![]() “I just don't see it happening,” said Mr Eskridge from his crab shanty, a small space built on stilts where he separates soft and hard shell crabs before selling them to market. While the impact of climate change is likely only to increase, many on the island don't accept that rising seas are to blame for their troubles. Even if we reduced emissions completely today, sea levels would still rise for at least the next couple 100 years,” said Mr Kirwan. ![]() Since the colonial period, the Chesapeake Bay has risen by nearly a metre and the water level is currently climbing at the second-highest rate in the coastal US, behind only Louisiana. Religion is an important part of life on Tangier. “Tangier is eroding from all sides, and so that material will eventually be lost.”īut he added that beefing up the island will help make it more “resilient”.Ī cross rises from the marsh on Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay. “Dredge disposal on marshes is not perfect we can put the sediment exactly where we want it but there's no guarantee it'll stay there,” Mr Kirwan explained to The National. While details for the pilot project remain scarce, Mr Kirwan believes dredging is a viable way to help protect Tangier - but it’s no permanent fix. “One way to combat the effects of sea level rise is to build the island higher,” said Matthew Kirwan, an associate professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science whose work focuses on coastal landscape evolution. The funding, which still must be approved by Congress, would mark the most significant investment in saving the island in years. The Democratic senator recently visited the island to tell Mr Eskridge that he may have secured $25 million to fund a pilot project that would use material dredged from narrow channels in the Chesapeake to help create a buffer near the island and allow it to be built back up. While that solution may sound simple, building jetties is expensive and so far, the state of Virginia has been hesitant to invest.īut a recent proposal by Tim Kaine, a senator representing the state, has made Mr Eskridge optimistic. “Rocks, rocks like we have on the west side to protect us from nor'easters,” Mr Eskridge says, referring to the massive storms that frequently form along the eastern coast of the US several months out of the year. “I believe we got help for the island that we would have been slower in getting,” Mr Eskridge said of Mr Trump's interest in Tangier.īut the island needs more help than the former president was able to provide.Ī jetty the Army Corps of Engineers built in 1989 has protected the western edge of the island for the past three decades and residents believe another one is needed to the north and east. The tightly knit conservative community voted overwhelmingly for Mr Trump in 20, and “Trump 2024" flags fly high above the island's docks. In 2017, Tangier, which measures 5km long and 2.5km wide, made headlines when then-president Donald Trump called Mr Eskridge to discuss ways to save the island. It is a fate the 400 or so residents are trying desperately to avoid. “When we go to bed at night and when we get up, if there's a storm out there, we're constantly monitoring it and of course, we know if we get not even a direct hit, if it comes close enough, we'll get quite a bit of damage and lose quite a bit of shoreline.”Ī 2015 study by the Army Corps of Engineers found that since 1850, Tangier has lost two thirds of its land mass and that by 2050, the island may be uninhabitable, perhaps making the people of Tangier some of the first climate change refugees in the country. “It stays on your mind that this is hurricane season,” said James “Ooker” Eskridge, the island's mayor. Tangier Island, which sits 20 kilometres off the coast of Virginia in the Chesapeake Bay, is losing land at an alarming rate and as hurricane season hits, islanders are particularly worried about their future. Five deadly disasters worsened by climate change this summer
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