Why would anyone want to live on a coastal island? After all, no less an authority than Orrin H. Pilkey, Jr., deemed "America’s foremost philosopher of the beaches," by the New York Times, and James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Geology at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University writes: “We strongly recommend against barrier island property purchase. Better to choose a high elevation inland site.”
Over the next few weeks, I am focusing my blogs on drilling down into Pilkey's recommendation for several reasons. First, I live on a barrier island and I own two ocean front properties on that barrier island, Bogue Banks, in Emerald Isle, NC. And, I've owned these two properties for well over 20 years. Second, I am a real estate agent who sells real estate in Emerald Isle, NC and elsewhere on the Crystal Coast. Third, I know Dr. Pilkey's research intimately. Fourth, I know Dr. Pilkey, personally.
And, when you think about inland in this great country of ours, you can’t get much further inland than Kansas. Do residents of this state worry about the strong winds and massive flooding associated with the likes of the hurricanes described in my Part I blog? In a word, yes! However, in Kansas these violently rotating columns of air are called tornadoes, twisters or cyclones. And, while Kansas’s most famous tornado, the one L. Frank Baum described in The Wizard of Oz, is fictitious, the Sunflower State has the deserved reputation for very real, very large, and very deadly storms.
Indeed, according to The Tornado Project, Kansas experienced over 4,000 tornadoes in the last 60 years, resulting in roughly 300 deaths, over 3,500 injuries and countless billions in property damage.
On May 25, 1955, for example, the tornado with the highest number of fatalities (80) swept through Sumner County in eastern Kansas. Eleven years later, on June 8, 1966, the tornado with the highest amount of reported injuries (450) appeared in Shawnee County, also in eastern Kansas. Not many years after, on September 13, 1973, the tornado with the largest footprint, a whopping 170 miles, raced roughshod through Rice, McPherson, Saline, Ottawa, Dickinson, Clay, Washington and Marshall Counties.
What do these numbers mean? Does Kansas have more tornadoes than any other state? According to the Tornado Project, the answer is “No.” When it comes to the total number of tornadoes, Kansas ranks fourth behind Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida. In terms of deaths and the number of killer tornadoes, the Sunflower State doesn’t even crack the top 10.
Well, clearly residents in the Midwest take their chances with wind, much like their coastal compatriots along the Atlantic Ocean. What about flooding? Are you kidding? Kansas is over 800 miles away from the Gulf of Mexico and well over a thousand miles remote from either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans. But, there are two very large rivers that cut through the Plains states, the Missouri and the Mississippi. And, sometimes, when it rains, it pours.
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 is an example of what happens when it really pours. What happens is a large contiguous swatch of the Midwest and the South, including the parts of the states of Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Iowa, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas finds itself under 30 feet of water.
The flood began with extremely heavy rains in the summer of 1926. By September, the Mississippi River was swollen beyond capacity in Kansas and Iowa. In late December, the Cumberland River in Tennessee exceeded its banks by some 56 feet. The beginning of 1927 brought several more months of heavy rain, essentially overwhelming the entire levee system along the Mississippi River. At least two months passed before the floodwater completely subsided. The flooding left more than 700,000 people homeless. Approximately 500 people died as a result of flooding. Property damages approached $1 billion ($1 trillion in today’s dollar), which was one-third of the federal budget at that time!
To try to prevent future floods, the federal government built the world's longest system of levees and floodways. That system was put to the test during a 77 day flood which inundated the region near the lower Mississippi River in 1973 and, again, in the Spring and Summer of 1993 when record flooding occurred across portions of the northern Plains states including North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Once again, hundreds of levees failed along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Damages totaled $15 billion, 50 people died, and thousands of people were evacuated, some for months.
I could go on but I think it is abundantly clear that moving inland does not mitigate wind and water weather events from threatening your home. That being said, to learn more about life in Emerald Isle, NC, go to my website, www.EIHomesforSale.com and request my free Guide to Living Were You Vacation or text your email address to: 919-308-2292.
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