Can Tangier Island be saved?

Tangier Island is located twelve miles offshore, in the Chesapeake Bay. The island is a tightknit,  culturally unique fishing community focused on commercial fishing and crabbing.
 A rapidly eroding shoreline, climate change and a rising sea level puts the island at risk to be completely underwater within the next 50 years forcing residents to abandon their way of life.




She always greets the graves of fellow Pruitts and others long gone, a few still marked by toppling headstones that face east toward Tangier Sound and the Eastern Shore 12 miles off, except when they're swamped by high tides and storm surge.



And, this time, some of those long-gone Canaan residents were there to greet her back.

"I saw a headstone just sitting in the sand, and I was like, 'Oh, my Lord,'" Moore recalled. "And I got to the beach, there was human skulls just floating on the shore."

Sandy had disinterred three complete skeletal remains, including those of a baby.

"You could see two buttons on her chest were still intact," Moore said. "Teeth, hair combs — I found a little bit of it all up here."

An archaeologist with the Smithsonian Institution dated the remains to around the Civil War, and removed them to Washington, D.C., for examination, she said. But in time they'll be returned to Tangier for reburial.

Uppards once supported two other communities — Aces and Persimmon's Ridge, she said — also lost over time to grinding storms and erosion.

Now, the growing concern among both climate scientists and Tangier residents is that the little town of Tangier is next.

And soon.

Climate change refugees

Scientists say the Chesapeake Bay has lost more than 500 islands to storms and erosion since the 1600s.

At one time, Tangier and Uppards were one big landmass, along with Goose Island farther north and Port Isobel to the east.

Since 1850, two-thirds of that landmass has been lost, shrinking into smaller bits.

And it's shrinking still, storm by storm, at alarming rates — losing as much as 16 feet of shoreline a year.

Map: Tangier Island in Virginia

In fact, a marine biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Norfolk estimates that accelerating rates of sea level rise could force residents to abandon Tangier within the next 50 years. Perhaps even 25 years.

When that happens, the state will lose its last inhabited island in the bay.

"The situation is actually very dire," said David Schulte, lead author of a report on climate change's impact on Tangier published in December in the journal Nature.

"Prior to my study, it didn't get a whole lot of attention. And I think in general the local government, the state government probably thought they had, maybe, decades in which to try to deal with this. I don't think they have that kind of time."

A $4.2 million federal and state project to build a small sea wall to protect Tangier's vulnerable harbor has been in the works for more than a decade, but it keeps getting delayed.

But to effectively extend the life of the islands, Schulte proposes an offshore breakwater system all around Uppards and along the remaining beach on the southwestern portion of Tangier. A rock jetty built in 1989 abutting the upper western shore has worked marvelously well to protect the tiny airport and sewage-treatment plant, officials say.

Then, Schulte suggests adding a sand beach/dune system between the breakwaters and the existing shoreline.

He also recommends restoring former upland ridges with dredged sand, then planting loblolly pines and other vegetation as anchoring material and seabird habitat.

He puts the cost at $20 million to $30 million.

The breakwaters would allow Uppards to do as it's always done and protect Tangier from the battering blows of hurricanes, nor'easters and the incessant erosion of pounding waves.

For now, though, there's no effort at any level of government to convert his proposal into action.

Yet, if nothing is done, he says, a culturally unique fishing community will soon be gone, its residents fated to become among the first climate change refugees of the continental U.S.

Nothing like it anymore

Tangier was founded in the early 1700s as a farming community. Residents still speak in a distinct accent often attributed to their Cornish forebears and their long geographic isolation.

Inhabitants turned to fishing in the 1800s, and now blue crabs provide the main income for watermen.

Today, Tangier is a working watermen village that draws leagues of tourists ferried in from the mainland every summer for fresh Chesapeake blue crab and an unplugged, laid-back lifestyle.

Some have begun to visit because they know what the island is facing.

"We wanted to come see it before it disappears," said Teri Myers, a Maryland native now retired to Florida with her husband.

"It's very charming," Myers said. "I took some video of the crab shacks when we were coming in on the boat. I remember places like that from when I was a kid in Ocean City. Everything looked like that when I was growing up, and nothing looks like that anymore."

Tangier Island itself is roughly 370 acres — about 700 acres including Uppards — but only about 80 acres is habitable. From the air, it's shaped like a billowing triangular sail.

There's a scenic beach stretching along the southwestern shore that locals avoid because of biting bugs, but it draws visitors to wade in the warm waters or watch the sunset.

In town, white clapboard homes are closely spaced along three north-south ridges that today lie a mere 4 feet or so above sea level. The ridges are connected by short bridges.

Three very narrow, paved roads run along the ridges, the only arteries through the island. The roads were once considered suitable only for bicycles and foot traffic, but lately residents have taken to zipping around in electric golf carts and motor scooters. The town once banned vehicles, but it now has at least a dozen cars and pickups.

Tidal creeks, called ditches or guts by locals, whipsaw through the island fringes.

Always, the bay's brackish waters encroach, waterlogging backyards and graveyards, converting turf to marsh grass. When the $1.2 million state-of-the-art health center was built in 2010 along Main Ridge Road, it was placed on stilts.

Like its landmass, the island's population has shrunk over several decades, from more than 1,000 to fewer than 500 today.

Increasingly, young people emigrate to the mainland once they graduate from the K-12 combined school. They leave for college, jobs or the military and rarely return.

Grocery store clerk Katie Mariano said her 19-year-old son just began training on a tugboat, a common alternative to the waterman's life.

"So probably one or two years before he's moving away," Mariano said. "I see his point. There's really nothing here for him, anymore. I mean, he's gotten everything out of it that he could."

Georgianna Parks, 22, grew up on the island and now studies international relations at Christopher Newport University in Newport News. She was back recently on summer break to waitress at the Fisherman's Corner restaurant.


She loves spending summers on her home island to boat and fish, but said she doesn't plan to make it her home again.


"Probably not, no," Parks said. "It's not for me."

'On our doorstep'

Town officials feel the urgency of saving the island, but they lack the resources to tackle the problem alone.

Renee Tyler managed the island's airport for many years before she was asked to fill in as town manager until they found someone. That was 10 years ago, and she's still on the job.

Her office is a modest white brick building next to the airport. It's equipped with aging computers, a pair of powder blue bedroom slippers stacked on a shelf among sparse office supplies and a ringing phone that only she was in to answer.

"We basically feel like we're the small fish in the ocean, pretty much," Tyler said. "I honestly feel like we're getting lost in the shuffle. Like we don't really matter."

But the town has a rich heritage, she said. In 2014, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places, meaning it's considered worth preserving.

"So we're on the map," Tyler said. "And I just can't see how government can let us go by. I really don't."

The longtime mayor is a full-time waterman named James Eskridge who everyone knows as Ooker.

This time of year, Eskridge is working night and day, between his crab pots in the bay and his soft-crab tanks at his harbor shack.

He shares the shack with four cats he rescued as kittens when they washed in after a storm, clinging to a tree stump. He named them after conservative icons. He also has pet sea gulls flapping overhead as he sorts his molting crabs, or peelers, waiting for him to toss crab bits their way.

"This erosion's been going on for years, but it's on our doorstep now," Eskridge said. "You pay more attention to it when it gets on your doorstep."

Relocating the island population, as some suggest, is a bad option, the mayor said.

"We don't want to," said Eskridge. "This has been our way of life for a couple hundred years."

Besides, he said, Tangier men and women have done their share of military service over the years, and it's only right that the government return the favor.

Protecting the island, he added, will also protect significant federal investment throughout the years in new streets, new bridges, the new school building, the new health clinic and the new electric power plant.

"Yet they drag their feet to protect the island itself," said Eskridge. "Now, if there was an endangered bird or something, it would get protected faster. Watermen are endangered, but they don't count, apparently."

Many residents don't blame sea level rise for taking their island. Instead, they blame erosion and a sinking landmass.

Experts agree that land in this region is sinking from the combined effects of glacial rebound, the aftereffects of a meteor impact about 35 million years ago and subsidence as communities pump out groundwater. But they also say seas are on the rise as a warming planet expands the oceans and melts land-based ice sheets.

Some islanders have no interest in arguing the point.

"I'm not a believer in sea level rise, but if sea level rise is the angle it takes to get us a sea wall, I don't care what they use," said Moore. "Sea level rise, global warming, save the bugs — I don't care. We need a sea wall. We need it now. We need it yesterday."

Sink or save

The island may lose its appeal for young adults yearning for excitement and new opportunities, but not for their parents, grandparents and younger siblings.

The place can be deadly dull over the harsh winters, said store clerk Mariano. But in summer the tourists return, crab season jumps into high gear and kids "just normally stay overboard" at swimming holes.

Mornings, young boys climb into their small, secondhand "shovin' boats" and paddle or pole along the ditches to check their secondhand crab pots or dip-net for fish and crabs.

They gather barefoot and bareheaded on a dock with fishing poles, roughhousing and cursing until their bait runs out.

They ride their bicycles, fat-tired "choppers" and motor scooters up and down the roads and across the footbridges, tracing looping circles around and around the island.

Around sunset, teenagers and adolescents alike climb atop pilings at the marina and leap into the harbor. Then they shimmy back up like monkeys and start all over again.

Evenings, while tourists are tucked into the two B&Bs that still operate on the island, young people gather to socialize on the covered deck of the Four Brothers Crab House across from the dock. They might move up the road to Spanky's, a 1950s-style ice cream and fast-food shop owned and run by retired teacher Bryan King, who grew up on the island.

"The island was much bigger when I was smaller," King said.

One resident calls Tangier "a good place to live if you're in trouble." When one of her sons died in military service, she said the whole town turned out in support when his body was returned. She didn't have to make a meal for months.

Nancy Creedle was born in Newport News and raised in West Virginia. She moved to Tangier in 1992 when her husband, Wade, was hired as minister of the United Methodist Church. He died in 2010, and Creedle remained as church pianist and secretary. She raised two children who've since relocated to the mainland, and said she's helping raise three grandchildren still on Tangier.

The congregation also has shrunk over the years, she said. And she hears growing anxiety from remaining parishioners about the island's future.

"They're very concerned, as well as myself," said Creedle. "Like, where am I going? Am I going to stay here and sink with the island?"

Her message to decision makers about Tangier is simple: "It's just home to people, you know. It's a place where people live. It just needs to be saved. We don't want to be homeless because we're going under."

Tyler said town officials haven't broached the idea of leaving, even as a last resort.

"We haven't discussed Plan B yet," Tyler said. "I know there possibly could be a Plan B. But I think myself and everybody else just wants to wait it out and stay here until we're forced to leave.

"I still have faith, though. That we're going to get protection."

If that's to happen, experts say there's little time to lose.

"Time is short," said Schulte. "If we're going to do something to save this island, we need to do it quickly.


"In my opinion, this is one of the jobs of our government — to do the big things for people that they can't do themselves. ... To build the interstate highway system, to put a man on the moon, to build the Hoover Dam. Now we're having these climate change impacts, and I think our government's going to have to step up."
