Rather than wait until two houses collapsed into the ocean at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the National Park Service has used $700,000 from the Land and Water Conservation Fund to purchase them and plans to have them removed.
The National Park Service recently awarded two contracts for work in Cape Hatteras National Seashore’s Hatteras Island District in Buxton, North Carolina. Construction activities along Lighthouse Road and at the Cape Hatteras Light Station are expected to begin in the coming months.
Tropical Cyclone Sixteen's path prompted storm warnings along coastal North Carolina and led to closures at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, and Wright Brothers National Memorial in North Carolina.
Hurricane Idalia's charge across Florida on Wednesday prompted more than a dozen units of the National Park System to close in the face of forecasts calling for heavy rains, high winds, storm surges, and possibly tornadoes.
In a coastal landscape of Spanish moss-draped live oaks, salt marshes, and white sand beaches, a land that offers nesting habitat for loggerhead sea turtles, is crawling with armadillos, and feeds Red knots, a threatened bird species, and wood storks, horses are incongruous.
As coastal erosion, sea-level rise, and more potent storms continue to risk the loss of beach houses at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina, a new report suggests it would be much less costly to buy out the homeowners rather than investing in beach nourishment work.
There are external, and even internal, influences that can impact units of the National Park System. Urban sprawl can strangle parks and their natural resources. Wildfires can sweep across boundaries and into parks. Rivers can flood and wash out trails and roads, as we saw last June at Yellowstone National Park.