Return to Hatteras Island a test for nonresidents

The waiting began in the darkness before dawn, on the arrow-straight two-lane to Stumpy Point.

Cars and pickups trickled down the mainland North Carolina highway to line up half a mile deep at the ferry dock by 4:45 a.m. Saturday. They were waiting for the 6:30 a.m. emergency ferry to Hatteras Island, the first voyage open to nonresidents since Hurricane Irene clouted the Outer Banks in late August and severed the island’s only highway.

License plates read Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ontario. Commercial trucks and humanitarian agencies were waved to the head of the line. A ferry worker went car to car with a clipboard, checking driver’s licenses by flashlight.

Another, working under a generator-powered street lamp, asked for property tax receipts, proof required for boarding. The line crept as the eastern sky flushed pink, then creamy peach.

The sun inched over the horizon, fiery crimson. Red sky in morning.

The ferry pulled away, leaving miles of headlights behind. The waiting began anew.

Kim Curling of Chesapeake stood on the highway beside his truck, talking about his ocean-view house in Rodanthe. Fifteen years he has owned it, and the worst he’s seen was 1 foot of water inside it during some less-memorable storm.

“Nothing like 3 feet,” he said, but that’s what the neighbor told him Irene had left. “It’s been a long two weeks.”

A man wearing a polo shirt with “FEMA” embroidered on the breast walked up. He said the Federal Emergency Management Agency would be taking applications for assistance through today. The office is in Buxton, on the far side of Pamlico Sound. The ferry will get you there. Wait for the ferry.

How’s Rodanthe? Curling asked him, and the FEMA man said a house had fallen into the new inlet that the hurricane cut across N.C. 12. Another house was leaning, and two were being undermined by the Atlantic, he continued.

Repairs to the highway, breached in two places, will take another month. The ferry is the only way to reach Hatteras Island, and for two weeks only emergency personnel and year-round residents were allowed on board.

Behind the wheel of a car from Ontario, waiting, a driver slept.

The ferry Croatoan arrived at 7 a.m., but refueling took 45 minutes, and prioritizing vehicles and loading cars in the remaining spaces took another 15. Tempers frayed.

“Why did you let all those people in front of us?” a woman demanded of a man directing traffic in two lanes. She was still on the dock when the ferry left at 7:55.

The 20-mile crossing takes two hours. People reclined their car seats and dozed or stretched out on deck benches in the sun. Pickup beds were filled with bags of charcoal, bottled water, wheelbarrows and generators.

The Croatoan chugged eastward. By 9:20, a blue line on the horizon had become a jagged row of rooflines, looking like a broken saw blade against the sky. Twenty minutes later, the saw teeth had become individual buildings, and 10 minutes after that, blue tarps could be seen on some rooftops.

The ferry unloaded next to an emergency center lined with vehicles from Operation Blessing and the Salvation Army’s disaster response teams. A hand-painted sign offered hot showers and free meals. For many, this is life now on Hatteras Island.

Both sides of N.C. 12 are lined with mounds of debris – couches, chairs, computer monitors, televisions, toys, carpets, insulation, broken boards and the remnants of decks and docks and boats.

Curling found his house in decent shape, the lower-floor walls rippled and water-lined but the appliances and furniture safe where he had raised them 4 feet off the floor.

A resident neighbor, Scott Leggat, who rode out the storm, said he’d never seen anything like Irene, which surprisingly got worse after the eye had passed, a time when most hurricanes weaken.

“You could see the water rise like it was time-lapse photography,” Leggat said. “It was like a white-water river, except it was everywhere.”

It wasn’t Irene’s power, it wasn’t the rain that drowned Hatteras Island. It was the duration, 10 hours of storm-force winds that pushed Pamlico Sound ashore. Rodanthe and Avon were among the hardest hit, especially the ground-hugging homes of year-round residents whose families have lived on this island for generations.

On Saturday, front and back doors stood open, exposing empty interiors for all to see, furnishings and possessions, even walls and flooring, piled up by the side of the road, waiting for trash trucks.

“At the elementary school here, there are 15 children that are now homeless,” Leggat said.

He works for a property management company that had 500 rental houses to check on after the storm. The homeless are now living in such buildings, he said.

“One of the worst things afterward was when the mosquitoes hatched out,” he said. A neighbor thought she saw a water spout, but it turned out to be a cloud of mosquitoes swirling above standing floodwater.

Electricity is being restored, phone service is coming back. Leggat said the ferry and other emergency services provided by Dare County have been outstanding.

“Anybody who criticizes what they’re doing,” he said, “just doesn’t understand the enormity of what happened here.”

At midmorning, Irvin Midgett, surrounded by the muddied remnants of his livelihood as a commercial fisherman and campground owner, paused in his cleanup.

“What do we need,” he repeated, without adding the question mark, and turned to his friend. “What do we need?”

“Help,” his friend said.

Four men had come from the southern part of Hatteras Island, which was not hit as hard, to help Midgett reclaim what he could of the St. Clair Landing campground.

Camper trailers had been pushed into heaps by floodwaters, and the bathhouse had visible damage. Midgett’s vegetable stand had been carried by the water to the other side of the highway. Three fishing boats had been smashed, and his pound net equipment was gone. The four friends were untangling gill nets in the yard.

“What do I want? What do the people need here?” Midgett asked. “Justice.”

Insurance will cover just $3,800 of the damage, for the bathhouse, he said.

“I put 15 years of my life into building this place,” he continued. “I didn’t have a savings account because I put everything into my businesses. To hear I can’t get anything except for the bathhouse, it’s humiliating. The banks own me.”

In the yard behind him were salvaged belongings he had been trying to clean.

“But I’ll get up,” Midgett said. “I’ll put one foot in front of the other. By the grace of God. It’s overwhelming.”

Tears came to his eyes. A man had offered him what he described as a wad of money. “It’s not about the money,” Midgett said. “We don’t want hand-me-outs down here. These islands are people that are proud people. We just want back what we had.”

This 5-acre plot on the edge of Pamlico Sound once offered campsites, a tackle shop, a dock, fishing charters, kayak rentals, fresh vegetables and fruit. During the offseason, Midgett crabbed, fished pound nets in the sound and gill nets in the ocean.

He had one boat left, the crab boat that he had stored on the mainland right before the hurricane.

For a few days after the storm, Midgett couldn’t face the destruction around his home, so he helped his neighbors and cleaned roads. Then people from the southern end of the island showed up to help. Strangers organized food and water and transportation and cleaning supplies, he said.

Midgett misses the big “bird hotels” he had made and placed around his property. He fed a flock of doves every day and gave them water in a big clamshell.

Friday, he said, one dove came back. The wild was gone from it and, for a moment, he thought it was going to light on his shoulder.

He fell silent for a few moments, looking shocked and blank.

“It’s exciting for people to come see,” Midgett said. “But it’s really hard for people that are going through it. It would be good if they’d give people a little time to breathe before they go sightseeing. Maybe some people would take it in their hearts to stay away.”

At noon, the lunch crowd arrived at the Avon Volunteer Fire Department, where the Salvation Army had been serving 1,000 plates a day for the past two weeks.

Numbers had been dropping as emergency food stamps arrived and as trucks came with groceries. Tractor-trailers of food have priority loading privileges at the ferry dock.

“Things seem to be improving every day,” said fire Capt. Kenny Brite. Then he added, “I understand there’s a 15-mile backup for the ferry.”

Assistant Chief Jan Laskow said the social aspects of the meals were as important as the food: “Sitting around the table, you listening to my story and me listening to your story, a lot of people feel lucky. It’s therapeutic.”

Longtime residents say the water wasn’t this high even in the 1944 hurricane, Brite said.

“This is our new benchmark,” Laskow said.

The streets of Avon also are lined with debris, and houses stand open to the drying wind. Free laundry service is available at the firehouse, and the truck bays are filled with bottled water and ice and supplies of all kinds, including pet food. A trailer of hay is on its way, Brite said, and Laskow’s wife was organizing the delivery of all kinds of pet supplies.

“She’s even got crickets for some kind of lizard or something,” Brite said. “We didn’t quite expect to need crickets.”

They didn’t quite expect to need so much of anything, Brite said. Hurricane Irene has been a learning experience on stocking supplies. “We won’t get caught again,” he said.

Six dump trucks were lined up at 1 p.m. on what is now the northern end of Hatteras Island, waiting to pour sand into the breach between sea and sound, so N.C. 12 could be rebuilt on top of it, and reconnect the island.

Two tall beach houses leaned awkwardly toward the surf, waves washing underneath. Yellow signs fastened to them read “Warning. This building has been declared unsafe.” Thirty buildings on the island bear such signs; most are repairable.

A side street was rippled like a giant’s washboard, the asphalt eroded and ponded with water. Boarded-up rental houses lined both sides.

“Are you sightseers?” a man shouted at a truck driver from a yard, despite the yellow “Disaster Re-Entry Permit” in the windshield. He then yelled an obscenity.

Hurricanes will do that. Some residents of Hatteras Island, largely dependent on tourists, are skeptical now of people getting off the ferry.

At 2:10 p.m., 10 vehicles were waiting for a ride back to the mainland. The line on the other side, a dock worker said, was reported to be 14 miles long.

The ferry W. Stanford White pulled in at 2:20 p.m. and disgorged four commercial trucks, a Salvation Army vehicle and 30 cars. At 3 p.m., it departed, only partially loaded, chugging away across a sparkling sound as flat and nonthreatening as a flannel blanket.

On the stroke of 5 p.m., the White arrived at Stumpy Point. Alongside, the Croatoan took aboard some 30 cars and embarked for Rodanthe. No cars remained at dockside.

The wait for the ferry was over, but for many Hatteras Islanders, the long road is still ahead. Diane Tennant. (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com