Story by Sydney Brainard
With every passing second, more and more of the North Carolina coast is eroding.
Some of the most intensely affected coastal areas, like Rodanthe, where videos of homes pitching, heaving and crumbling into the sea have been going viral since 2020, have erosion rates as high as 14 feet per year.
It’s an inevitable truth that coastal towns are confronting constantly: their beaches are moving, and there’s nothing that they can do to stop them.
The North Carolina barrier islands, for example, have always shifted significantly.
“As a coastal geologist, I call it barrier island migration,” Kerri Allen, coastal management program director at North Carolina Coastal Federation, said. “As someone who is operating a government or owning a home on that island, they call it barrier island erosion.”
Hefty budgets are dedicated to beach renourishment – replenishing eroding beaches with sand transported from alternate locations – and other temporary coastal mitigation efforts. None of these efforts are long-term. All of them are expensive. Some are controversial. Many of them are environmentally damaging.
But for now, all of them are necessary. All that remains is the question of who gets what.
The North Carolina coast stretches along 320 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. Every mile is shifting in some way or another. There isn’t enough sand to sustain all of it.
“All the coastal towns in North Carolina are trying to figure out where they’re going to get their sand from, because the islands are moving,” Chris Shank, executive director of Bald Head Island Conservancy, said. “There’s going to be—and I hate to use the phrase ‘sand wars’—but ultimately, there’s going to be, ‘Where are you going to get it?’”
Securing sand for beach projects is complicated. The Village of Bald Head Island, for example, typically uses sand from an area called Jay Bird Shoals, but the available sand is limited. Recently, Bald Head attempted to get a permit to dredge sand from Frying Pan Shoals, however, due to a pending environmental study, the Island hasn’t been able to access the sand in that area. For the time being, Bald Head Island will continue to dredge from the waning supply at Jay Bird Shoals.
“We don’t have the luxury of time,” Chris McCall, village manager of Bald Head Island, said. “If you think about when you work on projects like these, and you have to deal with permitting and engineering and design and modeling and review by regulatory agencies at the federal and state level—these things don’t happen in a year.”
What Bald Head Island does have over other coastal areas, however, is money. Much of the area’s coastal mitigation efforts are paid for by property taxes. Bald Head Island, as one of the wealthiest areas in the state, with the highest tax rate in Brunswick County, has a considerably deeper tax base than most.
“Every town is completely different,” Allen said. “There is a definite disparity of resources. It is not equitable by a long shot.”
In Dare County, where Rodanthe is located, officials have struggled to secure money for beach nourishment projects.
Last year, after its fund for beach nourishment projects was maxed out, the county applied for a $40 million Federal Emergency Management Agency grant. FEMA denied it.
“The fund just isn’t growing quick enough to do that,” Dare County Manager Robert Outten said at a Board of Commissioners meeting last July. “We’re trying to get with them and say, ‘Okay, we didn’t get it, why? Were there shortfalls in the grant? Is there something else we can show you?”
And with still no money available for temporary solutions, houses are continuing to fall. The costs of demolishing, relocating or cleaning up the debris also fall on the homeowner,
Earlier this year, similar concerns for funding caused Oak Island officials to postpone a scheduled beach renourishment project to the next year. Oak Island hasn’t been able to fully renourish their beach in over two decades.
Historically, the Village of Bald Head Island, particularly its uber-wealthy residents, has managed to use their wealth to skirt some of the policies typically applied to coastal areas, specifically concerning the construction of hard structures like groins or sea walls.
“Their tax base is astronomical,” Allen said. “They have the funding. They also have the political sway to get what they want, to an extent.”
In 1994, Walter Davis, a wealthy oil magnate, who at one point co-owned Bald Head Island, sued the state in order to prevent his beachfront home from being affected by the coastal erosion. A year later, even with an existing ban against hardened structures along the coast, the Coastal Resources Commission granted the installation of sand-filled tubes by Davis’ home, in exchange for his suit being dropped.
But a year later, when a Wrightsville Beach resort requested permission to place sandbags along their coast, the Coastal Resources Commission denied the request.
Now, the Shoals Club, a beachfront country club on Bald Head Island, is seeking another exception to the law, hoping to receive a permit to build an erosion-control structure on their section of coast.
For environmental groups like Bald Head Island Conservancy, hardened structures aren’t the answer. They carry several risks, such as causing greater erosion in areas down the beach from the structure and environmental damage to marine habitats nearby, according to the North Carolina Coastal Federation. They also aren’t permanent solutions, and still require continual beach renourishment projects.
According to a study conducted by the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission in 2010, the long term results of terminal groins can vary. In examining terminal groin sites along the coast, the study found that often, “a minor to moderate negative result occurs over the first half to three-quarters of a mile,” and while net results become positive after this interval for many of the sites, for Shackleford Banks the results were still a net negative.
The study’s data on environmental impact was limited, but concluded that, “if habitat succession occurs, species suitability may be affected.”
Largely, the process seems to be a guessing game.
“The one thing that hardened structures do not do is fix the problem,” Shank said. “They’re very short-term measures, and a lot of times they end up creating longer-term issues. You might fix it for a year or two, if you get lucky, but you’re probably creating a longer-term issue.”
The problem, Shank says, is that coastal towns often don’t have the ability, due to finances or public pressure, to think in the long term.
“They’re trying to make it through the next few years and then see what happens,” Shank said. “When it’s your house that’s having waves lap up underneath the structure, you’re probably not very patient, and that’s one of the challenges, too.”
In an ideal world, environmental groups would prefer to see towns enact a policy of “managed retreat,” which is where money is directed toward moving buildings and infrastructure further inland—working with coastal erosion and migration rather than against it. However, for beach residents, who want the problem to be solved in the present, it’s not a popular idea.
“It’s one of those things where, if folks could go back in some of these beach communities, 40, 50 or 100 years when they created the properties directly on the oceanfront, maybe they could have considered not developing right along the oceanfront and leaving that as a buffer,” McCall said. “But, now we’re here.”
Still, temporary solutions have long been reaching a breaking point. A 2022 National Park Service report found that 750 structures along the North Carolina coast are currently threatened by erosion. There is not enough money or sand to protect all of them.
“We’re not going to be able to keep pumping sand on the beach indefinitely,” Allen said. “Managed retreat, where you’re purposely relocating and moving off the islands, to me, sounds very logical, but to most of the coastal municipalities, is a dirty word.”
Shank says he thinks coastal towns will begin to change their tune once the financial impact is felt more acutely on their expensive beachfront homes.
“I think people will have a harder time getting insurance for their homes, or it’ll be so astronomically expensive that people will say, ‘I’m out,’” Shank said. “I don’t think they’re there yet, but I think Mother Nature will force them to get there.”
