99% Invisible - 293- Managed Retreat

Episode Date: January 31, 2018

In the 1970s it looked like the beloved, 200-year-old Cape Hatteras lighthouse was in danger. The sea was getting closer and threatening to swallow it up. And people were torn over what to do about it - they could move the lighthouse, or leave it in place and try to defend it against the forces of nature. For the next 30 years, the locals fought an intense political battle over this decision. It’s the kind of battle we can expect to see a lot more of as sea levels rise and threaten coastal communities around the world. Managed Retreat

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, and only 200 yards at their narrowest. And there's one part of the outer banks that used to be especially treacherous for ships. It's called Cape Hatteras. That's reported Gordon Catech of a podcast called Cited. The Cape is known for choppy seas and strong ocean currents. Since the 16th century, these waves have caused a lot of shipwrecks, over a thousand, according to the National Park Service. The areas become known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

So many sailors were dying that in the late 1700s, Congress authorized the construction of a giant lighthouse. It would illuminate the dangerous passage and make the outer banks less deadly. The lighthouse went up in a small town called Bucston, North Carolina, right near Cape Hatteras. And the people of Bucston, they love this lighthouse. Generations of families there have helped maintain it. You know, it's what your grandfather did, it's what your great grandfather did.

This is Danny Kouch. He's descended from English pirates, and his family goes back nine generations in North Carolina. Today, Danny leads tours of the Outer Banks. Gordon went on one of those tours last summer. But we've got three maritime symbols in this country. Number one, the Statue of Liberty. Number two, the Golden Gate Bridge, and then number three, the Granddaddy of American Lighthouse, the 288th Hall, the 800-inch pine house. After him's on the right,

we can leave anything you need on board, we don't have any crying here. Okay. It is pretty majestic. It's got a red base and a really tall, black and white spiralally paint job sort of like a black and white candy cane. I see some people on top. It's a little observation deck. There's a crowd of people waiting outside. A park ranger is standing near the

entrance. That's because this is all a national park. This is the tallest brick lighthouse in North America that you all are about to climb today. So hope everybody's ready to climb. It is a strenuous climb today. It's hard to overstate just how important this lighthouse is to the people of Bucston. There are three lighthouse gift shops in town. Practically every business here has a lighthouse in its logo or its name, like the lighthouse view motel, or the lighthouse view motel or the lighthouse

sports bar and grill. Even the churches, like the lighthouse Christian assembly. But back in the 70s, it looked like Bucston might lose their beloved lighthouse. The sea was getting closer and closer, threatening to swallow it up, and people were torn over what to do. Move the lighthouse or leave it in place, and try to defend it against the forces of nature. For the next 30 years, the people of Bucson fought an intense political battle over this decision. It's the kind of battle we can expect to see a lot more of, as sea levels rise and threaten coastal communities around the world. It all started with a scientist who had a radical idea about what to do with the lighthouse.

An idea almost nobody liked. Let it fall into. Nothing is so important that it can't fall into the sea. Why don't you introduce yourself, Lauren? Oh yeah, I'm Lauren Pilke. I'm a retired marine geologist who started out in the deep sea and ended up on the beaches. Lauren Pilke is a professor emeritus at Duke University. He typically wears short sleeve button-up shirts

with two or three pens in the front pocket. And he studies beaches, but there aren't any beaches at Duke because Duke is right in the middle of the state. So in the 1980s, Orn would pack his students into a bus and head east, all the way to the Cape Hatteras lighthouse. It's usually a pretty exciting place. The average wave height at Cape Hatteras is higher than anywhere else on the east coast except possibly northern Maine. Orrin would tell his students that the waves at Cape Hatteras don't just calmly roll onto shore.

They slam into it and spray up into the air. While the students stared out into the water or unexplained, these waves are washing away the beach we're standing on, and soon they'll reach the lighthouse. The shoreline of the outer bank, the entire shoreline of the outer bank is a roading, and partly this is simply a matter of the waves picking away at the cotton that 90% of the world's beaches are roting. Some very, very slightly and some very quickly. The beach in front of the lighthouse can rot fast. The rates vary wildly from decade to decade. Sometimes the coast loses 50 feet a year.

Other times the beach actually gains sand. It's an erratic, natural process. But Warren says climate change is also part of the story. It's speeding up the erosion process. For decades, a bunch of different government agencies have been fighting back against the sea. They tried barriers to slow the waves. They put down a wall of sandbags.

They even tried this thing called beach nourishment. That's just a fancy way of saying, pumping a ton of sand onto the shore. And they had some other inventive ideas too. They put in what they call seascape. It was plastic strips of plastic that floated. Strips were supposed to act like seaweed and keep the sand from washing away. And here it was. This is a very cheap way to stop erosion the Cape Hattles lighthouse, but it didn't even begin to work. In fact, none of this stuff worked. After decades of fighting back against the waves,

the ocean was getting dangerously close to the lighthouse, less than half of a ball field away. Basically, we would stand beside the lighthouse and see how this precious historic structure was due to fall in. I mean it was easy to see where a good storm would have taken out the lighthouse. It wouldn't have to be a whimdener storm but it had gotten to that stage. And so in 1974, Orrin wrote an academic article, he said, we've tried pretty much everything to protect this lighthouse.

It's time to give up. He wrote, quote, it is difficult, but necessary, to come to grips with the ultimate result of living with nature at the shoreline. And then he started telling the people of Bucston to let the lighthouse go. Which made them really mad. The whole idea of letting things fall in

was absolutely outrageous. Of course we're going to defend ourselves. As one core of engineered colonels said, we're not just going to hold up our hands and slink away. Most North Carolinians did not want to see the lighthouse fall into the sea. In 1981, a photographer and conservationist named Hugh Morton started a group called Save the Lighthouse.

School children across the state raised money to support the group. And they recruited prominent North Carolinians, like university presidents, business leaders, and politicians. Danny, the tour guide from the beginning of the story, he became the local representative for Save the Lighthouse. In terms of uniting political philosophies and contradictory elements of society,

developers, and environmentalists, everybody can rally around the Cape Atters lighthouse. And that was essentially the essence of what was going on. Nothing else mattered. It was to do right by that lighthouse in our heritage in this country. Eventually Danny settles on one big idea. Build a solid concrete wall all the way around the lighthouse. I think you can pick and choose your fights with Mother Nature. You're not going to win all of them. You got to pick a fight that you can win. Ah, yes.

That was a very common attitude in those days, but my idea was to live with nature at the shoreline. Orren thought the sea wall would be extremely expensive and ultimately counterproductive. Well, sea walls, this is one of the more controversial things that I would think others too, that sea walls destroy beaches. Orren had maps and diagrams of the East Coast, and they showed that seawalls made erosion happen even faster. He argued that that's exactly what would happen at the lighthouse.

A wall would make the beach smaller and smaller. So now you're a beach community without a beach? With this seawall plan, the lighthouse would eventually become a walled island out in the water. Not ideal, but even if you were fine with that, the wall probably wouldn't hold. Orin said it's hard to imagine building a sea wall strong enough for the waves at Cape Hatteras. They have lots of big storms at the Cape, unless the sea wall is going to be half the size

of the lighthouse, the storm surge would top over the sea wall and top of the lighthouse. Then one day, Orin met an engineer named Dave Feshetti. Dave said, look, people don't want the lighthouse to fall in. We don't want a sea wall, but there's a compromise. That thing can be moved. It's around 200 feet tall, about 1.25 million bricks and 48 hundred tons, but believe it or not, engineers have moved bigger buildings. This presented a pretty good opportunity for Orin. He could use the lighthouse to test something that planners call Managed Retreat. The idea is that, as sea levels rise, we won't be able to defend every coast with a giant wall.

Instead, we're going to have to make plans to abandon certain areas and move some things out of the way. Orren thought, if Bucston could be convinced to move this big lighthouse, it might show that managed retreat is doable. So he and Dave Feshaddy, along with one of Or of Orange students, Dave Bush, formed their own group. They called themselves the Move the Lighthouse Committee. We met together a lot and we produced a blizzard of papers documenting things about erosion and things about moving buildings and mainly aimed at the media. So why did you care so much to spend so much your time? Yeah, well, it became a challenge, of course.

It became a, I guess I got emotionally involved also. I wasn't going to let that lighthouse fall in, and it's by the first article of mine. So now you got these two groups. They both want to preserve the lighthouse, but they're debating how. Ultimately, it's up to Congress and the National Park Service because this is federal property. So the two groups are trying to convince the feds that they have the better plan.

The town of Bucston flatly rejected Orren's move idea. A local magazine did a poll, over 90% of residents wanted to keep the lighthouse in place. Many were offended by the very idea of retreat. Hugh Morton said retreating from the shoreline would be, quote, seeding man's historic battle against nature. And it would make Buckston the laughing stock of the coast. Danny's group, that saved the lighthouse. They felt confident they could win this fight.

And they didn't like these outsiders telling them otherwise. It was a situation of, you know, again, where the local people kind of claim ownership of that. And how dare somebody with some out of state plates come in here and want to tell these poor dwellers on these shifting lonely sands what to do with their lighthouse? I mean, we're not afraid to pick a fight. We're very independent people.

Danny told me a story to explain the tension between Orn's group and the locals. He said there was a Duke grad student who would drive down to give talks in Bucston. Danny remembered meeting him one day. And he proceeded to Waltson to a gas station that I was running at the time, Phil and station automotive repair shop. And we're changing out semi-tires for tractor trailers and stuff and he starts wagging his finger, and he'll figure my face.

Don't you know that this lighthouse, we're gonna lose this lighthouse, and y'all are obstruction as y'all are. You are not y'all, he didn't, he wasn't a y'all. He said, you are holding this up, you're holding this project up. And I'm standing there with like a tire arm in my hand. Orin and his group had a serious credibility problem in Bucston.

And they understood why people like Danny were upset. Of course, of course we were outside and we were from way far away in Durham. Did this ever give you pause? I suppose so. Going into the community and saying, hey, I know the truth. And I felt that there was a bit of arrogance in that, but what was the choice?

I didn't know anything about how you deal with people, I guess, in this sense. I understood sometimes that I was speaking over their head. They're saying things that they did not understand or didn't want to understand. And there were other reasons people didn't like Orn's group. Many word the lighthouse was so big and so old that it would break if you tried to move it. Others had strong feelings about the location of the Lighthouse. They said it would lose historical value in a new spot.

And then there were also some big money interests. Business owners and real estate developers thought a move would hurt their bottom line. If you own something with a name like the Lighthouse View Motel and then people move the Lighthouse out of of you. You can see the problem. Throughout the 80s and 90s, there were lots of scientific committees, commissions, studies and reports. They all decided that moving the lighthouse was the best idea, but that didn't do much to convince the locals. Except for these two local lighthouse historians, Bruce and Cheryl Roberts.

Bruce, nice to meet you. Yeah, how you doing? You? Come on in. Nice to meet you. Yeah. How you doing? You're right on time? Yeah. Cheryl wasn't around when I met Bruce. She was busy working on a new lighthouse book. My wife does most of the routing and I take pictures of lighthouses.

I've actually photographed almost every American lighthouse. Bruce and Cheryl have basically turned their home into a shrine for lighthouses. They've got over a hundred lighthouse books. There's a bunch of miniature lighthouses scattered about. I see countless lighthouse paintings and pictures. And in their study, there's a giant three-panel room divider. It looks like one of those Japanese screens. Only it's got the Cape Hatteras lighthouse painted on it.

There is something about a lighthouse I think that is special. And particularly Hatteras, it's the best, best known one. Back at the time of the controversy, Bruce and Cheryl were writing a book about the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. That's when they started to do some research. We had read the reports that the lighthouse would be lost and we talked to some of the scientists who had studied this and made an interesting discovery. The scientists told them that the lighthouse sits on yellow pine timbers. They're submerged in a pool of freshwater. It's a strange design. The builder who constructed the lighthouse

knew that if he kept those beams in fresh water, they'd be preserved. And his plan had worked for over a hundred years. But here's the problem. The ocean was coming closer and closer to the lighthouse. And the ocean is filled with microorganisms that could degrade the wood. If the saltwater seeped into the foundation, the beams would rot. And that was the reason that Cheryl and I realized that if nothing else happened, a lighthouse

would begin to tip as that wood foundation was eaten away. We actually went and talked to several of the scientists who had signed the study saying it had to be moved. And we got convinced that they knew what they were doing, and that it could be done. This was a huge get for team move the lighthouse. Bruce and Cheryl weren't technocratic outsiders. They were lighthouse fanatics and they were saying, look, like it or not, the scientists are actually right.

Then in 1996, two major hurricanes hit North Carolina. Hurricane Broughan and Hurricane Fran. North Carolina and the Okra-Koke Island and Hatteras Island are under an evacuation mandate. With the waves counting on the dunes, they likely won't be much peace near tomorrow. Hurricanes were becoming more frequent and more intense, and this created a new sense of urgency. So in 1997, Congress started planning a potential move. 17 years after Save the Lighthouse formed, and after almost two decades of debate,

a public meeting was held to discuss the move. It was organized by a US Senator from North Carolina, as well as a state Senator from the region. It was April 1998, about 400 people filed into an aquarium, the largest building in the outer banks. Children were bust in from every school. There were 11 news crews there reporting on the event.

The people of Bucston knew the fate of the lighthouse might be decided here, today. They had their move it or lose it's signs. And then the others were like, save, not move. This guy came up to me, grabbed me by the arm, said, here's your sticker. And I looked at it and said, move it or lose it's signs and then the others were like, save, not move. This guy came up to me, grabbed me by the arm, and said, here's your sticker. And I looked at it and said, move it or lose it. I don't want that damn sticker.

Politicians and their aides watched as people got up to testify for each side. Every time somebody said something that was beneficial to their side, they would erupt in cheers like you or some of the Roman Coliseum with a bunch of gladiators. And Bruce, who was there along with Danny, thought the crowd was clearly against the lighthouse move. I think I felt that we were going to lose.

Bruce went back home feeling defeated. He was convinced Congress was not going to fund the move. I think that that day or two, I heard the phone ringing back in the office in Cheryl. Went back and I heard her say, oh yes, Senator. North Carolina State Senator Mark Bassnight was on the other end of the phone. He said, before the meeting I supported moving the the lighthouse but then i saw just how unpopular that was and now i don't think i can do it and i said wait a minute here's sharel

you know about that timber that's the foundation and the danger of it's collapsing he said no i said well the mart of its collapsing. He said, no. I said, well, then, Mark, you should not be making a decision in this matter. You need to listen more to the facts." Cheryl told the senator about the pine boards in the saltwater. She told him, if we don't move it, the lighthouse might just fall over. And he's listened to her an hour and a half. And she won him over.

His eyes had to be open. He had to know the facts, the scientific facts. This was the critical moment. Cheryl got the senator back on board, and he urged Congress to act fast. A few months later, Congress funded the move. In a last-titch effort, the local county sued, but they lost. It was a stinging reminder that even though it may have felt like Buston's lighthouse, it wasn't. It belonged to the federal government. It's an exciting morning here. We're live at Cape

Hatteras, and we're going to have all sorts of folks to talk to you. The moon began on June 17, 1999, over 200 journalists swarmed Bucston. Because nothing like this had ever happened before, no one had picked up a 4,800 ton lighthouse and moved it over half a mile. People called it the Move of the millennia. Make sure they know we're rolling the tape from the truck. You're hearing tape from a documentary made by a local TV station. Already there have been 1800 visitors to the park this morning.

That's about double what they usually see coming here this time of year. The park service put an orange fence near the base of the lighthouse, and tourists lined up along it. Locals sold them t-shirts and hot dogs as everyone waited anxiously. Brian, what do you think about the lighthouse? What do you think about it? What? It's so big. Unweighted anxiously. Brian, what do you think about the lighthouse? What do you think about it? It's so big. It sure is big.

How are they going to move that? Can they pick it up? I'm sorry, but it's heavy. It is heavy. The process was pretty simple. First, the engineers cut through the granite base of the lighthouse. Then they slid seven giant steel beams underneath it.

The beams created a new foundation, a grid under the lighthouse. Open your number one. Pressure at 44. Then they rolled wheels under the steel grid, and using hydraulics, they lifted the whole thing up onto a track leading to the lighthouse's new home. Pull the swatz now, up we go. Alright, coming up. up onto a track leading to the lighthouse's new home. The engineers were already to roll. They pulled a giant lever and the lighthouse started to inch forward.

If you were there that day in the crowd, this all would have looked anti-comacted because the lighthouse moved so slow. You couldn't even tell. The Rangers had to put markers along the track just so you could be sure that it did in fact move. It's just going real, real slow. Yeah, nice. It's cool. And you're lucky to be here to see it. At the end of the first day, the lighthouse

had only moved 10 feet. This whole process would take weeks. Oh, my word. It still going up. Slowly, but surely. Bruce remembers showing up one day near the end of the move. He saw Danny coming towards him through the crowd.

Danny told him they're moving it too fast. I'm stunned. I said, what's wrong with moving it too fast? He says, look, every restaurant is making money. Every hotel is making money. We have never had crowds like this ever before. And you said, if you can just slow it down until September, we'll all be rich. Slow it down, slow it a half, 1 inch. Hey, that's it, Ben.

Right there. That's it. As the lighthouse inched to its new home, it was again 1,600 feet from shore. The exact same distance it was in 1870 before the sea washed the beach away. Before the move, the people of Bucston felt something terrible and undemocratic was happening to them. These out of towners were destroying the heart and soul of their island.

The community fought hard, and they lost. But in a strange way, things actually worked out for them. I look back at this, you know, after this is all said and done, was moving that lighthouse the right thing to do? Yes it was. Danny got a ton of business from the tourists. His repair shop and gas station had never done so well. So he's had a complete change of heart, and he's not alone.

In fact, most people think that the move was the best thing that ever happened to Bucston. Something as monumental as moving America's lighthouse put us on a national radar, on an international radar, and people started thinking about the outer banks. It was a raging success. Danny doesn't look back now and see the move as a cowardly retreat. He sees it as a testament to human ingenuity. This all makes Orin hopeful because if Danny can change his views, maybe others will too. I think the moving the lighthouse was a profound event in terms of our response to sea level ride.

I think the Cape Hatties lighthouse is a good example of What we're going to be doing a lot in the future, if you can move with 3,000 or whatever, just a ton of lighthouse, you can move a lot of colleges. But it's not just lighthouses and beach cottages. There are thousands of miles of vulnerable U.S. coastline. The Battle of Bucksson is just a preview of the tough choices we'll have to make. We have 3,000 miles of barrier on a shoreline, so whatever happens here is also happening in Galveston,

and also it's happening in Middle Beach and in Jekyll Island, Georgia, and they're all going to be asking for money from the feds. We need money, we need money, we need to nourish the beach, and we need help buildingish the beach, we need help building a sea wall, but it ain't gotta be there. That's why retreat is important. By the year 2100, at least 500 U.S. communities will be at risk from sea level rise, including major cities like Miami and New Orleans, that's according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. And then there's the millions of people in other parts of the world,

in countries like Bangladesh or the Solomon Islands, that are already being badly affected. If people get this worked up about a lighthouse, imagine how hard it'll be when we start talking about moving entire cities. How can you do that fairly? And in a way that doesn't devastate communities. We're going to be fighting this battle over and over again. And after all of this, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse will probably have to move again.

It might last 100 years at its current location, but some scientists say it could be even less than that. We have another high-stake story of a building being moved at this time. All the people were in it when it happened. Right after this. Sometimes moving a building is about preserving historic architecture or cultural heritage, but a 99-Pi fan named Tamara Solorzano wrote us about an unusually high stakes move that happened in her hometown of Guadalajara, Mexico.

And Krokosta is here to tell us about it. So back in 1950, city officials in Guadalajara decided to widen a major avenue to accommodate more traffic. And a lot of buildings were just demolished, to make way. But there is a problem. There's this 1, 1700 ton brick structure occupied by the Mexican telephone and telegraph company. Even though the old telephonic and telegraph company

was the first to be demolished, so why not demolish this building along with the rest of the buildings they demolished when they widen the street? Well, it would have been more expensive, but it also would have knocked out regional telephone service for at least a week. Okay. And that's where Jorge Matute Ramos comes in. He's the civil engineer and he's the dean of the cities university and he has this idea to move the building while leaving everything wired up and keeping the operators at work inside it. Wow. Well, that was to make them pretty nervous.

Well, yeah, and Matuti Ramos was definitely sympathetic to that, and he wanted to reassure the operators and make them feel safe. So his wife, Esbaralda, agreed to also go into the building while it was being moved. And she even took along their seven-year-old son, Juan Jorge. And Matuti Ramos has since passed on, but here's this lovely clip of his widow talking about the move on television news. And so,

we met Jorge and I, my son, to be very confident. And we all felt the slightest movement. So she says, she and her son, Juanay, were inside the building to gain their trust. And they didn't even feel the tiniest movement when they moved the whole building and all the operators inside it. That's so cool. Yeah.

And so basically, it all went really well. The building was slowly shifted about 40 feet to its new location. And yeah, the people inside didn't feel a thing. They kept working. And the whole move was done in just five days with no interruption to phone service, very critical. And they did it on a budget of around $100,000, which was a fraction of what it would have cost to demolish the structure and then build some replacement.

Wow. And so this was about, how long ago about? About 70 years ago. 70 years ago, okay. And so the building, is it still there? Is it along this new widened road? It is. And Matute Ramos has a pretty unique memorial statue

right outside the building. It's this life-sized figure of him. And they actually positioned it, so it looks like he's physically pushing the structure by hand. That's so cool. Yeah, next to that sculpture, of course, there's a plaque dedicated to his civil service and engineering genius. Oh, that's fantastic.

Yeah, it really is. And special thanks to tomorrow for sending that into us to a really neat story. And you can see a video of the move and images of that cool statue of Matute Ray Moose on our website. It's 99pi.org. 99% invisible was produced this week by Gordon Catech and Sam Fen of CIDD podcast, that's C-I-T-E-D like an academic citation. It do stories about research and higher education. You can find their work at CIDDD podcast.com. Social thanks to Mike Boer, Phil Evans, and Stavros Avramides.

Thanks also to WRAL-TV for letting us use their documentary, The Cape Light, away from the edge. You can find a link to the full program on our website. From our staff, this piece was produced and edited by Delaney Hall, Mixed in Tech Production by Sharif Yusuf, Music by Sean Riel. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Kohlsted, is the digital director.

The rest of staff includes Avery Trophiman, Emmith Fitzgerald, Taren Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 K.A.L.W. in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown, Oakland, California. We are a part of Radio Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by of Radio Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting.

We are supported by listeners just like you, and if you support us in the last drive, well, you should be checking your mailboxes. These are exciting times. You can find 99% invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI or work, or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. We have more visual design stories and videos too at 99PI.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX.

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