Tag Archives: Dorian

Facing Waterfront Hazards in Wilmington

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Wilmington, a charming city of just over 100,000 on the far southern edge of the North Carolina coast, has taken some hits from coastal storms in recent years, most notably Hurricane Florence in 2018. Hurricane Dorian this year posed a minor threat but mostly left a trail of 14 identified tornadoes in its wake, a phenomenon familiar in the Southeast, though their association with hurricanes may be less well known elsewhere.

Wilmington Planning Director Glenn Harbeck, who I was told was one of the most knowledgeable people in town for the purpose, on October 8 took me on a boat tour of much of the city’s interior waterfront to let me see and photograph the area along Hewletts Creek, a stream feeding into the Atlantic Ocean behind the barrier island that includes the Masonboro Island Estuarine Reserve. Glenn and his wife have lived in Wilmington for 40 years, during which, he says, they have experienced a succession of hurricanes: Diana (1984), Bertha (1996), Fran (1996), Bonnie (1998), Floyd (1999), Matthew (2016), Florence (2018), and Dorian (2019).

Why it has taken me this long to write about it is another matter related entirely to my own obligations and distractions. At the time, however, I was in Wilmington as the invited keynote speaker for the annual conference of the North Carolina chapter of the American Planning Association. That event was at the city’s convention center, which sits along the Cape Fear River, which basically serves as the city’s western edge, with suburban or unincorporated New Hanover County on the other side. Along with the adjoining Embassy Suites, the complex boasts a boardwalk that allows people to walk to restaurants and other venues in more historic quarters of the city. I joined a party of a dozen at a nearby seafood restaurant, The George on the River, and got to see much of it. Some of the boardwalk appears to need work, but I was not clear on whether that was due to hurricane damage of work in progress. But I can give The George five stars. The food was wonderful and a credit to southern coastal cuisine. (I enjoyed crab-topped salmon with garlic mashed potatoes and spicy collards. I gladly recommend it.) Added appeal derived from the outdoor seating that made for a pleasant evening setting.

But all that followed the boat tour, which came in the late afternoon after a delayed arrival in Wilmington following a long layover in Atlanta on the way from Chicago. The weather had been uncertain, and Glenn was a bit concerned about concluding the trip before it turned rainy or inhospitable, although it never did. It was simply a bit chilly, but my photos have that overcast, gray-sky look as a result.

Compared to some prior tours I have taken of disaster sites, this one was relatively brief with modest expectations. Nonetheless, there are always learning opportunities, and I had never visited Wilmington before. Touring by boat allowed a different perspective than by land. Certain factors became readily apparent, with Glenn supplying ample explanation.

One, to be expected, was that, despite the clear dangers and mitigation challenges associated with a waterfront near the ocean in a region frequently affected by coastal storms and hurricanes, housing along Hewletts Creek remains attractive to its owners and has gained value as a result. These are people who love their boats and their access to the water, and the storms are simply part of the environment, much like a snowstorm in Chicago. Whether everyone takes all the appropriate precautions to protect those properties may be another matter, but most are at least aware of the challenges they face when hurricanes move toward North Carolina.

Because access to the water is a prized asset, most properties include piers, although shared piers are becoming more common, according to Glenn, presumably because of reduced costs and environmental impact. Those piers, however, have typically taken a beating in big storms, and Hurricane Florence contained some solid punches. One problem, he informed me, is that the buoyancy of the wood is the enemy of the piers’ survival because, as the storm surge rises and the piers rise with it, they are bent and twisted and collapse. In other words, the buoyancy of wood works against them. The photos provide ample evidence, but Glenn also told me that some had been repaired in recent months; if I had come three months earlier, the destruction would have been more evident. Past adaptation in some places was to rebuild the piers higher than before to move them above likely wave levels, but frequent storms and high storm surges have sometimes obviated the effectiveness of this approach. Instead, some pier owners are adapting with the use of Titan decking, which uses polypropylene plastic to stabilize the piers during future storms.

There were also, a year after Florence, remaining indications of the damages suffered to the boats themselves, which can easily be tossed about by winds and waves. We encountered one of those (below) toward the end of the tour.  

It should be noted that, although it is inside Wilmington, Hewletts Creek has a much more rural or suburban feel than the Cape Fear River waterfront, which is near the urban heart of the city and its downtown. The riverfront is not primarily residential but encompasses a variety of commercial uses, including hotels and a large marina. In contrast, the waterfront along Hewletts Creek consisted predominantly of private residential property.

I do not wish to leave the impression from this glimpse of Hewletts Creek that what happened there is the extent of the impact of Florence. Although I did not have time on this trip to get a thorough tour of the city, I did receive other information from Glenn and from Christine Hughes, a senior planner with the city for Comprehensive Planning, Design, and Community Engagement. From her, I learned that Wilmington’s working and low-income populations sustained a large hit on their affordable housing stock with the loss of approximately 1,200 apartment units. In September, the Wilmington City Council approved $27 million worth of bond issuances for the Wilmington Housing Authority. A big part of that involved the closure of Market North Apartments on Darlington Avenue, which will be rebuilt. That closure forced evacuation by more than 1,000 residents. Wilmington will be recovering from Florence for some time to come. The cost and numbers of people affected in this housing redevelopment underscore the solemn fact that often low-income and minority populations suffer the greatest impacts of natural disasters. Our communities are not whole unless and until we give them high priority in recovery planning.

It is also worth knowing that the quest for coastal resilience is not new to Wilmington, which has engaged with federal and state agencies for some time, as illustrated in a 2013 report on a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pilot project on community resilience. Glenn Harbeck has been in his current position for more than seven years after a long period of consulting and knows well the direction the city needs to take, but it is a long road. Residents can learn a great deal about the progress of infrastructure recovery projects from the city’s online map tracking such efforts, which include street and sidewalk repairs and stormwater management. Recovery is a complex process, as Wilmington knows well, and future storms, climate change, and sea level rise will all surely add to the challenges that lie ahead.

Jim Schwab

If You See Something, Say Something

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National Park Service photo

We have become so accustomed to a certain Homeland Security phrase since the events of September 11, 2001, that we have never seriously contemplated its larger meaning. “If you see something, say something,” for most people simply means that, if you notice something strange, someone leaving a package on a train platform and walking away, for instance, you need to call 911 or point it out to a nearby security official. Having done our civic duty, we can go on about our lives and hope for the best. We may save someone’s life, or we may simply be exercising caution. Check it out.

But suppose we interpreted that phrase in the context of our duties as citizens of an endangered, or even potentially endangered, democracy. Suppose the threat were to our democratic institutions and not just to the lives of those in a single public place. Suppose the threat involved policies that affected thousands of people threatened by racism, ignorance, or hatred? Ought we not to speak up? How different would the history of the world have been if millions of Germans had spoken up about what they saw even in 1933? How many Russians in the past two decades have risked their lives and their careers to speak up about the threats they see to a democracy being strangled in its cradle? In the past year, the people of Sudan have arisen against a brutal military dictatorship and forced remarkable changes. Are we Americans somehow so special as to be free from such obligations? Do we not eventually lose our moral authority to speak for democracy in the world if we fail to speak for it at home?

If you see something, say something. Let me tell you what I see:

I see children housed in filthy cages at the southern border by the U.S. government, separated from their parents, their eyes full of fear and bewilderment, when their only alleged crime was to be brought here by parents from Central America who sought to remove them from gang warfare, violence, crime, and corruption in desperately poor countries. I see a U.S. President, as a form of retribution, cutting aid to those countries that was meant to promote reform and economic opportunity to reduce people’s need to flee such chaos in the first place.

I see Temporary Protective Status (TPS) denied to survivors of Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas, a neighboring country with deep ties to the U.S., even as that nation struggles to rescue and house its own people in the face of mind-numbing devastation. The rationale from the President was that “very bad people” would harm our country if this were allowed, although TPS has been standard practice in the past in the very same circumstances. It is unclear, other than being people of color, what makes the Bahamians especially dangerous in his eyes.

I see neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Ku Klux Klan members marching and chanting “Jews will not replace us” through the campus of the University of Virginia and the streets of Charlottesville, defended ardently by a President who sees “very fine people” on both sides while an innocent young woman is run over and killed by a young Nazi sympathizer with his car. I see this rhetoric emboldening an ever-widening circle of mass shooters who sow terror in American cities with unlimited access to weapons of war, but I also see a widening circle of brave citizens rising to demand effective action against such terror.

I see America losing the moral courage of the Emma Lazarus poem at the Statue of Liberty, pleading for the world to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and nearly mocking Lady Liberty as she seeks to lift her lamp beside the golden door. The Golden Door is becoming instead the Great Border Wall built with money never legitimately appropriated by Congress, and members of the President’s own party unable and unwilling to stop him or even raise the weakest of objections lest they be expelled from the halls of power—or are they becoming halls of obeisance, like the Roman Senate in Nero’s time?

I am telling you what I see because I understand the moral and civic obligation to say something. We must all be whistleblowers for the future of democracy. What do you see? Are you prepared to say something as well? And what shall we do once we have spoken?

Jim Schwab