Posted on 09/13/2019 1:24:46 PM PDT by Rebelbase
Portsmouth Island is an 18 mile stretch of undeveloped barrier island south of Ocracocke. There is a private ferry that carries 4x4 vehicles over to a primitive fish camp. Most people fish and camp along the beach. All 18 miles were driveable.
The link shows before and after views of the storm damage. Dozens of new inlets were created.
It's a sad day for those of us who loved camping and fishing the entire island. Those days are gone for the foreseeable future.
Ocracocke = Ocracoke.
Definitely. The Outer Banks are basically just rolling cylinders of sand, and they are constantly shifting and being punched through by storms.
Loved going fishing and camping but this is how Mother Nature shapes her world. You could go back to the last bad storm and show the differences as well. Our creek bed on our farm changes form year to year, according to the weather. Same thing for the Mississippi river. Go look at a google map and see the course changes. Life happens
It’s sad to see destruction like that because the Outer Banks are so beautiful. The wildlife there is pretty resilient and will find ways around obstacles and new inlets. Thanks for linking the incredible pics.
Peach
I’m a big fan of North Carolina, but I haven’t been there. I checked out another site that had some ground-level, pre-Dorian photos. How beautiful! I was interested to see the picturesque old buildings still there. I wonder if they survived.
We used to spend a week on Hatteras in August. Stayed in a little cottage in Rodanthe (back when there were little cottages) and a hurricane came a couple weeks later and washed them off their foundations. Stayed in Salvo and Avon and Buxton too, once got the swell of a hurricane out to sea, and the other times there was a hurricane within a month, cutting the road in half and so on.
We talked to a guy in one of the towns who had a nice ocean front house - when his family bought it forty years earlier it was six blocks back from the beach.
It’s a wonder people have managed to live there for hundreds of years - more if you count the Indians.
Hatteras business model - Midgetts sell mainlanders a McMansion on the beach, manage the rentals. You can build to withstand category 3 or 4 but it doesn’t matter if the land washes away from underneath.
The village on the north end of Portsmouth survived just as it has for the past 150 years. A lot of water and roof damage but the park service will fix it up again as they every time a storm rolls through.
Sand and water....
Looks to me like it got a lot more interesting, with fewer people as a bonus.
That’s pretty resilient, all things considered.
That will recover faster than you believe. Is it changed? Sure, but it will come back
It’ll be back and sooner than you think. Look on the bright side. Maybe the Feds will abandon it and it’ll be decent fishing again. Hurricanes stir up the surface but with time and the prevailing currents it will sand back in. I’ve seen it time and again on Padre Island. (Texas Gulf coast)
Looks like the seagrass and sea oats and scrub did their job... the only places damaged were where there wasn’t plant cover. But the sand will be back.
I wish we had visited there. We never got further south than Ocracoke. I loved that island. There was a restaurant there that was delicious. I miss OBX. It is BEAUTIFUL!
Same thing at Folly Beach SC.
What was beachfront 40 years ago is gone and what was 6 blocks away is now beachfront, for now.
The entire outer banks has been marching inland for millions of years and will eventually make the sounds behind them disappear entirely.
Whew! Imagine if that were a developed island. Wipe out!
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