File:Coast watch (1979) (20471369328).jpg

Title: Coast watch
Identifier: coastwatch00uncs_2 (find matches)
Year: 1979 (1970s)
Authors: UNC Sea Grant College Program
Subjects: Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology
Publisher: (Raleigh, N. C. : UNC Sea Grant College Program)
Contributing Library: State Library of North Carolina
Digitizing Sponsor: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

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• the building to be strongly con- nected from the top of the roof to the bottom of the pilings. It would be 18 years before the guidelines would become mandatory. But homeowners and builders began to comply. They mounted their houses on pilings, sunk the pilings deep into the sand and tied roofs to walls and walls to foundations. "The image of the typical beach house changed," says Spencer Rogers, Sea Grant's coastal engineering specialist. "People wanted to buy beach houses elevated on pilings with underhouse parking because that was their idea of what a beach house looked like on the North Carolina coast. They probably didn't connect that image with hurri- canes. But at least they were making the right choice." North Carolina building codes were years ahead of the rest of the nation, Rogers says. It was the mid-1970s before the Federal Flood Insurance Program coerced coastal localities nationwide into tougher building re- quirements. But Rogers saw ways that the North Carolina code could become even bet- Continued on next page The Carolina Code A better foundation for constntction in coastal North Carolina. By Kathy Hart A hurricane named Hazel slammed 120 mph winds and a 15-foot wall of water against North Carolina's south- ern beaches Oct. 15,1954. On Long Beach, only five of 357 buildings were left standing. Five other hurricanes followed in the next six years. Each took its toll on coastal homes, and each delivered a lesson. Coastal structures weren't built to withstand the fury of hurricanes. Even strong northeasters posed a threat. After Hurricane Donna in 1960 and the Ash Wednesday northeaster in 1962, the N.C. Building Code Council realized that a different set of stan- dards was needed for coastal construc- tion. Six years later, North Carolina be- came one of the first states in the nation to set up guidelines for coastal residen- tial construction. The guidelines were optional and applied only to homes built on the Outer Banks or east of the Intracoastal Waterway. They called for: • pilings to be sunk 8 feet in the ground, • the floor foundation to be 2 feet above the site's highest recorded storm surge, and

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