooly Adegid; and a study on saltwater-based energy storage.

This is the first in a two-part report on the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory’s work.

CHAPEL HILL – After a startup year mixed with scrutiny and budget uncertainty, the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory is now in full stride in its second year as a public-private research grant conduit. But where the environmental and natural resources study center fits in the broader process of policy making is still a work in progress.

“We really see the collaboratory almost as an in-house NGO, a grants-making organization,”

Brad Ives, Director N.C. Policy Collaboratory

Compiling GenX and emerging contaminants, studies on filtering systems, inexpensive home test kits for drinking water contaminants and the effectiveness of floodplain buyouts are among the latest round of collaboratory studies.

Brad Ives, the University of North Carolina’s associate vice chancellor for campus enterprises who also serves as collaboratory director, said that after getting organized and putting processes in place, the organization can now focus on its main mission.

“We really see the collaboratory almost as an in-house NGO, a grants-making organization,” he said, using the acronym for non-governmental organizations.

A Shaky Start

Much of the collaboratory’s first year was dedicated to getting the organization established while fulfilling legislative assignments for studies and analyses. Studies already assigned by the North Carolina General Assembly range from marketing programs for an “oyster trail,” which would highlight the state’s oyster heritage, to a detailed examination of water quality and regulation of nutrients in the Falls Lake and Jordan Lake reservoirs.

At the same time, the collaboratory faced uncertainty when its funding became a bargaining chip in state budget negotiations. In the 2017 budget cycle, the Senate continued the collaboratory’s $1 million annual recurring appropriation along with an added $150,000 for an aquaculture study. The Senate’s budget plan also included major cuts to the Department of Environmental Quality and conservation funds not favored by the House.

When House members got their crack at the budget, they restored the DEQ and conservation funding and zeroed out funding for the collaboratory and then assigned its reports to divisions within DEQ.

The final budget compromise continued the collaboratory’s annual appropriation and assigned studies and added an additional study on battery storage for the legislature’s Joint Commission on Energy Policy. The budget bill also changed the wording of a previous $3.5 million collaboratory challenge grant to expand potential matching requirements.

During another showdown over funding early this year, Ives and a top public health researcher were summoned to Raleigh to speak before a Senate committee negotiating changes to a bill to address GenX and emerging contaminant research.

Senators changed a House bill that directed funding to DEQ for a high-resolution mass spectrometer for contaminant research, moving the money instead to the collaboratory, which was also given authority in the Senate version to recommend the best place for the scientific instrument to be located.

The move was analogous to one by the House last August, which proposed to use funding earmarked for the collaboratory to pay for DEQ’s GenX work.

Neither effort succeeded and Ives, a former DEQ deputy secretary, said he’s more confident now of the stability of funding. Ives said he didn’t expect to see the same kind of gamesmanship this year as in past cycles but added the standard caveat of veterans of budget battles.

“No one funded by the legislature knows where they stand until the budget’s passed,” Ives said. “Come see me at the end of June.”

So far, he said, the legislature has been reasonable in its approach to balancing resources with what’s being asked.

“The legislature has done pretty well for funding for larger projects,” Ives said. Smaller projects, he said, have been funded through the regular appropriation.

“I feel like we’re doing well,” he said. “What we would love to see is that for larger projects we do get some specific funding from the legislature, because most likely they will outstrip our ability to cover them with the $1 million in operating money.”

Ives said managing funding has also meant holding some funds in reserve in case the legislature comes up with an emergency assignment.

“We’re holding some funds back, so we have the ability to hop on a hot topic or two should they come up,” he said.

The language tweak from last year allowing for more flexible use of the matching-grant funds has helped add funding to projects and helped the collaboratory bridge the gaps between the state’s fiscal year and the academic calendar.

What’s missing right now, Ives said, is a more formal process for presenting reports and proposals to the legislature.

During a meeting two weeks ago, the collaboratory updated the Joint Agriculture, Environment and Natural Resources Oversight Committee on the oyster trail project but also took some time to show members a broader view of the projects.

Ives said he wants to see the collaboratory develop a more formal relationship with the committee and conduct regular briefings going forward. Ives said he and Jeffrey Warren, the collaboratory’s research director, are working with legislative staff to work out the timing for regular reports.

“We think that’s the missing element now,” he said.

Early Skepticism Fades

When it was first revealed in a Senate budget plan in the spring of 2016, there was a mix of confusion and concern about how the collaboratory would go about its business.

Under the Senate’s plan, the new university-based organization would take on research of some of the most controversial environmental issues in the state.

The proposal was a surprise not just in the legislature but even in the UNC system, where officials made it clear it was not part of the system’s official budget request. Environmental groups expressed concern that it was an effort by the Senate leadership to influence the science driving policy. The collaboratory proposal also came during a time when legislators increasingly questioned reports coming out of DEQ.

Not helping the wariness was the open secret that Warren, then science adviser to Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, would be tapped to run the center.

UNC officials said the search would be open, but the criteria used for hiring for the job gave Warren a significant advantage.

The collaboratory proposal also drew criticism on the Chapel Hill campus and was included among a list of concerns about legislative interference passed in 2016 by the UNC Faculty Council.

Ives, whose position is under the university’s business side, set up a structure in which an academic advisory board has the oversight role for work with researchers. The nine-member panel is appointed by the school’s provost, its chief academic administrator.

The current board includes Department of Marine Science Chair Jaye Cable and UNC Institute of Marine Sciences Director Rick Luettich, along with faculty in environmental finance, engineering and public law. The advisory board’s duties include project selection, staffing, research guidance, grant approvals and report reviews and approvals.

Ives said he had confidence that the board maintains a solid firewall between science and politics. “We’re very confident in that approach,” he said.

The advisory board, he said, represents some of the university’s “all-star” researchers. “They are not going to be involved in something if they think that there’s undue influence from outside or even the staff of the collaboratory itself,” he said.

Researchers working with collaboratory grants are governed by the rules for research where they work and each campuses’ own oversight systems.

“Once we make the grants, then the researchers are going to comply with their normal requirements for research at their home institution,” he said.

Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, a longtime environmental advocate in the legislature, said she was wary of the collaboratory when it was announced but said Ives had done a good job in setting it up.

Harrison, who served on the Coastal Resources Commission when Warren was a staff scientist with the Division of Coastal Management, said she has had policy disagreements both with Warren and his former boss at the state Senate, but believes the collaboratory is proving itself. She was impressed with what she saw at the recent committee presentation.

“I was super skeptical at first,” Harrison said. “I was a little bit critical of them when it was set up and was worried about what that meant but, based on the presentation I saw and what I’ve read, it does seem like they are doing good stuff.”

She said Warren is taking the right steps to reach out to scientists around the state at both public and private universities.

“He seems sincerely intent on making this work,” Harrison said. “At this point I trust them to try and take advantage of all the scientific expertise we have in this state to help us solve some of these problems. “

What’s Ahead

This year, the collaboratory is working through its to-do list of studies and reports. Ives said he didn’t expect to see new legislation related to the collaboratory, but he expects to make a formal request to move the deadline for one key study.

Warren told legislators this month that researchers want a six-month extension on a report on nutrient strategies for Falls and Jordan lakes.

Warren said that work on Falls Lake is nearing completion, but that studies on Jordan Lake would take more time and may require development of new modeling to better understand the dynamics of the reservoir.

Harrison said she didn’t want to see an extension on the timeline for research translated into yet another delay on rules to reduce nutrient pollution of the reservoir. But given the complexity, she said, it’s understandable that more time might be needed.

Next in the series: An Innovative Approach

Last in a three-part series

Getting to the Three Sisters Swamp to paddle amongst the ancient bald cypress trees is a relatively easy, laid-back trip down the Black River.

Venturing through the swamp, its watery floor littered with fallen branches, downed logs and fields of cypress knees, is a different story.

Some passages are just wide enough for kayakers and canoeists to slip through. Paddlers sometimes have to push, pull, scoot and rock their way through the intricate swamp forests’ maze.

“You see something different every time you come through here,” said Cebron Fussell.

It was a while before Fussell, leading a group of 10 kayakers and canoeists, most members of the Friends of Sampson County Waterways, spotted a familiar, neon-colored ribbon he uses to mark paddling paths.

Fussell is no stranger to the Black River, having paddled it countless times. It’s hard to imagine traversing through Three Sisters without someone as experienced as him as a guide.

Three Sisters is about 4 miles down the river from where the paddlers put in at Henry’s Landing, privately owned land opened to those willing to pay a small fee to access the river.

A yard sign, white with black lettering, is staked next to the dirt drive leading from the road to the landing: “NO Black River State Park.”

Those words echo throughout the riverside community, members of whom argue a state park would damage the river’s ecosystem, heighten the trespassing problems in which they deal with, and burden, in some cases, resource-strapped emergency first responders.

Out of the Blue

Riverfront property owners learned about the proposed Black River State Park after it was introduced into legislation earlier this year.

Up to that point, there had been no public meeting, no notice that such a proposal was coming down the pike, property owners say.

“They pushed this through the House without ever coming to this area and having the first meeting,” said Ivanhoe resident Donna Sykes. “I started a petition because the people who do not want a state park in our area are not being heard.”

She’s collected more than 1,300 signatures, names including that of Harold Corbett.

“I’m dead set against it,” Corbett said. “I don’t like the way they went about it. If I hadn’t heard about it from somebody who told me I wouldn’t have known a thing about it. The way they went about it was underhanded. My whole family feels the same way.”

Corbett lives in Atkinson, a small Pender County town near the Bladen County line. He lives closest to the Black River of his siblings, whose family land stretches 3 miles along the river and more than 600 acres in Sampson County.

The land has been in the family for more than 100 years.

They tend to the land and enjoy its natural resources, hunting and fishing off the Black River’s banks.

“I want to be left alone on my property,” Corbett said. “We’ve taken care of it. The state can’t even mow the shoulder road. They want to tell me how to run my own property?”

More people, more problems?

Despite park officials’ assurances that private land would not be taken via eminent domain, riverfront property owners remain leery.

There are only a handful of river accesses, including private property launches, along the nearly 70-mile-long river.

Riverfront property owners interviewed for this story said they do not know how the state intends to add more launches if they do not own the riverfront property necessary to do so.

Avid river paddlers like Fussell would like to see more public river access, but, he admits his feelings are mixed about the prospect of additional accesses drawing more people to the river, particularly Three Sisters.

During a series of state-sponsored community meetings held during the course of the late summer and early fall, parks officials gave a loose estimate that upwards of 50,000 people may visit the river each year.

“This area can no way withstand that many people,” Sykes said.

“Even if you break it down to 140 people a day in that river, you’re going to see a lot of negative impact on the ecosystem, on the wildlife. There’s going to be so much trash. There’s going to be so much trespassing. There is no water rescue here. The Ivanhoe Volunteer Fire Department doesn’t have a boat. There are no restaurants here. We like it like that. It is literally an untouched area. The reason that it’s so beautiful is the lack of people here. We’re happy for people to come visit the area, but we’re not looking to advertise.”

The Sampson County Board of Commissioners in July adopted a resolution in support of the proposed state park, stating a park would allow people to “enjoy this natural resource, promote tourism and economic growth.”

Commissioners in Bladen County, which could host a large chunk of the proposed park, have had little discussion about it, according to board Chairman Charles Peterson.

“I did go to the (state) meeting,” Peterson said. “Personally, I live on the other side of the county, but I’d have to lean toward the people of that community. The more I know about it, I would say I would be against it because I’m not well versed on what’s going to happen down there. It’s a beautiful place. The thing that bothers me about state land is we have thousands and thousands of (acres of) state land in Bladen County that we don’t get tax (revenue) off of.”

Bladen County Commissioner-at-large David Gooden also pointed out that state-owned land equates to no tax revenue.

“In my opinion the state owns enough land in Bladen County,” Gooden said. “And, people in that area do not want it. I know a lot of those people that live down there. They don’t want a bunch of people down there and I respect that.”

Sykes said she hopes Sampson County commissioners will rescind their vote.

“You can get on the river if you want to get on the river and we’re not trying to keep anybody off the river,” she said. “We just do not want them to funnel that many people through this area. I’ve lived here for 40 years and it looks the exact same as it did 40 years ago. The reason is because we’re so rural and so far out. All the neighbors help each other. Most people farm in some way. The cypress trees are already on Nature Conservancy land. Everything is protected. Nobody can log them. You can’t even hardly get to them.”

She said she fears the same for novice paddlers drawn to the proposed park that try to navigate the river and swamps. Cell phone reception is, at best, spotty along parts of the river. If someone gets in trouble, Sykes said, they may not be able to call for help and, if they do, it may take rescuers a long time to reach them.

Sykes’ concerns are a consistent theme among those arguing against the prospect of a state park.

“The point is we don’t want 50,000 people in there tearing this place up,” said riverfront property owner Paul Turlington. “It will destroy it.”

Turlington owns 10 acres just below Three Sisters in Bladen County.

He doesn’t want a park. He doesn’t want any part of the river designated natural area. The option of “nothing” was not available on surveys offered to those who went to the state-sponsored meetings, he said, only what they wanted in a park.

“The Nature Conservancy owns all the land that is important to the trees,” Turlington said.

Rachel Giddens’ family owns a little fewer than 200 acres along the Black River near the South River. Giddens is a blueberry farmer. The land has been in her family for decades.

“The influx of people through here if they open a park, it’s just going to devastate the area,” she said. “The river would change. If those trees weren’t there, I probably wouldn’t be as worried about it. I care about the area. I care about those trees.”

She fears converting portions of the river into state park would change the culture in which her family has a rooted history.

“Our family used to run the steamboats to Wilmington and back hauling supplies,” she said. “We’ve left the riverside natural. It’s everyday life to be on that river, to be a part of that river. We are a part of that river and that river is a part of us.”

Learn More

• Black River State Park Feasibility Study

Second in a three-part series.

David Stahle has a way of verbally painting a picture of the Black River that taps into your inner explorer and leaves you thinking, “I want to see it.”

“There’s only one Black River, North Carolina,” he said. “It’s one of the greatest natural areas in the world. Nowhere else in the world do you have 1,000-, perhaps 2,000-year-old trees that are growing out of the water where you can kayak amongst them. I’ve been to many of the oldest known tree sites in the world. None of them are growing from a river as beautiful as the Black River.”

Stahle is the University of Arkansas professor who discovered the ancient bald cypress trees growing along river banks and swamps by accident in the 1980s while doing research on the relationship between cypress tree growth rings and climate change.

News of the ancient trees made various publications, piquing the interest of explorers wanting to see the majestic trees and conservation groups wanting to preserve them.

“We’ve been acquiring property there since 1991,” said Debbie Crane, The Nature Conservancy’s communications director.

Today, The Nature Conservancy owns and manages more than 2,200 acres, including the Three Sisters Swamp, in its Black River Preserve and monitors conservation easements on more than 260 acres of privately owned land.

In all, about 14,500 acres have been protected primarily through partners, including the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust, according to The Nature Conservancy’s website.

“If you’ve got the oldest trees on the East Coast you want to make sure they don’t get shovel logged,” Crane said. “We want to make sure we get the prime property to protect it. We’re just lucky these trees didn’t end up mulch in someone’s yard. We’re always looking for property there and probably will continue to buy property.”

A Black River State Park?

Throughout its nearly 70-mile stretch from its headwaters in Sampson County over into Pender County then Bladen County, where it flows into the Cape Fear River, much of the Black River’s waterfront property is privately owned.

There are two public wildlife boat accesses on the river.  The first is a North Wildlife Resources Commission ramp at Ivanhoe Road in Sampson County. The second is at Hunt’s Bluff roughly 20 miles downriver in Bladen County.

A couple of private property owners allow access from their properties for a nominal fee. These are popular spots for kayakers and canoeists who enjoy paddling the stretch of river that accesses Three Sisters.

“No Trespassing” signs are posted on either side of the river’s banks, but the warnings routinely go unheeded, property owners say.

Groups like Friends of Sampson County Waterways, a club whose members help maintain and preserve that county’s waterways, have obtained permission from some riverfront property owners to stop for lunch and take breaks during paddle trips.

“We would like people to enjoy it as much as we do,” Crane said. “Right now, the prettiest places, we own. Making it a public park would open those areas. We just think it belongs in public ownership. ”

In March, House Bill 353 was introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly. That bill included a proposal for a Black River State Park.

The proposed Black River State Park had been cut out of the bill when legislators passed it in June. By then, mounting backlash from riverfront property owners had reached the halls of the General Assembly.

The North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation is currently doing a feasibility study on the proposed park, as directed in the version of the bill Gov. Roy Cooper ultimately signed in July. The division, along with The Nature Conservancy, recently held a series of community meetings in the three counties through which the river flows.

“We’ve got a lot of local support from some counties and not from others,” said Katie Hall, state parks and recreation spokeswoman. “We’ve definitely heard a lot of concerns from citizens about too many people coming to the area and damage occurring to the ecosystem.”

Parks officials estimate a Black River State Park would draw each year roughly 50,000 visitors, an estimate officials based on the numbers of visitors to the Lumber River State Park.

“It’s just a best guess based on the closest linear park with a few accesses and facilities,” Hall said.

Still, that number alarms some property owners, who raise numerous concerns ranging from trespassing to pressure on small, local first-responder resources.

Hall said the meetings parks officials hosted earlier this fall were held to try and set the record straight.

“There’s a misconception that state parks are involved in taking property and forcing people to sell their land,” she said. “We don’t do that. We only work with willing private land owners.”

The parks service has three goals: conservation, recreation and education.

“Conservation really rises to the top as the focus and the most critical aspect of what we do,” she said. “When we have a resource like (the Black River) in our state our priority is to incorporate that property into our park system. It protects that area from ever being developed in a way that is harmful to that ecosystem. The idea would be we would purchase property from the nature conservancy that would protect the most delicate natural resources.”

The feasibility study area includes roughly 2,600 acres and 45 miles of the river corridor, although that’s not an indication of the area proposed for a park. A state park size or area has not been proposed, Hall said.

There are also options in lieu of a state park.

The river could be designated a state natural area or be added to the state trail system. Natural areas are those designed for viewing wildlife, nature and conducting research without the presence of recreational amenities.

Part of the state parks’ study is looking at what option is most appropriate for the river, Hall said.

The parks’ study must look into the accessibility of the river, gauge the local communities about the proposed state park, identify potential impacts on those communities and the river’s ecosystem, and estimated cost to develop the park.

Parks officials have to report their findings to the Legislative Oversight Committee on Agriculture and Natural and Economic Resources by March 1, 2018.

“There will be more meetings later in the year and, in the meantime, the study will continue,” Hall said. “Considering the very delicate nature of these resources, I think everyone would agree that the focus here would be accesses to these natural resources with great respect for them and not leaving a trace behind.”

Anyone wishing to participate in the study may submit comments to dpr.masterplancomments@ncparks.gov.

Learn More

• House Bill 353
• The Nature Conservancy: “Protecting the Ancient”

Read Part 1: History, Ancient Trees

Next: Why Locals Oppose Park

Update April 23, 2018: Study Recommends State Park on Black River

First in a three-part series.

BLADEN COUNTY – Roughly at the halfway mark of the Black River, some of nature’s old treasures reach up through the water and tower over the remote swamp where they’ve grown for centuries.

The trunks of the ancient bald cypress trees here are hollow, knotty and gnarled, a visual testament to their age.

Their roots, or “knees” as they’re called, pepper the spaces between the trees throughout the swamp. Hundreds of these knobby, stalagmite-like knees, some 4 to 5 feet tall, jut from the water.

This is the Three Sisters Swamp, a majestic area of the Black River, which widens and narrows, curves and turns for about 70 miles from its beginning at the confluence of Great Coharie Creek and Six Runs Creek in southern Sampson County to where it empties into the Cape Fear River some 14 miles north of Wilmington.

Three Sisters Swamp, given its name because of how the swamp exits via three distinct channels into the river, showcases some of the more than 1,000-year-old trees thriving within the Black River.

In the 1980s, while conducting research tying cypress tree ring growth to studying the history of climate change, University of Arkansas Professor David Stahle discovered the Black River to be home to some of the oldest living trees in the world.

One of the trees cored and tagged is 1,654 years old “and counting,” according to Stahle.

“That’s a core sample I took in the mid-1980s,” he said in a telephone interview. “I took it 15 feet above the ground so that’s the minimum age of that tree. We believe there are much older trees in there. We don’t really know yet.”

Since that discovery, conservation and environmental groups, with the help of some private property owners, have taken steps to protect more than 14,000 acres, according to The Nature Conservancy.

Now, much to the ire of many riverfront private property owners, the Division of Parks and Recreation is considering buying land owned by the conservancy around the river.

Steamboat Alley

The Black River has a history as rich as its tea-colored water.

Long before paddlers enjoyed the quiet, scenic views of mostly undeveloped riverfront land here, the river was a passageway for transporting people and goods.

Settlers in the 1700s began using flats or pole boats in the river. Before that, modern-day paddlers like to point out, Native Americans navigated the river in canoes.

Following the Civil War, technological advances introduced the use of shallow-draft steamboats on the Black River.

In an effort to encourage area trade, the Black River Navigation Co. was formed in the mid-1870s. With the assistance of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the river was dredged to make an accessible steamboat route.

Steamboats hauling everything from lumber and wood products to cotton, rice and livestock ferried back and forth between Wilmington and Sampson County’s Clear Run community, which was the head of navigation on the river.

Naval stores, or materials used to build and maintain ships, and lumber were the primary cargo of steamboats navigating the Black River between 1875 and 1914.

One of the largest steamboats that traveled the river was a 57-ton stern-wheel named the A.J. Johnson.

According to the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, the steamer was built at Clear Run in 1899 and operated until it sank where it was tied up in Clear Run during a storm in 1914.

The steamer’s hull remains at the river’s bottom, as does an intact pole boat farther downriver in Bladen County.

The River and Research Today

Hints of the river’s past lie in the few remaining steamboat landings on private property.

It’s hard to imagine large steamboats navigating the river with its undulating width and depths. Large branches and entire fallen trees clog the river, making even kayaking or canoeing tricky.

As the river has been allowed to return to its more natural state, its water quality has improved since its days as a navigable body.

Though, as one vigilant riverkeeper points out, runoff from hog farms along the upper part of the river in Sampson County are a source of pollution, the Black River is designated outstanding resource waters.

The river received that classification in May 1994 from the then-North Carolina Department of Natural Resources, now the Department of Environmental Quality.

The riverfront itself remains mostly undeveloped.

Much of the privately owned land along the river is rural landscape dotted by farms of row crops and blueberry fields, seemingly far away from river’s banks, from the river’s view.

During a mid-August trip from Arkansas to the river, Stahle and a group of graduate students traversed the swampy forest to core, tag and map the locations of the ancient trees.

Their locations and size, which Stahle describes as “massively buttressed trees,” make them a challenge to core.

“You have to actually climb the tree and get to a third of the way up to get the solid wood and even then it’s not solid in many cases,” he said.

For that reason, he and the group of student researchers were selective in choosing the trees they cored, looking for the oldest they could find.

In all, they only cored about 20 trees in a week.

“It’s far from efficient, what we’re doing,” Stahle said.

The core samples are being used by researchers in two ways: The samples reveal the ages of the trees and they provide a window into the history of climate change in the region.

Cypress trees form very distinctive concentric growth bands, Stahle said. These bands can be counted, starting with the outermost ring, and dated to the calendar year.

“Then, if you look at those rings, they have an amazing variability of width from one year to another,” Stahle said. “What’s going on there is climate is affecting tree growth. In moist years, they grow well. In dry years, they grow poorly. You can use that climate-induced pattern of ring variability to synchronize going back hundreds of years in time.”

The history of drought and moisture variability, he said, reveals drought conditions during Colonial times.

In 1587, the year Virginia Dare was born and Sir Walter Raleigh’s colony last seen, tree ring widths indicate it was the driest year in 800 years, Stahle said.

There’s been an increase in wetness in eastern North Carolina since the 17th century and into the 21st century, although not a dramatic change, he said.

“This is very valuable for dating past climate,” Stahle said.

Stahle’s research has him returning to the Black River, but “not enough.”

“We’re really just scratching the surface,” he said. “These streams contain not only living trees, but (also) dead wood that litter the forest floor and are often submerged when the water’s high. Some of those logs are so-called storm logs that simply fell over and sank to the bottom of the creek and maybe have been there for 10,000 years. We’re trying to map those areas that are left. Some of them are privately owned. Some are public properties. On those public properties we don’t know necessarily what’s super ancient. If we can provide those agencies with the specific information, it may assist their management efforts going forward.”

Next: Park Study Underway

Second in a two-part series.

WILMINGTON – When the news broke in June that GenX and other chemicals had been detected in the Cape Fear River and the area’s treated drinking water, it was a call to action for many, both new and experienced environmental activists.

A handful of organizations have rallied or regrouped in response to the threats to clean water, shining a spotlight on the issues and industries that often operate behind the scenes.

“It always takes this kind of crisis to get people thinking about those things they usually take for granted,” said Kemp Burdette, who has been the Cape Fear Riverkeeper with the Cape Fear River Watch for eight years. “It makes people pay attention to the kinds of serious problems we have with the way we allow polluters to contaminate the water.”

This summer, concerned residents have organized rallies and forums to help focus efforts to address the problem. The Wilmington group, Stop GenX in Our Water, has a Facebook following of more than 9,000 members and recently helped organized events with well-known activist Erin Brockovich. Other organizations, such as the Brunswick Environmental Action Team and the New Hanover chapter of the NAACP’s Environmental Climate Justice group, say this issue has forced them to reorganize their priorities.

Clean Cape Fear members were already active in community affairs when they met in June.

“We thought it would be better to unite,” said Emily Donovan, who formed the group along with Burdette and six others. “We could pool our resources and experience.”

Clean Cape Fear members represent grassroots organizations such as Women Organizing for Wilmington, or WoW, along with scientists and politicians.

“It is not possible to separate women from water, so, of course WoW has taken on the Chemours’ contamination of the Cape Fear River,” said Lynn Shoemaker, founder of the organization. “This water crisis is nothing short of a wake-up call that we need more regulations not less. WoW will continue to beat our Teflon pots and pans outside local legislators’ offices, educating voters on the issue, for as long as it takes.”

Adrian Schlesinger is another person who wanted to do something after hearing about GenX. As someone who has been dealing with a long-term illness for many years that leaves her homebound, she needed the help of her parents to get access to unpolluted water.

“I know that not everybody has the help I do,” Schlesinger said. She formed Wilmington Water Share to do the same for others. She collected water and delivered it in a limited area. Eventually, though, she said it seemed a wise choice to merge her group with Stop GenX in Our Water and donate her supplies to them, but she has no plans of stopping her activism.

“I really want to play a role as an individual in helping fix a system that is no longer serving the needs of the people,” Schlesinger said. “I think this has started a dialogue about how we can all do more.”

That’s a similar sentiment and frustration with the status quo that’s led to a reinvigoration of the Brunswick Environmental Action Team, said Sandra Ford, who is on the organization’s interim board. The group was founded in 1996 but faded after about a decade of activism. Organizers reactivated the group earlier this year to fight a number of threats.

“Offshore drilling, terminal groins. Stuff just keeps coming,” Ford said. And now there’s water pollution.

Ford recently spoke at a clean water rally in Wilmington. Contaminated water offers more reasons to bring awareness about environmental issues. “I think there is a segment of the population here in Brunswick County that has no idea that this even exists,” she said.

Awareness, especially of those problems that disproportionately affect communities of color, was a reason that the NAACP added Environmental Climate Justice to their national platform two years ago, said Deborah Maxwell, president of the New Hanover County chapter.

“It was necessary to address a number of issues that keep coming up,” she said. The local group meets once a month and clean water is just one topic they discuss.

She’s a frequent speaker at local water rallies because, she said, this is a concern that affects the community as a whole, and perhaps some of that interest and energy can be channeled into larger environmental issues.

“It’s important to act as one,” Maxwell said. “One voice makes a better sound.”

These groups have seen results, too. “It can seem like a long, slow process,” Donovan said. “But there has been progress.”

Clean Cape Fear, Donovan said, will continue to push for transparency and more open meetings regarding GenX and continue to reach out to local politicians. Another of Clean Cape Fear’s priorities has been distributing information, including flyers, to those who might not have access. This includes bilingual information and a fact-checked website.

“We are very careful about what we have up there. It’s all vetted by scientists,” Donovan said.

Ongoing campaigns include getting clean water to more people, such as students in local schools.

Burdette, the Riverkeeper, says there’s a familiar pattern with this type of contamination.

“First, there’s a public outcry, which happened here?” Burdette said. Gradually, though, the focus tends to shift and it can be difficult to maintain the urgency. It’s up to these groups and activists to help to continue to apply the pressure on politicians and polluters to change water quality for the better, he said.

“It would be great if we could all think more about that,” Burdette said. “I would love it if everyone had a more awareness. If they could take a minute when they turn on the tap to think about where this water comes from and what else is in there besides water, to think about what impacts huge animal agriculture operations and industrial companies have on our water.”

Read Part 1: GenX Response: Stored Water Disposal Set

This is the first installment of a two-part special report on the GenX response.

This story has been updated.

WILMINGTON – About 50 million gallons of treated drinking water stored in the Upper Peedee Aquifer will soon be pumped back into the Cape Fear River.

The Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, which provides drinking water for nearly 200,000 people in the Wilmington area, said it plans to begin withdrawing the water from the aquifer around Sept. 10. Preliminary testing of water shows scant traces of the chemical GenX, a contaminant for which federal regulatory standards have yet to be developed.

The pump-out is part of the authority’s latest moves to respond to the GenX contamination, in addition to a nearly $65,000 contract with the University of North Carolina Wilmington announced Monday to study unregulated compounds and chemicals in the water supply.

Related: What Else Is In the Water? Study to Begin

Authority officials in July contracted Wilmington-based Catlin Engineers and Scientists for an amount not to exceed $50,000 to design and implement a plan to remove the water, which had been drawn from the river, treated at the authority’s Sweeney Water Treatment Plant and injected into the utility authority’s Aquifer Storage and Recovery, or ASR, well.

The water is being pumped from the well to allay public fears about GenX in the area’s drinking water.

“Out of an abundance of caution we wanted to discharge the water that’s in there now back to the river,” said Gary McSmith, engineering manager with CFPUA’s Design & Planning Division. “We just want to get the GenX out.”

GenX, a chemical which little is known about the affects in humans, has been intermittently released into the river since 1980 by DuPont, then its spin-off company Chemours at its plant near Fayetteville. The plant is about 100 miles upriver from Wilmington.

GenX is a chemical compound designed to make high-performance polymers used in products such as non-stick cookware, cabling, laptops and cell phones.

A team of researchers first reported their discovery of GenX’s presence in the river in a journal of the American Chemical Society last November, more than two years after the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority began pumping treated water from the river into the ASR well.

“They didn’t know (GenX) was there when they were storing the water,” said Rick Catlin, the environmental engineer overseeing the water removal project. “They care very much about taking away the concerns of the citizens. They have not been required to pump it out, but they’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do.”

The water in the ASR will be discharged into the river at a safe distance from the drinking water source.

“It’s downstream from any water supply levels,” Catlin said. “It won’t have any impacts on any drinking water.”

McSmith said the concentration of GenX in the water that will be pumped into the river will be less than 140 parts per trillion, below the state Department of Health and Human Services’ health advisory standard updated in July.

A series of monitoring wells is being tested to determine how widespread the presence of GenX is in the aquifer. Those wells will be routinely monitored throughout the discharge process.

“The utility authority’s plan is to at least take out what was put in” the ASR, Catlin said. “Then, based on hydrogeology analysis and concentration sampling and plume delineation, that’s when they’ll determine any other pumping they may need to do.”

GenX-tainted water stored in the ASR system had flowed into the part of the aquifer where Wrightsville Beach has one of two wells, leading the town to shut down the affected Well No. 11, but a subsequent test of the Wrightsville Beach well found no detectable amount of GenX. Utility authority officials had previously indicated that the ASR well storage zone was limited to a 300-foot radius. Wrightsville Beach’s Well No. 11 is about 3,500 feet from the ASR well. Its other well showed no traces of GenX.

Water stored in the ASR will be pumped into the Northside Wastewater Treatment Plant then discharged into the Cape Fear.

“The water coming into the sewage treatment plant has very, very low dilution levels now,” Catlin said. “The levels may get even lower as we’re pumping.”

The process will take a minimum of two to three months, he said.

An innovative system

Though the Aquifer Storage and Recovery process has been around more than 20 years, the ASR is Wilmington is one of only two in North Carolina.

The utility authority’s ASR process involves injecting water treated at its Sweeney Water Treatment Plant into the Upper Peedee Aquifer, where it is stored to supplement drinking water sources during increased demand and extended periods of drought.

“ASR is a nationwide, worldwide proven technology for really helping us meet our peak demands,” said Richard Spruill, an associate professor at East Carolina University and principal hydrologist and president of Groundwater Management Associates Inc. of Greenville. “It’s a really neat and exciting technology. Frankly, North Carolina has lagged behind in implementing it.”

ASR wells are utilized in coastal areas of South Carolina – there are four ASRs in Hilton Head alone – and Virginia.

Spruill, along with David Pyne, a pioneer of ASR technology, designed the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority’s ASR, the second such well permitted by the state for storing treated water underground.

Spruill said ASR is a proven technology and an incredible opportunity to store water in a safe environment. Research has proven that trihalomethanes, a group of chemicals formed during the water treatment process, can be dramatically reduced when stored underground, he said.

“Groundwater moves really slowly,” Spruill said. “It wouldn’t be unusual at all if the water that’s stored underground to move only a matter of inches per day. It’s not like there’s this big zone of contamination underground. That’s the beauty of ASR. You have this reservoir of water that doesn’t move very fast.”

The state Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, has a rigorous ASR permitting process, one Spruill praises.

He worked on the first ASR well permitted in the state in Greenville.

“That well probably took us 10 years,” he said. “The water we’re putting underground, we’re required to meet all the national primary and secondary drinking standards.”

After an ASR well is constructed and permitted it must then undergo a cycled program in which water is repeatedly injected then removed over a period of months. This helps ensure that naturally occurring elements in the aquifer do not react to treated water.

The authority started injecting treated water into its ASR in 2014. By March 4 of that year, 13.75 million gallons of drinking water had been stored.

The state-issued underground injection control permit requires the authority to routinely cycle and test water as it goes into and out of the ASR. The authority’s ASR has been through two and a half cycles since 2014.

“The permit’s very explicit on the tests we run,” McSmith said. “The purpose of each cycle is to increase the amount of storage over time.”

Though the well is designed to hold more, the authority would ultimately like to store 100 million gallons of water in the ASR.

“We would like to begin normal ASR operation in due course,” McSmith said. “By pumping out everything it resets the clocks because then we’ve got to go back and start filling it again. We haven’t set a timeline except that once we remove the 50 million gallons we’ll initiate discussions with the state. We don’t want to start filling it until we’re on the same page with the state. We’re really trying to do the right thing.”

Wednesday: The Community Responds

Last of two parts

SALVO – Out on a cactus-mined shoreline overlooking a wide and empty Hatteras Island beach, Gabriel Matthias showed off the equipment he had just finished installing. Tall sticks, with an aluminum rod attached halfway up, stood 33 feet apart in a row along the dune line. Their simple, Scout-project appearance belies the part they’re playing in an important new study off Cape Hatteras.

Eight pieces of wood, still looking fresh from the lumberyard, held a narrow aluminum rod with an antenna that receives low-frequency radio waves bounced off the ocean. They’re reading the direction and velocity of the waves, coming and going. A black cable attached to each antenna snaked across the sand to a trailer where the electronics were stored. Three-hundred feet away, the same number of antennas, arranged in two 36-foot by 10-foot rectangles, transmitted signals about 60 miles out to sea.

“They’ve been working up to this for a while,” said Matthias, a research professional at University of Georgia Skidaway Institute of Oceanography. “This is the exciting part. This is the data acquisition.”

There had been some explanatory signs attached to a few of the poles, he said, but they proved too skimpy to withstand the ocean wind. More substantial educational signs will replace them soon, so the curious passersby will know the significance of the wired poles.

Set up at four different beaches on Hatteras and Ocracoke islands, the radar went live last month. It’s the latest in an ambitious collaborative scientific project to decipher the dynamics of the water exchange between the continental shelf and the Gulf Stream, the ocean speedway that nearly brushes the crook of the Outer Banks.

One of the most powerful and consequential currents in the world, the warm Gulf Stream runs north along the edge of the Atlantic continental shelf. At Cape Hatteras, the cold waters of the Labrador Sea converge, creating tremendous movement of water that is very significant and little understood. It is here where the Gulf Stream veers east, toward Europe.

“This will allow us to see things we haven’t been able to see before,” said Dana Savidge, the project’s lead scientist with Skidaway Institute. “We’re expecting to see some very complex circulation … to find some new ways the Gulf Stream might be affecting the water on the shelf. It is going to be opening a whole new view.”

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the four-year, $5 million project has harnessed top-notch researchers and a wide range of oceanographic equipment to focus on processes that control the massive exchange of water between the continental shelf, the Gulf Stream and the open ocean. The radar, also set up on beaches in Buxton, Frisco and Ocracoke, is an important component of what Savidge calls a major oceanographic research project.

“What we’re after is a reflected signal that tells us how fast the currents are moving,” Savidge said of the radio wave equipment. “It’s been tested before, but never deployed. It’s low power, it’s temporary and we are hoping to understand a very, very interesting area better.”

The ocean is a very good conductor, she explained, allowing the radar to go a long way. Waves ride on currents, revealing current speed. Their direction can be determined by the signal’s frequency.

Even for scientists, the project name is especially unwieldy: An Observational and Modeling Study of the Physical Processes Driving Exchanges between the Shelf and the Deep Ocean at Cape Hatteras. Out of obvious necessity, the project soon became known by a shortened, more charming version: PEACH.

Project partners, in addition to Skidaway, include Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, North Carolina State University, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the UNC Coastal Studies Institute.

Reading data and maps on a screen is just part of PEACH’s modeling and observational activities. The data is to be published on a website, Savidge said, and people will be able to look at plots and maps with vectors on them. Ideally, locals will be able to add to the discussion of the data.

Difficult to Study

Thanks to the intense energy of everything happening in one spot off Cape Hatteras, the area has been notoriously difficult to study. For that reason, the research team will use a combination of shore-based instruments – the radar – and ocean equipment. Autonomous underwater vehicles will move along the continental shelf. Called gliders, the vessels have a slew of measuring instruments attached and can fly untethered underwater, sending data via satellite as they go. Soon, the data will be made available to fishermen and boaters.

Moorings and upward-pointing echo sounders have also been placed on the sea floor. These acoustic units will track water movement while also recording temperature and density.

Oceanographic instruments on the 250-foot naval research vessel Neil Armstrong, operated by Woods Hole researchers, were also put to work off Cape Hatteras for two weeks in April.

The crux of what scientists are studying at what they call the Hatteras Front has to do with the complicated and mysterious “forcing” mechanisms at the shelf – winds and changes in motion of the Gulf Stream. Cold water dominates the shelf north of Cape Hatteras, and warm water dominates the shelf south of Cape Hatteras, and both drift toward Cape Hatteras. The convergence results in a powerful current directed shoreward. Water depths plunge from about 60 yards at the shelf edge to as deep as 2,000 yards. That’s where the Gulf Stream is.

The combination of forcing factors has a profound influence on the volume and momentum in the ocean. Mixed layers of water vary in temperature and salinity and buoyancy. The Gulf Stream carries a huge amount of heat from low latitudes to high latitudes. Scientists want to know the behavior of the water right where it leaves the shelf.

“We know in general what causes changes,” Savidge said, “but when it is all operating together, it makes it very complex.”

The area is in the vicinity of the Point, where oil companies were interested in exploring in the 1980s and the 1990s. Situated about 40 miles off Hatteras, the area is believed to hold trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. But it is also the location of one of the richest areas of marine and bird life in the world.

The Gulf Stream travels from south to north, but it also eastward, pushed by variability in western boundary currents, seasonal conditions, atmospheric forcing and shelf water properties. Similar characteristics are found at the Brazil-Malvinas Confluence off the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay and the mixing of the warm Kuroshio and cold Oyashio currents in the Pacific, which are also boundaries between subtropical and subpolar oceanic gyres, or circulating currents, according to PEACH information provided online by the partners.

The Gulf Stream is the strongest western-boundary current, Savidge said.

“The processes that the Gulf Stream influences will be found in these other locations, too,” she said.

The research is meant to answer critical questions about the ocean’s response to climate change and the influence of marine ecosystem dynamics. Water exchanges between the shelf and deep ocean are relevant to global carbon budgets, transport of larvae and pollutants and knowledge of storm tracks and intensity.

Recent trends could be harbingers of dramatic shifts in forcing: extreme winter winds; accelerated shelf warming; fluctuations in buoyancy; large deviations in Gulf Stream position; and increased sea level rise north of Cape Hatteras. Advances in observational and modeling systems will provide new capabilities for PEACH scientists to fill in the gaps in knowledge of the processes at the coastal margins. The observations and the numerical models will enable scientists to better anticipate the way coastal systems will respond in the future.

PEACH will benefit from the five years of observations already done off the Outer Banks by the North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program at the Coastal Studies Institute. The state program is studying ways to tap the enormous energy in the Gulf Stream, using both offshore vessels and long-range radar equipment funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“The part that’s really exciting is the collaboration between CSI and the PEACH program,” said Mike Muglia, the institute program’s lead researcher. “The PEACH project will complement what we’ve been learning. We’ll get a more comprehensive view of what’s happening out there, because we’ll be getting so many more observations.”

For her part, Savidge has been studying the Gulf Stream for much of her career – her first academic paper about the Gulf Stream off South Carolina was written in 1992 and her first about Hatteras was in 2001. She said she has been working 10 years to pull PEACH together.

“There is still a lot to learn about the Gulf Stream, yes,” she said. “If we anticipate changes, there is urgency to understand. It is crucial to what we’re doing now, because there are changes coming.”

Learn More

• Research Project PEACH

Read Part 1: Project Looks to Tap Gulf Stream’s Energy

First of two parts

WANCHESE – As the Gulf Stream passes Cape Hatteras, the movement of water is some 45 times greater than the flow of every river on earth. That amount of moving water represents an extraordinary amount of potential energy, enough energy, according to the Coastal Studies Institute, that harnessing just 0.1 percent of the available power would yield the equivalent of 150 nuclear power plants. That’s 300 gigawatts of power.

Cape Hatteras is the point at which the Gulf Stream passes closest to the continental United States – about 12 miles offshore. It is also the point at which the stream is most restricted, and therefore, most accessible. This two-part special report will explore the methods researchers are using to better understand the Gulf Stream’s power.

For the past four years, the Coastal Studies Institute’s North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Research Program has been studying the Gulf Stream, trying to determine if its power can be harnessed.

“What is the resource? Is it viable? How does it vary? Maybe we’ll find out that it’s not a viable resource,” said Mike Muglia, lead researcher for the program.

Although it is often described as a river within the Atlantic Ocean, that description falls short of what is happening.

The Gulf Stream is more like a fire hose that no one is holding; there is always flow and a lot of it, but the actual location of that flow is constantly changing.

The key to successfully harvesting the energy of the Gulf Stream is to always be where that flow is greatest.

University of North Carolina professor John Bane is an expert in wind and ocean current energy production and has been modeling the variability of the Gulf Stream.

Speaking at a recent CSI symposium on ocean energy Bane said, “This is one of the most important aspects in considering harvesting ocean energy from the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is always there, but it’s not always in the same place.”

The modeling is getting better, and with the recent addition of the PEACH, or Processes driving Exchange at Cape Hatteras, a system launched in cooperation with the University of Georgia’s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, the ability to predict where the best resource will be is improving.

“We are getting a much better handle on variability and the resource’s specific location from the information … and modeling we’ve gathered,” Muglia said.

With predictability of the resource improving, researchers are beginning to confront the next step.

“It probably is a viable resource,” Muglia said. “How are we going to get at it? How are we going to think about this?”

Some things are known.

Turbines would harvest the energy. Although there are design features of a water turbine that are different than wind turbines, the principals are the same.

What is different, and significantly, is how the turbines would be deployed.

A wind turbine is stationary. The blades move to the wind, but the platform on which it rests does not move.

The ocean is a three-dimensional environment. The Gulf Stream flows northward but within its stream, the strongest current is constantly moving east and west. There is also the possibility that useful amounts of energy can be harvested at varying depths.

“The Gulf Stream is variable in space. It is also variable in time,” explained Chris Vermillion, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UNC-Charlotte. Vermillion was one of the presenters at the CSI Energy Symposium.

“There are some (other) challenges. One of the challenges is the Gulf Stream is a deep-water resource. It could be a couple of hundred meters (or about 650 feet) deep while the Gulf Stream is adjacent to North Carolina,” he added.

Although a turbine theoretically can harvest ocean energy from the Gulf Stream, it’s never been done. Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton is also studying how to harness the energy of the Gulf Stream, although their focus differs from the Ocean Energy Program.

“They’ve focused more on … how you design a turbine and put it in the water and what does it do,” Muglia said.

The UNC team is focused on how that energy will be collected.

“We do have a side project that I’m collaborating on that is trying to figure out some unique way to put a turbine in the stream so that it can move,” Muglia said.

The Coastal Studies Institute

The University of North Carolina Coastal Studies Institute is a estuarine and coastal research and education facility located in Wanchese. The 213-acre campus is a partnership between East Carolina University, the UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, UNC-Wilmington and Elizabeth City State University.

The turbine would have to be attached to a submersible – an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, with the ability to move to the location of the best resource. The AUV would have two turbines attached to it, almost like propellers on an airplane wing.

There is an AUV that meets the criteria of the design team: the ISE Theseus that was developed for the Canadian Department of National Defense.

“It fits very nicely … to make this system work. You wouldn’t necessarily have to design that whole thing from scratch,” said Andre Mazzoleni, a member of the design team.

As the problem of harvesting energy underwater has been examined in detail, some things have become clear.

“It’s very unlikely a single turbine in isolation is economical. The likelier case is that turbines need to be installed in arrays. Because of the depths, it’s very unlikely a towered system is economical. The systems would have to be tethered to the ocean floor,” Muglia said. “The tether would not just be a part of the system that moves energy, but it also would be part of the system that moves information.”

The information that would be sent along the tether would tell the AUV where the best resource was located.

Any commercial harnessing of energy from the Gulf Stream is years in the future. Muglia points out, though, that the concept of energy from the ocean does not exist in isolation.

“The area that we’re working in the Gulf Stream is the only area that has been identified (by the Department of Energy) as a viable wave-energy resource on the East Coast,” he said.

There is also ongoing research at North Carolina State University to develop an ocean compressed air energy storage, or OCEAS, system. The system would use the pressure of ocean waters to compress air in storage. As the air is released it would turn a turbine, creating usable energy. Needing a minimum depth of more than 1,300 feet to operate, the requirements of an OCEAS system match the anchor depths of the tethers for the AUVs.

“You need storage, which is why compressed air research is going on,” Muglia said. “To make it economically viable, part of the thing is, you need to be able to store this energy and put it on the grid when the demand is high.”

“Part of (the) economy of scale comes from diversity,” he said. “If I’m going to go to the trouble of cabling the areas of the Gulf Stream, now I’ve got energy infrastructure in place. I truly think that if we do a project like this it’s not going to be Gulf Stream energy alone.

Learn More

• The North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Project

Thursday: Using Radar to Measure Currents

Last in a series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn More

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

Third in a multi-part series

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

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

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

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

Living shoreline proponents say that’s no surprise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday: Planning in the wake of hurricanes

Read the first and second installments in the series

Learn More

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

Last of two parts

BEAUFORT– As more people move toward the coast, estuaries are increasingly under stress. If not correctly managed, North Carolina’s estuaries may see the same fate as other overwhelmed estuarine systems in the country.

The Chesapeake Bay, for example, was once a thriving estuary with unmatched oyster harvesting. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, numbers have fallen to less than 1 percent of historic populations because of overfishing, poor water quality, habitat degradation and disease.

North Carolina is home to the country’s second-largest estuarine system behind the Chesapeake Bay, the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary. As with the Chesapeake Bay, national and state agencies have both worked to protect the resources and livelihoods the areas provide. Despite these efforts, over the years both areas have lost habitats, suffered from poor quality and seen increasing development nearby. Restoration efforts in both states are now focused on improving water quality and growing the oyster economy.

This week is National Estuaries Week, as designated by the nonprofit group, Restore America’s Estuaries. In this second installment of a two-part special report, we will look at the types of threats North Carolina’s estuaries face and what their futures may look like.

Coastal Living

In 2010, NOAA reported that about 40 percent of the United States’ population lived directly on a shoreline. This percentage is projected to increase, along with the risks estuaries face. North Carolina also has the fourth most beach visits in the country, adding more pressure to its coastal region.

Joel Fodrie, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, said coastal development presents estuaries with many different challenges at one time.

“Those local impacts, because they happen everywhere, those may be the real dangers,” Fodrie said.

Boating, as one example, can result in cumulative deterioration as thousands of vessels transit estuaries annually, disrupting ecosystems, Fodrie said. Construction of bridges and causeways can also add pressure to the various habitats in estuaries, including oyster reefs, mud flats and sea grass beds.

Lexia Weaver, a coastal scientist at the North Carolina Coastal Federation, said waterfront property owners who install bulkheads and seawalls are among the biggest offenders. The hardened shorelines cause the salt marshes along properties to disappear.

“Whenever they put a bulkhead in, it takes away all of that habitat in front of it,” Weaver said.

Stormwater runoff from development also affects estuaries.

After heavy rainfalls, chemicals, sediment and bacteria are carried by stormwater into estuarine systems. The Division of Marine Fisheries will temporarily close waters to oyster fishing and clamming if bacterial concentrations are high enough to keep consumers from eating contaminated shellfish. During these closures, it is unlawful to take or sell oysters, clams and mussels from the polluted areas.

Just this week, heavy rainfall and runoff associated with Tropical Storm Julia caused the division to close waters in Carteret, Craven and Pamlico counties, and continue closures of waters in five other coastal counties.

Continued coastal development can make this problem worse as roads and other impermeable surfaces prevent stormwater from filtering through soil naturally.

Pollution carried by stormwater has also affected the Chesapeake Bay. The bay has some of the most documented cases of dead zones, or low-oxygen waters, in the country. In July, an update from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources showed that 20 percent of the Chesapeake Bay suffered from dead zones. These areas can develop when runoff mixes fertilizers and other nutrients into the water, promoting algae growth. Algal blooms then draw oxygen out of the water, often leading to fish kills.

Both the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds are at heightened risk of low-oxygen waters because of their proximity to North Carolina’s industrial farming areas.

Poor water quality also puts the state’s commercial fishing economy at risk by disrupting habitats like sea grasses. Commercially important species of flounder, black bass and blue crab rely on North Carolina’s sea grasses for part or all of their life cycles.

Disease is another threat to estuarine habitats. In the Chesapeake Bay, disease and overfishing nearly wiped out once-thriving oyster populations. It is estimated there used to be enough oysters to filter the entire bay in a single week, but now it could take the remaining populations a year to do the same work.

The same trend of decline is visible in North Carolina’s oyster reefs, which were once rich fisheries. According to the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s 2015 State of the Oyster report, oyster harvests have declined 15-20 percent since 1889. The culprit is dermo, a disease that kills oysters before they reach a certain size.

Anne Deaton of the Division of Marine Fisheries habitat-assessment program said that there has been a historic loss of oysters, causing the fishery’s status to be “concern” because of disease, poor water quality and habitat loss.

“We’ve improved the regulations,” Deaton said, “but they just haven’t come back to what they used to be.”

Climate Change

Fodrie said the threat of climate change is not as immediate as development along the coast. Species, he said, have for the most part experienced climate changes over geological time and may be able to adapt.

“In the historical record from 15,000 years ago to 5,000 years ago, they basically averaged a meter rise every century, so the animals and plants in the estuaries have seen that before,” Fodrie said. “They can handle that in a vacuum.”

Fodrie said the more interesting question is how estuaries will adapt to climate change while also dealing with humans.

“The new player is going to be us,” he said, “and so it’ll really be how we respond, how adamant we are to tow the line or how easily we are able to retreat away from a moving seashore. The plants and animals will be responding to us and to that change.”

Estuaries may be able to adapt to human-induced climate change if other, local threats are well managed.

“They’re certainly resilient as long as we don’t screw up too badly,” he said.

The Future of North Carolina’s Estuaries

If the future of North Carolina’s estuaries looks anything like the Chesapeake Bay, it is concerning. However, Fodrie said it’s difficult to predict what the future will look like for the state’s estuaries.

Restore America’s Estuaries, a nonprofit that works to protect the country’s estuarine systems, said on its website that as individuals, people can help protect the future of estuaries by recycling and minimizing vehicle emissions.

Weaver is optimistic about the future of the state’s estuaries. She said North Carolina is doing more than other parts of the country to protect its estuarine systems.

“I think here in North Carolina, because of all the efforts that are happening with respect to oysters and living shorelines and all the research that’s going on because all the marine labs are here, that its promising,” she said.

Funding and grants aimed at improving and restoring the state’s estuaries and fish habitats are also available, Weaver said. The federation uses this type of funding to restore living shorelines, salt marshes and oyster reefs.

It is difficult to know how the continued effects of human encroachment and rising sea levels will change estuaries and the organisms that will rely on them.

Estuaries’ blessing is also their curse. The calm, productive waters inspire people to protect them, while also fishing, recreating and living near them.

“The challenge,” Fodrie said, “is to make sure we don’t love the estuaries to death.”

To Learn More

• Restore America’s Estuaries
• North Carolina Coastal Federation

Read Part One

First of two parts

More than 4,500 feet of new terminal groins could armor the southern N.C. coast within the next few years. That’s a wall of rock, concrete and metal to stretch more than triple the length of the longest Navy supercarrier.

Of the proposed terminal groin projects in North Carolina under federal review, the shortest is 750 feet long. The remaining projects are no less than 1,000 feet long.

All will jut from public beaches, span navigable waterways and, in some cases, cross private properties.

Since the General Assembly in 2011 repealed a decades-long ban on hardened erosion-control structures on the beach, terminal groins have been at the center of a debate about the potential effects man’s engineering will have on the state’s barrier islands.

Not everyone with a stake to claim agrees a terminal groin is best for their island. That is particularly true of some of the property owners who may be asked to grant land easements to their local governments for the purpose of building these controversial structures.

If even one property owner holds out, the process for a town and, in one case, a private island, could become mired in months, if not years, of legal battles, stalled permit applications and delayed construction.

There is also the issue of building on public property, an issue that is being overlooked in discussions about terminal groins, said Mike Giles, a coastal advocate with the N.C. Coastal Federation.

“These groins, some of them are proposed to be anchored on private property, but they extend on public recreational beaches,” he said. “Does everybody in North Carolina agree on putting these rock structures on public property? They would be not only on public beach but in public waters. They keep saying these terminal groins will be buried, that you won’t see them. I don’t believe them. You can go to Oregon Inlet and see the structure there. For the applicant to say there’s not going to be a negative effect on these beaches, it’s incorrect.”

Bald Head Island

The anchor of newly built terminal groin at the Village of Bald Head Island is buried and future maintenance of the structure should ensure it stays that way, the village administrator said.

Bald Head Island is the first North Carolina beach town to build a terminal groin since legislators repealed the law in 2011 and allowed up to four structures to be built along the coast. During the legislative session last year, lawmakers upped the number to six.

The Bald Head project received state and federal permits to build up to a 1,900-foot-long terminal groin and did not require any easements to private property.

The first phase of Bald Head’s terminal groin – 1,300 feet long – was finished in early January.

“The idea is that we monitor it,” said Chris McCall, the island’s manager. “At a minimum, it might take two to three years if there’s going to be a need for phase two. We just really would like to sit back and monitor the performance of it. Once we get some actual data that supports it’s working we could certainly weigh in more. We’re only asking to try and correct a man-induced problem with an engineered design.”

Bald Head Island has for years dealt with its erosion-embattled south and west beaches where chronic sand loss increased with the widening and deepening of the entrance to the Wilmington Harbor channel.

McCall said 99 percent of the island’s property owners understood the need for a terminal groin as part of the village’s long-term beach maintenance plan, “so there wasn’t any real pushback,” he said.

In 2014, village voters overwhelmingly passed an $18 million bond to secure funding for the project.

The village did not have to obtain private property easements on which construction crews would need to access to build the terminal groin and no portion of the structure is on private land.

The location of the second phase of the project, should the village opt to add on another 600 feet, would primarily be in the water, McCall said.

Figure Eight Island

That will not be the case for Figure Eight Island, whose homeowners’ association’s board of directors wants to build a 1,500-foot-long terminal groin at the northern end of the private island in New Hanover County.

Figure Eight was the first community in the state to submit a draft Environmental Impact Statement, or DEIS, selecting a preferred location of its proposed terminal groin to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2012.

Pressed by environmental groups, the Corps last year released a supplement to the draft study after the homeowners’ board submitted a preferred design and location different from what was included in the original DEIS.

The new design calls for the structure to be 420 feet farther north of the alternatives listed in the original study.

The decision to move the proposed structure, according to some property owners opposed to the project, was made so the board would not have to obtain easements from homeowners who indicated they would refuse to grant easements to their properties.

Figure Eight is unincorporated, and the homeowners’ association doesn’t have the legal authority to condemn property.

The HOA board will need anywhere from 12 to upwards of 15 property easements.

“The number will be determined once the final location has been permitted and determined through the EIS,” said David Kellam, Figure Eight Island administrator. “Obviously, the terminal groin in its general location and general elevations has been engineered in preliminary forms. I’ve not looked in a long time into the actual number that we would be proposing to pursue in getting easements for. We are certainly waiting until we know the facts of the (final) EIS so that we’re not asking somebody to grant an easement without knowing for certain that we’ll need that easement.”

Holden Beach

According to information in the DEIS of Holden Beach’s proposed terminal groin project, it appears the 1,000-foot-long structure would cross two private properties.

Beachfront properties have actually accreted within the gated neighborhood of Dunescape at the far eastern end of the island where about 300 feet of the proposed terminal groin would be anchored on the shore.

The beachfront just below where the sand buildup has occurred has had chronic erosion problems for decades. What were once second-row beach homes on McCray Street sit on the oceanfront.

Holden Beach officials have said they do not think the proposed project will require property easements.

They are waiting for the final EIS to be released later this year before determining if easements will be necessary. Town officials have also not determined how to pay for the 30-year project.

The proposed $34.4 million project has its fair share of skeptics, including property owners and town commissioners who question whether a terminal groin will benefit the entire island or merely a handful of properties.

Ocean Isle Beach

Holden Beach’s neighboring barrier island immediately to the west, Ocean Isle Beach, is already is the process of gathering dozens of property easements for its proposed terminal groin project.

“We’re not looking at acquiring any private property,” said Town Administrator Daisy Ivey. “We’re looking at obtaining easements for the construction of the terminal groin and then maintaining it.”

The town earlier this year mailed out requests for 50 property easements it needs to access the construction site for the terminal groin and for future sand nourishment projects associated with the structure.

The town has to have the easements prior to applying for a Coastal Area Management Act major permit.

“We’re hoping to get it (the permit) in and approved to be able to go to construction this year if possible,” Ivey said.

Tuesday: Will town condemn needed property?