There’s a popular T-shirt on Hatteras Island along the North Carolina Outer Banks that says: “One road on. One road off (sometimes)” — poking fun at the constant battle between Mother Nature and a thin ribbon of pavement connecting the narrow barrier island to the rest of the world.
Mother Nature is probably going to win this week. Hurricane Erin is forecast to stay hundreds of miles offshore but is still sending waves 20 feet (6 meters) or greater crashing over vulnerable sand dunes on the islands.
Officials have ordered evacuations of Hatteras and Ocracoke islands even without a hurricane warning because that tiny ribbon of highway called N.C. 12 will likely be torn up and washed out in several places, isolating villages for days or weeks.
The 3,500 or so Outer Bankers who live there have handled isolation before. But most of the tens of thousands of vacationers have not.
“We haven’t seen waves of that size in a while and the vulnerable spots have only gotten weaker in the past five years,” said Reide Corbett, executive director of the Coastal Studies Institute, a group of several universities that study the Outer Banks.
In a basic sense, they are sand dunes that were tall enough to stay above the ocean level when many of the Earth’s glaciers melted 20,000 years ago.
The barrier islands in some places are as far as 30 miles (48 kilometers) off mainland North Carolina. To the east is the vast Atlantic Ocean. To the west is the Pamlico Sound.
“Water, water everywhere. That really resonates on the Outer Banks,” Corbett said.
The most built-up and populated part of the Outer Banks are in the north around Nags Head and Kill Devil Hills, which aren’t under the evacuation order. South of the Oregon Inlet, scoured out by a 1846 hurricane, is Hatteras Island, where the only connection to the mainland is N.C. 12. South of there is Ocracoke Island, accessible only by boat or plane.
The first highways to reach the area were built more than 60 years ago. And the Outer Banks started booming, as it went from quaint fishing villages to what it is now, dotted with 6,000-square-foot (550-square-meter) vacation homes on stilts.
On a nice day, what look like snowplows and street sweeper brushes wait on the side of N.C. 12 to scoop and sweep away the constantly blowing sand.
When the storms come, water from the ocean or the sound punch through the sand dunes and wash tons of sand and debris on the road. In more extreme cases, storms can break up the pavement or even create new inlets that require temporary bridges.