THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 19, 1994 TAG: 9411170376
SECTION: REAL ESTATE WEEKLY PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: About the Outer Banks
SOURCE: Chris Kidder
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines
The geology of the Outer Banks north of Oregon Inlet is like a bad marriage. Bodie Island and the Currituck beaches were once islands, separated by inlets that opened, closed, relocated and disappeared at least two dozens times in recorded history.
Tenuously joined to mainland Virginia today, one big storm could break it up. And there's more than Mother Nature eating away at these barrier islands.
Identity is the least of their crises. Attached to terra firma or not, the Outer Banks look and behave like islands. They draw people and money like a ribbon of slender magnets lining the coast from Sandbridge, Virginia, south through Cape Lookout.
Never mind visitors who come for a week or two then go back to where they came from. Look at the folks who want to turn their vacations into lifestyles.
If you made the Outer Banks your home during the last 20 years, you, like me, probably had a serious hankering to live on a barrier island. Dare County population doubled between 1970 and 1980. It doubled again between 1980 and 1990.
Barrier islands have appeal that transcends the conveniences and benefits of life in the cities that most of us left behind.
We're charmed by the neighborliness and low crime rates, by the five-minute commutes to a laid-back job that doesn't require men to wear three-piece suits or women to totter around on high heels.
That maritime appeal evidently transcends good judgment, as well, for while we revel in living on a fragile sandbar, we ignore the consequences of how we live.
The beach is our proverbial cake. Every person, every day, is taking a bite out of the ecosystem that makes the Outer Banks the place we want to be.
The one resource that makes owning property on barrier islands desirable is water. Water quality is crucial: for commercial and sports fishermen, for folks in the water recreation business, for the hospitality industry and all the rest of us who depend on tourists to come to our shores.
There's talk of a sewer system for the beach. Yet many waste water experts say that sewer systems on barrier islands are less island-friendly than septic systems.
Some question the wisdom of confining an island's waste water discharge to a small area. Others point to the indirect ``benefit'' of central sewage: higher development densities.
Once the space requirements of septic systems are removed, we open up possibilities: High-rise buildings to cast shadows across our beaches and jam-packed, paved beachfronts like the strips at Virginia Beach, Myrtle Beach or Ocean City.
These aesthetic arguments miss the real threat to island life as we know it. More people mean more treated waste water to be filtered back into estuaries and ocean. More run-off pollution. More garbage, more trash.
In fact, septic systems are just a drop in the ecological bucket. We live on a sandbar. Waste water - each flush of the toilet, each washing machine load of detergent and bleach - makes a short, fast trip through our sandy soil and into the high water table.
But run-off is the major contributor to water pollution. Every time it rains, pollutants are washed off the roads and parking lots, off our homes and out of our lawns and gardens, off the golf courses, right into our water.
``It's hard for people to buy the concept that to manage water you have to manage the land better,'' said one local planning director. Hard or not, do we really have a choice?
And then there's trash. Just a few years ago , nearly 900 cubic yards of trash was carried from the beach to landfills on an average summer day. Spread on a football field, our garbage then was three feet deep, goal line to goal line, in less than two weeks.
Current figures weren't available but the amount no doubt more than that now.
Even if our towns wanted to put their garbage in their own back yard they couldn't. Landfills on our islands are impossible under current Federal regulations.
Trash from the beach will always have to go elsewhere.
Recycling was mandated by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1989. By 1993, it said, we were to be recycling 25 percent of the total waste stream per capita (in 1992, less than 5 percent was recycled statewide).
Legislators fiddled with the formula in 1991, changing the goal from recycling to waste reduction.
So far, they have provided few incentives to make this happen or shown little inclination to enforce their goals.
The bad news is that only Southern Shores has implemented a serious recycling program. The good news, such as it is, is that recycling solves only part of the problem anyway.
Southern Shores ran a demonstration recycling project with curbside collection this past summer targeting both residents and tourists.
They've distributed educational literature and pleaded with residents to take personal responsibility for reducing trash.
According to town council member Diane Henderson, who heads the recycling effort, the project was ``encouraging. We collected 51 percent more in recyclables than for the same three months last year.''
In announcing the start of a year-round curbside recycling program this fall, Southern Shores included several reasons why the program was necessary.
The last reason should be all any of us need: ``It's the right thing to do.'' by CNB