The state Department of Transportation will consider two approaches for repairing the damage caused by Hurricane Irene to N.C. 12 on Hatteras Island: Fill in the breaches on the barrier island highway or build new bridges over them.
"We've asked our engineers to accelerate the thinking on this, so we can have some options by the end of this week," Gene Conti, the state transportation secretary, said Tuesday after a Hatteras flyover.
N.C. 12 is closed because Irene punched big holes in the roadway at two places on Hatteras Island: in the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge about five miles south of Oregon Inlet, and just north of the village of Rodanthe.
That means about 2,500 year-round residents in the island's seven villages are cut off from the mainland - along with hotels, restaurants, shops and 2,400 vacation cottages that were bustling with tourists this time last week.
No one wants to make the official announcement, but it's clear that tourists will not be returning to Hatteras Island for the Labor Day holiday - the last big vacation weekend of summer - and perhaps not for several weeks into the fall.
"The only thing we can tell them is what we've been instructed: There's no access," said Lee Nettles of the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau. A backup ferry service is taking supply trucks and repair crews from the Dare County mainland to Rodanthe and the village of Hatteras. Dare County officials haven't said when island residents will be allowed to ride the ferry, too.
"As soon as the emergency needs are met and we can open it up, we will try to provide as much access as possible," Conti said. It has become routine in recent years for hurricanes and other storms to close parts of N.C. 12 on Hatteras Island - leaving them covered in water or sand or washed out entirely. DOT spent $5 million and took two months to repair a large breach at the southern end of the island after Hurricane Isabel in 2003
More recently, N.C. 12 was severed in other places bynor'easters in 2006, 2008 and 2009. DOT installed 300 yards of sandbags along the east side of N.C. 12 just north of Rodanthe in 2007, and Conti said they had prevented damage from ocean storms since then.
But Hurricane Irene attacked from the opposite direction Saturday as it passed to the west of the Outer Banks. The newest N.C. 12 blowouts were caused by storm surge from the Pamlico Sound.
N.C. 12 also is closed on the eastern end of Ocracoke Island, where a three-mile stretch of the road is buried deep in sand. DOT crews are digging out the road, which separates Ocracoke village from the busy ferry to Hatteras.
DOT ferries to Ocracoke from the Pamlico Sound docks at Cedar Island and Swan Quarter were restricted earlier this week to first responders only, but DOT allowed year-round Ocracoke residents to began using the ferries Tuesday. Island visitors will not be allowed to return to Ocracoke for at least a few days, DOT and Hyde County officials said.
Conti said DOT engineers will consider whether it's feasible to fill in the gaps in N.C. 12 - one of them at least 200 feet wide, informally called an inlet by many people who have seen it this week. That option would require environmental permits from federal agencies, and it would pose the simple challenge of where to find all the earth and other necessary fill material.
Any new bridges on N.C. 12 would have to be a few hundred feet long, Conti said. He wouldn't predict repair times or costs, but he said either option probably will take more time and money than the repair after Isabel eight years ago.
