The Outer Banks' Collapsing House Problem

North Carolina’s Outer Banks are a beautiful place to vacation, but building and maintaining towns on an ever shifting sandbar is a lot easier said than done. But with a median home price around 900,000 dollars and a total gdp of around $10 billion, there is significant incentive to keep the island chain open for business and the buildings as protected as possible…… even if that means replacing small bridges with very large ones and occasionally playing high stakes games of Jenga.

The outer Banks are a series of barrier Islands and peninsulas off the coast of mainland North Carolina. They were formed when a large series of sand dunes were tall enough to survive the melting of glaciers. Given their location and geological makeup, they have always been susceptible to shifting and changing. At times some of the peninsulas have become islands and vice versa. The total number of islands has also changed as both the regular currents and one-off storms are constantly reshaping the island. Despite the island being permanently inhabited for over 500 years, building and maintaining these developments have been a challenge.


Chapters
0:00 - Intro
0:37 - What are the Outer Banks?
1:24 - Rodanthe... the disappearing town
2:00 - Can anything be done to protect the town?
3:11 - A bigger problem than collapsing houses...
4:38 - Oregon Inlet ... a very expensive engineering challenge
6:20 - Hatteras Inlet ... another constantly changing inlet
6:45 - "The Graveyard of the Atlantic"
7:26 - Famous Shipwrecks
8:00 - Pirates of the OBX
8:55 - The biggest contribution of the Outer Banks
10:25 - See it now before its gone