State Department of Transportation engineers were on the scene determining how to fix a 150-yard section of N.C. 12 that was washed out by high surf from the May Day coastal storm. The plan is to have the road reopened to traffic by this weekend, according to Heiss “As of this morning we are working to get repairs started as soon as possible, hopefully before the end of the day,” said NCDOT spokesperson Jennifer Heiss. “Crews have been waiting for the waves to die down before they can begin working.”
The road was closed early Saturday after high tide Friday evening and Saturday morning carved out the sand alongside the roadway to a depth of as much as 8 feet to the beach below. A large gap, or slough, in the underwater sandbars just off the beach at the end of East Kitty Hawk Road allowed the waves to reach the shoreline and eat away at the dunes.
Tides that were higher than normal due to a full moon on Saturday night and Sunday morning washed out the sand underneath the northbound lane, and the pavement fell to the beach below. Waves of up to 8 feet pounded the beaches of the Outer Banks Friday through Sunday. What remained of the dunes to the north and south of the blowout were cut in half, with cliff as much as 15 feet from the peak to the beach.
“For a short-term fix to reopen the road, we will remove all of the damaged pavement in the area, (and) refill the area back up with sand,” Heiss said. “Once the sand is in place, we will then pave the area with no dune so we can immediately restore traffic. We will also be working on getting plans and applicable permits together to reconstruct the dune with a slope to the beach so that it doesn’t immediately wash back out,” but there is currently no timeframe on the dune construction, Heiss said.
A much longer stretch of dune line and N.C. 12 in the same area was washed out by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and sheet piling was placed against the road bed just north of where this weekend’s washout happened. The dune crossover built by Kitty Hawk Public Works over the winter has help up so far to the pounding waves, but it is closed due to safety concerns.
“We just added additional pilings to the crossover last week (on the seaside),” said Kitty Hawk Public Works Director Willie Midgett. Without the added supports, the original pilings would have been suspended above the washed out sand and the crossover likely would have collapsed, Midgett added. The biggest concern now is how much work can be done before another coastal storm taking into consideration of the fact that the year’s first tropical system is forecast to pass near the Outer Banks this coming weekend.
Courtesy: OuterBanksVoice.com