HATTERAS ISLAND, N.C. — The massive dunes stand tall across from the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center on Friday. Much of the stretch between the visitor center and the Marc Basnight Bridge is constantly threatened by the ocean, rebuilt and reinforced constantly by North Carolina Department of Transportation crews and their front-end loaders.
As time is of the essence, Dare County officials have hired a firm to help address their short-, mid- and long-term options along the vital piece of infrastructure for Hatteras Island.
"That brings me to the fall of 2025 and a nor'easter that caused the ocean to reach the dunes on Pea Island, and to my horror, I watched on social media as a small white car that was driving on the state maintained and open highway get hit by a wave and wash from side to side in the storm waters out of the driver's control. I knew then it was time to start looking for more help for our only way on and off our island," said a Hatteras Island resident at the March Dare County Board of Commissioners meeting.
News 3 has experienced and shown viewers stretches along N.C. 12 covered with water during storms, making the road too dangerous to travel on and ultimately forcing the closure of the Marc Basnight Bridge to residents and visitors. Dare County knows something needs to change and is now looking at not just one major solution, but a hotspot-at-a-time approach that could save time and money.
"For example, in the Canal Zone, the area at the Pea Island Visitor Center is the hottest place along a four or five mile hot spot. So could we tackle that first, and then, once that's done, then tackle another small area, and do this in smaller bites that become more affordable and the possibilities of getting done become greater," said Dare County Manager Bobby Outten.
Dare County has hired Greer Beaty Consulting to help determine what realistic interim solutions are available, such as moving or raising the road or building small bridges in specific threatened areas along the highway.
"Their major goal would be to look at Highway 12 and tell us you could do a bridge here, and it's going to cost this amount of money. You could move the road, and it's going to cost this amount of money, and it would value this amount of time before you had a problem," said Outten.
Dare County says it's time to examine what the future of N.C. 12 looks like, as the lifeline of Hatteras Island continues to be threatened year after year.
"We would hire a company, someone to come in and look at this, tell us, sort of how to break it down, somebody that has some knowledge about building infrastructure and then costing that infrastructure. So that we now would have a plan that we could go out and when we talk to somebody and say, here's what we want to do, it costs this much money, and so on and so on. So that over the next years, we're actually accomplishing something, and we're not spinning wheels like we were doing trying to do that much bigger scale project that came out of the highway 12 Task Force," said Outten.
Outten said working with NCDOT remains an option, but the county also wanted to explore ways to get ahead of these issues on its own.
"One was to get DOT to do it, and two was for us to do it. DOT is so strapped for money and resources and time and got so much going on that to ask them to do it seemed like one wasn't likely they could, and two was going to take a long time to do," said Outten.
Outten said the county has had productive conversations with state and federal leaders about the challenges N.C. 12 faces and how it could pursue multiple funding avenues for these smaller-scale projects.
