Member Blogs Living on the Edge: The Outer Banks By John Sandberg
CAMDEN (July 9): Uncle Jack has been in Camden for a month now, long enough to understand why he has heard so many people refer to it as “paradise”. It is indeed a lovely town situated in a beautiful part of the world which has a rich cultural life as well. He could cheerfully spend the rest of his life here as long as he was allowed to escape to some warmer place in the winter. (Having grown up in northern Wisconsin he had had enough of winter by the time he was ten years old).
For the past 40 years he has lived on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, another place that he has often heard described as “paradise”, albeit more often in the past than in the present. Like the mid-coast it is an area of great natural beauty but of a very different kind. It is the magnificent beaches that attract people to visit the Outer Banks in droves and sometimes seduce foolish people like himself to want to live there, close to the ocean.
It was around the time that Uncle Jack first discovered the Outer Banks in 1969 that the heavyweight developers began to move in. Having transformed sleepy beach towns like Ocean City, Maryland and Virginia Beach into the seaside megalopolises they have become, they descended on the pristine Outer Banks like the Visigoths attacking Rome. In an orgy of building that continues to this day, the Outer Banks have been irrevocably changed from a kind of sandy wilderness into a sickening sprawl of houses, condos, big-box stores and shopping centers choked with traffic reminiscent of downtown New York City. Only the developers continue to refer to it as “paradise”.
And the beaches, too, have suffered. It is seemingly in the nature of people to want to build their houses as close to the ocean as the law allows, and on the Outer Banks lawmakers (too often developers themselves) have been extremely short-sighted about the eventual consequences of building on the edge of the sea. As the pictures below testify, the ocean is relentlessly moving westward as it has been for millennia and in many areas buildings have gotten in the way.
Last year the commissioners of Nags Head, Uncle Jack’s home town, proposed to spend $32 million of local tax money to try to save these buildings by dumping sand dredged from the ocean floor in front of them. Their proposal was put to the voters who resoundingly (and wisely in his view) turned it down. To draw a line in the sand and tell the ocean to go no farther is a very expensive exercise in futility.
But the builders keep building and the people keep coming. Where it will end is anybody’s guess but there is no doubt that a Category 4 hurricane could make a powerful statement about the wisdom of overbuilding on narrow sandspits like the Outer Banks. In the meantime Uncle Jack will enjoy his stay in beautiful Camden.
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| Hurricane Isabel took this modest old beach house. Note the 14 room mini-hotel going up right next to it. Developer's hubris at work. |
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| Huge sandbags are the first line of defense for many buildings. These bags are illegal but the laws are not enforced in order to keep the properties on the tax rolls. |
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| This condo was built long after the building next door had been battered many times by storms. It's hard to sympathize with the owners. |
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| FEMA paid to rebuild this street and build an artificial dune with trucked-in sand. It all washed away in the next storm. Your tax dollars at work. |
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| All the sand washed out from under this walkway in one storm. The walkway (which was a replacement built by FEMA) washed away in the next storm. |
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| What's that funny looking box, Mom? |
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| The sunrises make it all worthwhile. Or do they? |
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