This week we celebrate Thanksgiving and two-step into the 31st N.C. Holiday Flotilla weekend.
The two island town will be packed with people, every rental and second home, and hotels occupied as the town — actually the all-volunteer Flotilla committee — puts on a big bash, complete with Day in the Park, lighted boat parade capped with a fireworks show.
Imagine, if you will, at the same time the town experiencing a utility failure; the sewer line is compromised, causing the town to basically shut down until it can be plugged.
In this what-if senario, 300 gallons a minute of raw sewage pour out of the town’s aging sewer pipe to the mainland to foul the waterway, the marshes, leaside beaches and waterfronts in an unprecedented ecological disaster.
Imagine just the financial impact to the island town and its 50,000 guests, not overlooking Landfall and Wrightsville Sound, too. Would the water system be affected, with a boil water notice in effect? Could people still flush in the homes, condos and hotels? Obviously, you couldn’t go in the water.
Think of the dead marine life and oh, the smell.
Does anyone remember the Hewlett’s Creek sewage spill in 2005 when 300 million gallons of sewage spilled into the creek in the days before July 4?
There were sewage and toilet paper floating in the waterways going north past Harbor Island and Masonboro Island.
It was just plain nasty.
The town’s sewage pipeline is not buried as deep as you may think. And there is a mini marina built atop a portion of it.
One nightmare scenario would be if the sewage pipeline were clipped by the propellers of a big boat sitting low in the water loaded with revelers, waiting at a nearby dock for the annual lighted boat parade lineup to begin. Or a boat could sink at this dock, which sits on top of the sewage pipeline.
Sound implausible?
Years and years ago when I was married, one August my husband took a boat to fish the Big Game Fish Tournament out of Pirate’s Cove, on the Roanoke Sound on a causeway between Nags Head and Manteo on the Outer Banks.
My husband’s boss’s boat had not previously fished Pirate’s Cove, they and the boat were new to big tournament fishing. Running the sleek 75-foot Merritt sportsfish from Wrightsville up to the tournament was uneventful, until the approach to the islands, when the boat “propped” something below the water.
The boat strayed out of the channel going in, hitting a major submerged pipe; it was low tide, and one of the big boat’s huge propellers clipped the main water line to Manteo and Nag’s Head, rupturing it.
Now you have 50 to 100 boats at the marina and thousands of people on the islands for the biggest event of the year and the islands have no water for days. Imagine it.
The crew didn’t want to be known as the boat that caused this catastrophe, but as the one who went and got the spare set of props out of storage and drove them up there so the boat could compete — I still remember it — as does Tripp Brice at the Bridge Tender Marina. It was a big deal.
At Wrightsville the one and only sewer line that takes sewage from the town to the mainland lies buried under the water on the north side of the Heide Trask drawbridge adjacent to the DOT right of way. All of the town’s poo runs through this pipeline to the mainland for treatment by Cape Fear Public Utility Authority.
Damage this well-over 40-year-old pipe and it would be the sewage spill of all spills, locally.
Seven or eight years ago, a local developer was allowed to build a 650 foot fixed pier over the marsh to the deep water in the shadow of the drawbridge, with a 60-foot floating dock for boat slips. At the time the town objected to a dock and dockage of boats in the town’s 70-foot utility easement, citing in its arguments, the dock, a portion of which lies directly over this sewer line, could imperil the town’s sewer pipeline to the mainland.
The town argued it would only take one misused anchor, one boat sinking at the dock, or one boat intentionally or unintentionally deepening a slip with its propellers to cause an ecological and financial disaster.
The dock was built anyway.
The developer is a well-liked guy. He has waited many years to build the mixed use project going up on the site of the beloved former Babies Hospital. The battle to keep the developer who purchased the Babies property, plus the former UNCW Marine Science facility, from tearing down the historic and iconic hospital was pitched, but the developer eventually won. As a crowd gathered daily, some weeping, down it came, seemingly with a vengeance.
The permitting process of this Wrightsville Sound strategic location at the town’s gateway was laborious as well. Neighbors fought hard to keep the quaint integrity of their community.
There has also been a great deal of concern over the fate of the centuries-old live oak trees on the property, several of which have come down. The adjacent Summer Rest tidal creek and pond, teeming with life, is a bird watcher’s paradise as a great variety of water fowl and raptors can be seen fishing there. A small fixed dock was added at the edge of the pond and the marsh grasses cut away.
Over time the developer was given permission by the city of Wilmington to build. The construction project, The Sidbury/Grand View, will comprise three four-story buildings ranging from 45 to 50 feet in height.
The 111 rental units will, of course, go for more with boat slips. Now the developer is petitioning to add on to and expand with additional floating docks, 122 foot and 180 foot on the creek, plus a new floating pier with more finger piers out on the ICWW, bringing the total boat slips to 27.
Due to the age of the endangered sewer line, the town needs to immediately plan for a redundant sewer line. There is too much riding on a pipe that doesn’t need to be disturbed.
The application says the closest dredging to the sewer line for the dock construction would be 11 feet, and dock construction dredging would stop at a depth 1 and one-fourth feet above the pipe.
A whole 15 inches, so we can all relax, right?
It’s not like we have epic astronomical low tides very often.
