A tale of two rural communities in the face of climate change

The Daily, the New York Times podcast, featured two rural North Carolina communities--one wealthy, one not--in an episode this week.  The availability of money is making all the difference in how impoverished Fair Bluff responds, compared to Avon, an example of rural gentrification, on the outer banks.   

Fair Bluff has flooded repeatedly in recent years, but there is no money to even re-open businesses or get city hall up and running.  Avon, on the other hand, is investing in a novel geo-engineering technique called "beach nourishment" to keep the beach from washing away, even as residents complain that their taxes might be increased to pay for the efforts.  Here's an excerpt from the transcript.  Flavelle is the journalist who has reported on the two communities, and Michael Babaro hosts The Daily.  Bobby Outen is an official in Avon.  

Chris Flavelle

Beach nourishment boils down to a fairly simple process. What you do is you find a spot offshore where the sand at the bottom of the ocean roughly matches the size of the sand that you want to replace, you build a machine that sucks the sand off the ocean floor, pumps it through a pipe a few miles to the beach, then you lay it down on the beach basically building back the beach that’s been torn away by the waves. 

Michael Barbaro
That doesn’t sound simple at all. It basically sounds like forcing a beach to exist where none does exist by mechanically pumping sand in.

Chris Flavelle
It’s not easy, but it works. The issue is how much does it cost.

Michael Barbaro
Well, how much does it cost?

Archived Recording (Bobby Outten)
The beach nourishment will cost us around $11 to $14 million.

Chris Flavelle
He says the price tag is as much as $14 million, which, even for this relatively wealthy town, is still a lot of money. Remember, there’s only a few hundred full time residents.

Archived Recording (Bobby Outten)
So now the question becomes how do we pay for it? And that’s probably why most if not all of you are tuned into this meeting. 

Chris Flavelle
So they’ve now got to figure out how they’re going to raise that much money.

Archived Recording (Bobby Outten)
There are no federal or state funds available. None.

Chris Flavelle
So right off the bat, and this is where the meeting becomes a bit contentious, he says, look, we’re not getting this money from the federal government. We’re not getting it from the state. We’ve got to find a way to come up with this money on our own.

Archived Recording (Bobby Outten)
We’ve been to every source of funds that we have, and we’ve been unsuccessful in getting funds. And so if we’re going to do the project, somehow it’s got to be done with funds that we generate in the county.

Chris Flavelle
This is where Bobby Outten says, you know what?

Archived Recording (Bobby Outten)
As we had proposed before, everybody in Avon would be paying something for this. 

Chris Flavelle
We’ve got to pay for it, and that means raising everyone’s taxes. But the problem isn’t just that people don’t like the idea of paying higher property taxes.

Archived Recording (Bobby Outten)
The rate of erosion in the Avon area has increased dramatically.

Chris Flavelle
The second problem is, this isn’t a forever thing.

Archived Recording (Bobby Outten)
Beach nourishment projects are designed to last five years.

Chris Flavelle
You don’t just do beach nourishment once. It’s a temporary fix.

Archived Recording (Bobby Outten)
And as that beach erodes, we plan to do a maintenance project in five years to put the beach back. And we plan to keep doing that as long as we can.

Chris Flavelle
Because, almost by definition, you are just putting back sand that’s designed to wash away. And the only issue is, can you keep reloading sand faster than the ocean takes it away?

Michael Barbaro
And are the Avon residents in this meeting, are they on board with that? Paying for this through a tax?

Chris Flavelle
Oh, they were very unhappy with it. 

Archived Recording (Avon Resident 1)
I don’t understand why you don’t put in place a single countywide beach nourishment tax.

Archived Recording (Avon Resident 2)
I just don’t understand how you can tax everybody at different rates? It just doesn’t seem equitable.

Archived Recording (Avon Resident 3)
I find it almost unbelievable, frankly, that you propose raising property taxes on private property owners in Avon to pump sand onto a beach that’s owned by the U.S. federal government. And to help protect a section of highway NC12 that’s owned by the state of North Carolina.

Chris Flavelle
Now everyone seemed to have a different opinion about what to do instead. There was no agreement on who should pay for it.

Archived Recording (Avon Resident)
So you haven’t been successful so far. Go back again! Don’t give up. Keep trying until you get the funding we need.

Chris Flavelle
And so over the course of this meeting, which lasts maybe two hours, Bobby Outten becomes sort of the whipping boy for all these problems. He’s the guy who has the job of persuading people that although they are upset about this idea, there really is no alternative.

Archived Recording (Bobby Outten)
We can’t wait. If we wait to see what and if they’re going to do, by then we will — the problem we’re trying to prevent will happen. And so we don’t have time to wait.

Fair Bluff, which has a significant Black population, has been featured in several other New York Times pieces about flooding and climate change.  An early September 2021 article titled "Climate Change is Bankrupting America's Small Towns" features a number of struggling towns in addition to Fair Bluff.   

What follows is from a 2018 opinion piece in the New York Times titled "Decimated by Hurricanes, Rural America Needs Our Help." 

Coastal-plain residents ... don’t casually choose to live in harm’s way; they are deeply connected to a landscape, a culture and a way of life that makes their place home. North Carolina river towns like Fair Bluff, Goldsboro, Kinston, Lumberton, Princeville and Seven Springs have long, storied histories — Lumberton is home to the largest Native American community east of the Mississippi River, the Lumbee, and Princeville is the oldest town chartered by African-Americans in the United States.

These rural towns have much in common: river’s edge locations tied to agrarian roots; household incomes far below those required to live on the coast; and historic houses, town halls and churches in areas designated as floodplains.

It should come as no surprise that some of the poorest, most disenfranchised populations live in high-risk floodplain areas, and they are often the least equipped to evacuate before the storms or rebuild afterward.

The opinion piece refers to the same general region as the other NYT pieces.  And this is out of Fair Bluff in 2016, in the wake of Hurricane Matthew.  

Just as I am about to publish this blog post, another river region struggling with the impact of climate change, is featured in the NYT:  West Virginia, in particular Rowlesburg and Farmington.  The headline, responding to Senator Joe Manchin's refusal to support the Biden infrastructure bill unless concessions are made on climate change initiatives, is "As Manchin Blocks Climate Plan, His State Can't Hold Back Floods."  

Postscript:  A new Daily Yonder story features yet a third North Carolina community struggling with climate-change related flooding, Caruso.