Depending on your point of view, he is either a prophet or the Antichrist of the coast. Pilkey is a short, square hobbit of a man, with an unruly gray beard and a disarming sense of humor. “I am sometimes condemned for saying this, but that’s what it is-madness and hubris of unbelievable proportions.”
“It’s madness,” Pilkey exclaimed as we examined a sliver of beach where two rows of homes were now underwater.
One by one, the houses toppled into the ocean or were condemned by the towns-“red-tagged,” in the parlance of local zoning officials. But these makeshift attempts at engineering provided only so much help. Some industrious owners had placed mesh bags filled with giant boulders around the pilings. Dozens of other houses now wobbled on stilts in the surf. Parts of Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, and Nags Head had lost entire rows of beach houses to the sea.
Billions of dollars of property now perched in harm’s way. We had come to talk about erosion, hurricanes, and the relentlessly defiant pace of development along the state’s once-pristine shore. Pilkey on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a more or less continuous spit of sand extending along half of the state’s four-hundred-mile coast. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.Ī WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS IN 1999, I met the acclaimed coastal geologist Orrin H.
0 kommentar(er)
