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Monday, March 15th, 2021

Tiny Town, Big Decision: What Are We Willing to Pay to Fight the Rising Sea?

Author:     Christopher Flavelle
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     March 14, 2021
 Link: Tiny Town, Big Decision: What Are We Willing to Pay to Fight the Rising Sea?
Stephan:   I am beginning to see an increasing number of stories about the struggles of coastal communities as they face the challenge of rising sea levels. It is all too often a tragic story and this is just the beginning of this trend. This New York Times report is about the Outer Banks of North Carolina which, by most predictions are doomed to be submerged. But it could be about many places around the world. We are going to see more and more of this, as well as the internal migrations these coastal submergences create.
Avon, N.C., faces a crisis: The main road into town risks being destroyed by the sea.
Credit: Erin Schaff/NYT

AVON, N.C. — Bobby Outten, a county manager in the Outer Banks, delivered two pieces of bad news at a recent public meeting. Avon, a town with a few hundred full-time residents, desperately needed at least $11 million to stop its main road from washing away. And to help pay for it, Dare County wanted to increase Avon’s property taxes, in some cases by almost 50 percent.

Homeowners mostly agreed on the urgency of the first part. They were considerably less keen on the second.

People gave Mr. Outten their own ideas about who should pay to protect their town: the federal government. The state government. The rest of the county. Tourists. People who rent to tourists. The view for many seemed to be, anyone but them.

Mr. Outten kept responding with the same message: There’s nobody coming to the rescue. We have only ourselves.

“We’ve got to act now,” he said.

The risk to tiny Avon from climate change is particularly dire — it is, after […]

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1 Comment

  1. Rev. Dean on Monday, March 15, 2021 at 11:37 am

    When I lived down in Florida, I worked on a high-rise building right on the ocean beach and thought it was very stupid building a big 40 level high building right on the beach and thought it would either sink or fall over when the ocean came in with a large wave or the ocean overflowing from climate-change.