‘Damage like we haven’t seen in quite some time’

By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice on September 29, 2026

N.C. Transportation Secretary Daniel Johnson talking to reporters about repairs to NC12 on Hatteras Island.
Credit: Kip Tabb

By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice

The work to repair NC12 at the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge Visitors Center is moving forward as NCDOT announced a temporary one-lane road will open for both southbound and northbound traffic on Wednesday, Sept. 30.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, September 29, N.C. Transportation Secretary Daniel Johnson said ‘We hope to have the two-lane road repaired sometime in the middle of next week.” He emphasized, however, that “Right now, our focus is getting people off the island that want to get off.”

There are no accurate figures for how many visitors remained on Hatteras Island last week.

“Our property management teams down there said we were at about 60% occupancy at the beginning of this. I don’t know how many left before the road closed,” Dare County Manager Bobby Outten told reporters. He put the number of weekly visitors during the summer season at about 100,000.

As weather models predicted a strengthening storm, NCDOT crews “built the dunes up as big as they possibly could to resist the incoming tides from the nor’easter,” Johnson said. “Unfortunately, this one was a particularly strong nor’easter and did damage like we haven’t seen in quite some time.”

The last time the dunes protecting NC12 on Hatteras Island were breached this extensively was in 2011 during Hurricane Irene.

That was also the last time the emergency ferry system was used to keep Hatteras Island supplied and to transport people off the island. The emergency ferry service began on Saturday, Sept. 26, traveling between Stumpy Point and Rodanthe.

“The ferries, through their efforts, were able to get 1,600 people so far and counting, off the island,” Johnson said.

The most significant damage occurred at the Visitors Center where the ocean ran over the dunes and undercut the highway, breaking the asphalt into large chunks.  “I don’t think we’ll be able to reuse much of that for this reconstruction,” Johnson noted.

Complicating the repair are “high tide cycles reaching where the roadbed is,” he added.

Johnson was asked about long-term solutions to protect the NC12 corridor. He noted that “the short-term solution right now is our focus is getting emergency access open. The longer-term solutions, they’re far more complicated, they’re far more costly.”

The estimated cost of the repairs, Johnson said, will be “approximately two and a half million dollars. That’s for both sandbag restoration and also the roadbed restoration.”