RAPID Evaluation of the Resilience of Shoreline Protection Methods to Hurricane Florence

One of the greatest challenges for managing and protecting coastal communities is that threats to coastal community resilience and sustainability span multiple temporal and spatial scales. For example, erosion of and damage to a developed shorelines can occur locally and quickly during a single storm event or slowly (decades) across an entire coastal region as a result of ambient wave conditions and human activities. This RAPID project seeks assess how the resilience of coastal waterfront properties and infrastructure to a major storm event, Hurricane Florence, varies as a function of past and current shore protection decisions. Hurricane Florence began impacting coastal North Carolina (NC) on September 13, 2018, as a Category 2 storm, producing storm surge in excess of 3-m and precipitation exceeding 50-cm over 3 days, resulting in unprecedented damage and flooding in NC coastal communities. Utilizing a multidisciplinary approach, through geographic information systems (GIS) science, emerging low-cost remote sensing and aerial mapping technologies, and waterfront homeowner surveys, the project seeks to: 1) assess the immediate impact of Hurricane Florence on shoreline condition and infrastructure; and 2) evaluate relationships between past and current shore protection approaches and patterns in observed shoreline change and infrastructure damage resulting from Hurricane Florence.

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