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Nature Tries to Shift Outer Banks but Man Keeps Shoveling It Back

September 22, 2003
By CORNELIA DEAN






CHAPEL HILL, N.C., Sept. 21 - Nature endowed the Outer
Banks of North Carolina with great beauty - long ribbons of
sand with Atlantic Ocean waves on one side and
marsh-fringed bays and sounds on the other.

But the people who flocked to the Banks have been
interfering with this fragile natural landscape for
decades, and the infrastructure they have built - in
particular the highway that runs along the islands that
make up the Outer Banks and possibly the artificial dune
that lines their beaches - has diminished the islands'
natural ability to survive a storm like Hurricane Isabel
and recover from its effects, geologists say.

So, as engineers contemplate eroded beaches, a broken
highway and a new inlet cutting across Hatteras Island,
they are struggling to find a way to restore the Outer
Banks tourism infrastructure while respecting the demands
of its landscape. In particular, they are looking for a way
to maintain State Highway 12, the main road, while allowing
the islands to shift, as they would naturally, in response
to episodes of heavy weather and long-term rising seas.

That will not be easy. The Outer Banks is really only
filaments of sand running across ancient river channels,
relics of the last ice age, when sea levels were far lower
and the coastline was hundreds of miles farther out than it
is today, said William A. Birkemeier, chief of the Army
Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility at Duck, N.C.,
an Outer Banks village about 60 miles north of where the
hurricane made landfall.

Monitoring, measuring and other research efforts undertaken
before, during and immediately after the storm will
eventually provide useful guidance for coastal engineers,
Mr. Birkemeier said. But the problems are pressing now.

In this era of rising sea levels, the Outer Banks is trying
to migrate inland. Much of this migration is accomplished
in storms like the latest one, when sand washes across the
island from sea to sound. Marsh plants colonize the sound,
the beach ecosystem colonizes the marsh, and the island
gradually shifts position. This is the process coastal
geologists say has been hindered on much of the Outer
Banks.

Though it looks natural, the dune that runs for 50 miles
along the Banks was man-made, created out of wood and brush
and sand by the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps.
Some coastal geologists say the dune has functioned as a
kind of sea wall, blocking much of the overwash of sand
from beach to marsh. Today only a major storm carries much
sand across the island, they say.

Without the dune, the beaches of the Outer Banks "would be
overwashed constantly," said Orrin H. Pilkey Jr., a Duke
University geologist who is famous in North Carolina for
his advocacy of letting nature take its course on the
coast. Also, he said evidence suggested that the presence
of the dune altered wave action such that the slope of the
beach in the surf zone steepened, which, in turn, would
cause waves to strike it with greater force.

Engineers like Mr. Birkemeier and some coastal geologists
are not convinced.

"I don't think the artificial dune has made the island more
vulnerable," said Rob Young, an associate professor of
geology at Western Carolina University, who studied with
Dr. Pilkey and who was out on the Banks as the sun rose on
Friday, the day after the storm.

"Primarily what that dune did was provide a false sense of
security and put off the inevitable, Dr. Young said. "The
real danger is Highway 12."

There is wide agreement that efforts to keep the road in
place have harmed the islands of the Outer Banks. When
heavy storms bury it in sand, the sand is typically swept
up and carried back onto the beach in crude piles. The
marsh, deprived of this sand, shrinks as sea levels rise.
Because the islands are so flat - in some places,
geologists say, their natural elevation is only about three
feet - even a small rise in water level can make drastic
inroads on both marsh and beach. And in places the islands
have narrowed sharply, to the point that in some spots the
walk from ocean to sound is 100 yards or fewer.

There are parts of the seashore, Dr. Young said, that are
where they are "only to keep Highway 12 in place."

"If Highway 12 was not there, these portions would be able
to migrate back naturally," he said. "They might not have
giant dunes, but they would be functioning ecosystems.
Because Highway 12 has to stay where it is, every time
Highway 12 is overwashed it is scraped back up into
hideous, debris-filled dunes. And they are getting larger
and larger, and after this storm they are going to be
extremely large."

Overwashed in other storms, Highway 12 actually broke up in
spots this time, as it was undermined and collapsed. So
engineers must decide how - and where - to rebuild.
Stretches of the highway, so important to the Banks that
its mileposts function as addresses, have been moved inland
before, but now the road builders are bumping up against
the marshes and duck ponds that line the sound.

But as Dr. Pilkey notes, "they have no way to move back
along most of this without getting into the wetlands and
the duck ponds."

Michael A. Turchy, a biologist with the North Carolina
Department of Transportation, said the department was
considering building a causeway that would run behind the
islands. But this would be a complicated engineering
effort, and its environmental effects might be substantial.
Anyway, Mr. Turchy added: "In looking at what happened with
Isabel, you have to wonder what's going to happen in the
next storm. A future causeway could be vulnerable to future
storms."

Just as pressing is the decision about what to do between
the villages of Hatteras and Frisco, where the latest storm
cut a substantial inlet through the barrier island.
Normally, inlets like this close on their own, but this one
is so big - it was 150 yards wide on Friday, Dr. Young said
- that it may be a permanent feature.

As a result, the village of Hatteras is its own small
island now, cut off except for the ferry that runs west to
the small island of Ocracoke, where other ferries take more
than two hours to reach Cedar Island or Swan Quarter, small
towns on the quiet western shore of Pamlico Sound.

Temporarily, Mr. Turchy said, the North Carolina Department
of Transportation is considering altering the
Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry run to include stops across the new
inlet at Frisco. But a dock would have to be built there,
he said. "We're not sure how long that would take. It
hasn't been done."

Also, it is not clear that this kind of ferry service could
accommodate tourism traffic or allow timely evacuation in
future storms.

Engineers might also consider filling the inlet. That is
what was done after the Ash Wednesday storm of 1962, still
the benchmark for bad weather on the Atlantic Coast, when
an inlet was cut at Buxton, not far from the new inlet.

"It was very difficult to fill it in," Dr. Pilkey said. "It
took several tries. You really have to marshal all your
forces and throw it in all at once, otherwise it gets
washed out."

The new inlet is the first to form on the Banks since then.
There are only two other inlets - Oregon Inlet and Ocracoke
Inlet - on Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds. "There have been
more in the past," Dr. Young said. "We should not be too
surprised that the Outer Banks could easily accommodate a
third or even a fourth inlet that would remain open."

Dr. Young recalled that an inlet opened on Pawley's Island,
S.C., during Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

"That inlet was nothing compared to this," he said. "They
closed it, but it wasn't easy. This one is way bigger."

He said engineers might want to bulldoze sand from either
side of the inlet to fill it, "but the adjacent portions of
the barrier island have lost their sand - they are just
three feet in elevation. There is no sand. It's in the
sound, offshore, but not on the beach."

As a result, he said, he feared there would be pressure to
bridge the inlet.

"I hope they take a deep breath and don't rush into making
a decision," he said. "I am sure there is some panic
because Hatteras village is isolated right now. I am
worried there is going to be tremendous political and
emotional pressure to do something fast like build a bridge
right away."

That, he said, would be "another example where the National
Seashore will be sacrificed to create infrastructure;
because the shoreline does not need a bridge."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/22/national/22BEAC.html?ex=1065242557&ei=1&en=c0d\
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