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Coastal erosion threatens homes on North Carolina’s barrier islands. Climate change is speeding it up.
Buxton, North Carolina — Living on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, photographer Daniel Pullen has seen the thin line between living on the ocean and falling into it.
“If you could bring some of the old-timers back from the dead and drive them around, they would just be like, why did you build your house there?” Pullen said.
In the last four years, the Atlantic Ocean has toppled 10 homes on Hatteras Island. Pullen captured one crashing down just last month. While less than 70,000 people are permanent residents, many of them count on the more than 5 million visitors every year to make their living.
Barrier islands, long, narrow strips of sand, buffer the mainland from the power of the ocean. In the eastern U.S., barrier islands cover 2,300 miles of shoreline. Naturally, they’re always moving.
“I think people are meant to live on a barrier island, but I don’t know to what extent do you have a massive economy on it,” Pullen said.
Oceanographer Reide Corbett, executive director of Coastal Studies Institute, works with the community to find ways to adapt.
“Large dunes, houses, the infrastructure — that stops the transport of sand across these barrier islands, which leads to a more vulnerable barrier island,” Corbett said.
One solution to protecting homes is by rebuilding the beach, pumping sand out of the ocean onto the shore. But that can cost upwards of $25 million. With rising sea levels and more intense storms driven by climate change, the new sand that used to last five to seven years is now being washed away in less than two.
“The economics won’t work always. I think we are, on the other banks, I think we’re getting to that point,” Corbett said.
What’s unique about the Outer Banks is that almost all of the beachfront belongs to the National Park Service. Dave Hallac ran a pilot program for the NPS that bought out two homes and demolished them. Unlike the 10 properties that fell into the ocean, the buyouts prevented homes from littering the beach and ocean with dangerous debris.
“We consider this a mitigation program. None of these owners built their houses in these locations. When they were built, there was a backyard, dunes, maybe even a back dune area and a large white sandy beach. It’s just that erosion and the ocean has caught up to them,” Hallac said.
The properties were bought at fair market value using money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The Park Service hopes to buy more homes when they can get the funding.
Pullen has mixed feelings about the future of the islands.
“Take somebody that grew up in their small little hometown their whole life and just like, ‘Hey, go live somewhere else,'” he said.
But, he says, “There’s a way it could be managed, and that’s to let a barrier island exist the way a barrier island was meant to exist. In order to do that, it means things will look a lot different here.”
He added, “I probably would have to move.”
For now, people who live on barrier islands hold tight to a patch of sand slowly escaping their grip.
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The secretary of state’s office was the target of an unsuccessful cyberattack earlier this month, the agency confirmed to CBS News on Wednesday.
An official with the secretary of state’s office said the attack was an attempt to crash the absentee voting website, and it was discovered when the agency noticed a spike in attempts to access the site nine days ago, on Oct. 14. There were over 420,000 attempts made from around the world, which the official said was a coordinated attempt to make the website crash.
Security experts were ultimately able to thwart the attack. The secretary of state’s office said it still does not know who was behind the attack but suggested it may have been a foreign country.
Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the office, wrote Thursday evening in a social media post that “this was a big win for our cyber security team and our partners. We work everyday to protect Georgia voters and our systems.” In a separate post, he said, “The attack was detected and mitigated quickly.” CNN first reported the cyberattack attempt.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is aware of the cyberattack and worked with the Georgia secretary of state’s office in the aftermath of the incident, sources confirmed to CBS News. The FBI has not responded to a request for comment.
Georgia voters have also been showing up for early voting, which began on Oct. 15. Early voters shattered records this year for the presidential election, the secretary of state’s office said, more than doubling early voting figures from 2020 on the first day, with 310,000 ballots cast, compared with 136,739 on the first day of early voting in 2020.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger predicted there would be record turnout in Georgia this year, telling CBS News’ Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation” Sunday, “You look at the turnout — we’re almost pushing 1.4 million who’ve already voted early or who we’ve accepted their absentee ballots.”
Nicole Sganga and
contributed to this report.
Boeing machinists on Wednesday voted to reject a new labor contract proposal and continue a costly weekslong strike that halted production of some of the embattled company’s top-selling planes, resulting in furloughs and layoff announcements for thousands of workers.
The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers announced on social media that 64% of members voted to reject the deal.
“The strike will continue at all designated picket locations,” the union said.
The vote comes more than a month after 33,000 union members overwhelmingly rejected a negotiated offer and walked off the job on Sept. 13.
The IAM on Saturday had said it had brokered a tentative deal with Boeing that included cumulative raises of almost 40% over four years, significantly more than the prior negotiated offer.
The new contract offer also includes a $7,000 ratification bonus and a larger company contribution to retirement plans. It did not bring back a defined benefit pension that was frozen a decade ago and that many wanted to return to.
Contract talks broke down earlier in the month, but the company and union resumed bargaining in recent days, with Julie Su, the acting labor secretary, traveling to Seattle to meet with both sides.
If workers had voted to accept the contract offer, they would have had to return to work on Oct. 31, according to the union.
Boeing can’t produce any new 737s so long as the strike that shut down assembly plants in the Seattle area continues. One major Boeing jet, the 787 Dreamliner, is manufactured at a nonunion factory in South Carolina.
As machinists cast their ballots, Boeing reported a massive third-quarter loss of more than $6 billion, with the airplane manufacturer hit by the five-week-old strike and charges tied to its commercial aircraft and defense programs.
Boeing is struggling to right itself after manufacturing troubles and multiple federal investigations after an in-air panel blowout in January.
In August, the company brought in Kelly Ortberg, a seasoned aerospace executive, as its new CEO with the mandate to right Boeing’s safety and manufacturing issues. Ortberg, who earlier this month announced job cuts of 10% of the company’s workforce, or 17,000 employees, on Wednesday wrote in prepared remarks he delivered to investors Wednesday that Boeing is “at a crossroads.”
“The trust in our company has eroded,” he wrote. “We’ve had serious lapses in our performance across the company which have disappointed many of our customers.”
