“It’s a North Carolina route on a ribbon of sand that jumps out into the ocean.” NC 12 is a poster child nationwide, if not worldwide,” he said. Together, the bridges push the cost of maintaining NC 12 to about a half-billion dollars.Īsked if there were another highway as vulnerable as NC 12, Colin Mellor, a DOT environmental specialist, shuffled around a bit before answering: “No, emphatically, is the answer. That includes rebuilding the S-Curves three different times, but doesn’t include the cost of three new bridges needed to traverse inlets opened by storms or to bypass the rapidly eroding shoreline. 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. “A lot of people have so much money they don’t care about the risk.” “It’s as if no one cares,” says Danny Couch, a Dare County Commissioner, real estate agent and sometimes tour guide. While the value of ocean property in smaller Currituck County has ballooned to almost $5 billion. Dare County, which includes thousands of beach homes, recently valued all of its property at nearly $18 billion. Property values have also soared to at an all-time high. Over many centuries, scores of inlets have opened and closed on the Outer Banks, while the barrier islands have slowly migrated landward as sand has washed across shorelines and flats on the oceanside and marshes have expanded along the backside, according to one federal study.ĭespite 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. The warm waters of the Gulf Stream and colder Labrador Current collide just miles offshore, creating dangerous shoals and some of the largest waves along the East Coast. Some of the islands are low and narrow, only a few feet above sea level, and especially vulnerable to winter Nor’easters and hurricanes in summers.
Viewed from an airplane, the nearly 200-mile-long ribbon of islands resembles a child’s Etch-A-Sketch drawing, skewing north to south for miles, then suddenly veering east to west near Hatteras Village, before turning once more in a southeasterly direction. 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 nc ratoles 2018 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.
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