Along the increasingly crowded Eastern Seaboard, Cape Lookout National Seashore is a place apart — 56 miles of wide and mostly pristine beaches on barrier islands stretching from Cape Hatteras to Beaufort, N.C. No paved roads or resorts intrude. You can stand on the beach and have a sense of what it must have been like there centuries ago.
Now, in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian, I fear the Cape Lookout seashore offers a portent. As the warming climate makes for more intense ocean storms and rising seas, it gives us a glimpse of what’s ahead for the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.
While Hurricane Dorian was not a monster storm when it approached and passed Cape Lookout and its barrier islands, the changes to the seashore were striking. The storm surge cut 50 new channels into the sand as ocean water poured from Pamlico Sound, across the beach, and into the Atlantic. Most have closed naturally, but others still have water flowing through them with the tides.
For many years, I have guided a project mapping the vulnerability of coastal infrastructure in our nation’s national parks, including Cape Lookout. I have never seen such a pronounced overnight change on an East Coast shoreline. While only a Category One storm, Dorian still generated a storm surge of eight to nine feet within Pamlico Sound as winds pushed that water offshore, toward the Atlantic. But that surge alone can’t explain the way Dorian simply sliced up the northern portion of the seashore.
Nineteen tropical storms have struck or brushed by coastal North Carolina since 2009. Rising seas make the impact of these storms incrementally greater. The barrier islands no longer have enough time or sand to rebuild themselves naturally through dune formation and other processes.
The combination of accelerating sea level rise and increasing storm impacts has pushed the island past a threshold. It has become more dynamic than stable. The sand moves easily and frequently. The changes in the future will be rapid and dramatic.
The East and Gulf Coasts have hundreds of miles of barrier island shoreline. The vast majority are developed, from Wells Beach, Maine, to Padre Island, Texas. As sea level rise continues, these islands are facing the same dual threats as the Cape Lookout barriers. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, communities often responded to this exposure by moving inland, just as the citizens of Portsmouth Village, the small community on Cape Lookout, moved across to the mainland. They did so for very practical reasons. The federal government did not rush in to make vulnerable communities whole after coastal storms.
In a recent article in the journal Science, A.R. Siders of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center, Miyuki Hino of Stanford and Katharine Mach of the University of Miami make a convincing case. They argue that managed retreat from flood-exposed areas is not only sensible and economically manageable — but also inevitable. In fact, buyouts of flood-prone properties have become an important way to mitigate damage across the country. There is a crucial exception. We are still not retreating from even the most hazardous locations on our barrier islands.
The reasons are many and complicated. In the simplest terms, it comes down to this: Most of the properties on barrier islands are investment properties not primary residences, so owners have less of a stake in the area and less appreciation of the dangers. And almost all of the risk of owning properties in those island communities rests with the public sector, through federal programs like the National Flood Insurance Program and others too numerous to list. Arguably the nation’s best organized buyout program at the state level is New Jersey’s Blue Acres Program. Yet even this successful program has had no interest from barrier island municipalities.
Instead, we continue to believe that we can keep these islands in place forever. Governments and private groups like homeowners associations have spent over $9 billion since 1970 building and rebuilding beaches along over 600 miles of shoreline, according to a database kept by the program I direct at Western Carolina University. The interval between projects keeps getting shorter and shorter — as little as two to three years in some post-Hurricane Sandy projects in Delaware and New Jersey. In places like South Florida, they are actually running out of sand.
Some of these resort communities would look just like Cape Lookout does now if tremendous sums weren’t spent maintaining and fortifying the beaches. We must realize that we can’t keep doing this everywhere, forever.
Robert Young is a professor of geology at Western Carolina University, where he directs the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article
Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Is Cape Lookout an Omen for Other Barrier Islands?
Opinion | Is Cape Lookout an Omen for Other Barrier Islands?
Along the increasingly crowded Eastern Seaboard, Cape Lookout National Seashore is a place apart — 56 miles of wide and mostly pristine beaches on barrier islands stretching from Cape Hatteras to Beaufort, N.C. No paved roads or resorts intrude. You can stand on the beach and have a sense of what it must have been like there centuries ago.
Now, in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian, I fear the Cape Lookout seashore offers a portent. As the warming climate makes for more intense ocean storms and rising seas, it gives us a glimpse of what’s ahead for the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.
While Hurricane Dorian was not a monster storm when it approached and passed Cape Lookout and its barrier islands, the changes to the seashore were striking. The storm surge cut 50 new channels into the sand as ocean water poured from Pamlico Sound, across the beach, and into the Atlantic. Most have closed naturally, but others still have water flowing through them with the tides.
For many years, I have guided a project mapping the vulnerability of coastal infrastructure in our nation’s national parks, including Cape Lookout. I have never seen such a pronounced overnight change on an East Coast shoreline. While only a Category One storm, Dorian still generated a storm surge of eight to nine feet within Pamlico Sound as winds pushed that water offshore, toward the Atlantic. But that surge alone can’t explain the way Dorian simply sliced up the northern portion of the seashore.
Nineteen tropical storms have struck or brushed by coastal North Carolina since 2009. Rising seas make the impact of these storms incrementally greater. The barrier islands no longer have enough time or sand to rebuild themselves naturally through dune formation and other processes.
The combination of accelerating sea level rise and increasing storm impacts has pushed the island past a threshold. It has become more dynamic than stable. The sand moves easily and frequently. The changes in the future will be rapid and dramatic.
The East and Gulf Coasts have hundreds of miles of barrier island shoreline. The vast majority are developed, from Wells Beach, Maine, to Padre Island, Texas. As sea level rise continues, these islands are facing the same dual threats as the Cape Lookout barriers. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, communities often responded to this exposure by moving inland, just as the citizens of Portsmouth Village, the small community on Cape Lookout, moved across to the mainland. They did so for very practical reasons. The federal government did not rush in to make vulnerable communities whole after coastal storms.
In a recent article in the journal Science, A.R. Siders of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center, Miyuki Hino of Stanford and Katharine Mach of the University of Miami make a convincing case. They argue that managed retreat from flood-exposed areas is not only sensible and economically manageable — but also inevitable. In fact, buyouts of flood-prone properties have become an important way to mitigate damage across the country. There is a crucial exception. We are still not retreating from even the most hazardous locations on our barrier islands.
The reasons are many and complicated. In the simplest terms, it comes down to this: Most of the properties on barrier islands are investment properties not primary residences, so owners have less of a stake in the area and less appreciation of the dangers. And almost all of the risk of owning properties in those island communities rests with the public sector, through federal programs like the National Flood Insurance Program and others too numerous to list. Arguably the nation’s best organized buyout program at the state level is New Jersey’s Blue Acres Program. Yet even this successful program has had no interest from barrier island municipalities.
Instead, we continue to believe that we can keep these islands in place forever. Governments and private groups like homeowners associations have spent over $9 billion since 1970 building and rebuilding beaches along over 600 miles of shoreline, according to a database kept by the program I direct at Western Carolina University. The interval between projects keeps getting shorter and shorter — as little as two to three years in some post-Hurricane Sandy projects in Delaware and New Jersey. In places like South Florida, they are actually running out of sand.
Some of these resort communities would look just like Cape Lookout does now if tremendous sums weren’t spent maintaining and fortifying the beaches. We must realize that we can’t keep doing this everywhere, forever.
Robert Young is a professor of geology at Western Carolina University, where he directs the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article