ounding the corner near the village of Rodanthe, there is a stretch of highway known as the S-Curves because of its twisting loops and turns. It is, by almost any measure, one of the most vulnerable sections of roadway in North Carolina, if not the nation. Years ago, highway officials erected a massive dike here with 2,200 sandbags — each bag was 15 feet long, two feet tall, and five feet wide — and then buried the dike in even more sand in an effort to keep the ocean at bay and the highway, known as NC 12, open.
It didn’t work, or at least it didn’t work as hoped. The Atlantic Ocean continued to pummel the towering artificial dune, crashing over the top, tearing apart sandbags, and flooding the highway — closing the only access on and off of the lower Outer Banks for days and sometimes weeks.
Following each storm, the North Carolina Department of Transportation (DOT) sent in bulldozers and graders to rebuild the sand dike and patch the road, only to watch the next storm undo its work. “It’s like the Siege of Troy,” said local biologist Mike Bryant. “It just goes on and on.”
Bryant managed the nearby Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge — a sprawling, 13-mile-long sanctuary that attracts tundra swans, Canadian geese, and 400 other species of migrating birds for two decades. He estimated that he spent 60 percent of his time on NC 12, including issuing permits to state and federal engineers to repair storm damage and severely eroding sand dunes. “It felt exhausting at times,” he said.
n one sense, NC 12 stands as a metaphor for the dangers of building anything on a highly dynamic, constantly-shifting barrier island, especially one that has lost hundreds of feet of shoreline in places over the last century and now faces even-larger threats from sea level rise and more frequent and powerful storms related to climate change. The risks aren’t limited to the Outer Banks, of course. Nationally, U.S. coastal resorts from Cape Cod to Miami to Galveston face unprecedented and costly challenges as their shorelines narrow and floodwaters inch ever-closer to millions of houses, condominiums, and hotels — over one trillion-dollars-worth of property in
Still, nowhere are the threats more visible than along the famed Outer Banks of North Carolina, where each summer a flotilla of SUVs deliver eager vacationers, swelling the population nearly tenfold, to over 300,000, while also fueling a tourist economy that supports thousands of jobs and generates millions in tax revenues for local governments.
Nearly four decades ago, the University of Virginia coastal geologist Robert Dolan, a long-time researcher of barrier islands, wrote that the Outer Banks are “one of the highest natural-hazard risk zones along the entire Eastern Seaboard of the United States.” He cited the Banks’ unique geography and risky exposure to storms, volatile currents, and percussive winds.
Despite these risks, developers continue to add billions of dollars of real estate, from Corolla in the north to Ocracoke Village in the south, making the Outer Banks the fastest-growing section of the North Carolina coast. Property values have also soared to at an all-time high. Dare County, which includes thousands of beach homes, recently valued all of its property at nearly $18 billion. While the value of ocean property in smaller Currituck County has ballooned to almost $5 billion.
“It’s as if no one cares,” says Danny Couch, a Dare County Commissioner, real estate agent and sometimes tour guide. “A lot of people have so much money they don’t care about the risk.”
In the last decade alone, DOT has spent nearly $80 million dollars to keep hazard-prone NC 12 open for the year-round residents of the lower Outer Banks. That includes rebuilding the S-Curves three different times, but doesn’t include the cost of three new bridges needed to traverse inlets oShifting Sands: Carolina’s Outer Banks Face a Precarious Future dollars.
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