The costs of a rising sea
Residents ask what price can be put on saving Outer Banks town
AVON, N.C. — Bobby Outten, a county manager in the Outer Banks, delivered two pieces of bad news at a recent public meeting. Avon, a town with a few hundred fulltime residents, desperately needed at least $11 million to stop its main road from washing away. And to help pay for it, Dare County wanted to increase Avon’s property taxes, in some cases by almost 50%.
Homeowners mostly agreed on the urgency of the first part. They were considerably less keen on the second.
People gave Outten their own ideas about who should pay to protect their town: the federal government. The state government. The rest of the county. Tourists. People who rent to tourists.
Outten kept responding with the same message: There’s nobody coming to the rescue. We have only ourselves.
The risk to tiny Avon from climate change is particularly dire — it is, after all, located on a mere sandbar of an island chain, in a relentlessly rising Atlantic.
But people in the town are facing a question that is starting to echo along the U.S. coastline as seas rise and storms intensify. What price can be put on saving a town, a neighborhood, a home where generations have built their lives?
Communities large and small are reaching for different answers. Officials in Miami, Tampa, Houston, San Francisco and elsewhere have borrowed money, raised taxes or increased water bills to help pay for efforts to shield their homes, schools and roads.
Along the Outer Banks — where tourist-friendly beaches are shrinking by more than 14 feet a year in some places, according to the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management — other towns have imposed tax increases similar to the one Avon is considering. Soon, county officials will vote on whether Avon will join them.
This despite the reality that Avon’s battle is most likely a losing one. At its highest point, the town is just a couple dozen feet above sea level, but most houses, as well as the main road, are along the beachfront.
“Based on the science that I’ve seen for sea-level rise, at some point, the Outer Banks — the way they are today — are not forever,” said David Hallac, superintendent of the national parks in eastern North Carolina, including the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which encompasses the land around Avon. “Exactly when that happens is not clear.”
Today, tourism dominates Avon, a hamlet of T-shirt shops and cedarshake mansions on stilts lining the oceanfront.
Audrey Farrow’s grandmother grew up in Avon and met Farrow’s grandfather when he moved to town as a fisherman in the late 1800s. Farrow, who is 74, lives on the same piece of land she, and her mother
before her, grew up on.
Standing on her porch last week, Farrow talked about how Avon had changed in her lifetime. Vacationers and buyers of second homes have brought new money but have pushed out locals.
And the ocean itself has changed. The water is now closer, she said, and the flooding more constant. The wind alone now pushes water up the small road where she lives and into her lawn.
“If we’ve had rain with it, then you feel like you’ve got waterfront property,” she said.
From any angle, the reckoning for Avon seems to be drawing nearer.
Over the past decade, hurricanes have caused $65 million in damage to
Highway 12, the two-lane road that runs along the Outer Banks and connects Avon and other towns to the mainland. The federal and state governments are spending an additional $155 million to replace a section of Highway 12 with a 2.4-mile bridge, as the road can no longer be protected from the ocean. Hatteras Island has been evacuated five times since 2010.
County officials turned to what is called beach nourishment, which involves dredging sand from the ocean floor a few miles off the coast and then pushing it to shore through a pipeline and layering it on the beach. But those projects can cost tens of millions of dollars. And the county’s requests for federal or state money to pay for them went nowhere.
So the county began using local money instead, splitting the cost between two sources: revenue from a tax on tourists, and a property tax surcharge on local homes. In 2011, Nags Head became the first town in the Outer Banks to get a new beach under that formula. Others followed.
Ben Cahoon, the mayor of Nags Head, said that paying $20 million to rebuild the beach every few years was cheaper than buying out all the beachfront homes that would otherwise fall into the sea.
He said he could imagine another two or three cycles of beach nourishment, buying his city 20 or 25 more years. After that, he said, it’s hard to guess what the future holds.
“Beach nourishment is a great solution, as long as you can afford it,” Cahoon said. “The alternative choices are pretty stark.”
Now the county says it’s Avon’s turn. Its beach is disappearing at a rate of more than 6 feet per year in some places.
During the meeting last month, Outten described Avon’s needs. As the beach disappears, even a minor storm sends ocean water across Highway 12. Eventually, a hurricane will push enough water over that road to tear it up, leaving the town inaccessible for weeks or more.
In response, the county wants to put about 1 million cubic yards of sand on the beach. The project would cost between $11 million and $14 million and, according to Outten, would need to be repeated about every five years.
Speaking after the meeting, Outten defended beach nourishment, despite its being temporary. “I don’t think we can stop erosion. I think we can only slow it down,” he said.