COASTAL REVIEW ONLINE MEDIA COLLABORATION

This is the third installment in a continuing series on making the North Carolina coast more resilient to the effects of climate change, a special reporting project that is part of the Pulitzer Center's nationwide Connected Coastlines initiative.

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MERRY HILL, N.C. - At the confluence of the Albemarle Sound and the Chowan River, Bertie County residents celebrated in June 2019 the grand opening of their first public beach.

Amid the joyous splashing and squeals of laughter, Ron Wesson spied a young girl trying to coax her little brother into the water. The boy would not budge, so the older man gently offered to help.

"We kind of sat there, with our toes in the water," Wesson recounted in a recent interview. "He held my hand, and I walked out there with him. We took it real slow."

Within a short time, the little guy found his nerve and was soon playing carefree in the water with the other kids.

Bertie Beach is the community's first cool gulp of the "Tall Glass of Water," the working name for the county's outdoor recreational project.

"It's weird, though, because I can kind of relate," Wesson said, referring to the boy's hesitation and that he and the boy are both Black.

In 2019, Bertie County was ranked by Wall St. 24/7 analysis as the poorest county in North Carolina. Of its population of 19,000 people, about 68% are Black. Wesson said that, historically, the county has the highest percentage of Blacks in the state.

But the experience that day transcended race, and its implications reverberated beyond Bertie County. The celebration was part of a strategic regional approach to community resilience: Bring the environment to the people and stimulate economic growth through sustainable ecotourism.

After devoting much of his career to study of North Carolina's barrier islands and sea-level rise impacts, Stanley Riggs, a professor emeritus at East Carolina University, has in recent years focused on the inland communities of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, which comprises sounds and rivers and is threatened by sea-level rise and other climate-change impacts. Those waterways and surrounding lands offer great opportunity but are considered vastly underutilized.

"That's one of the world's great water systems and it's hardly used," Riggs said in an interview late last year. "There's nobody on Alligator River and the whole Albemarle Sound system. There's precious few people out there.

"We've lost several generations of people. Kids have never learned to swim. You take people out on boats and they're scared to death."

Riggs is chairman of the North Carolina Land of Water initiative, or NC LOW, and Tall Glass of Water is one of its first success stories.

To Wesson, a county commissioner and Bertie native, the project's multiyear effort shines new light on the county's wealth of natural resources.

"It's about broadening the opportunities and possibilities in a community," he said. "You have to look at the resources available in a community. This is economic development. This is our brick and mortar."

Perhaps more than any promotion or lecture could ever do, Tall Glass of Water is showing that climate resilience springs not only from a community's shared investment in its environment, but also from its shared access to and benefits of that environment.

Its success demonstrates to the entire region that resilience and adaptation to changing climate conditions can enrich communities and open up new economic possibilities, while protecting their environments.

People from all over northeastern North Carolina attended the grand opening of Bertie Beach, said Steve Biggs, Bertie County's director of economic development, in a recent interview. About 250 people were coming on summer weekends, he said. Swimming, kayaking, canoeing and paddleboarding are all allowed. Eventually, he said, he envisions families traveling to the Outer Banks stopping by for a respite in Bertie.

Biggs explained that the genesis of Tall Glass of Water, or TGOW, was in about 2014, when he was on the lookout for a piece of land for the county to build a boat ramp on the Chowan River. As he was heading into work one day, he said he noticed a "For Sale" sign on some waterfront property.

"I came in and jokingly told the commissioner who happened to be here that morning, 'So I found your 2 acres for your boat ramp, but it comes with an additional 135 acres,'" Biggs said. As it ended up, the county purchased the 137 acres, he said, and added 10 more later.

Even though Phase I of the TGOW project was stalled by COVID-19 shutdowns, the public outdoor recreation plan has already injected a bolt of energy in talk of ecotourism collaboratives among Albemarle communities.

"We wanted to create a place where folks can spend the day," now-retired Bertie County manager Scott Sauer said in an interview shortly before the June 29, 2019, opening day. "We think this will be a place that will draw people regionally."

Not only does the project boast a 3/4-mile stretch of shoreline - 350 feet of which is sandy beach - and shallow, calm water bordered by soundside cliffs where the Chowan River begins, TGOW also includes opportunities for kayaking and canoeing, and will eventually offer a music pavilion, picnic shelters, hiking trails, ramps and walkways, primitive campsites and environmental educational field experiences for students and adults, according to plans. There also will be restoration of the former agricultural land and woodlands, which will help restore the wetlands.

Gov. Roy Cooper announced last September that the TGOW project would receive $500,000 through the North Carolina Parks and Recreation Trust Fund, which awarded $5 million total in grants to fund 16 local parks and recreation projects across the state.

Bertie County's local match for Phase 1 is $529,591, for a total of $1,029,591.

The county-owned land encompasses Site Y, where archaeologists with the First Colony Foundation recently discovered artifacts that indicate some members of the 1587 Lost Colony relocated there after leaving Roanoke Island.

As luck would have it, a large area of adjacent wilderness was protected around the same time as TGOW was hatched. The new, more than 1,200-acre Salmon Creek State Natural Area was purchased for conservation by the nonprofit Coastal Land Trust, which turned it over to the state in 2019. Altogether, a total of 1,432 acres of undeveloped soundfront land now is protected.

Robin Payne, a project consultant for Tall Glass of Water, said the citizens provided input into the master plan, which was released in March 2020. The project is being built and funded in phases.

"You know, it really all has to be sustainable, and it has to tie together community, environment and economic development," she told Coastal Review Online last year. "And so, as we move forward, we're making sure that we connect those three points."

Until now, unless a family could go to a private pool or beach, it wasn't a realistic option to enjoy a refreshing dip - especially for African-Americans. There still are plenty of kids from Bertie who have never been to the ocean, Wesson said; the Outer Banks is about a 90-minute drive from Windsor.

Wesson, 70, was born and raised in Bertie County before leaving for college and beginning a 32-year career as a corporate executive in supply-management solutions with Dun and Bradstreet.

He returned home about 15 years ago, and hasn't forgotten what it feels like as a Black kid who had never had the opportunity to swim or go to a beach. He said he didn't get to swim until he persuaded his mother to take him at age 12 or so to a biracial pool in Rocky Mount, where one of the lifeguards informally taught him the basics of swimming.

"If you've never been in the water, other than a bathtub," he said, "you're not sure what's going to happen to you."

Bertie Beach is the first public access beach not only in the county, he said, but also along the entire Albemarle Sound. To this day, there is no public pool in the area.

Windsor, Bertie's county seat, suffered extreme flooding from Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016, but flooding overall has increased in recent years. That realization spurred residents to support efforts to make the town more resilient to flooding.

Biggs, the economic development director, said more people are elevating their homes and businesses, but he added that, right now, there is not much state or federal help for small businesses. Still, with more people homebound as a result of the pandemic, he said, there is a lot more renovation being done, and the town is continuing to build back.

A farming community by tradition, many residents today work at the Perdue chicken processing plant or at the state correctional facility in Windsor, which houses medium- and maximum-security prisoners. Other folks raise chickens for Perdue or have jobs at Nucor Steel in adjacent Hertford County. The Hope Plantation is in Bertie County, but there are few other tourist attractions. At the same time, there are few chain stores and restaurants.

Biggs noted that more farmers and landowners in the county - as elsewhere in the region - also are leasing their land out for solar farms, which can produce steady income.

Inland coastal counties in North Carolina, especially in the rural northeast corner, are some of the poorest in the state, with losses in population and traditional industries such as timber, farming and fishing, leaving historic old towns with vacant storefronts and entire communities with too few good jobs.

Unlike the Outer Banks' beach communities that benefit from a billion-dollar annual tourism industry, those communities in the "Inner Banks" - a relatively new term used to describe inland coastal counties - often are overlooked by visitors.

As part of NC LOW efforts, Riggs, the coastal scientist, in 2018 produced a report, "From Rivers to Sounds in the Bertie Water Crescent," which detailed opportunities for economic development that enhances and protects the environment and culture of the region. That environment encompasses numerous rivers and tributaries with pristine, clear blackwater, filtered by the surrounding peat bogs and wetlands.

In a broader NC LOW report, recommendations include development of five educational and recreational "water hubs" for ecotourism development, with each plan designed for the unique qualities of each hub, but complementary to the whole system.

"All ecosystem components of these different water bodies and their vast swamp forest floodplains," the report said, "are dominated by numerous forms of wildlife including a vast recreational fisheries resource."

Within the last 15 years or so, an on-again, off-again proposal to connect the Albemarle port communities with a small ferry operation has been enthusiastically embraced by local governments for its appeal to tourists and as a potential bonanza for economic development. But for various reasons, the idea has never come to fruition. Still, it has never entirely died, and the idea may yet bear fruit.

"Every time anything about it happens, everybody gets excited: 'When are the boats coming?'" said state Rep. Ed Goodwin, R-Chowan, who also was a former director of the state ferry division, in a recent interview. "I firmly believe that sooner or later, I'll get it. I believe it will happen."

A 2018 report "The Harbor Town Project," a collaborative done by the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School, said that a ferry system serving the Albemarle Sound could "increase tourism and create sustainable jobs and careers" and "is an attractive investment opportunity that can become profitable."

Ferries could serve ports in Elizabeth City, Edenton, Hertford, Plymouth, Columbia and Kitty Hawk, and possibly expand to Windsor, Williamston, Manns Harbor and Manteo, the report said. As many as 140,000 Outer Banks tourists, the report estimated, could be lured to extend their vacation to hop on Inner Banks ferries.

Potentially, the system could garner about $14 million in tourism revenue and create 94 jobs, with annual ridership projected to be 107,000 in the first year.

"Tourists and visitors would enjoy visiting historic towns and sites, seeing nature, and exploring the IBX region by ferry," the report said, playing off the ubiquitous OBX abbreviation for Outer Banks.

According to news accounts, plans were being made for a 100-foot private passenger vessel to start ferrying passengers between six towns in May 2020. But with COVID-19 shutdowns in mid-March, everything having to do with tourism ground to a halt.

"Everybody is still enthusiastic and wants it done next week, even if it's an expansion of the current ferry system," Goodwin said, referring to the state Ferry Division system on the coast.

Goodwin said he envisions developing routes that highlight the uniqueness of the Albemarle's environment, while promoting the strength of the region's rich culture.

"Everybody loves to ride a boat," he said. "We've got to maximize what we have. And what we have is quaint little towns with a lot of history in them."

Coastal Review Online Assistant Editor Jennifer Allen contributed to this report.

Next in the series: Learning to live with water

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This story was produced with original reporting from Catherine Kozak for the Coastal Review Online, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The full story is online here.


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New data show lead levels in Syracuse's drinking water are higher than those in Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey.

The city's tests show lead levels are at 70 parts per billion with more than 14,000 homes containing lead pipes.

Erik D. Olson, senior strategic director for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, noted along with corrosive lead pipes, other factors make it a precarious situation.

"When cities have not been doing the kind of upkeep that they need to do and pulling out these lead pipes when they come across them, or having an affirmative program to remove them, which some of the cities that are sort of looking forward have been doing for years, what we have is these situations where we are one mistake away from a public health crisis," Olson contended.

To remedy it, Olson feels the city must better inform residents, noting public officials downplaying the severity of this can lead to long-term health impacts. He believes Syracuse should provide residents with certified water filters to remove lead and premixed baby formula so families are not making it with lead-contaminated water.

Another way the city can reduce lead levels is by re-evaluating how it treats water so lead is caught quickly. If there are legal impediments or the city cannot access a home, Olson said Syracuse has to do what places like Newark did in the same situation.

"Adopt a local ordinance that said that any adult occupant of the home can give permission to replace the lead pipe," Olson urged.

He added the city must ensure the water utility picks up the tab since billing homeowners could be an environmental justice issue. Replacing every lead pipe in Syracuse could cost as much as $98 million but the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocates $15 billion for lead pipe replacement.

October is National Seafood Month and the fish on your plate might not be coming from where you think.

The U.S. imports 90% of the seafood it consumes. Offshore fish farming has come to dominate wild harvest in recent decades, with farmed salmon making up 80% of global salmon supply. Oregon does not have regulations to stop the practice.

Johnny Fishmonger, executive director of the group Wild Salmon Nation, said legislation proposed in Congress could make fish farming more prevalent in federal waters. He compared large-scale fish farming practices to dairy and poultry farms.

"It's like on land -- concentrated animal feedlot operations, CAFO -- so concentrated aquaculture feedlot operations where the fish are farmed intensely in high densities," Fishmonger explained.

Fishmonger noted sea lice infestations are common and devastating problems for fish farms. The AQUAA Act would allow aquaculture companies three miles offshore in federal waters. The SEAfood Act would create aquaculture assessment and grant programs. Supporters of large aquaculture operations said they are needed to feed the world's population.

Fishmonger stressed the aquaculture companies wanting to operate in federal waters are not mom-and-pop operations.

"One of the real distressing parts of that is there's no such thing as a small, family owned fish farm, except for like trout farms on land," Fishmonger contended. "Every farm in the ocean has been taken over by huge, multinational corporations."

Rob Seitz, a fishing boat captain, who opened South Bay Wild Fish House in Astoria, said there is other legislation to boost his line of work, the Domestic Seafood Production Act. The bill would require congressional approval for offshore aquaculture operations and invest in local fishing communities. Seitz argued fewer fish farms would be good for the environment.

"Wild catch fishing has the lowest carbon footprint of any form of food production," Seitz pointed out. "All of our fisheries in this country are sustainable pretty much now."


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By Bennet Goldstein for Wisconsin Watch.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Wisconsin News Connection reporting for Wisconsin Watch-Public News Service Collaboration

As environmental groups and policy analysts in the Mississippi River basin seek solutions to shrink a massive “dead zone” that forms off the coast of Louisiana each year, they have looked to a regional cleanup program in the Chesapeake Bay as a model.

A key component of that effort, known as the Chesapeake Bay Program, is regulation.

For nearly 15 years, it’s included a legally enforceable, multi-state pollution quota — one of a select few in the nation. This “total maximum daily load” aims to reduce the amount of nutrients, like phosphorus and nitrogen, that run off into the bay’s waters. 

In excessive quantities, chemicals derived from these elements, commonly used to grow crops and fertilize lawns, can cause algae blooms and die-offs that rob waters of oxygen and suffocate aquatic life.

But the bay program’s scientific advisers recently noted the strategy is imperfect. 

After two missed deadlines to reduce nutrient runoff, and a third looming, Mid-Atlantic state and federal officials are reevaluating their options.

A unique legal agreement

In 1983, the Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia governors along with the mayor of Washington and administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency signed the Chesapeake Bay Agreement, a pledge to reduce the pollutants and sediment entering the bay that contribute to the loss of organisms like seagrasses, shellfish and waterfowl.

The tapering of nitrogen and phosphorus remained the focus of subsequent agreements, but the jurisdictions did not meet their goals voluntarily, so in 2010 the EPA created the country’s most expansive pollution quota. It applied to six states — Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia — and the District of Columbia.

The quota’s creation and enforcement took political arm-twisting, including an act of Congress, a presidential executive order and multiple lawsuits. It requires nutrient plans from each jurisdiction and “reasonable assurances” each will take steps to control pollution from “nonpoint sources” like farm fields and parking lots. 

If states fail to meet their obligations by set deadlines, the EPA can implement stricter limits, force unregulated polluters to get permits and redirect or condition grant money.

Signatories believed they would achieve the program’s primary goal — improving habitat for the bay’s aquatic life — if they capped nitrogen and phosphorus entering the Chesapeake each year at 214.9 million and 13.3 million pounds, respectively, and sediment at 18,587 million pounds per year.

Instead, scientific modeling estimated that 258 million pounds of nitrogen and 15 million pounds of phosphorus entered the bay in 2021, a reduction from previous years thanks to upgrades to wastewater treatment plants and lower airborne emissions, but still off the mark. The program did hit its sediment target.

The bay program’s advisers say those declines represent achievements. Without the nitrogen and phosphorus reductions, things could be a lot worse as the region’s waters warm, urban population grows and agriculture expands. The bay’s 1-cubic-mile dead zone also might be even larger. 

Nonetheless, the sluggish progress remains an inconvenient truth. Officials have concluded they will not meet a 2025 deadline to stem the flow of nutrients after failing to achieve benchmarks set for 2000 and 2010.

“At the rate we’re going, it’s going to take about 150 years,” said Denice Wardrop, a bay program science adviser who directs the Chesapeake Research Consortium. “We better learn how to do it better.”

The program offers lessons for the Mississippi River basin too.

Something is better than nothing

Efforts in the Mississippi River, where environmental regulations are comparatively lax, to reduce annual injections of waterborne nutrients into the Gulf of Mexico largely have failed. This summer’s hypoxic zone is forecast to span 5,827 square miles, 5% larger than average. 

Scientists expect climate change to worsen conditions by warming the gulf’s waters, which would cause it to retain even less dissolved oxygen, and increasing rain, causing more runoff.

“The way that we operate right now is very much a state-by-state, choose-your-own-adventure model,” said Maisah Khan, former policy director at the Mississippi River Network.

Several groups say the federal government needs to lead and coordinate state restoration efforts, as it does in the Chesapeake Bay.

A Mississippi River-wide nutrient quota could streamline and prioritize runoff control projects and allocate federal dollars where they are needed most. Numerous academics and the National Research Council Water Science and Technology Board of the National Academies also embrace the concept.

“Without that,” said Alicia Vasto, water program director with the Iowa Environmental Council, “I think we’re kind of rudderless.”

So why doesn’t a Mississippi River quota already exist?

For one, the scale of the problem, said professor emeritus David Dzombak of Carnegie Mellon University, who chaired the National Academies committee that recommended policies to improve the river’s water quality.

Given the challenges that come with coordinating nutrient quotas in the 64,000-square-mile bay watershed, doing so across 1.2 million square miles in the Mississippi River basin — which comprises 41% of the continental United States — seems unimaginable.

Another factor: political will.

Basin states must cooperate with their neighbors to enforce a quota, but their interests vary significantly. Far upstream, a Louisiana shrimp trawler’s livelihood is all but haze in the distance. Meanwhile, few states are hungry for more federal oversight, and the EPA is likewise reluctant to brandish a stick.

The agency said it prefers helping states develop their own lists of impaired waters and cleanup plans, rather than doing so itself for an entire region all at once.

That’s exactly what environmental groups say isn’t working.

A better quota

Yet Chesapeake Bay scientists admit their regional nutrient quota isn’t a panacea.

“It’s a two-edged sword,” Wardrop said. “While it had some wonderful benefits in initiating action, of building an accountability system, it had some consequences where you got painted into a corner.”

Regulators fixated on tabulating the total pounds of sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus that drain into the bay’s deep channel (where the hypoxic zone forms each year), she said, instead of considering other ways to improve conditions for its plants and animals.

For instance, restoring wetlands and protecting shorelines could enhance shallow-water habitat for fish and mollusks, even if the bay program hasn’t completely reduced nutrient runoff.

“Yes, phosphorus and nitrogen are important, but it’s not a fix-all,” said Zach Taylor, freshwater mussel hatchery manager at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. “There are still other considerations for improving the water quality, but I do think that it’s a good place to start.”

Because the bay’s shallows respond more quickly to falling nutrient levels, scientists say, the program should prioritize those regions for habitat improvement, which could help rally public enthusiasm. 

The same holds true for the Mississippi River basin. Improving water quality in upper basin states helps that region and the gulf, said Doug Myers, Maryland senior scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

“You certainly don’t want your whole Mississippi River project tied to meeting dissolved oxygen criteria in the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “It’s the people who live in those inland states that are gonna have to see the benefits for themselves and get excited about it for the benefit of their communities.”

The elephant in the room

As industry and sewage facilities cut their discharge, agricultural runoff now ranks as the largest remaining contributor to the bay’s water pollution — about half of all nitrogen and a quarter of phosphorus.

The situation is more pronounced in the Mississippi River basin, where an estimated 60% to 80% of the nitrogen entering the gulf originates at farms and livestock operations.

Bay scientists say a nutrient imbalance impedes improvement more than anything else. 

As farms multiply and expand, agricultural producers import more nutrient-rich fertilizer and animal feed. Hungry livestock convert feed into manure, which farmers apply to fields along with synthetic fertilizer. But crops don’t absorb all the nutrients. Excess nitrogen and phosphorus build up in soil, resulting in harmful runoff.

The source of the bay program’s authority, the Clean Water Act, can’t place pollution limits on field runoff. Instead, state and federal agencies offer grants and incentives to encourage producers to adopt better practices like planting cover crops or ceasing to till fields before planting.

But bay researchers say agencies promote these practices without considering their effectiveness or placement. 

The cheapest interventions, such as cover crops, offer farmers private benefits like improved soil health. But they are the least efficient at removing nutrients from the ground compared to other remedies like denitrifying bioreactors, structures that reduce nitrogen in field runoff. 

That leaves taxpayers with the fewest pounds of nutrients removed per public dollar spent.

The scientists say the program could stop tallying the number of nutrient-cutting practices installed on farms and instead incentivize success. For example, regulators could measure the nitrogen coming off fields and pay farmers when they fall under a set limit.

“We’ve maybe got to change our incentivizing systems for how we ask farmers to do things,” Wardrop said.


Bennet Goldstein wrote this article for Wisconsin Watch.


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