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HURRICANE ISABEL made landfall at Cape Lookout National Seashore along the North Carolina coast on September 18, 2003. The powerful northeast quadrant of the storm also struck Cape Hatteras National Seashore, opening a 1,700-foot-wide breach in the narrow barrier island park. Additionally, storm waves washed over the lower portions of Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland and Virginia, piling sand on parking lots and roads. Although these three barrier island parks were affected by the storm, Cape Hatteras faced the greatest restoration effort. The only road to give island residents access to their homes within this national seashore was damaged and required immediate attention. The need to restore public access influenced the park’s decisions related to natural resource management.
Hurricanes and other storms are vital for maintaining the barrier islands along the Atlantic Coast. Storm waves wash over the islands, depositing sand that stretches across the islands in fanlike shapes and adds elevation. As the beach on the ocean side erodes, the corresponding buildup of sand toward the more protected sound side preserves the island by allowing it to remain above rising sea level. If this process did not occur, barrier islands would break apart very quickly and be inundated.
At Cape Lookout and Assateague Island National Seashores the National Park Service is able to maintain natural barrier island processes because infrastructure such as roads and homes is minimal. The fans of sand resulting from Hurricane Isabel are being preserved for detailed geologic study and are playing out their natural role of island preservation. Indeed, at Assateague, a prestorm shoreline restoration project to mitigate the impacts of jetties constructed at Ocean City was designed to allow the natural storm process to continue. Nevertheless, the National Park Service facilitates visitor use at these national seashores. Cape Lookout is repairing the docks to restore boat access to the barrier island. Additionally, the interdunal sand road—a transitory, unpaved driving route—has been relocated and meanders across the new sand deposits. On the south end of Assateague Island, portable visitor-use facilities that were demobilized in preparation for the storm are being reinstalled on the new sand deposits. At these national seashores, requests for NPS protection of private and state infrastructure are minimal.
The situation at Cape Hatteras, however, is quite different. The State of North Carolina has the right to maintain State Highway 12 running through the park. Moreover, the presence of six villages within the park results in private and state “restoration” actions that alter many of the park’s natural resources, including barrier island dynamics. The breach or inlet opened by Hurricane Isabel severed Highway 12 northeast of Hatteras Village, cutting off residents from their prestorm mode of travel along asphalt roads. The situation was considered an emergency because no other means of access, such as bridge, causeway, or ferry, is available to the village. Accordingly, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security directed the Army Corps of Engineers to fill the new inlet. Once the inlet was filled, the state transportation department reconstructed the broken segment of highway.
Private property owners in the park also tried to restore prestorm conditions by reconstructing berms between their homes and the park beach, using the 2–4 feet ( 0.6–1.2 m) of sand that had washed onto their property. Unlike the case at many barrier islands, large berms are not natural to Cape Hatteras. In an effort to maintain barrier island dynamics on parklands, the park did not allow residents to use park beaches as a sand source for the berms, and required the berms to be built as far onto private property as possible.
The sheer magnitude of Hurricane Isabel’s effects on the infrastructure along the barrier islands has heightened the awareness of state agencies and local communities of the need for environmentally sound, long-term transportation planning. Cape Hatteras National Seashore has long been involved with the Outer Banks Task Force, an interagency panel that has studied Highway 12 problems for 10 years. Spurred by the storm, the panel is finalizing its recommendations to guide the interagency response to any future inlets created by storms on the Outer Banks. If the results of these collaborative planning efforts can be implemented after future storms, community restoration actions may become more consistent with natural coastal processes.
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