Hurricane Erin is expected to stay at least 200 miles offshore this week as it curves past the East Coast. Yet the massive storm still is hurling giant waves and life-threatening storm surge toward North Carolina’s Outer Banks — forcing some communities to evacuate.
That’s unusual, emergency managers in the Outer Banks told POLITICO’s E&E News. It’s rare to issue evacuation orders for a storm that will never make landfall, let alone one so far out to sea.
But Erin is an unusually large hurricane. And the Outer Banks is an unusually vulnerable region of the coast. Put together, it’s a dangerous situation — and it’s influenced on both counts by climate change.
“This will not be the last storm that brings these types of waves,” said Reide Corbett, executive director of the Coastal Studies Institute, a research partnership based in the Outer Banks. “This is not the last tropical system or nor’easter that’s going to create significant damage across the Outer Banks. So we must come up with solutions.”
