From the air, it's easy to see how Hurricane
Isabel ripped a new inlet between the
village of Hatteras and the rest of the
island, severing North Carolina Route 12.
DON LONG/TIMES-DISPATCH
Posted on 09/29/2003 4:19:20 AM PDT by putupon
Written in sand
Storms repeatedly open and close inlets on Hatteras
BY BILL GEROUX
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER Sep 29, 2003
From the air, it's easy to see how Hurricane
Isabel ripped a new inlet between the
village of Hatteras and the rest of the
island, severing North Carolina Route 12.
DON LONG/TIMES-DISPATCH
From the air, it's easy to see how Hurricane Isabel ripped a new inlet between the village of Hatteras and the rest of the island, severing North Carolina Route 12. DON LONG/TIMES-DISPATCH HATTERAS, N.C. - The new inlet is a nasty piece of work.
It is a gash one-third of a mile long isolating the main part of Hatteras Island from this storm-battered village at the island's southern tip.
It ranges in depth from 2 feet to 30, and it changes constantly. It contains two ragged islands topped with crumpled asphalt from North Carolina Route 12, the only road that led to the village.
At high tide, the ocean roars through the inlet into Pamlico Sound in a confusion of whitecaps and breaking surf.
A half-submerged house far out in the sound only adds to the rawness of the scene.
The inlet was created on Sept. 18, most likely during the early afternoon hours, when Hurricane Isabel was at its worst.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has predicted it will get the inlet plugged within 3? weeks, by Oct. 24. The Corps has summoned a huge dredge it says can fill the inlet with sand faster than the ocean can steal it.
The senior Corps commander, Col. Ray Al- exander, says the gap in the island is a "breach" rather than a natural process at work. At a meeting in Hatteras on Saturday, he dismissed critics of the project as "nay-sayers."
But Alexander acknowledged that the Corps already has changed its project on the fly, and that subsequent storms or equipment problems could complicate things.
"Engineering is a science," he said. "But there are a lot of variables and a lot of unknowns to what we're working with."
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Oregon and Hatteras inlets, which many people today consider permanent parts of the landscape, were opened by the same huge hurricane in 1846.
Another monster hurricane in 1933 tore open an inlet in the same spot as Hurricane Isabel did, said former Dare County Sheriff Bert Austin, who was 2 at the time. Austin said a wooden bridge was built across that inlet to carry what few vehicles made the trip in those days.
"But after a number of years, the inlet filled in by itself, and people stopped using the bridge and went back to just driving along the sand," Austin said. The government finally burned the useless bridge in 1941 to harvest the metal in it for the war effort, he said.
As if to honor its predecessor, the new inlet opened by Hurricane Isabel exposed pilings from the old inlet bridge that had been hidden beneath the sand for a half-century. "Some of us knew they were down there somewhere," Austin said.
The most recent inlet on Hatteras Island before Isabel was cut in 1962 between Buxton and Avon by a fierce nor'easter popularly known as the Ash Wednesday Storm. The Corps struggled for nearly a year before it successfully closed that inlet with two small dredges.
Hurricane Dennis in 1999 opened a narrow breach in the island in roughly the same place as the Ash Wednesday Storm. That opening closed itself, and the state highway department quickly repaired Route 12 and reunited the island.
As one 50-something Hatteras native put it last week, "This isn't our first inlet."
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Dr. Orrin Pilkey, a retired Duke University geologist and a frequent critic of engineering projects to protect beachfront development, said the new inlet might not stay closed.
Filling the gap should require somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million cubic yards of sand, Alexander said, depending on how fast the ocean steals what the dredge deposits.
Corps officials said the cost surely will exceed $3 million, most of it borne by FEMA.
Alexander said the Corps could reunite the island by Oct. 24 if all goes well. But, he said, any number of factors could affect the timetable, including the weather.
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(Excerpt) Read more at timesdispatch.com ...
Highway 12 was built right after WW2 to allow better access for the hundreds of people who live in the Hatteras area. That was long before the building boom.
What? You want to cut off the road because "those people" have beach access, and you don't?
Nice. I hear Howard Dean is looking for campaign workers.
How do you know?
There are two distinct issues here, although you are trying to morph them into one:
(1) replacing a road (which makes sense) and
(2) providing federally back flood insurance
Replacing the road makes sense, but providing federally backed flood insurance is not. If you provide federally-backed flood insurance, why not fire insurance and homeowners insurance? It just doesn't make sense to provide one and not the other.
We should not have to subsidize flood insurance. The folks in flood plains should move, OR buy insurance from a private insurer -- no the american people..
Yes. But I'm getting a little exasperated with people who can't tell the difference between PUBLIC and PRIVATE propery. Why do you ask?
There are two distinct issues here, although you are trying to morph them into one:
(1) replacing a road (which makes sense) and
(2) providing federally back flood insurance
HUH?! Could you point to my post where I said that?
I wrote this in post 61:
I don't think I could have made it more clear.
Just a bunch of rich bankers.
Let 'em fight their own war. (/sarcasm)
God sends huricanes that knock down buildings, Osama claims Allah wants his followers to knock down buildings, hmm-m-m-m.
I don't think I quite agree with your sarcastic analogy.
Then the people on the sandbar should feel good that they don't have to worry about it again for a while and build their own access.
As for the OBX, isn't it all being moved west, or did they go to all that trouble to move the lighthouse back a half mile or whatever it was from the beach just for the fun of it?
I'm vehemently opposed.
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