Friday 12 March 2010 at 5:27 pm
“If the Fish and Wildlife Service had a reputation of reasonableness in the implementation of the Endangered Species Act, my letter would feature an entirely different tone and text. Unfortunately, like this Revised Recovery Plan, your agency has a reputation of indifference to the human and economic impacts of your regulator programs. I want you to know that I too love nature, birds, fish, plants, and animals. If we lived in the Garden of Eden, none of this would be a problem. But, we do not live in the Garden of Eden, and the Piping Plover does not pay taxes, rent rooms, create jobs, or even buy t-shirts. And so it is that people too must be part of the environment, and their activities must not be displaced by the birds, no matter how much we love them.”
--Letter from Robert V. Bobby Owens, Jr., chairman of the Dare County Board of Commissions to Anne Hecht of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, May, 1995
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Friday 05 March 2010 at 8:30 pm
Finally, after a very long wait, the Park Service has made public its Draft Environmental Impact statement and preferred alternative for managing off-road vehicles on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
How long the wait has been depends on when you start counting – and how good your memory is after all these years.
The seashore has been more than three decades without a long-term ORV management plan, as is required by federal regulations.
About 15 years ago, environmental groups started taking notice that there was no plan – especially groups that have no use for ORVs.
Sometime in mid-1990s, seashore officials started talking about coming up with a plan, but that talk didn’t really get very serious until after the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was moved a little over 10 years ago.
Then a revolving door of superintendents talked a lot about it, but got nothing done.
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Friday 26 February 2010 at 3:17 pm
The long wait to see what access to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore beaches might be like in the future is apparently almost over.
The National Park Service’s notice that the Draft Environmental Impact Statement and preferred alternative for off-road vehicle use at the seashore are available to the public could be published in the Federal Register as early as late next week, according to Cyndy Holda, the seashore’s public affairs specialist and assistant to Superintendent Mike Murray.
“The NPS Notice of Availability (NOA) for the DEIS has been cleared for publication in the Federal Register, which is likely to be mid-to-late next week,” Holda said today in an e-mail.
Holda said that when the NPS Notice of Availability is published, the document will probably be available to the public on the Park Service’s planning Web site.
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Friday 19 February 2010 at 3:57 pm
It may still feel cold here. High and low temperatures are still below average and have been since about Christmas.
However, there are signs that spring is on the way.
The daffodils are sprouting in island gardens. Mourning doves are courting. Businesses are starting to get ready for the upcoming season.
And the National Park Service is getting ready to close large areas of the points and spits at the Cape Hatteras National Seashore for pre-nesting areas for shorebirds – namely the piping plover.
(Click to read story and see maps on Beach Access Issues Page.)
This is not a new rite of spring here, as some environmental groups would have you believe.
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Friday 12 February 2010 at 6:49 pm
Has the Park Service dropped the ball again on ORV rulemaking?
We are literally on the eve of having the Park Service unveil its Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) and preferred alternative for ORV regulation on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
Seashore superintendent Mike Murray says he expects the Notice of Availability of the DEIS to be published in the Federal Register just about any day now. That notice will open a 60-day public comment period and kick off a series of meetings, also to solicit input from the public.
The process has no doubt been slowed down again -- this time by back-to-back crippling snow storms that have shut down the federal government in Washington, D.C., for most of this week.
It’s been a long and convoluted road to get to this point – beginning with Park Service inaction on enacting a required ORV plan in the late 1970s to the negotiated rulemaking committee that was to recommend a plan to the Park Service. The committee ended its work last year without reaching consensus on a recommendation on ORV operation, so the task of formulating a preferred alternative went to the Park Service.
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Friday 05 February 2010 at 4:04 pm
A few weeks ago, Jim Keene, president of the North Carolina Beach Buggy Association, sent me an e-mail after there was some discussion on local blogs about the Cape Hatteras National Seashore’s 1978 draft management plan to regulate off-road vehicles.
Attached was a January, 1979, newsletter from the North Carolina Beach Buggy Association (NCBBA).
Keene wrote in his message: “As I earlier noted to some people while I struggled to write an article for NCBBA, ‘Why do I write new articles when we could revive old ones, same organizations, same subject, different people?’”
And how right he is.
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Friday 29 January 2010 at 1:13 pm
Two meteorologists from The National Weather Service in Newport came to Hatteras on Tuesday, Jan. 26, with a message for us.
They want to hear from us to help them improve their coastal flooding forecasts, especially for soundside flooding.
And there may be an opportunity this weekend for us to help them out.
Meteorologists Brian Cullen and Scott Kennedy spoke to about two dozen islanders at a community forum on forecasting the weather on Hatteras and Ocracoke.
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Friday 22 January 2010 at 5:10 pm
The beach cottage Serendipity is without a doubt the second most photographed structure on Hatteras Island – after the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
And the move of the house out of harm’s way on the oceanfront – or in the ocean more often than not lately -- has been almost as well documented as the move of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in 1999.
Serendipity, the northernmost house on Hatteras Island in Rodanthe’s Mirlo Beach, has captured the imagination of both islanders and visitors who have been trekking here to take pictures of the house for years and were on hand for the move this past week.
First they came by the dozens to see the house being prepared for the move. Steel beams and wooden cribbing were placed underneath for support.
Then last Friday, Jan. 15, a larger crowd gathered at the site to see Serendipity’s pilings cut away and watch it being lowered by the hydraulic jacks onto the big fat tires on which it would rest for its trip down Highway 12.
It was quite a spectacle when it finally made the trip on Monday, Jan. 18.
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Friday 08 January 2010 at 3:41 pm
If you find the weather outside is frightful – as in frightfully freezing – you can plan a trip to some warm place, if you can find one, and you won’t miss out on comment periods or meetings on the National Park Service’s effort to formulate an ORV plan for the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
In a November blog I wrote that seashore Superintendent Mike Murray said he hoped the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) and the park’s preferred alternative for managing off-road vehicles would be ready for public comment and public meetings at the end of December or early January.
Now Murray says that time frame is being pushed back again.
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Thursday 31 December 2009 at 4:19 pm
It seems that all the media do it this time of year – the top 10 news stories of the year, the top 10 singers, actors, or athletes of the year or the decade or whatever.
So I thought I would close out the year with what I think were the top 10 stories on our islands.
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