Three more Dare County residents have died from COVID-19, the Dare County Dept. of Health and Human Services reported today on its dashboard.
The DCDHHS gave no personal details about the people who died, but a reduction in the number of hospitalizations on the dashboard suggests all three were hospitalized at the time of their deaths.
Since Christmas, 12 local residents have been hospitalized with COVID-19, according to DCDHHS dashboard records. Nine of them have been people age 65 or older.
The dashboard also reported today 16 new COVID-19 cases in Dare County, 11 of them local residents.
Since March 2020, 10 Dare County residents have died because of COVID-19. We extend our condolences to all who are grieving the lives that have been lost.
Dr. Sheila Davies, Dare County’s health director, gave no accounting in her COVID-19 update yesterday of the outbreak she has confirmed at Peak Resources nursing home and rehabilitation center in Nags Head. Instead she touted “hopeful trends” in COVID-19 cases—saying last week’s total of 153 cases was the lowest total in Dare County since before Christmas—and focused on vaccines.
Also yesterday, the COVID-19 dashboard of the Dare County Dept. of Health and Human Services reported 32 new cases, 24 of them Dare County residents. Of the 24 locals, six are age 65 or over, and two have been hospitalized.
The day before—Monday—the dashboard reported only three new cases, all of them Dare County residents. Monday is always the lightest day of the week for case reports.
One of the newly hospitalized residents is reportedly a man age 65 or over; and the other is a male minor age 17 or younger.
If the DCDHHS dashboard has accurately reported all hospitalizations and hospital discharges, there should be 12 residents—not nine, as the dashboard currently shows—still hospitalized with COVID-19
DCDHHS Director Davies confirmed with The Outer Banks Voice last Friday an outbreak at Peak Resources of at least 45 people, 39 residents and six staff members.
Residents and staff at Peak have been offered the opportunity to be vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, which is being administered by Walgreens and CVS through a partnership program with the federal government.
Dr. Davies gave no indication yesterday in her report, COVID-19 Update No. 80, how many of the residents and staff at Peak have been vaccinated with first and second doses, and how many of the infected residents may have been vaccinated.
In fact, she has not given an individualized accounting about how people newly diagnosed with COVID-19 likely acquired the virus since Dec. 22, 2020—after providing this public information in every update since she started her updates.
The Beacon believes that Dr. Davies’s withholding of information about the means of viral spread in Peak Resources and elsewhere in the county is a failure in local public health, which should be guided by science and the public interest, not politics.
As for vaccines, Dr. Davies reported that the DCDHHS’s “guaranteed weekly allocation from the state for the next three weeks is 300 doses per week.”
These are only first doses; second doses are in separate shipments.
Dr. Mandy Cohen, Secretary of the N.C. Dept. of Health and Human Services, has said that there are no problems with the federal government’s supply of second doses, just first doses.
This week, Dr. Davies said, DCDHHS was able to secure an additional 500 doses “through a special event request.” For the next two weeks, however, no more than 300 doses per week are guaranteed.
GOVERNOR URGES IN-PERSON LEARNING FOR SCHOOLCHILDREN
Governor Roy Cooper and Secretary Cohen strongly urged local school districts yesterday “to get our children back into the classroom,” as the Governor said at an afternoon COVID-19 briefing, in which top State education officials participated.
The Governor was eloquent in describing schools as not only sites for academic instruction, but as places where children “learn social skills, get reliable meals, and find their voices.” He also mentioned the role that teachers play in identifying child abuse and other problems that students may be experiencing at home.
Newly elected Superintendent of N.C. Public Instruction, Catherine Truitt, said that the pandemic is having “negative effects on children’s mental health and overall well-being, as well as their academic instruction.” In returning to in-person learning, she said, “We face a challenging pathway ahead.”
But, she insisted, “Our students cannot lose any more time”—after noting that even before COVID-19, “children were behind.”
Those of you with school-age children probably know that the Dare County Board of Education has decided to discuss a return to in-person learning at its Feb. 9 business meeting.
Previously, the Board had announced that it would hold a special meeting Feb. 13 about reopening schools—the day that many Dare County school staff receive their second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
The DCDHHS held a special vaccination clinic Jan. 23 for Dare County teachers and administrators and law enforcement personnel—even though Dr. Davies knew soon after she received State approval for the event that North Carolina’s vaccine prioritization had changed to advance all people age 65 or older ahead of teachers and other “essential workers.”
Governor Cooper said yesterday that he and Dr. Cohen had not discussed changing the state’s prioritization groups.
The Secretary reiterated that 83 percent of the nearly 10,000 people who have died from COVID-19 in North Carolina were age 65 or older. The vaccine prioritization, she said, is based on the “highest risk of death.”
“We will get vaccines to our essential workers as soon as possible,” she said.
The Dare County school staff members who were vaccinated Jan. 23 received first doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
We found Dr. Cohen’s remarks about school studies yesterday to be the most interesting. She reported on research that, she said, has determined schools are a “lower-risk setting” for COVID-19 than other public places. She also distinguished between elementary schoolchildren age 10 and younger and older students in middle school and high school.
She said that studies show “younger children are less likely to get and spread COVID-19,” and when they do contract the virus, they have very mild cases. Severe COVID-19 cases among young children are extremely rare.
The NCDHHS Secretary also said that children age 10 or younger “rarely transmit” COVID-19 to other children or to adult staff members. (Dare County had COVID-19 outbreaks in several of its elementary schools last year before the School Board reverted to remote learning exclusively.)
Regardless of the age of the students in a school building, Dr. Cohen explained, all students participating in in-person instruction will have to weak masks at all times and maintain six-foot distancing from each other.
She also said infection-prevention protocols such as screening students and staff for fevers and wiping down high-use surfaces will be in effect.
The NCDHHS has a “Strong Schools N.C. Public Health Toolkit (K-12)” for schools to implement and observe.
“The science is clear,” Dr. Cohen concluded. “It is safe to reopen our schools in accordance with the health protocols.”
In response to a reporter’s question, however, she acknowledged that the NCDHHS’s safety guidance will be more difficult to observe in middle schools and high schools because of the “physical configuration” of buildings and “the number of students.”
The Governor elected not to issue an executive order requiring N.C. public schools to open because he prefers to give local school districts “flexibility.” He would rather “spur action” by local school boards, he said, than to dictate it.
Asked by a reporter whether he would sign N.C. Senate Bill 37, a fast-moving bill filed Monday to require all school districts to provide in-person instruction while also observing NCDHHS safety protocols, the Governor demurred, saying “I have not seen the legislation.”
But he also expressed concern that the bill is “stripping some health protocols.”
Northbound traffic backs up on East Dogwood Trail, west of its intersection with Hickory Trail, last June.
The report of the $7500 traffic study being performed by the Town’s traffic engineering consultant is expected to be submitted by Feb. 12, according to Tommy Karole, chairman of the citizens’ Exploratory Committee to Address Cut-Through Traffic, who has been in contact recently with Town Manager Cliff Ogburn.
Feb. 12 is the same date that Mr. Ogburn gave at the Dec. 10 study progress report meeting that the Town held via Zoom between two employees of consultant J.M. Teague Engineering and Planning of Waynesville, N.C. and members of Mr. Karole’s committee.
(See The Beacon, 12/14/21, for a report on that meeting. For other background on the study, see 12/4/20 and 10/14/20.)
Mr. Karole asked at the December meeting if his committee could meet remotely with the two Teague employees, Engineering Director Will Thompsen and Engineering Technician Forrest Lundgren, to share with them homeowners’ observations “in the trenches.”
Both Mr. Thompsen and Mr. Lundgren, who gave a slide presentation about their early study data analysis, said they would welcome hearing from locals “on the ground.”
Mr. Karole informed The Beacon Sunday, however, that Mr. Ogburn has advised him the Town will not permit this information session to occur. This is a decision that would have had to have come from Mayor Tom Bennett, with or without consultation with individual Town Council members.
There has been no discussion at a Town Council meeting since Dec. 10 about the traffic study. Nothing public.
Mayor Bennett has been opposed for years to taking any action to prevent summertime weekend traffic from cutting through the residential areas of Southern Shores. Last June for the first time, and under emergency conditions, he supported prohibiting a left turn at U.S. Hwy. 158 on to South Dogwood Trail on two weekends.
It bears mentioning that Mr. Bennett’s term ends in December. The four-year term of Councilman Jim Conners, who, until Council members Elizabeth Morey and Matt Neal were elected in November 2019, also refused to take action to curb cut-through traffic, expires this year, as well.
The picture of Southern Shores traffic that the Teague engineers painted at the Dec. 10 meeting was a grim, but accurate, one. They said that N.C. Hwy. 12 is operating over-capacity, at what they called “forced saturated flow,” during the peak-season weekends, and that because of this saturation, traffic “cascades” to alternative routes that affect Southern Shores’ neighborhoods.
The traffic bottleneck in Duck, caused by that town’s 25-mph speed limit and pedestrian crosswalks, is “the common denominator of all congestion that is formed in Southern Shores,” said Mr. Lundgren.
At the conclusion of their slide presentation, Mr. Thompsen said, “We’re continuing with examining different strategies to cope with [the] cut-through traffic, as we were tasked within our scope of services.” He did not offer any last December.
The Beacon is disappointed that the “Town” has decided not to allow the public (members of the citizens’ committee) to meet with the Teague study engineers.
People who have not experienced the oppression and hardships posed by the cut-through traffic cannot ever truly imagine its effects and, therefore, can never be fully informed in their decision-making. The value of their detached objectivity is diminished by their lack of firsthand experience.
The one site visit that Teague made to Southern Shores was in September, after the summertime traffic crush had subsided.
We look forward to receiving the Teague consultants’ recommendations later this month.
TOWN COUNCIL MEETING TODAY AT 5:30, IN THE PITTS CENTER
The Beacon will not be able to attend or to live-stream today’s Town Council meeting at 5:30 p.m. in the Pitts Center. We will view the videotape as soon as possible and report to you what happened.
See The Beacon, 1/31/21 and 2/1/21, for commentary about two business items on the agenda: the Town Manager’s filing of his report supporting the establishment of two municipal service districts for the purpose of levying higher tax rates on certain properties to pay for the Town’s proactive 2022 beach nourishment project; and the initiation of the construction bidding process for “improvement” projects on sections of Hillcrest Drive and Sea Oats Trail.
Regarding the MSDs, we would like to note further that the Southern Shores Civic Assn., which owns oceanfront property from Hickory Trail north to the Duck town line, as well as all of the beach accesses along the town’s 3.7-mile-long shoreline, has not endorsed the 2022 project.
In an email Jan. 29 to SSCA members, in which he announced that the SSCA Board of Directors has granted the Town easements for the project, president Rod McCaughey said: “I want to be perfectly clear that granting the easement[s] does not constitute an endorsement of any particular beach replenishment plan or project.”
(The SSCA is a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization and is exempt from real estate taxation.)
There also will be a public hearing at today’s meeting regarding a change in Town Code chapter 17, which established the Historic Landmarks Commission, to add an alternate member to the five-member commission.
The public hearing is strictly pro forma. We foresee the Town Council unanimously approving this change and appointing Michael Guarracino of Tall Pine Lane to the newly created alternate position.
Mr. Guarracino’s background is in law enforcement and security. You may view his application for the Historic Landmarks Commission, which he filed to fill a regular membership position that he did not get, in the meeting packet.
The Town Council also will honor Lorelei Costa, one of the founding members of the Historic Landmarks Commission, who, we are sorry to report, is leaving Southern Shores.
The members of the Historic Landmarks Commission serve as volunteers, without any compensation.
It is not too late to submit public comments to be read at the meeting. Just send an email with “public comment” in the subject line to info@southernshores-nc.gov.
The Southern Shores shoreline near Trout Run just days after Hurricane Dorian passed by.
In August 2019, the Town of Duck laid the groundwork for what would be a yearlong monitoring program of its dunes and beaches using an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS), which relies upon what are commonly known as drones.
Duck partnered with APTIM Coastal Planning & Engineering of North Carolina—the Wilmington-based firm with which Southern Shores has contracted since 2017 for all of its coastal engineering surveys and plans—to monitor the dunes and beach berm on its coastline before and after storms, starting with Hurricane Dorian in September 2019.
APTIM, now known as Coastal Protection Engineering of North Carolina (CPE), used UAS technology and special software to measure the volumetric change of sand along Duck’s shoreline above the mean high-water mark (MHW). Other sand within the beach profile, such as the off-shore sand that is under water, was not measured. (See The Beacon, 1/26/21, for “How the Beach Works 101.”)
The bottom line: Although Duck’s dunes and berm generally (but not all) experienced an erosion of sand when Dorian passed by and when two other storm events occurred in October and November 2019, they also experienced an accretion (an addition) of sand by September 2020, when data were collected after Hurricane Teddy, which became a nor’easter.
With the exeption of Duck’s beach-nourishment project area, which is approximately from the northern end of Skimmer Way south to Spindrift Court, the overall accretion in cubic yards after the Teddy nor’easter was substantial.
But even in the project area, 8,600 cubic yards of sand were added between Skimmer Way south to just north of Canvasback Drive.
Unlike the Southern Shores Town Council, which has committed to a townwide nourishment project despite the lack of need along most of the beaches north of Skyline Road, the Duck Town Council has carefully evaluated the variability in its shoreline.
Also, unlike Southern Shores, the Town of Duck had substantial shoreline erosion and houses teetering on the ocean in its project area before it did beach nourishment. It did not proceed with a proactive project based on speculation, as Southern Shores is doing.
For purposes of the drone surveying and analysis, Duck divided its shoreline into three sections, designated as:
1) “Area North of Project,” between North Baum Bay, near the Sanderling development, and Skimmer Way;
2) “Project Area,” between Skimmer Way and Spindrift Court; and
3) “Area South of Project,” between Spindrift Way and the Southern Shores town line.
Southern Shores had an opportunity to join Duck in this UAS monitoring program and to obtain aerial photographs of its 3.7-mile-long shoreline before and after storm events, but the Town Council declined to make the small investment. It declined, even though the same coastal engineering firm that Duck hired to perform the monitoring was already doing Southern Shores’ annual beach surveys.
Indeed, Ken Willson, who is now managing all of the myriad details of Southern Shores’ $14-$16 million 2022 beach nourishment project, filed the first report in the Duck drone monitoring program.
Thereafter, his colleague, Adam Priest, who submitted the draft report of Southern Shores’ June 2020 beach survey, which The Beacon reviewed 1/26/21, submitted Duck’s other reports.
HURRICANE DORIAN, THREE OTHER STORM EVENTS MONITORED
Between Aug. 26 and Aug. 29, 2019, APTIM installed 70 painted and pole-mounted Ground Control Points (GCPs) on the backside of the dune and on roadways and walkways along the Duck shoreline.
GCPs are used to “georeference data collected during UAS flights,” Mr. Willson wrote in a letter Nov. 5, 2019 to former Duck Town Manager Christopher Layton.
APTIM also “created and provided UAS flight plans to the Town, which were used to conduct rapid assessment UAS aerial surveys of the Town’s beach and dune,” he continued, “. . . Flights were planned to maximize coverage of the beaches while maintaining the resolution needed to derive an accurate topography of the ground.”
Drones are unmanned or uncrewed aerial vehicles: You may think of them as small aircraft without pilots whose mission is to take aerial photographs.
While Mr. Willson goes into detail in his letter about how APTIM collected data within the GCP network and then analyzed them, we will stop here in the methodology and refer henceforth to the data collection and processing as “drone surveying.”
The Beacon has this letter from Mr. Willson to Mr. Layton because the leadership of the Southern Shores Civil Assn. shared with us the files it received from the Town of Duck about its 2019-20 drone surveying. We have imagery as well as written reports.
APTIM’s drone surveying covered four events:
HURRICANE DORIAN, which “impacted the Dare County shoreline,” Mr. Willson wrote, between Sept. 6-7, 2019. Duck town staff conducted pre-storm drone flights of the shoreline between Sept. 3-5 and post-storm flights between Sept. 8-12.
STORM EVENT TWO, which, Mr. Priest wrote in a Dec. 13, 2019 letter to Mr. Layton “impacted Dare County between Oct. 9-12, 2019,” was “non-tropical,” and was “produced by the combination of two coastal low-pressure systems that stalled off the East Coast creating days of high wind and sea conditions.” APTIM used data taken from the Dorian monitoring Sept. 8-12 to represent the pre-storm conditions for Event Two, and Duck town staff conducted drone flights between Oct. 15-22 to obtain post-storm conditions.
STORM EVENT THREE, which, Mr. Priest wrote in a Dec. 30, 2019 letter to Mr. Layton, “impacted the Dare County shoreline” between Nov. 16-18, 2019. This storm also was reportedly non-tropical and produced a nor’easter that “transited offshore of the East Coast creating days of high winds and sea conditions,” he wrote. The post-storm data of Oct. 9-12 from Event Two served as the pre-storm data for Event Three. Duck town staff conducted post-storm flights for Event Three between Nov. 25-26.
STORM EVENT FOUR, whose “impacts to the Dare County shoreline,” Mr. Priest wrote Nov. 17, 2020, to then-Interim Town Manager Joe Heard, “occurred between Sept. 19 and 24, 2020.” This storm, the CPE engineer wrote, was “associated with Hurricane Teddy as it moved north in the Atlantic, offshore of the East Coast and reached Category 4 strength.” It created “days of high wave conditions and elevated water levels,” he said. Mr. Priest went all the way back to Nov. 25-26, 2019, and the aftermath of Event Three, for his pre-storm data, while Duck town staff conducted post-storm flights between Oct. 1-6, 2020.
We have, but we will not belabor, the volumetric change data from each of these storm events, over all three sections of the Duck shoreline.
We will say, however, that, until data were collected after the Hurricane Teddy-associated storm, the drone surveying generally showed erosion of the berm—which is the backshore of the beach, next to the dune—along the upper portion, and scarping at the toe of the dunes.
But not across the board.
Interestingly, a positive volumetric change was measured in the Area North of the Project after both Hurricane Dorian and Event Two, which APTIM attributed to “a result of the visual differences between the pre- and post-storm imagery and not a true representation of measured elevation differences between the datasets.” But it may have been simply a natural occurrence.
After Event Three, the northern section experienced a volumetric loss of 33,200 cubic yards above the MHW, much of which it had gained back after Event Four.
In his Hurricane Dorian letter, Mr. Willson described the linear coverage area used to calculate volumetric change as being from the backside of the dune seaward about 120 to 150 feet to the waterline.
As we noted earlier, every section of the Duck shoreline experienced accretion, much of it substantial, between Event Three, which occurred in October 2019 and was assessed Nov. 25-26, 2019, and Event Four in November 2020.
Although we said we would not belabor data, we do think that Duck’s “Area South of Project,” which abuts Southern Shores at its southern end, is worth a closer look.
THE SOUTHERN SHORES LINE
According to SSCA President Rod McCaughey, who has conferred with Duck officials, data were collected in this section as far south as Eleventh Avenue in Southern Shores.
The data analyses by APTIM/CPE show that this southern section experienced the following:
After Dorian: Some erosion in the beach berm, but no escarpments along the toe of the dunes because of the steeper beach slope in this area. The net volumetric change above the mean high-water mark was a loss of about 18,000 cubic yards.
After Event Two: Some berm erosion, but no escarpments along the toe of the dunes. Net negative volumetric change was about 16,000 CY of sand above MHW.
After Event Three: Erosion along the beach berm resulting in a negative volumetric change of 15,350 CY of sand above MHW.
After Event Four: Accretion occurred throughout the section, with a positive volumetric change of 36,000 CY above the MHW.
If drone data were to be continuously collected, would we see that the amount of sand lost eventually returns? Would we see, and would our decision-makers better appreciate and respect, the seasonal and post-storm fluctuations that occur on the shoreline?
When Mr. Willson presented the results of APTIM’s first Southern Shores beach assessment to the Town Council at its March, 6 2018 meeting, he told Council members that “the shoreline is looking fairly stable” and there is “no big rush” to “jump” on beach nourishment.
“I think time is in on your side,” he concluded.
The results of his company’s data collection in the shoreline’s 22 beach stations showed, according to Mr. Willson: 1) the shoreline is “stable,” having lost only 0.4 feet (that’s five inches) between 2006 and 2017; and 2) the volume of sand in the system had actually increased during the same time period.
“The shoreline is looking pretty stable,” he said. “We’re not seeing any hot spots right now. The long-term averages and the short-term averages [for shoreline changes] look to be pretty stable, pretty manageable.”
And yet, here we are just three years later, with the Town Council on the verge of committing to a monster beach-nourishment project that is not only unnecessary, but pits property owners against each other, as it sorts them into different tax districts to pay for this unnecessary project.
Us-versus-Them. My back yard-versus-not my back yard. A town and community divided.
Selling out and moving to Duck is starting to seem like a darn good idea.
Town Manager Cliff Ogburn will propose at the Town Council’s Tuesday meeting establishing two municipal service districts (MSDs) for the purpose of levying a higher tax rate starting in FY 2021-22 on property owners near the oceanfront to pay for the Town’s 2022 beach nourishment project.
We believe the report that Mr. Ogburn has filed in support of these two MSDs, which are defined solely by their proximity to the ocean, is inadequate to meet the standard imposed by North Carolina law for such special tax districts, the creation of which would be unconstitutional otherwise.
The law requires a showing of need, not benefit, and the Town Manager’s report contains no shoreline data supporting the need for a townwide sand fill. With the exception of the beach section south of Skyline Road, the 2022 project is specifically designed to limit future, speculative damage, not to address current need.
Although the FY 2021-22 town property tax rates will not be determined by the Town Council until springtime budget sessions, the Town Manager presented at the Council’s Jan. 19 workshop proposed increased tax rates for the two proposed MSDs. When combined, property owners in these two MSDs would pay for 75 percent of the Town’s portion of the 2022 beach nourishment bill.
Mr. Ogburn suggested a tax rate increase of 25.98 cents per $100 of value for MSD 1, which runs along the oceanfront, and 9.23 cents per $100 for MSD 2. (We refer you to Mr. Ogburn’s report in the Feb. 2 meeting packet for the precise boundaries of proposed MSD 1 and MSD 2, and to The Beacon, 1/19/21.)
(For the first time, you will need to sign into Dropbox, which is a free online service, in order to access the materials in support of the agenda items that are in blue type. Click on MSD BOUNDARIES.pdf (dropbox.com) for the MSD report.)
The cost of the 2022 project has been estimated by Mr. Ogburn at $14 to $16 million, but these figures date to 2019 and are not firm.
Dare County has pledged to contribute from its Beach Nourishment Fund, which is supported by county occupancy taxes, no more than $7 million up-front and an additional sum for debt service.
The Council’s Tuesday meeting will be held at 5:30 p.m. in the Pitts Center, with COVID-19 infection-prevention protocols in effect. As usual, you may email public comments to the Town Council at info@southernshores-nc.gov before the meeting or appear in person to present them.
The Council also will consider Tuesday initiating the bidding process for the street-rebuilding projects on Hillcrest Drive and Sea Oats Trail that were postponed last year because of concerns over reduced revenue during the pandemic.
The Hillcrest Drive project extends from the street’s intersection with Hickory Trail north to the Southern Shores Civic Assn. tennis courts. The Sea Oats Trail project targets the section between Eleventh Avenue and Duck Road.
Those two projects combined will cost an estimated $1.42 million and will be paid equally by all Southern Shores taxpayers, not just the ones who own property on the improved streets.
The funding will come from the Town’s unassigned fund balance, which will be left with an estimated $3 million in available funds above the $3 million balance that must be maintained as a hedge against emergency expenses, according to Mr. Ogburn’s meeting report.
STATUTORY REQUIREMENTS OF MSD CREATION
North Carolina law allows a city council to define service districts in order to finance “beach erosion control and flood and hurricane protection works.” (See North Carolina General Statutes sec. 160A-536(a)(1)).
The state law authorizes a city council to define an MSD, however, only upon a finding that “a proposed district is in need of [beach erosion control, etc.] . . . to a demonstrably greater extent than the remainder of the city.” (NCGS sec. 160A-537(a)).
The city council must prepare a report that contains a map of a proposed MSD and “a statement showing that the proposed district meets the standards” set out in NCGS sec. 160A-537(a), that is, that it needs beach erosion control and hurricane protection to a demonstrably greater extent than the rest of the city. (NCGS sec. 160A-537(b)).
At no point in the report that Mr. Ogburn has prepared and included in Tuesday’s meeting packet does he substantiate a demonstrably greater need that the properties in the two proposed MSDs have now for beach nourishment. He does not because he cannot.
The 2022 townwide project is proactive and not based on current need.
Dare County Manager Bobby Outten expressly recognized the proactive nature of the Southern Shores project when he responded to a question at Duck’s January town council meeting about whether Southern Shores was really going ahead with beach nourishment. Mr. Outten administers the County’s Beach Nourishment Fund and is well aware of the parameters of the Town’s project.
As we exhaustively explained 1/26/21, long-term average erosion rates for the Southern Shores shoreline do not support the 2022 beach nourishment project. They are low and show, in fact, that the 3.7-mile-long shoreline is stable, except for the southern hot-spot section near Pelican Watch.
The short-term data that exist—largely, a comparison of Coastal Protection Engineering of North Carolina (CPE)’s measurements in 2017 with its data last year—are variable, according to the 22 stations where CPE took measurements, and are attributable to seasonal fluctuations, which are not really erosion. (See The Beacon, 1/26/21.)
Had the previous Southern Shores Town Council elected to join with the Town of Duck in the drone surveying that it contracted with CPE to do from September 2019 to September 2020, these fluctuations of erosion and accretion would be readily apparent.
But the Council rejected Duck’s offer, so we do not have data that show how storms, such as Hurricane Dorian in September 2019 and nor’easters in November 2019 and September 2020, cause both the erosion of sand, as well as the addition (accretion) of sand, on the dunes and the berm during an entire year.
(Southern Shores would have had to change the timing of its annual surveying, which would not have been difficult to do.)
Instead, all we have are measurements by CPE of shoreline and sand-volume changes taken once during a calendar year and during different months of the year: December in 2017; May in 2019; June in 2020.
For some of the 22 beach stations measured by CPE there are data from 2006 compiled by coastal engineers with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility in Duck, but they do not show significant shoreline change and sand loss.
It is well known that the beaches are at their narrowest during the wintertime and at their widest in July and August, and that measurements from different seasons are of little to no value. Apples to oranges. Even CPE admitted in its latest annual Southern Shores beach survey that measurements should be done during the same month each year.
Duck’s drone data, which we will discuss tomorrow, show pre- and post-storm conditions of that town’s beaches, extending south to Eleventh Avenue in Southern Shores.
CPE, which is performing Southern Shores’ annual surveys, could have done 12-month drone surveying, too, but the Town Council declined to pay for such detailing.
BENEFIT IS NOT NEED
The Town Manager cannot cite in his report shoreline erosion data that support the establishment of the two proposed MSDs. They do not exist. As a consequence, he focuses on the speculative benefit that these properties would enjoy.
But speculative benefit is not the determining factor for the establishment of special tax districts; need is.
For example, the Town Manager writes in his report:
“The Town Council . . . has determined that the creation of two Municipal Service Districts are necessary as those districts receive a greater benefit from the beach nourishment project than the rest of the Town . …”
Elsewhere, he similarly writes:
Proposed “District One receives the greatest benefit as it is closest to the ocean, benefits to a greater degree by ocean influence and beach access and is at greater risk of storm damage than those in District Two and the rest of the Town. District Two receives those same benefits but to a lesser extent than District One as it is set back further from the improvements, but to a greater extent than the rest of the Town.”
Always benefit, never need.
Indeed, the report specifically states that “The beach nourishment project is designed to limit damage from erosion and storms, thus protecting structures from this damage in District One and District Two.”
This statement is significant because it clearly addresses future speculative damage from erosion and storms. Southern Shores’ 2022 project is not designed to repair damage, as all of the beach nourishment projects in other Dare County towns and unincorporated areas have been, and there currently are no structures in Southern Shores that are threatened by erosion.
The report also states that the “The Town is committed to beach nourishment to maintain a wide recreation beach strand.” Whatever the Town’s commitments may be, they are not a factor in the needs assessment required for establishing a tax district that otherwise would be unconstitutional.
The new concept of “sufficient useable beach width,” introduced by the current Town Council in December 2020 in response to Seventh Avenue homeowners who complained about the width of their beach, has no basis in need.
Not only has the Town’s coastal engineering consultant failed to define what constitutes a sufficiently wide beach in Southern Shores, it has not deemed any Southern Shores beach to be insufficient in width. It has only measured shifting widths from May 2019 to June 2020, a 13-month drop in the shoreline-data bucket.
We have not seen any crowds on the Southern Shores beaches, which might suggest an insufficient beach width, and we have not heard any complaints about the beaches being too narrow, except from the Seventh Avenue complainers, and in 2016-17, from Pelican Watch homeowners.
CPE’s decision in its beach-width report of January 2020 to consider the width of Kitty Hawk’s and Kill Devil Hills’ beaches, which are much more congested than Southern Shores’ beaches because of the much denser development in those towns, is arbitrary and without apparent reason. More apples and oranges.
CPE has consistently reported that the area of the Southern Shores shoreline that includes Seventh Avenue has ample sand in its beach profile. (See The Beacon, 1/26/21, for details about the profile and other “How the Beach Works 101” facts.)
The Beacon finds Mr. Ogburn’s report to be inadequate to meet the N.C. statutory standard required to establish MSDs. The decision to define MSDs and to perform an exorbitant beach nourishment project—which will have to be “maintained” every five years—should be based on actual need, not on speculative benefit. We would have no objection if it were, but the data are not there.
As a postscript, we note that properties on the east side of Ocean Boulevard between the Duck Road split and Hickory Trail that do not abut the ocean are included in the Town Manager’s proposed MSD 1, not in proposed MSD 2, as Councilman Matt Neal suggested putting them at the Jan. 19 workshop.
Forty-five people—39 residents and six staff workers—have been infected with COVID-19 in an outbreak at the Peak Resources nursing and rehabilitation facility in Nags Head, The Outer Banks Voice reported yesterday, saying it had confirmed the cases with the Dare County Dept. of Health and Human Services.
The Beacon has not seen a public accounting of this outbreak—or of any other possible nursing-home outbreak—on the DCDHHS website. But on Jan. 21 already, we observed “an unusual trend upward” in the number of COVID-19 cases reported by DCDHHS among people age 65 or older. (See The Beacon, 1/21/21.)
In her Jan. 19 COVID-19 update, Dr. Sheila Davies reported only that the recent rapid increase in Dare County-reported COVID-19 cases was being driven by “viral spread in the workplace from prolonged exposure between co-workers.”
She cited “meetings, lunch gatherings and shared working space” as places where workplace viral spread was occurring. She made no mention of COVID-19 cases in either of the two skilled nursing facilities in Dare County: Peak Resources and Spring Arbor in Kill Devil Hills.
Dr. Davies’s update a week later focused on Dare County’s reduced vaccine allocation from the State and was conspicuously absent of any individualized details about the new COVID-19 cases. She did not discuss COVID-19 transmission at all.
The DCDHHS Director also has conspicuously dropped her Friday COVID-19 updates. Surely these short reports can be prepared without much difficulty even when vaccination clinics are being conducted. The number of new cases daily has slowed since the holiday surge, but it is still too high.
On Jan. 21, The Beacon remarked upon the unusually high number of COVID-19 cases reported Jan. 18-21 by the DCDHHS among people 65 or older and quoted case percentages of the total.
On Jan. 20, for example, the DCDHHS reported 30 new COVID-19 cases, of which 13, or 43 percent, were in the 65-or-older age group, and 11 of them were Dare County residents.
This upward trend of COVID-19 infections occurring among the highest-risk age group has not abated, and now we know why.
As Dare County’s public-health director, Dr. Davies owes county residents an explanation about how the Peak Resources viral outbreak occurred and spread, as well as an assessment of its current containment, or lack thereof.
In light of the statewide problem with nursing home staff refusing to be vaccinated, we have a right to know if noncompliant staff may have caused or in any way contributed to the outbreak. What percentage of the total local skilled nursing facility work force has refused to be vaccinated?
In just the past four days, Dare County has reported 27 people age 65 or older as having tested positive for COVID-19, and 22 of them are locals. One of them, a man, was hospitalized. (A woman age 65 or older was reported hospitalized on Jan. 25.)
Yesterday nine people age 65 or older—43 percent of the total new cases for the day—were reported to have tested positive for COVID-19, and all of them are Dare County residents.
We demand to know from Dr. Davies, who has never held a media briefing about COVID-19, what is going on in the county’s two congregate living facilities that supposedly care for our most vulnerable population.
We are a year into the coronavirus pandemic. How can an outbreak happen now?
Governor Roy Cooper announced today at a COVID-19 briefing in Raleigh that the State’s modified stay-at-home order, which includes the 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew, will be extended until Feb. 28 and his order permitting to-go mixed-drink sales after the 9 p.m. cutoff time for in-restaurant service will be extended through March 31.
All restrictions of the Governor’s modified stay-at-home order, which was to expire Friday at 5 p.m., will remain in effect.
The Governor also announced that North Carolina’s federal shipment of vaccine will increase by 16 percent, starting with next week’s shipment, and that this increase will be in effect for three weeks.
North Carolina had been receiving 120,000 doses weekly.
According to the Governor, federal officials notified the State of the vaccine-supply increase yesterday, after N.C. Dept. of Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen held an afternoon briefing. (See The Beacon, 1/26/21.)
During her briefing, Dr. Cohen explained that her department had accelerated the rate of vaccinations statewide in order to clear North Carolina’s “backlog” of first-dose COVID-19 vaccine and show the U.S. government that it is ready to receive more.
North Carolina had been among the slowest states to vaccinate its population, ranking 43rd in percentage vaccinated just a week ago. It has since improved to No. 12.
The recent ramp-up of vaccinations—which the Governor reported today has exhausted 99.8 percent of the State’s first-dose backlog—left the NCDHHS with only 84,000 vaccine doses to distribute this week to local vaccine providers, such as the Dare County Dept. of Health and Human Services, Dr. Cohen said.
In a bulletin Monday, DCDHHS director Dr. Sheila Davies said that the State’s reduction in vaccine distribution—which resulted in Dare County receiving half of its expected allocation—might cause it to cancel hundreds of local vaccination appointments scheduled Friday. She described news of the reduction as “frustrating and dismal.”
Yesterday afternoon, however, Dr. Davies announced that the “vaccine shortfall” she had anticipated would likely be covered by transfers of vaccine doses from the Outer Banks Hospital and from Onslow Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville, N.C.
Cooperation among the DCDHHS and the two hospitals is precisely what Dr. Cohen had hoped would occur among local vaccine providers, she intimated, when she decided to allocate this week’s limited number of doses on a county-by-county basis, according to a county’s population.
Both the Governor and Dr. Cohen quantified the anticipated vaccine as an increase to 140,000 doses weekly.
All of these doses are first doses, said Dr. Cohen, who corrected the Governor’s assertion that they are both first and second doses.
According to Dr. Cohen, the NCDHHS “holds back for three to four weeks” the necessary second doses and apparently has them now in reserve.
As usual, both State officials stressed the “three W’s” of infection prevention to stem the spread of COVID-19: Wear a mask; wait six feet apart; and wash your hands frequently.
Governor Cooper characterized the number of new COVID-19 cases statewide as “stabilized,” after a holiday surge that peaked Jan. 10, but “still high.”
“The virus is still raging through our communities,” he said. “… We still have work to do. We cannot let our guard down,” especially during the winter months.
North Carolina is “still experiencing worrisome levels of virus,” Dr. Cohen said, a situation that she said has been “compounded” by the arrival of the more contagious United Kingdom variant of the coronavirus.
SHOULD DARE HAVE HELD A VACCINE CLINIC FOR SCHOOL WORKERS?
A number of the questions raised by media representatives after the Governor and Dr. Cohen gave their prepared remarks concerned vaccinations in nursing homes—or the lack therefore—and vaccine prioritizations observed by different local vaccine providers.
The Trump Administration contracted with CVS and Walgreens to handle vaccinations of staff and residents in long-term care facilities, such as nursing homes and other group homes.
Whether or not North Carolina could have opted out of this U.S. government program was not directly answered by Secretary Cohen when a reporter asked. The Governor said he did not think it could, but then deferred to the Secretary when she sought—but did not achieve—clarification.
Apparently, some states are handling vaccinations in long-term care facilities on their own.
While NCDHHS is trying to educate and inform people about the vaccines and their safety, North Carolina has no oversight over vaccinations of nursing home staff—up to 60 or 70 percent of whom reportedly have declined to be vaccinated—and residents.
A refusal by nursing home workers–many of whom are people of color who distrust the medical system–to be vaccinated is a national problem. Online misinformation about the vaccines also contributes to their reluctance.
Dr. Cohen did clarify, however, that any vaccinations now of frontline essential workers, such as teachers, postal workers, grocery store employees, and other workers defined as essential by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventions, are “out of the prioritization order” announced by the NCDHHS.
A reporter raised the issue of teachers receiving vaccinations in certain jurisdictions, but not in others, even though they are not age-eligible under NCDHHS’s prioritization plan.
Although she would like to allow “flexibility at the local level” in vaccination protocol, and she recognized that some of the vaccination appointments for frontline essential workers pre-dated the State’s shift on Jan. 15 to prioritizing all people age 65 or older, Dr. Cohen said that “going out of the prioritization order should be unusual.”
Dare County held a vaccination clinic last Saturday for all Dare County school staff, as well as College of the Albemarle personnel and Dare County law enforcement officials—regardless of their age—at First Flight High School in Kill Devil Hills.
According to a release by Dare County Schools Superintendent John Farrelly, 1,100 first doses of the Pfizer vaccine were provided by Vidant Hospital in Greensville for this day-long clinic. Second doses from Vidant will be administered at a Feb. 13 clinic.
The Outer Banks Hospital is part of the Vidant Health system.
OBX Today reported that the DCDHHS scheduled this clinic, and it was approved by the NCDHHS, just 24 hours before the State changed its vaccination plan to prioritize all people age 65 or older, regardless of general health or living situation.
The Beacon believes Dr. Davies should have canceled this clinic. We think she showed poor judgment and poor form in not doing so. The COVID-19 vaccine supply has always been limited and should be reserved for those people deserving of higher prioritization. No one should “jump the line.”
As an educator, Dr. Farrelly should have immediately recognized this and requested a postponement.
Had the DCDHHS Director canceled the schools clinic, she would have had a ready supply for the people age 65 or older whose Friday vaccination appointments she cast into doubt Monday.
According to Dr. Cohen, 83 percent of the nearly 9,000 people who have died in North Carolina because of COVID-19 were age 65 or older.
The people who now should be receiving vaccinations statewide are all healthcare workers with a high risk of COVID-19 exposure; all long-term care facility staff and residents; and all people age 65 or older.
Dr. Cohen would not speculate on when there will be a statewide “shift” to the next level of prioritization, which includes frontline essential workers.
There is “still a lot of demand from people age 65 and over,” she said.
“Millions of people” need the vaccine, Governor Cooper said, but the State has “only thousands of shots.”
The State of North Carolina has nearly cleared its supply “backlog” of first-dose COVID-19 vaccine, N.C. Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen reported at a press conference this afternoon, and will have to strictly ration the 120,000 first doses it receives each week from the U.S. Government until its allotment is increased.
Dr. Cohen does not expect the State to receive more vaccine for at least the next two or three weeks, and when it does, the “bump up,” she said, is likely to be on the order of 10 or 20 percent more.
The Secretary declined to specify in response to a reporter’s question just what communications the NCDHHS has had with federal officials, saying only, “We are advocating for more vaccine.”
Only 84,000 of the State’s weekly 120,000 first doses will be distributed to local vaccine providers, such as the Dare County Dept. of Health and Human Services, Dr. Cohen said, according to a distribution plan based on county population.
The remaining 36,000 doses are being kept “in reserve” for “large-scale vaccination events”—such as those scheduled this weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway and the Panthers’ Bank of America Stadium—and for distribution to communities where minorities historically have been under-served.
As a result, about 300 COVID-19 vaccination appointments scheduled for this Friday in Dare County may have to be postponed because the State cut Dare’s vaccine allocation in half, according to a bulletin issued yesterday by Dr. Sheila Davies, Director of the DCDHHS.
When asked by a reporter how the NCDHHS decided “per capita” vaccine allocation, which varies considerably from county to county, Secretary Cohen made clear that she is not trying to achieve per capita equity.
More of Friday’s 1,100 appointments in Dare would have had to be canceled if arrangements had not been made for a transfer of vaccine from the Outer Banks Hospital and an anticipated transfer from Onslow Hospital, Dr. Davies said in her bulletin, COVID-19 Update No. 78.
As of midnight yesterday, Dr. Cohen said, North Carolina had “exhausted” 95 percent of its first-dose backlog by speeding up vaccine administration statewide. By tonight, she predicted, 100 percent of the backlog will have been eliminated.
This backlog has nothing to do with second doses of the COVID-19 vaccines. The State will always have sufficient second doses “on hand,” Dr. Cohen assured.
As The Beacon reported 1/21/21, North Carolina has lagged behind most of the other states in “getting vaccines in people’s arms,” which the new Biden Administration has pledged to do quickly. The State’s poor showing disadvantaged it in terms of its vaccine supply from the federal government. North Carolina had to prove that it was deserving of more vaccine.
Five days ago, North Carolina ranked only 43rd among the 50 states in the percentage of people vaccinated among its population, according to the COVID Data Tracker of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, its ranking is 25.
The State will receive its next federal shipment of 120,000 first doses tomorrow, Dr. Cohen said. Local vaccine providers typically have just a “48-hour window,” Dr. Cohen said, “on when vaccine will arrive.”
“Demand for vaccine,” she said in one of many understatements made at today’s briefing, “vastly exceeds supply.” Another was that “supply is incredibly limited.”
According to Dr. Davies’s bulletin, people whose Friday vaccination appointments have to be rescheduled will be contacted by DCDHHS. She asks that people “be patient and wait for a staff person to call you.”
Dr. Davies also said that DCDHHS could “vaccinate 2,000 to 4,000 people per week [if vaccine were] allocated to us.”
As of Jan. 24, DCDHHS had administered 4,588 first doses and 51 second doses of vaccine, according to its vaccine dashboard, which is updated every Sunday.
The beach near Trout Run in September 2019, close to high tide and shortly before Hurricane Dorian passed by.
No meaningful conclusions can be drawn about the Southern Shores beaches from the surveys performed in the past few years by the Town’s coastal engineering consultant because the data are too short-term, and there are insufficient historic data with which to compare them. They are too short-term even to suggest trends.
We have reviewed the draft report of the “2020 Beach Assessment Report” presented at last week’s Southern Shores Town Council meeting by Ken Willson of Coastal Protection Engineering of North Carolina (CPE)—just as we did the consultant’s 2017 and 2019 beach surveys and find it, like the others, to be of little value except as a recent snapshot in time.
Mr. Willson is program manager for the $14 to $16 million 2022 town-wide beach nourishment project approved unanimously by the Town Council last year. CPE is responsible for permitting, design, and oversight of the project; it will not do the actual construction.
A series of beach snapshots taken over an extended period of time—during the same month each year—eventually will yield a useful portrait of Southern Shores’ ever-changing 3.7-mile-long shoreline. But we are not there yet.
The 2022 project, however, does not address actual damage to the beaches—except in the “hot spot” area south of Skyline Road, where a fill project occurred in 2017.
Slated for construction from May to October 2022, the town-wide beach nourishment project is designed to put sand on the beaches in order primarily to reduce potential storm damage from a potential storm comparable to Hurricane Isabel.
Isabel hit Dare County in 2003, but as one noted North Carolina coastal engineer and erosion specialist told The Beacon, it “pretty much petered out by the time it got to Kitty Hawk.”
“Storm patterns are pretty scattered” in the northern Outer Banks, in contrast to Hatteras Island and the southern Outer Banks, Spencer Rogers of UNC-Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science told us in an interview last year. Nor’easters that occur in the fall through the late spring pose more of a threat to the Southern Shores shoreline than hurricanes do. (A nor’easter has been forecasted for later this week.)
According to Mr. Rogers, Southern Shores has not been directly hit by a severe storm since the Ash Wednesday storm of 1962, an “Extreme Nor’easter” that took out the old Sea Ranch Hotel at the current site of Pelican Watch, next to the Kitty Hawk Pier. Since this March 1962 event, no buildings in Southern Shores have been destroyed or even threatened by erosion. This makes Southern Shores unique among Dare beach towns.
We have written extensively about beach nourishment in the past few years and bring up this background because people still do not understand that the 2022 project is based on a storm-simulation computer model. Southern Shores has a history of low long-term average erosion rates, but long-term erosion has never part of the beach-nourishment conversation held by the Town Council. (These rates are obtainable from the N.C. Division of Coastal Management.)
Aptim Coastal Planning and Engineering (APTIM), of which CPE is a corporate offshoot, performed beach surveys of the Southern Shores shoreline in December 2017 and May 2019. In 2018, it produced Southern Shores’ “Beach Management Plan,” which provided three “discretionary” beach-nourishment options for the Town to consider. This plan was updated in 2019, when the options were reduced to two, and then modified in 2020 with the addition of a new goal beyond storm damage reduction: that of maintaining a “sufficient useable beach.” The project options then expanded.
(For an elaboration of “useable beach,” see the section, “The 2020 Report Data,” below.)
In the 2020 Beach Assessment Report (“The 2020 Report”), which Town Manager Cliff Ogburn provided us, CPE states that its data will be used for “updating” the 2022 beach nourishment project design and will serve as “the conditional survey to develop construction documents to bid the proposed project.”
The bidding process will occur in June. Mr. Willson said last week that there are only five beach construction companies in the nation that can handle a project of this scope.
The 2020 Report compiles measurements taken last June along the Southern Shores shoreline at 22 “stations,” which are locations on the beach that are spaced 1,000 feet from one to the next. These same stations were monitored in the earlier two surveys.
We will discuss some of the data collected by CPE in 2020, as compared with 2017 and 2019, but only with the red-alert caveat that such short-term comparisons do not yield reliable conclusions upon which reliable recommendations can be made.
Before we get into the data, we would like to discuss the natural processes of the coastal environment and how beach nourishment works. Warning: We wax long in this blog.
All of CPE’s 2020 data will inevitably change as the beaches inevitably change. Changes in data over 13 months (from May 2019 to June 2020) or 2 ½ years (December 2017 to June 2020) are just a drop in the bucket.
THE SEASONAL CYCLE OF THE COASTAL ENVIRONMENT
To quote Spencer Rogers, who has worked with the renowned research, education, and outreach program, N.C. Sea Mark, for more than 40 years: “The beach oscillates in width from season-to-season and from year-to-year.”
Seasonal erosion occurs because of variations in wind and wave energy, the two drivers of coastal environmental change.
The beach is at its widest in late July and early August, according to retired longtime U.S. Army Corps (USACE) of Engineers Field Research Facility coastal engineer and former Southern Shores homeowner Bill Birkemeir. As most of you know, the USACE’s Field Research Facility (FRF) is in Duck.
In the “seasonal cycle,” Mr. Birkemeier told The Beacon last year, the beach is “narrow and steep in winter” and “comes back in the summer.” Passing hurricanes and other storms push the sand off-shore, but it returns. The beach maintains an equilibrium.
“It’s really simple,” Mr. Birkemeier noted, and very important to understand. (See “How The Beach Works 101” below.)
On Sept. 19, 2020, oceanographer Dr. Katherine L. Brodie of the FRF, who lives in Southern Shores, told the Town Council at a special planning meeting that APTIM’s conclusions about the town’s need for beach nourishment were “based on limited data” and “on short-term trends that are not particularly helpful.”
“There is lots of seasonal variability” in erosion [loss] and accretion [gain] of beaches, she said, and the time to measure beach erosion is not in the winter, as APTIM had done in 2017.
“Historically,” Dr. Brodie advised, “Southern Shores has been one of the most stable areas of our coastline here on the Outer Banks.”
The Beacon interviewed both Mr. Rogers and Mr. Birkemeier for a comprehensive report about beach nourishment that we published 2/1/20. We refer you to it now as a helpful guide. We also recommend that you read the opening sections of Mr. Rogers’s book, “The Dune Book,” which is an excellent primer on how the beach works and changes.
The only “historic” data referenced in CPE’s draft report date to October 2006, when the Field Research Facility collected measurements on the southern 15,000 feet of the Southern Shores shoreline, roughly from Third Avenue south to the Kitty Hawk line.
Unfortunately, the FRF’s data-collection methodology is not explained, so we don’t know whether a comparison of the 2020 data with the 2006 data is even valid. (This may be explained in the report appendix, which we did not obtain.)
CPE tries to fill the historic gap by referencing some data collected in September 2013 in the three northernmost stations—this is from Ninth Avenue to the Duck line—by an engineering firm hired by the Town of Duck. It does not disclose this methodology, either.
HOW THE BEACH WORKS 101
A fundamental principle in “How The Beach Works 101” is that change is the only constant. The coastal environment is dynamic, filled with energy and constantly changing.
“[O]cean waves dominate the beach,” Mr. Rogers explains in “The Dune Book,” and “waves absorb energy from the wind.”
Another principle: Stronger winds and larger storms create larger waves, which have a stronger impact on the coast when they break. Where and how the waves break on the visible beach is critical to understanding how beach nourishment works.
In The 2020 Report, CPE discusses the design of beach-nourishment projects, but this material is woven into data analyses and lost.
For a straightforward explanation, we refer you to a 2017 white paper written by Mr. Willson and other members of the Science and Technology Committee of the American Shore & Beach Preservation Assn.: WhitePaper_85_2_Profile_Eq.pdf (asbpa.org). Some of the language of this article is incorporated into The 2020 Report.
The dry-sand beach that we see and walk upon represents only a “fraction,” Mr. Willson writes, of the active beach “profile,” which is the area from the landward dunes and vegetation line east to what is known as the “depth of closure,” the seaward boundary.
The depth of closure is just beyond where the largest waves break; it is usually 15 to 25 feet beneath the ocean.
The dry-sand beach where you put your towel is known as the berm.
According to Mr. Rogers, who spoke at Southern Shores’ beach nourishment forum at the Hilton Garden Inn: “It is very difficult to eyeball the shoreline” and assess its status, which, of course, is what laypeople tend to do.
Not only is much of the beach profile under water, there are “radical changes” going on in the dry-sand area that the eye cannot detect, Mr. Rogers said.
Let’s consider erosion.
There are four different types of erosion, according to Mr. Rogers, only two of which we believe most people appreciate: seasonal fluctuations caused by varying weather and storm patterns, and storm-induced erosion, such as dune escarpment.
Neither of these “erosions” is permanent, because the dunes and berm will recover when the beach profile regains its equilibrium.
Long-term or chronic erosion, which causes the dune to erode and move landward, is one of the other two, but as we noted, the Southern Shores shoreline has held up well over the decades. The fourth type, inlet erosion, does not apply to our area.
“On summer days,” Mr. Rogers writes in “The Dune Book” (p. 5), “it is hard to imagine that the berm is temporarily eroded almost every year. On a typical North Carolina beach, the waterline moves about 75 to 100 feet every year due to seasonal fluctuations.”
Actually, he writes, seasonal fluctuations are not true erosion—provided the volume of sand that is lost in the winter returns for the summer.
Similarly, sand is moved from the visible beach to submerged areas off-shore by severe storms that create large breaking waves on the shoreline and a rise in water level. Large wave action may flatten the slope of the berm and temporarily erode the dunes.
But as more sand moves off-shore, the water depth near the shoreline gets shallower, a change that forces the waves to break farther off-shore. As soon as the breaking of the waves recedes, erosion of the visible beach slows down. You may have noticed that storm waves frequently form off-shore sand bars, which also act as a filter for the largest waves, slowing them.
In time, as the wave action reduces, the beach moves toward its equilibrium, experiencing little erosion. Dunes also provide protection from the waves.
When a beach-nourishment project is designed, the natural processes of the entire profile from season-to-season are accounted for and taken advantage of. Wind and wave action will distribute any sand placed on the dunes and/or the berm by dump truck or dredge over the entire profile, including, and perhaps most importantly, off-shore.
Sand deposited on the dunes and the berm is known as design or beach fill. Sand placed just to the east of the design fill in an area of the profile that is more steeply sloped is known as advance or advanced fill. Advanced fill is critical to reducing or dissipating the wave energy. It forces the waves to break farther off-shore, thus “widening” the dry-sand beach area.
(According to Mr. Willson, the sand that will be transported from off the shores of Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills to “nourish” our beaches in 2022, will be “finer” and, as a result, “the slope of [our] beach may end up being a little flatter.”)
“The most important protective feature of the beach and dune system is the submerged offshore slope,” Mr. Rogers writes. “As a wave moves into shallower water, friction-like factors internally affect the wave form, slowing the base of the wave but having less effect on the crest or top of the wave. The decreasing depth [the shallow waters] causes the wave to increase in height, slow in speed and become much steeper. At some point, the crest of the wave is moving too fast for the bottom of the wave form to keep up. Then the wave becomes unstable and breaks, dissipating part of its energy before reforming into a smaller wave.”
The shape of the beach—its elevation contours, both in the dry sand area and off-shore—also changes constantly with changes in wave action.
A picture of the Southern Shores beaches in December (egad!), May, or June is not a picture of the beaches at their most robust. If CPE is going to continue its annual monitoring, it should pick a summer month in which to do it.
If CPE elects to continue with springtime monitoring, because of a concern about an early hurricane, it should choose one month or the other—May or June—and make its timeframe consistent.
Indeed, CPE itself recognizes in its draft report that “the same timeframes” should be used from year to year “to mitigate the influence of seasonal differences.”
We wonder why it did not do this last year.
You may recall that Hurricane Dorian passed by the Southern Shores shoreline in September, and we experienced several damaging nor’easters last winter and early spring. The effects of Dorian’s passage and the pounding of the other storms on the shoreline’s condition in 2020 are not mentioned in CPE’s draft report.
THE 2020 REPORT DATA
For purposes of monitoring the Southern Shores shoreline, CPE-NC divided it into three areas:
The Northern Section: from around Third Avenue north to the Southern Shores/Duck line.
The Central Section, formerly known in the Beach Management Plan as the “Main Fill”: from Third Avenue south to about 450 feet south of Chicahauk Trail.
The Southern Section: from 450 feet south of Chicahauk Trail south to the Southern Shores/Kitty Hawk line.
CPE then measured shoreline change; sand-volume change (called “volumetric change”), and useable beach width at the 22 stations in these three sections. There are seven stations in the Northern Section; nine in the Central Section; and six in the Southern Section.
Data can and do vary substantially from one station to the next. With such variability, we do not find averages useful, but note that CPE-NC calculated them.
The metrics the consultant used to assess the condition of the shoreline are as follows:
Shoreline change: The “bar” for measuring shoreline change is the mean high-water (MHW) mark on the dry-sand beach. If the MHW moves landward, there is a negative shoreline change; seaward movement connotes a positive change.
Volumetric change: This metric essentially refers to the volume of sand measured at a beach station, both what is visible in the profile and what is off-shore up to the closure depth. Volumetric changes are measured in cubic yards per linear foot (cy/lf).
Useable beach width: APTIM/CPE-NC defined this concept, in response to a request by the Town Council in late 2019, as the distance between two specific elevation contours on the beach. They are identified as the +12.0 ft. NAVD88 Contour, which marks the landward limit on the dry-sand beach; and the +4.0 ft. NAVD88 Contour, which is the seaward limit on the dry-sand beach.
On Dec. 3, 2019, a unanimous Town Council—with three new members sworn into office just that evening—decided to add “sufficient useable beach width,” as a goal of the Town’s Beach Management Plan. This action was taken in response to repeated complaints from two Seventh Avenue homeowners about their allegedly narrow beach.
Persistent and driven, and armed with visual aids during their many appearances before the Town Council, Paul Borzellino and Mark Peters of Seventh Avenue are primarily responsible for the Council’s decision to include the beach north of Third Avenue in the 2022 nourishment project.
As we understand it, CPE relied upon photographs of the Southern Shores stations taken in May 2019 to derive both station-by-station measurements, as well as an average useable beach width in town south of Third Avenue of 84 feet.
It also came up with an average useable beach of 103 feet for the beaches from Skyline Road in Southern Shores, south to a point about 200 feet south of the Asheville Street beach access in Kill Devil Hills. The 2020 Report does not recap how CPE made this determination. This is the area that was nourished in the 2017 projects.
At no time did the coastal engineering firm ever evaluate sufficiency. See The Beacon, 12/14/19.
The station-by-station June 2020 measurements of beach width represent a “one point-in- time reading,” Mr. Willson explained in response to Councilman Matt Neal’s question last week about the existence of historic data documenting the beaches’ linear footage. Mr. Willson said LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data dating to 1996 could be “pulled together” to give a perspective of 24 years. We hope this will be done.
In this draft report, we are only looking at a few years in the life of a shoreline that has existed for thousands of years—during which residential development has existed for about 80 years.
CPE’s data on shoreline and sand-volume changes in the Northern Section do not support beach nourishment. They did not in December 2017, and they do not in June 2020.
From December 2017 to June 2020, according to The 2020 Report, the entire Northern Section experienced a positive change in sand volume in the beach profile. In the same time period, the shoreline change along the seven stations varied, with a purported positive gain in the MHW mark of 9.1 feet around Eighth Avenue—in other words, the MHW moved seaward—and a loss of 8.7 feet between Third and Fourth Avenues.
The Seventh Avenue beach experienced a negligible change of -0.2 ft., or a landward move of 2.4 inches.
As for the measured change in the useable beach of the Northern Section between May 2019 and June 2020, it increased by an average of about 12 feet. The Seventh Avenue beach purportedly picked up 8 feet.
We find the comparative data conclusions reached by CPE-NC about the Central Section to be the most problematic. According to the draft report, the change in sand volume for this area in the 2 ½-year period was an average of -0.3 cy/lf per year.
CPE measured primarily negative volumetric changes from Third Avenue to the southern boundary of 226 Ocean Blvd. and in an area between 600 feet north of Chicahauk Trail to 450 feet south of Chicahauk Trail.
Between 330 feet south of East Dogwood Trail to about 500 feet south of the Duck Road split, however, the volume of sand increased during the same time.
Notably, between October 2006 to June 2020, all of the Central Section stations gained sand volume.
Shoreline change between December 2017 and June 2020 was also variable for the Central Section, with the station around First Avenue gaining 9.6 inches per year; the station around Dolphin Run picking up 13 ft./yr.; and the station at Bluefin Lane gaining 7.7 ft./yr.
CPE shows a loss of shoreline, as measured by the MHW, in other stations within this section for the same timeframe, especially near Trout Run; but the long-term shoreline change, assessed by using the FRF’s 2006 data, is not nearly so dramatic. The shoreline change at all Central Section stations from October 2006 to June 2020 is much less severe, suggesting again that short-term data are not reliable indicators.
CPE reports that between May 2019 and June 2020, the useable beach width in the Central Section decreased at every station, except one near the Duck Road split—and by as much as 33 feet between Bluefin Lane and Trout Run. We will be interested to see the 2021 measurements for this metric. The width measurements are “one point in time” measurements, and the 2019-20 off-season was a turbulent one.
The Southern Section, part of which was nourished in 2017, experienced volume loss in all of its stations in the 2 ½-year period, the worst occurring around Skyline Road. The shoreline change in the south also was uniformly negative, as well as precipitous, and the useable beach width change in one year took a dive of between 10 feet and 45 feet!
We have never argued that the Southern Section of the Southern Shores shoreline is not an erosion hot spot. The Southern Section needs beach maintenance in order for its oceanfront to remain attractive to vacationers.
We are troubled, however, by the Town Council’s decision to broad-swipe the rest of the shoreline in a beach nourishment project that can best be described as proactive, but not necessary.
If you would like to receive a copy of the consultant’s draft report, please write to us at ssbeaconeditor@gmail.com, and we will email a PDF to you. We welcome readers’ opinions.
THE PELICAN WATCH NOURISHMENT PROJECT
Thanks to a question by Councilman Leo Holland at last week’s meeting about sand lost in the Southern Section of the shoreline where beach nourishment occurred in 2017, we learned for the first time that this project was not designed. It was largely a matter of placing advance fill as a “stop-gap” measure, Mr. Willson explained.
Councilman Holland voted to approve the so-called Pelican Watch project when he served on the Town Council from 2013-2017 and was surprised to learn this, as were we. Mayor Tom Bennett said that advance fill “saved” the Pelican Watch oceanfront.
When engineers like those employed by CPE design a nourishment project, they determine how much sand must be placed in a beach profile to meet “a stated goal”—such as preventing waves from overtopping the dunes during a storm event and washing out N.C. Highway 12, as the community of Avon on Hatteras Island seeks to do. (See Mr. Willson’s White Paper, above, for this proposition.)
Some of the sand that is placed on the dry-sand area is intended to be transported off-shore, in order to change wave action, as we explained above.
According to Mr. Willson, the Pelican Watch project was an “emergency” project to stop a “crisis.” It was not designed. Within a month of placing beach fill on the shoreline, most of the sand had moved off-shore, he said. Advance fill created the wider beach, and sand fencing installed by the Town helped the dune to rebuild itself, he explained.
This project cost $1 million, of which the Town of Southern Shores paid $500,000 and Dare County paid the other $500,000, according to an accounting given at last week’s Town Council meeting.
Thirty percent of the Town’s contribution, or $150,000, was paid by Pelican Watch homeowners through a special assessment. The rest of us (we are the Town) picked up the tab for $350,000.
The Town Council is not proposing to contribute any monies from the Town’s general fund for the 2022 project.
The SSCA’s Sea Oats Park is located at the intersection of Sea Oats Trail and Hickory Trail.
We pass along the following email from the Southern Shores Civic Assn., which we just received, as a public service:
“Many [SSCA] members have Ameri-Kart trash and recycle totes, and Joel Newton, board member and fixer of all broken things, orders parts for them from the only known distributor in the country. This individual just informed Joel that he had found 24 more brown recycle cart lids in his warehouse. Once they’re sold, the only replacement lid will be black. So if your Ameri-Kart recycle cart lid is cracked/split/broken, you may wish to take this opportunity to replace it. Cost is about $35 including tax, handling and shipping from Arizona.
“Please let Joel know ( jrnewton@charter.net ) by January 28th if you wish to order a new brown recycle cart lid, or for that matter, parts such as axles and wheels.”
Of course, you can only take advantage of this offer if you are an SSCA member.
Having paid $90 for a new recycling can because of damage caused by Bay Disposal during its pickup—the cans are probably more expensive now—we consider this offer a bargain. Your dues also support a good cause.
Newcomers to Southern Shores may not know how much the SSCA does on a budget that consists largely of membership dues to maintain the town, its character, its beauty, and its amenities. The founders of Southern Shores set up the SSCA as a major property owner in order to preserve the area’s open spaces and protect its natural beauty, including the beaches.
The existence of the SSCA sets Southern Shores apart from every other beach town in Dare County. It has always been committed to preserving Southern Shores’ environment and the quality of life in its diverse neighborhoods.
Everyone who lives and/or owns property in Southern Shores should know that the SSCA owns and maintains—through the efforts of dedicated volunteers who do hands-on repairs–the 33 beach-access walkways and dune crossovers in Southern Shores.
The Town of Southern Shores contributes nothing to the maintenance of these walkways and crossovers, nor does it give the SSCA any money for the maintenance of its other properties, which include:
*The Hillcrest Drive beach parking area, which currently has two showers, toilets, a gazebo, benches, and a wheelchair-accessible viewing platform.
*The North Marina, South Marina, and Loblolly Marina. There is a boat launch ramp at the North Marina off of South Dogwood Trail, as well as a pavilion for parties and events. The SSCA offers wet and dry slips to SSCA members who join its Boat Club, for a minimal annual fee, as well as kayak storage.
*Soundview Park on North Dogwood Trail, which features a children’s playground, picnic tables, charcoal grill, bocce ball court, horseshoe pit, park benches, and a kayak launching platform on a sandy beach. (Many people head to Southview Park to watch the sun set over the Currituck Sound)
*The Hillcrest tennis courts, which may be used by SSCA members who pay a modest annual fee.
*Sea Oats Park, which provides a basketball half court, a children’s play area, soccer field, and picnic tables.
*And many other natural open green spaces, as well as ponds.
Membership in the SSCA entitles you to access all of these properties.
(The SSCA also owns a large tract of oceanfront property north of Hickory Trail–a fact that was not directly addressed by the Town Council during its discussion Tuesday about the designation of municipal service districts for purposes of beach-nourishment taxation.)
Membership in the SSCA entitles you to access all of these properties.
The SSCA is a 501(c)(4) organization, which is an organization operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.
The Internal Revenue Service considers an organization that is “primarily engaged in promoting the common good and general welfare of the people of a community”–which the SSCA is–to be a social welfare organization, and, as such, it is exempt from federal income taxation. Donations to 501(c)(4) organizations are not tax deductible for the donors, however.
Annual SSCA dues are $65 for residents and second-home owners and $95 for rental property owners. You may apply and pay your membership dues online via the SSCA website or send in your application with a check to the SSCA office. (Check the website for details.)
Every member receives two SSCA window decals, entitling him or her to park in SSCA parking lots, as well as two parking passes for guests.
The SSCA owns the park and parking lot at the Duck Road split where the cell tower is located. Parking permitted along certain roads, such as East Dogwood Trail, near the SSCA’s beach access, is regulated by the Town.
The Southern Shores Beacon 