I am just outraged.

I can’t think of any other way to say it.

I am outraged by the attitude of some of my fellow North Carolinians about the need to replace the Bonner Bridge over Oregon Inlet and to move ahead with it now.

Their attitude is ignorant, uninformed, cavalier, paternalistic, and just totally insensitive toward those of us who live on Hatteras and Ocracoke – or even the thousands of visitors who love to come here.

 On Aug. 27, the planning for replacing the Bonner Bridge moved forward when a review board of high-level officials from two federal and two state agencies decided that the least environmentally damaging and most practical alternative is building a short bridge, parallel to the current bridge, and to address the problems with overwash on Highway 12 with a phased approach of short bridges when they are needed.

The next day, two environmental groups challenged that decision, calling for a federal investigation of the legality of the environmental review process.

The next day, the News & Observer in Raleigh published an editorial, entitled “Short and unsweet.”

The unnamed editorial writer called the plan “shortsighted.”  The writer called it the bridge to “nowhere,” which offended many Hatteras islanders who don’t consider this island to be “nowhere.”

Then the writer went on the advance the agenda of the environmental groups who don’t want a short bridge but prefer a long bridge bypassing Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge.

“Yet representatives of the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the state Department of Transportation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Highway Administration's North Carolina division now are leaning strongly in the other direction,” the editorial writer said. “They've been prodded by Dare County officeholders -- eager to get the easier-to-finance short bridge under way -- and by anglers who see the long bridge as a hindrance to Oregon Inlet access.”

Oh, really?  Prodded by Dare County officeholders eager to get the “easier to finance” short bridge underway. 

Let’s set the record straight.  Dare County officeholders want a new bridge and want it now.  Some – or even many – officeholders may favor the short bridge because they feel that if Pea Island is bypassed, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will not continue to make the popular recreation area easily available. 

However, Dare County officeholders are on record saying that the long bridge is acceptable if the money can be found to pay the exorbitant price of building it.  Furthermore, Dare County officeholders won’t have to vote to pay for it.  The bridge will be financed by the state and the federal government – and the money to build the short bridge is already available.
The officials deciding in favor of the short bridge are being prodded by anglers who see the long bridge as a hindrance to Oregon Inlet access?

It’s the county officeholders and the anglers? Just those two groups?

Well, that is about the most uninformed comment I’ve seen recently on the editorial page of a major newspaper.

There’s not one mention in this editorial about the people who live and work and operate businesses on Hatteras Island.  We are the regular folks who need that bridge to go to work, conduct business, get medical attention, visit friends and relatives, shop, conduct our business with the county, get to an airport.

Not one mention of the visitors who come here each summer – about 3 million of them.  They are the folks who drive the engine of the tourism business on Hatteras – a business that sends plenty of money to the tax coffers in Raleigh.

Not one mention of the island tourism economy that depends on those visitors – or even the commercial fishing businesses that also depend on the bridge to move their freshly caught seafood to market.
I will add that Jerry Allegood, a News & Observer reporter who knows a lot more about the Outer Banks than his colleagues in the editorial suites, wrote a fair and balanced story about the regular folks on Hatteras and their fears about crossing the aging bridge.

So, just as I start forgetting about my anger at the News & Observer’s sloppy editorial, I learned  about a segment about the bridge that appeared yesterday, Sept. 10, on WRAL, the NBC News affiliate in Raleigh.

It was a fair and balanced piece of reporting, but then the station invited viewers to comment.
These people made comments such as this:

“I don't have a problem with a bridge, just a problem with a toll-free bridge to serve a few thousand residents like Beth Midgett who own property out there. If they want it to be built, it should be built with tolls, plain and simple. The repaving of highway 12 every other year, plus all the beach replenishment should also be paid with tolls and fees on property owners.

”YOUR RIGHT TO ACCESS ON BARRIER ISLANDS ENDS WITH ME HAVING TO PAY FOR IT YEAR AFTER YEAR! You want to live on an unstable sand bar, then it's your problem, not mine. I'm tired of paying to support bad behavior by real estate developers and bad land use policy.

I have the same advice for the people who live below sea level in New Orleans. Just because that's where you've always live doesn't give you the right to have it rebuilt when your property is in a flood zone or a moving sand bar.”

Or this:

“Replace it and heavily toll the new one. Or, replace it with ferry service only. Make ALL hurricane evacuations mandatory. When your home is destroyed, the park service should purchase your land through emminent domain. We need to get folks off of the sand bars. Frankly, I'm tired of bailing them out, and having to pay higher insurance premiums to cover hurricane losses. Let the wildlife and park service take over these shifting barrier islands/reefs, and put people on stable land!
Why are we building a billion dollar bridge to a barrier Island that in 20 years may move or be over-washed. Barrier Islands are basically Large sand bars. If we build the bridge more development will be encouraged on the Island meaning that when the next hurricane hits more of my tax dollars will go to bailing out the owners of the million dollar homes they build there.”

Or these:

“There would be plenty of ferries for an evacuation if the ferries were limited to people and what they can carry. If you are dumb enough to wait for the mandatory evacuation, you should have to leave your car/SUV and boat behind.”

“I say tear the thing down and start ferry service. The total cost to repair, including re-aligning and elevating route 12 comes to over a billion dollars. That money would be much better spent on dozens of other needed projects around the state.

Barrier Islands were never meant to be permanent structures, they move east or west depending on sea level changes which are always fluctuating. Currently we are on a warming trend and sea levels are rising, why build a bridge to an Island that may not be there in 20 years?”

All of these people, of course, used screen names, not their real names.  And I have not bothered to correct their spelling or grammar.

I’m just wondering how they can be so sure about their uniformed opinions about our islands.  You can read even more of these ridiculous comments on the WRAL Web site.  (To be fair, some folks were more sensitive and informed in their comments.)

Without getting into the whole controversy over long-bridge, short-bridge, no-bridge, just look at these few basic facts:

--Ferry service is not an option. Average daily traffic flow over the Bonner Bridge exceeds 5,000 vehicles per day, and that number can double to around 10,000 during the summer months. The emergency ferry service plan would allow for only 1,300 vehicles per day to move onto and off the island - 650 each way. This would effectively cut the flow of traffic between Hatteras Island and the rest of Dare County by 75 percent and by about 87 percent during the peak season.  The ferries could not even adequately serve the people who live here, much less the visitors.

--The upfront cost of the short bridge is about $300 million compared to about $1 billion for the long bridge around Pea Island.  The money for the short bridge is “in the bank.” No one, including the environmental groups who oppose it, has said where the $1 billion might come from.

--There has been a road through Pea Island since the 1950s, and the highway, the cars, the people, and the wildlife seem to have co-existed just fine.

--Neither the Cape Hatteras National Seashore nor the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge is today in its natural, pristine state.  It has been manipulated by the federal government since the 1930s when the Civilian Conservation Corps built the dunes along Hatteras and Ocracoke.  (That’s right.  There were few “dunes” before that time.  Overwash was the natural state of the barrier islands.)  Also, the Fish and Wildlife Service has manipulated the refuge to suit its purposes, building the pond impoundments, among other things.

--People have lived on the barrier islands for hundreds of years.  And they aren’t leaving now.

--Folks to the west of us have gotten their fair share of government help after storms, such as Floyd in 1999 and Hugo in 1989, both of which left the Outer Banks unscathed and caused billions of dollars of damage inland.

We want a bridge and we want it now.  Either bridge will do.

We want the partisan bickering to stop and some serious planning to replace an aging, unsafe bridge to start.

We think two decades of bureaucratic wrangling and interference from environmental groups is enough.

Build us a bridge before there is an accident that all of us will regret.


For more information

You can read the editorial about the Bonner Bridge in the News & Observer at http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/editorials/story/685578.html

Video of the WRAL news story on replacing the bridge and viewer comments can be found at http://www.nbc17.com/midatlantic/ncn/news.apx.-content-articles-NCN-2007-09-10-0022.html

More facts and information on the Bonner Bridge are available on the Dare County Web site at www.replacethebridgenow.com

There is an interesting discussion about the bridge issue on the OBX Connection’s main forum.  Check it out at www.obxconnection.com.

Also, there are other articles on the Bonner Bridge replacement controversy on the Local News page of our Web site.