
DATE: Sunday, August 3, 1997                TAG: 9708030059

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS 
DATELINE: NAGS HEAD                         LENGTH:   96 lines

SHIFTING SAND SLOWLY CLOSING OREGON INLET THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS PROPOSES $100 MILLION JETTIES TO KEEP IT OPEN.

Like skin healing over a cut, Oregon Inlet is slowly sliding shut while state and federal officials scramble to find a way to keep it pried open.

The inlet has moved 2 miles south since it was created by a hurricane in 1846. Its channel is cleared of sand by regular and expensive dredging. The Army Corps of Engineers proposes building mile-long, $100 million jetties to prop it open.

Oregon Inlet looks roomy by day, as bottom-fishing boats bob on the wakes of fast sport-fishing boats headed for marlin and tuna in the Gulf Stream. At night, the blackness of the place is broken only by specks of red and green on navigation buoys or a faint fisherman's lantern on shore.

``It's closing up,'' said Chief Boatswain's Mate Daniel ``Sash'' Griffin, in charge of the Coast Guard's Station Oregon Inlet.

``You have to know what you're doing. When it's kicking, it can get very interesting in that inlet.''

An appropriation for $400,000 to fund environmental studies and planning for part of the jetty project, called a terminal groin, is stuck in negotiations over the state budget.

One point of contention between the House and Senate is a provision sponsored by state Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight, D-Dare, that would prevent state court challenges. The provision also orders that permits be issued and land condemned for the jetties.

Coast Guard boat crews see the inlet every day and say the outlet to the sea for much of the water in North Carolina's sounds and rivers is getting narrower.

Those crews go through the inlet in all kinds of weather, sometimes towing disabled craft back to safety in storms. The crews also check the location of navigation buoys and have to reset them regularly.

The crew aboard the 47-foot lifeboat ``Oregon Inlet'' points out markers of the inlet's movement during a trip through the channel. They count pilings on the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge and say the inlet's northern bank has moved seven sets of pilings to the south since last year.

Another marker of the inlet's movement is the patched section where a runaway dredge hit the bridge in 1990 and closed it for four months. Today, the patch is over dry sand. Fishermen park under it for shade.

``The narrower it gets, the stronger the current gets,'' said Boatswain's Mate Second Class Ross Fowle, 29, who was piloting the lifeboat.

``Last year, we could cut through the channel there,'' Fowle said, pointing to an area of shallow water near the bridge. ``It's really surprising.''

Fowle's first summer at the station in 1995 was a time when lots of large summer flounder fishing boats from other states came through the inlet. Today, because of groundings in the shallow water, fewer come. They've been replaced by smaller boats under 50 feet.

``We do boardings on them, and they always talk about coming through the inlet, with waves crashing over the stern and scaring them. Some say they don't want to come back,'' Fowle said.

Fowle said the trip through other inlets with jetties to protect them are much smoother. At Oregon Inlet, huge waves sometimes break at the shallower 8-foot-deep entrance, or bar, and keep boats out.

``A lot of times, you go out and get a boat in tow and you don't know - if it's breaking - if you're going to be able to get through or stay out until it stops breaking,'' Fowle said.

A survey by Dare County's Waterways Commission in April showed the inlet, including the navigation channel, has narrowed to about 2,100 feet. When the 2.5-mile-long Bonner Bridge was built in the 1960s, most of it was over the inlet's water instead of the sand flats and scrub growth under it today.

Environmental groups oppose the project, saying jetties would make erosion worse south of the inlet.

Basnight said he doesn't know of any other way to make the inlet reliable than to build jetties. Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr., R-N.C., said he also backs the jetty project in his district.

Already, a shorter rock wall has been built on the south side of the inlet and has saved the base of the bridge, said Bob Peele of the state Commerce Department.

Peele said an environmental impact study of the project is due from the Corps by mid-1998. But even with improvements, the inlet isn't envisioned to handle cargo vessels, just larger fishing vessels.

``It's still inching. It's not stopped,'' said ``Moon'' Tillett, a retired fisherman and chairman of the Dare County Waterways Commission, whose fish company docks in Wanchese are six to eight miles from the inlet.

If it closed to navigation, water would still slosh through, but fishing would be ruined, and pollution would concentrate in the sounds instead of being flushed to sea, Tillett said. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

OREGON INLET

Oregon Inlet's dredged width is 400 feet. Total width is 2,100

feet.

About $5 million of that is spent on Oregon Inlet.

The Corps' proposed mile-long rock jetties would cost

approximately $100 million. The jetty project includes a $12 million

wall called a terminal groin already built on the south side of the

inlet and a proposed $21 million groin on the north. The jetties

would be anchored to the groins.