DATE: Thursday, October 9, 1997             TAG: 9710090518

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: BUXTON                            LENGTH:  108 lines

WILL THE STRIPED SENTRY LEAVE ITS POST?CONGRESS CONSIDERS FUNDING A STUDY TO MOVE IT, BUT SOME PREFER TO SHORE IT UP.

Federal officials are fighting for funding to slide the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse away from the sea.

They say if they don't move the nation's tallest brick beacon about a half-mile inland, it will topple into the tides.

This week, Congress is scheduled to vote on a $2 million appropriation that would start engineering studies to relocate the lighthouse by 1999.

But in the interim, organizations and individuals are flooding elected leaders' desks with letters.

The storm now surrounding the spiral-striped tower revolves around whether to move it or to let it keep clinging to the coast it has watched over for 127 years.

``Rather than risk what might happen if they try to move it, I think they should go ahead and protect that lighthouse in its place,'' Buxton resident John Hooper said. Hooper, a 43-year-old Hatteras Island hotel owner, grew up in the beacon's shadow. He said it's a historic structure that needs to be saved - on site.

``I'd hate to see it moved,'' he said. ``That won't be the right thing to do for at least another 30 or 40 years. The most realistic solution right now is to go ahead and put a fourth groin in to stop the shoreline from eroding any further.''

Hugh Morton agrees. The former chairman of the governor's travel and tourism committee, Morton heads an 18-member group called ``Save the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse Committee.'' The group wants Congress to use the $2 million to build another seawall south of the beacon.

``We think it's silly to try to move the tallest brick lighthouse in the world when not everything has been done to save it where it is,'' Morton said Tuesday from his western Carolina home. ``There's some little-boy adventurism in this whole thing. Those officials just want to move it to prove it can be done.''

Engineers say they have to relocate the lighthouse to save it from the sea. They've spent more than $2 million since 1970 trying to hold the shoreline in place with sand bags, sea grass and other stabilization projects. And they invested about $1 million in taxpayers' money shoring up the tower and renovating its interior so that it can withstand a move.

``If the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is to be preserved for enjoyment by future generations, it must be moved,'' a panel of North Carolina State University professors told state leaders in January.

North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt asked for federal money to move the beacon. State Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight, D-Dare, also requested funds to relocate it. He even talked to President Clinton.

``If there was any information that another revetment or any other shoreline stabilization project would work, Senator Basnight would have gone for that,'' spokeswoman Julia White said. ``It came down to: Do you want to save it forever by moving it? Or do you want to lose it altogether?''

Built in 1870 on Hatteras Island's elbow, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse stands 208 feet tall and weighs almost 3,000 tons. It guards the Graveyard of the Atlantic, the ocean off the Outer Banks. Its bright beacon has saved thousands of ships.

More than 150,000 people visit the lighthouse each year.

This weekend is that last time it will be open until spring 1998.

When it was built, the beacon sat a quarter-mile from the sea. But storms have eroded the sand around its octagonal base. Today, only 120 feet of sand separates the tower from the waves.

An average of 12.8 feet of shoreline washes away from the area each year.

Russ Berry, who headed the National Park Service's Cape Hatteras National Seashore office for the past two years, said there is an 80 percent chance that the lighthouse will succumb to the sea during the next strong hurricane or a series of northeasters.

He led the campaign to get federal funding for the move. But he left Cape Hatteras last week to take a post in the Virgin Islands. Park Service officials said no one has stepped in as the lighthouse's liaison yet.

U.S. Sen. Lauch Faircloth has led the federal fight for securing the $2 million to start studying the move. He supports sliding the tower away from the tides.

U.S. Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr. also has asked for funds. But he has not yet said whether he wants the money used to move the lighthouse - or keep studying other options.

``Mr. Jones has met with people on both sides. And he sees pros and cons on each side,'' spokeswoman Courtenay Westall said Wednesday. ``He wants to save the lighthouse - by whichever method the experts decide is the best one.''

Meanwhile, missives keep flooding federal offices.

The Sierra Club, Surfrider Foundation, Coastal Federation, Southern Environmental Law Center and Lighthouse Preservation Society all have written, asking congressmen to move the beacon - and not keep putting on Band-Aids. Some of the environmental groups say state officials shouldn't relax their prohibition on hardening the shoreline by building another groin in front of the tower. Others say merely deflecting waves from the lighthouse's base is not going to save it for long.

In the 1930s, the ocean got so close to the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse that officials had to abandon it for a few years and build a skeleton tower further inland.

During the late 1960s, the Navy built three rock groins in front of the lighthouse, perpendicular to the beach, to ease erosion around a submarine spotting station that sat about a mile north of the beacon. Those jetties, Hooper said, saved the now-defunct surveillance station. But they increased erosion around the lighthouse's base.

``If jetties sped up erosion there then, why can't they be built further south to slow erosion around the base now?'' he asked. ``We need to save this historic, national treasure and not just let it fall into the Atlantic.

``But if they move it inland, they'll take away the impressiveness - and significance - of its coastal location.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

DREW C. WILSON/The Virginian-Pilot

The edge of the shore is creeping up on the Cape Hatteras

Lighthouse, which guards the Graveyard of the Atlantic. The historic

beacon needs to be preserved, but people are at odds over how best

to do that.

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