Old North News

Boat operators are facing a challenge to get out of Hatteras Inlet as the channel's water depth is down to approximately 2 feet of clearance in some areas.

That is forcing boats to stay home.

"Hatteras Inlet is great," Dare County Waterways Commission Chairman Steve Coulter said in a WRAL.com report this week. "It's just the channel to Hatteras Inlet that is the problem."

Coulter added that he can't recall the water levels ever being so low.

It's called shoaling. The ocean churns up sand and deposits it near land formations. The geography of the Outer Banks is such that much of the sand is piling up near the channel.

"You've got five, six, 10 roads where you live where you can get to your job or you can get to your house," Coulter told WRAL. "We have one. One road, one channel. We need it. That's why we're here."

The WRAL report said the sand buildup is trapping more than 60 boats inside the marinas. 

The cost is estimated at approximately $130,000 lost per day during peak season.

"That's just for the fishing trip," Coulter said. "That's not for the house, that's not for the hotel, that's not for dinner, that's not for gifts, that's not for fuel driving up and down the road. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, all the time."

The solution of dredging is easy enough on paper, but it is complicated by the fact that some of the area is owned by the state and other parts are owned by the federal government. Although there has been talk of transferring responsibility to the federal government, that's a long way off.

"Having that route be part of the federal channel will make it easier in terms of giving us authority to do work and do maintenance dredging in that corridor which is being used by the mariners," Brennan Dooley, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Shallow Draft Program manager, said in the report. "However, it doesn't guarantee funding and it doesn't take away all these other competing priorities that we have out there."