What I Saw Today on the Way to Work

I really love to drive the Beach Road when I travel to and from work, or simply from place to place up and down the coast on work errands. I can keep my eye on the surf conditions. But today I saw a succession of things which underscored what it's come to now, especially for those living on the Beach Road in Kitty Hawk, say between Old Station (Black Pelican) and Kitty Hawk Pier. It reminded me of my childhood on the beach.

Many of you have heard us talk about moving sand around before in this blog. So let me set the mood before I describe what I saw.

Remember when you were a kid building a sandcastle on the beach at the very edge of the wet tide line? We usually started by building a mound dug from a small trench or moat in a semi-circle around it, the future castle replete with drip-sand towers. This was something worth protecting and defending from the ocean's ravages. On the ocean side of the moat we would then build a seawall from sand dug from the first moat and another moat to the ocean side of this new sand wall.

All the while the ocean wash would occasionally roll up over some or all of our new structures built ever so close to the water in the tidal zone. We would quickly repair our sandcastle and if the tide was outgoing, find we could then embellish the castle with more elaborate detail. However if the tide was incoming, we would call for our friends' and work furiously together to stop the onslaught, digging the moats deeper and the sand seawalls taller. And despite our best efforts, the ocean would roll right through anything we built. As little children, this is how we learned not to build our sandcastles in the tidal zone, unless we chose this conflict with the ocean. And if we did, we always knew we were doomed to its overwhelming power.

What I saw today as I drove along the stretch north of Old Station after a high tide, were quite a few Bobcats (the mini front-end loader/bulldozer-type equipment) parked or hard at work around oceanfront homes, a bulldozer, a contractor with dump trucks delivering sand to a particularly endangered section of Beach Road sand dune, and people with shovels helping defend both the Beach Road and homes along the way. I thought of my childhood learning where to build our sandcastles.

Of course this is way over-simplified. When most of these homes and the Kitty Hawk Beach Road were built, the beach stretched before them was far wider, with the pack sand (sand wet or dry depending on the tide)in the tidal influence far to the east. Now the pack sand is beneath many of these homes and on even a garden variety-type northeaster like the one we just had---a measly 20-knot blow---ocean overwash reaches the homes on the west side of the Beach Road.

But the bustle of activity and the call for help to defend what had been built years before, is identical to what I felt as a child protecting my very own sandcastle. So when it blows hard northeast here this time of year, the TV newscasters run down from the Tidewater area of Virginia and the Greenville area of North Carolina and train their cameras on the modest old homes along this stretch hoping to capture sensational live shots of the ocean taking homes from their piling perches.

The ocean forms escarpments in the new sand trucked in along the frontal dune. That sand is in turn, dragged seaward to help form new sandbars and many times better surf breaks. Or the sand is simply transported south toward Oregon Inlet and is deposited at other sandbars. Our mission is to find the new breaks and do our solemn duty to insure its waves are ridden. I shall do my part, I promise...more later. Keep at it.

The Month of Maypril on Our Coast

Welcome to the half-way point in our coast's month of Maypril...the cruelest month of all. It's actually more than a month because it won't let us go until about the 10th day of the month we used to call May. At that time we are jolted from 52-degree air to 95-degree air with 95-percent humidity.

Maypril is the nastiest season on our coast because it loves to mess with our hope and expectations about great weather "just around the corner". Most normal people think of this as the Spring season. The harsh weather is about to dissolve gradually away into glorious, clear and temperate air somewhere we hear.

But alas, there is no gradual progression to such soothing caresses by airy breezes. In fact, forecasters here can relax during Maypril. They need only predict wind direction. Almost every day here the Maypril wind blows in excess of 20-25 knots and often gale force. Wave upon wave of low pressure systems grind off the continent as the days roll past. Northeasters blow up about every week. And yeah, that's salt water ponding on the Beach Road in Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, and South Nags Head. (So drive your new SUV through it fool, just like the car commercials on TV. Then take it home and wonder why it's rusting away.)

Carry one of every kind of clothing you own with you every day---from shorts and tee shirts to winter insulated coveralls, from board shorts to 4-3mm full wetsuit with booties, gloves, and hood. You can sample any type of weather here during this hybrid month.

The beauty in it though, is having a head-high to overhead swell every week for the past 4 weeks. That's right Maypril, give us the left hook and then your right jab. Give the dolphins their wave playground and pound the sand on the bars into molecules. Show us your passion. Then pull us all through your keyhole into the sweltering summer lull. Maypril on our coast, is the cruelest month of all.

The Street Cred of Hurricane Forecasting

Alright, here we go again...Dr. William Gray of the University of Colorado has done it once more. He and his esteemed team at the esteemed university located in the country's middle waist have once again published their annual forecast for the year's hurricane season. How many named storms, how many hurricanes, how many major storms...you know. This event always entertains me and the carpenters I work with daily. This prediction from the people who can't really predict with any certainty, the path of one of these storms when its spinning itself up right off our coast.

Show us your "cone of probability". Tell us where you think the "eye will come ashore" one more time as it rolls over our coast.

Does the good doctor really expect us to base our annual, long range planning on these storm forecasts? What should we be doing with this impossibly unreliable information? Come on, one of you heavyweight, meteorologist, atmospheric sciences expert readers please weigh in here, help us. I welcome your comments. What good is this type of forecasting? Maybe the Insurance Institute for Property Loss Reduction and its major insurance corporation supporters would like us to have this hurricane talk ringing in our ears as much as possible so we'll find value in the thousands we pay in each year on our flood and windstorm policies.

With the attention this gets from the media each year, these are our suggestions as ways to improve/capitalize on this annual pronouncement. Let's make it more of a media-sensational event, more festive.

First, we think Dr. Gray should stand before a microphone reading from a scroll or some similar dignified manuscript wearing a spandex suit emblazoned with his sponsors' name across his chest, replete with cap and maybe a cape (see a professional cyclist's racing kit)as he makes his grand, yearly pronouncement. You know, each year the university could sell the sponsorship of this momentous event kinda like naming rights for an arena or stadium. It all demands a fitting circus atmosphere. Attendants could be seen dressed in foul weather oilskins and Gumby-like survival suits in the background on stage.

To be completely honest, I believe forecasts like this are just one of the things that help mislead the uninformed inhabitants on the coast into believing someone really does have the ability through technology or whatever, to predict these storms. This is just one of many things that have happened in the past 20 years which give some a false sense of security in their newer structurally improved homes. This came as a result of Hurricane Hugo hitting the Charleston, South Carolina area with its whopping 21'+ storm surge and Andrew following in southern Florida in the early '90's with its record dollar value of damage. And then there was Katrina..."Brownie you're doin' a helluva job."

Some won't evacuate now because they're sure their home can withstand the carnage. Some of the new structural building code requirements born in the wake of these storms did raise the price of all homes somewhat, but had particular effect on the price of entry level homes in these high wind zone regions mostly east of Interstate Ninety-five. I believe the inverse effect is that some are left behind in newly substandard construction, not being able to afford one of these new home fortresses.

The science Dr. Gray is attempting to advance holds great potential to save lives and infrastructure some time in the future there is no doubt. But the forecasting track record in general where these storms are concerned tells us maybe he should cool out until near-term forecasting has more accuracy. However, he may as well make a visual circus of it for now if he must persist. Let's have some tabloid fun!

In the meantime, we'd like the University of Colorado and the rest of the U.S. to take a look at our lunchtime-developed, Outer Banks of North Carolina snow forecast for the nation's mid-section for next winter...