Ocracoke is still recovering from Hurricane Dorian. Are ferries slowing the progress?
As a middle school basketball coach on Ocracoke Island — where the only way on or off is by ferry — it’s never simple for Jason Wells to load up his team for away games. But on Jan. 15, it took them 12 hours to travel 40 miles to and from another school within Hyde County.
Ocracoke Island, part of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, has dealt with reduced ferry service on and off since Hurricane Dorian all but destroyed the community in September.
Some of the roughly 1,000 residents who live there year-round say they are frustrated by continued delays and cancellations of the ferries they rely on to carry them to their jobs, grocery stores, doctor appointments and even prep sports games.
Now that tourist season is only a few months away, locals say they’re concerned the island won’t be ready for the thousands of annual visitors they rely on to stay at hotels and spend money at local businesses.
‘We threw the kitchen sink at the response’
After devastating the Bahamas and slowly creeping up the East Coast, Hurricane Dorian made landfall over the Outer Banks on Sept. 6. Up to 7 feet of water from the Pamlico Sound inundated the Ocracoke Island, flooding more than half the homes and businesses, The News & Observer reported at the time.
Longtime residents said they had never seen that kind of flooding on the island before, and an estimated 800 people were stranded with no electricity and dwindling supplies.
Hyde County had issued a mandatory evacuation order ahead of the storm, allowing the ferries to transport 1,441 people and 756 vehicles off of Ocracoke before canceling all routes on Sept. 5, according to the N.C. Department of Transportation.
DOT relaunched ferry service two days later for emergency responders carting much-needed generators, communication equipment and water to the island.
“We threw the kitchen sink at the response,” Jed Dixon, deputy director of the NCDOT’s Ferry Division, told McClatchy News.
Ferry routes extend in three directions from Ocracoke — Hatteras to the north, Swan Quarter to the west and Cedar Island to the south. Limited service from Swan Quarter and Cedar Island were restored first, about two weeks after Dorian’s arrival.
The Hatteras route was canceled indefinitely due to excessive damage on N.C. 12, the major highway that connects the islands of the Outer Banks.
In response, DOT officials made a somewhat unprecedented decision: a replacement route between Hatteras and Silver Lake Harbor on Ocracoke. Dixon said the island slowly began to reopen for crews to clear debris and lay the groundwork to make repairs and rebuild.
The island remained closed to visitors for nearly three months, until N.C. 12 reopened in early December. Much remains in disarray.
A 40-foot pile of debris sat on one part of the island for months, said Wells, who has lived on Ocracoke since 1976.
According to the N.C. Department of Public safety, 56,000 cubic yards of vegetative and construction debris still has to be removed.
“It’s a slow process that’s at the mercy of the ferries, which on some days struggle to maintain service through the constantly shifting shoals of Pamlico Sound and Hatteras Inlet,” the department said.
Trying to rebuild
Ocracoke is sandwiched between Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras national seashores toward the southern end of the Outer Banks. It’s roughly 20 miles from the nearest shoreline.
Debbie Leonard, a retired teacher, started visiting the island in 2002, bought a house there in 2012 and stayed for good in 2017. She said some people have the misconception that Ocracoke is a wealthy community.
“It’s not like there’s a few privileged people living on this island wanting special privileges,” she said.
Hyde County, home to Ocracoke, is one of the 40 “most distressed counties” in North Carolina in terms of economic well-being, according to the N.C. Department of Commerce. It had the highest unemployment rate in the state last year — 8.4%. The statewide rate was 3.99%.
Finley Austin, a full-time resident, said no one on the island wants to feel like they’re complaining, but the ferry cancellations are a major disruption to their daily lives — even more so as they try to rebuild.
“In some ways, people are now so resigned to getting kicked,” Austin said. “It’s all the uncertainty in everything everyone’s dealing with right now. There’s just this one more thing added in.”
Delayed maintenance
About 800,000 vehicles and 1.8 million people use the North Carolina ferry system each year, according to the DOT.
The three ferry routes that service Ocracoke accounted for 41 percent of total ridership in 2017.
“That’s the only way you can get on and off Ocracoke unless you own a private plane,” Wells said. “We rely on ferries for all our supplies.”
Residents say routes have been rescheduled or canceled almost every day since Dorian — usually at the last minute.
When routes get canceled, the DOT primarily uses social media to communicate with residents. Updates for Cedar Island and Swan Quarter, which Leonard and Wells said are used more often for getting to the mainland, are posted to an account called @NCFerryPamSound.
According to the Twitter feed, both routes currently have only two daily trips scheduled — compared to the normal three in the winter and four to five during the summer — due to maintenance that started Jan. 12.
Tim Hass, spokesman for the Ferry Division, told the Island Free Press on Jan. 14 the maintenance should be finished “within the next two weeks.”
Some of the boats were due for maintenance in September when the hurricane hit, according to the DOT. Those repairs got pushed back as crews focused on immediate recovery needs on Ocracoke, Dixon said.
All of the boats are also under Coast Guard inspection and subject to federal regulations — including a mandatory “dry dock period” two times every five years, he said.
Of the vessels servicing Ocracoke now, Dixon said two are under their scheduled “dry dock period” and one is offline for repairs.
That leaves two boats to run the Pamlico Sound routes and three for Hatteras — all without “the luxury of another vessel to fill in,” he said.
“This is the slowest time of the year traffic-wise throughout the entire division,” Dixon said. “This time of year from the middle of January to March are our least-used routes. In order to get the boats back online, it’s necessary.”
But Leonard said the lack of communication — and planning — has made that a hard pill to swallow.
“If they would come over here and explain that to us, that might go a long way toward alleviating the frustration that people feel,” she said.
Meanwhile, business owners like Wells are hoping for improvements. His family goes back generations on the island, where he also owns and runs Jason’s Restaurant — much of which had to be rebuilt after the storm. It has not yet reopened.
He’s racing the clock to tourist season.
“At Jason’s, 80 percent of the profits that we make in a year happen within a two-month period from the second week of June through the second week of August,” Wells said. “Those eight weeks are prime time.”
