THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 18, 1994 TAG: 9412150184
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 16 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Real Estate
SOURCE: Chris Kidder
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
The beach has been Kitty Hawk's documented draw for more than 400 years. Some historians believe that Italian Giovanni da Verrazano was the area's first tourist, sailing under the French flag while searching for a new route to the Far East.
The question isn't whether Verrazano sailed along the coast in the 1520s: He did. What scholars dispute is whether he anchored off Kitty Hawk beach and sent a scouting party - the first Europeans - to walk its sands.
In the 1560s, Spanish flags flew offshore and then English. For the next 200 years, most visitors made their landings unceremoniously as victims of shipwrecks. More than a few saw that Kitty Hawk was a pleasant place and stayed.
Nags Head to the south was a seaside resort before the Civil War but the beach road, built in the early 1930s, made tourism a fledgling business at Kitty Hawk. When Orville and Wilbur Wright visited Kitty Hawk for the first time in 1900, they found only a flat, windswept, empty beach.
Ninety years later, Kitty Hawk is a far cry from the isolated government outpost that welcomed the brothers from Ohio.
But after years of building, houses along the Kitty Hawk beachfront are disappearing, one by one, victims of an eroding beach and storm tides. The line of man-made dunes along the town's four miles of beach is being flattened, a few hundred feet at a time.
Hurricane Gordon gorged himself on this same beach a few weeks ago. He devoured a pre-Thanksgiving feast of sand, wood and road asphalt, chewed it up and spit it back out, up and down the seashore.
Television and newspaper reporters converged on Kitty Hawk to watch the meteorological gluttony.
As reports of the destruction made their way around the country, those of us in the dining room discovered that Gordon was little more than a bad mannered, indecisive hooligan. He ate and ran - and left most of us wondering how anything so noisy could do so little damage.
The owners of four homes destroyed by Gordon and the five left uninhabitable along the Kitty Hawk oceanfront, however, might remember Gordon as final proof that nature packs a powerful punch.
The blow is softened, however, by insurance: the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), created by Congress in 1968 and administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The program was augmented by the 1987 Upton-Jones Act which allowed claims to be paid for moving or demolishing NFIP-insured buildings threatened - not necessarily damaged - by erosion.
(We'll take a closer look in an upcoming column at Upton-Jones and the legislation that will replace it next September).
Flood insurance policies are available only to property owners living in local jurisdictions where federal land-use planning and flood management programs have been instituted. Policies can be written only on buildings that meet state building code and flood elevation requirements and their contents.
Most Outer Banks homes qualify for flood insurance. But one insurance agent estimates that nearly a quarter of those have no flood insurance or are underinsured (because the ceiling on NFIP policies is below the value of the area's most expensive homes).
Without flood insurance, compensation for storm damage is not out of the question. After Hurricane Hugo, FEMA paid out millions of dollars in disaster aid for homeowners who had not been covered by NFIP. But after Bob and Emily, after the Midwest floods, future storm victims may have a harder time collecting if they've deliberately chosen to remain uninsured.
This get-tough attitude should come as no surprise. The flood insurance program has always been controversial. Some saw the program as a subsidy for those wealthy enough to own oceanfront homes. Some said the program encouraged construction where nature never intended for people to live.
Some have suggested that Kitty Hawk is a good example of what's wrong with the NFIP.
In a recent Washington Post article - reprinted in last week's Real Estate Weekly section of the Virginian-Pilot - author Maryann Haggerty talked with locals about the effect of storms on Outer Banks real estate.
She reported what most of us already know: People want to live on the beach. As long as there's insurance available to cut their losses, they will continue to buy oceanfront property and build homes there.
According to Haggerty, Duke University Professor Orrin Pilkey, a long-time critic of barrier island development, says that buying property on barrier islands is stupid.
But my guess is that the question of living at the beach for most of us runs deeper than a conscious decision to make the smartest choice. We'd be here whether we could buy property insurance or not.
For hundreds of years, people have traveled long distances to be at Kitty Hawk. You just can't fight a destiny like that. MEMO: Chris Kidder covers Outer Banks real estate for The Carolina Coast. Send
comments and questions to her at P.O. Box 10, Nags Head, N.C. 27959.
by CNB