North Carolina policymakers should be "cautious" about expanding the number of hardened structures along the state's coastline, the Coastal Resources Commission's Science Panel warned in a draft report released last week.
Building structures like seawalls or terminal groins to divert wave energy or capture sand means protecting one part of the coastline at the expense of others, Laura Moore, a UNC-Chapel Hill coastal geomorphologist who chairs the Science Panel, told the full CRC.
"Hard structures may achieve goals locally, but they also alter the coastal system and coastal processes, and can lead to adverse effects both within the project area and beyond the project area, including loss of the public beach," Moore told the CRC, adding that losing the beach can in turn impact tourism and recreation spending.
The panel is made up of 10 scientists who study North Carolina's coast, largely based at schools like UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC Wilmington, and Duke University. To complete the report, the group also consulted with a coastal economist to determine how costs and benefits of building a hardened structure would be evaluated.
The report comes as coastal lawmakers in the N.C. Senate have introduced a trio of bills intended to help make it easier to build hardened structures along the coastline, a response to the rapid erosion that communities like Buxton have experienced in recent years. Since 2020, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore reports that 32 Dare County houses have collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean in Buxton and Rodanthe erosion hotspots.
These impacts are likely to worsen in coming years due to the impacts of climate change such as rising seas and potentially stronger storms, scientists reported.
"Mitigating erosion and protecting — or intending, trying to reduce risk to infrastructure — will unfortunately become more and more challenging," Moore said.
Lauren Salter, a CRC member from Davis, said she understands the emotions people feel about protecting their homes using hardened structures, recounting how her own home was destroyed by 2018's Hurricane Florence.
"All I can see in this report is, where you place (a hard structure), you're picking who gets protected at the expense of someone else. And how do you determine which citizen has earned a hardened structure because other people have homes, too, and how do you choose who gets it and who gets the adverse impact?" Salter said.
Scientists also told the CRC that the long-term future of North Carolina's barrier islands is more likely to be protected by processes that allow sand to migrate along the shoreline and wash over the island, raising its profile in response to rising seas, than with hardened structures that stymie the natural movement of sand or cause it to wash away entirely.
North Carolina's policy
North Carolina has effectively banned new hardened structures along its coastline since 1985, first via CRC rules and then, starting in 2003, in state law.
There have been some exceptions to that, including a 2011 law allowing four terminal groins that has led to construction on Bald Island and on the eastern edge of Ocean Isle Beach, and a handful of variances allowing private property owners to place huge sandbags in front of their homes in places like North Topsail Beach, effectively sacrificing the remaining coastline to protect houses.
There is also a seawall made of rocks in front of Fort Fisher on the southern tip of New Hanover County, a terminal groin built to slow erosion at Carteret County's Fort Macon, and a dilapidated series of three terminal groins originally built to protect a naval base in Buxton.
"The places where hard structures are present along the North Carolina coast at the moment are places where there has been a decision to protect something of federal interest," Moore said, later adding, "What we don't have examples of are groins in the middle of barrier islands to protect private property, which is more analogous to the places that we see in New Jersey."
Last week, the Senate's Agriculture, Energy and Environment Committee voted in favor of Senate Bill 1009, which would repeal the state's ban on hardened structures, referring the bill to the Senate's Appropriations Committee.
The committee also approved Senate Bill 1001, which would allow local governments to use money from the state's Coastal Storm Damage Mitigation Fund to permit, build, or repair terminal groins as long as they protect nearby public land. North Carolina's longstanding policy has been that state taxpayer money should not be used on shoreline hardening projects.
The Senate's Finance Committee is scheduled to consider SB1001 Tuesday.
Scientists recommended that any changes to North Carolina's law banning hardened structures include cost-benefit analysis of specific new projects that account for "the myriad adverse affects," net benefits,pickin and any potential long-term maintenance needs. That evaluation should, scientists said, account for impacts to the nearby coastline, ecology, the local economy and recreational opportunities.
Beyond that, scientists wrote, any new hard structure should be required to implement a long-term monitoring and maintenance plan, including beach nourishment needs caused by the project's potential changes to the natural movement of sand and triggers that could automatically compel the modification or removal of the project.
Jordan Hennessy, a member of the Coastal Resources Commission, seemed taken aback at the suggested requirements.
"It would be setting a bar for hard structures that no nourishment project is set to," Hennessy said.
"Well, hard structures are a little different than nourishment," Moore responded.
The Science Panel's report is, for now, a draft. The full CRC is set to discuss the report again at its August meeting.
