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 $1 trillion worth of property in all. The risks aren’t limited to the Outer Banks, of course. In 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. 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 just goes on and on.”īryant 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. “It’s like the Siege of Troy,” said local biologist Mike Bryant.
#OUTBANK HURRICANES PATCH#
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.įollowing 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 didn’t work, or at least it didn’t work as hoped. 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 is, by almost any measure, one of the most vulnerable sections of roadway in North Carolina, if not the nation. Rounding the corner near the village of Rodanthe, there is a stretch of highway known as the S-Curve s because of its twisting loops and turns. This article was originally published by Yale Environment 360.
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