In this series of blogs, I am examining the impact of mitigation techniques, techniques that enable man and island to live with the ocean. In this blog, I look at beach renourishment efforts on Currituck and Bodie islands, barrier islands on the Northern Outer Banks.
What does it mean to residents of an “island?” starving for sand? For starters, the gaps in the dunes are places that have been breached, can be breached or are about to be breached during a weather event. This translates into smaller and smaller storms having the capacity to flood the island. Where will the flood waters go? Right into the “bowl” the bottom of which is the low, flat and poorly vegetated interior of the island. The walls are the higher elevation artificial dunes on the frontal (Atlantic) and the historic dunes on the sound side (Currituck Bay) portions of the island.
Nearby Nags Head is another Bodie Island community with an ever-changing coastline. "We were losing infrastructure. We were losing streets. We were losing power lines, and we were losing water lines. We were losing homes," said Cliff Ogburn, a Nags Head Town manager.
In an effort to save its beaches, the town of Nags Head completed a $36 million "beach nourishment project" in 2011, paid for with local taxes.
A common approach to combating erosion at U.S. coastlines, beach replenishment is literally taking sand from one place, often offshore, and pumping it onto a sand-depleted beach. The questions are: Can beach replenishment keep up with the ever-increasing forces of climate change? Or, like Sisyphus forever pushing his boulder up the hill, is adding sand to beaches an expensive, temporary fix to a long-term problem?
For Nags Head, it is the latter as the town of Nags Head is working towards conducting its next beach nourishment maintenance project. Plans call for sand to be placed on 10 miles of beach during the summer of 2018. The Town is now awaiting permits and construction bids. Dune stabilization measures such as sprigging and fencing will also be included in the project.
"Any beach nourishment project is forever — it's like painting a house — once you start it, you have to keep doing it forever to maintain," says Michael Orbach, professor emeritus of marine affairs and policy at Duke University. "The problem is, with climate change and rising sea levels, there's going to be even more demand by orders of magnitude because the beaches are going to erode more and faster.”
Stanley Riggs, a coastal geologist at East Carolina University in Greenville, agrees. “Under the combined effects of storms, development, and sea-level rise, portions of this narrow, 200-mile island chain [northern Outer Banks] are collapsing. We’re losing them right now…it’s going to awful.”
That being said, to learn more about life in Emerald Isle, NC, along the Sothern Outer Banks, 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. Stay well and stay safe.
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