In this year alone, the U.S. has had a myriad of natural hazards worsened by climate change: the earliest recorded Category 5 hurricane to make landfall; floods throughout the country; record-breaking heat everywhere; tornadoes in the Midwest; and wildfires in the West. The La Nina weather pattern is expected to arrive soon, which is likely to fuel storms in the Atlantic during this year’s hurricane season.

Climate change amplifies the frequency, duration and intensity of extreme weather events. It can cause all kinds of disruptions and health hazards while driving up expenses like heating, cooling and homeowners insurance.

Get hammered enough by amplified weather events and you might wonder if there’s somewhere a little less hazard-prone to live. While there is no place on Earth that is immune to the impact of climate change, some places are less exposed to risk than others.

Last year, NerdWallet examined federal data and found that most of the fastest-growing places in the U.S. are also at high risk for natural hazards that are exacerbated by climate change. This year, we explored which places — in this case, counties — are least likely to feel the impact of natural hazards.

Isolation doesn’t guarantee fewer risks — just fewer people

If you rank places only by Federal Emergency Management Agency rating, the counties in the U.S. with the lowest risks are the places with the fewest people.

At the top of that list is Loving County in North Texas, where just 64 people reside — the least populous county in the country. No. 2 is Kalawao, Hawaii, which was originally established as an area of forced isolation for people with Hansen’s disease, or what was once more colloquially known as a leper colony. And No. 3 is Keweenaw, Michigan, a peninsula containing a national park where, as the county’s website says, you can “find solitude in the pristine, remote wilderness while sharing trails with the island’s moose and wolves.”

However, solitude doesn’t make for the best measure of risk from natural hazards. FEMA’s risk index takes population into account as part of social and community risk when it makes its risk designations — it stands to reason that the fewer the people, the lower the risk. But, of course, the natural hazards are still there: North Texas isn’t immune from extreme heat, tornadoes or extreme thunderstorms, for example. A Hawaiian island won’t be immune from a hurricane, earthquake, flash flood, wildfire or tsunami. And any area that is designated a peninsula, like Keweenaw, Michigan, is highly likely to be flood-prone.

While FEMA’s National Risk Index measures current risk, it must be noted that extreme weather effects are projected to worsen as the planet continues to warm on our current trajectory, and in coming decades, coastal flooding will increase as sea levels rise.

Note also that FEMA’s ratings consider not only the kinds of events that can be worsened by climate change (floods, droughts, wildfires, storms), but also natural hazards that aren’t affected by climate change, like earthquakes and volcanoes.

What midsize counties have the lowest climate change risks?

To get a better picture of what might make an area least vulnerable to natural hazards and still boast the creature comforts of basic infrastructure, NerdWallet set a population control of at least 100,000 people. It includes the annual cost of living in 2023 dollars, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator for households comprising two adults and two children.

What most populated counties have the lowest climate change risks?

People migrate to some of the most populated areas in the country for obvious reasons, like the availability of housing, jobs, entertainment and a desire for proximity to lots of other people.

Among the counties with populations above 1 million residents, here are the counties where the risk of natural hazards is lowest. The analysis also includes the annual cost of living in 2023 dollars, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator for households with two adults and two children.

No matter where you live, climate change will cost you

The terrible truth about climate change is that even if you uproot your life and move to a place with low risks of natural hazards, intense weather events are still likely to find you. For example, most of the relatively high risks in midsize counties have to do with winter weather. In some places, winters are becoming less severe, but in others, they are worsening. And one big event could be devastating.

In the U.S., extreme weather events cost nearly $150 billion per year, according to The Fifth National Climate Assessment, a report released in November 2023 by the federal government. That sum doesn’t account for additional costs including loss of life, health care costs, or damages to what are known as ecosystem services — for example, food, water, timber and oil. There’s a billion-dollar weather or climate disaster in the U.S. every three weeks, on average, the report found. That is compared with one every four months in the 1980s.

Despite all this, nearly half of all Americans (45%) don’t believe that climate change will affect them personally, according to a December 2023 survey by Yale University. So how about what a single person pays: Issues related to climate change will cost a child born in the U.S. in 2024 at least $500,000 — and as much as $1 million — over their lifetime due to indirect and direct costs (such as missed cost-of-living increases and lower earnings), according to an April analysis conducted by ICF, a global consulting firm, and released by Consumer Reports.

Some current and future costs are likely to include:

• Homeowners insurance. If you’re a homeowner, you know all too well how heightened weather-related disaster risks play into your homeowners insurance premiums. In certain places where risk is highest, private insurers won’t provide coverage for floods and wildfires.
• Home maintenance, upgrades and safeguards against climate risks. These could include installing a sump pump or resealing basement walls; upgrading insulation and windows; adding or enhancing heating or ventilation systems; roofing upgrades and more.
• Energy bills. With increased heating and cooling needs come higher energy bills.
• Food. Weather changes present challenges to food production, which could lower supply and increase prices.
• Higher taxes due to more government spending and lower government revenues. The Consumer Reports report cites reduced personal and corporation earnings that lead to less tax revenue combined with higher expenses that the government must take on for health care and infrastructure damages.
• Lower income. The Consumer Reports analysis cites a possible decrease in labor hours due to extreme weather, which may lead to lower earnings.

Climate migration within the U.S. is already happening. A 2021 survey by the real estate website Redfin found that among those who plan to move, half say climate change-fueled conditions like natural disasters and extreme temperatures are factors in their decision. There are expenses associated with uprooting your life and moving elsewhere — and those aren’t costs that everyone can afford.

Anna Helhoski writes for NerdWallet. Email: anna@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @AnnaHelhoski.

The article You Can’t Escape Climate Change, but in Some Areas, Risk Is Lower originally appeared on NerdWallet.

Researchers say the polymetallic nodules that mining companies hope to harvest from the deep-ocean seafloor may be a source of oxygen for the animals, plants and bacteria that live there.

This discovery of this “dark oxygen” has the potential to rock negotiations happening this month in Jamaica, where a world rule-making body — the International Seabed Authority — is meeting to decide the future of deep-sea mining.

The work was published recently in the journal Nature Geoscience.

“This study is a really good example of how limited our knowledge of the deep ocean currently is, and how much more we still stand to benefit with further scientific research,” said Diva Amon, a marine biologist from Trinidad and a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Initiative.

The excitement is focused on the potato-sized rocks — or polymetallic nodules — found littered across areas of the ocean floor. These nodules contain minerals, such as cobalt and nickel, that green-energy batteries and technologies require.

For years, companies such as Canada’s The Metals Co. have been working to persuade the international governing authority to greenlight their plans to harvest these metallic nodules in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion Clipper Zone — a stretch of sea that spans 4,500 miles between Hawaii and Mexico.

The company has argued that the metals are essential for building technologies that do not rely on fossil fuels. They say the impact mining will have on the ocean floor is not only minimal, but also doesn’t compare with the destruction of rainforests and human communities that terrestrial mining inflicts.

But environmentalists, oceanographers and others say that driving large harvesting machines across the pristine, little-known ocean floor — atop and along areas of sediment three and four miles below the surface — could have unforeseen and disastrous consequences. They are urging lawmakers to postpone or ban the industry from digging up one of the last “untouched” ecosystems on the planet.

This new research, which was funded by TMC, suggests the toll of mining the area could be greater than anyone had imagined.

That’s because a team of international scientists found that the prized nodules produce oxygen — and may be responsible for enriching this dark, remote ecosystem with one of life’s most important elements.

Jeffrey Marlow, an assistant professor of biology at Boston University and one of the authors on the paper, said he and his team had received funding from TMC to conduct baseline environmental studies, which included sending something to the ocean floor called a benthic chamber.

These structures, which he described as being about 10 feet tall — “think of it as just like an overturned box or something that you jab into the seafloor,” Marlow said — are watertight and gas tight, and contain instruments designed to take measurements of the sediment’s chemistry and composition.

The sampling method is pretty standard, he said. Scientists measure the amount of oxygen that is lost, or declines, during a 48-hour period as the chamber sits in place on the ocean floor. The decline serves as a proxy for the amount of life down there — as animals respirate, they consume oxygen.

But when they sent the chambers down for this analysis, they noticed that oxygen levels went up, not down.

Marlow said they were certain the machinery was faulty. They tried again and noticed the same results.

“These benthic chamber experiments have been done around the world for decades,” he said. “So the technology and everything is pretty well established.”

He said they spent days, then weeks troubleshooting.

“We had a couple of redundant ways of measuring it, so we knew that not one of them was failing. Ultimately, we were forced to conclude” that oxygen was being produced.

What the researchers think is happening is that nodules — and the metals in them — are working like a battery, at a chemical level.

“These rocks are made up of minerals which have metals that are … distributed throughout the rock in heterogeneous ways,” he said. “Each of these metals and minerals is able to hold on to an electrical charge in a slightly different way. So essentially, just the natural variation means that there is charge separation … in the same way there is on a battery.”

That means there’s enough voltage to take water and “split it open in hydrogen and oxygen.”

But not everyone is convinced by — or happy with — the study’s conclusion.

TMC, which sponsored the research, sent the Los Angeles Times a critique of the paper, stating the research had been rejected by four scientific publications until finding a home at Nature, which the company described as “a journal that has taken a strong view against deep-sea mineral sourcing.”

A request for comment went unanswered by the journal’s communications team, but the periodical is generally regarded as one of the most prestigious and selective publications among scientists.

TMC also said the methodology was flawed, arguing that the team’s findings contradicted other work that had been conducted in the Clarion Clipper Zone, but which used a different method.

“This inability to reproduce the findings with both methods suggests that elevated oxygen levels are in fact an artifact in the data,” said the company in a statement. The company noted it was “currently preparing a peer-reviewed paper as rebuttal.”

Bo Barker Jorgensen, a microbiologist at Denmark’s Aarhus University — who was not involved with the research or on TMC’s payroll — said the work elicited more questions than it did answers.

He said he did not “think this discovery is important for our understanding of the ocean in general or for deep-sea mining” and described the research as a “novel and very puzzling process for which the mechanism is still not clear.”

The study’s authors pushed back on the critiques, stating they too had been puzzled by their findings — but they’d been rigorous in eliminating every other possible scenario.

“We were the worst critics of this paper for a long time,” said Andrew Sweetman, leader of the Seafloor Ecology and Biogeochemistry research group at the Scottish Assn. for Marine Science, and lead author on the paper. “For eight years I discarded the data showing oxygen production, thinking my sensors were faulty. Once we realised something may be going on, we tried to disprove it, but in the end we simply couldn’t.”

He said he welcomed more research on the topic and urged other scientists to investigate further.

“Following the publication of this paper, I have been approached by other researchers with similar data sets also showing evidence of dark oxygen production that they discarded thinking equipment was faulty,” he said.

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Now, the remains of a humongous ice age animal have been found near a spot that thousands of motorists drive past every day. Workers recently unearthed around a dozen pieces of a mastodon skeleton while digging at the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel expansion project.

“This is the stuff they don’t teach in engineering school,” said Ryan Banas, project director.

Soon, residents and travelers will be able to view the bones and other artifacts at a new project visitor’s center in Norfolk.

Workers at the project got very lucky discovering the bones in the fall of 2023, Banas said. A worker noticed something odd while looking at a conveyor belt at the slurry treatment plant, which is located on the project’s South Island.

Banas said the plant moves fast, processing 16,000 gallons of slurry a minute.

“So, the fact that we had one of our staff members that was able to catch a glimpse is pretty, pretty darn impressive,” Banas said.

The bones, which are anywhere from 12,000 to 50,000 years old, include ribs, vertebrae, a tooth the size of a small hand and part of a limb, Banas said.

Back then, lower sea levels meant the land near the HRBT would have likely been a forest, said Zaborniak, making it a perfect foraging ground for the mastodons.

Very similar in appearance to wooly mammoths or modern-day elephants, the creatures spent much of their day looking for food, he said. They were anywhere from 7 to 10 feet tall with large tusks and weighed around 6 tons.

Elephants and mammoths had flat teeth built for chomping down on grass, Zaborniak said.

“Mastodons, on the other hand, have very large ridges on their teeth, which are great for browsing,” he said. “So these animals are going to be eating plants such as leaves, pine needles and fruits.”

There is some evidence of social behavior, he said, but it’s likely male mastodons were solitary creatures. The animals had a wide range across North America, he added. Early humans also would have potentially crossed paths with them, he said, but it would have taken several people to hunt one.

Other mastodon bones have been found in Hampton Roads: the Virginia Living Museum possesses much of a skeleton that was discovered in Yorktown over a period of several years, according to a previous report by The Virginian-Pilot.

The $3.9 billion HRBT expansion project will double the road’s capacity, from two to four lanes in each direction, and add two two-lane tunnels. It is scheduled for completion in 2027.

Similar construction work elsewhere in the region has also turned up interesting historical finds. In 2023, workers on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel expansion project dug up an old ship anchor buried beneath the shipping channel. Work was delayed for several months, and resumed in April, so the 10-foot anchor could be excavated.

HRBT project spokesperson Paula Miller said the mastodon discovery was not expected to delay that project’s construction timeline.

Other artifacts unearthed by the HRBT project and now housed at the visitor’s center include two Civil War-era cannonballs, a World War II-era helmet liner and pieces of an old shipwreck, Banas said. Project leaders hope to open the visitor’s center, located at 9401 4th St. in Norfolk, in September.

“These are all things that are super, super interesting, that help you appreciate what came before us,” Banas said.

Trevor Metcalfe, 757-222-5345, trevor.metcalfe@pilotonline.com

City Manager Mary Bunting and Col. Sonny Avichal, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers Norfolk District, signed the agreement which outlines the cost-sharing structure of the 3-year Peninsula Coastal Storm Risk Management Feasibility Study. The Army Corps of Engineers received $3 million in federal appropriations to fund the study, according to a city news release.

“Currently, we have no financial obligation because we got 100% funding — if the scope or needs expand, we would have to pay 50/50 for our part,” Bunting wrote in an email.

In the release, Bunting described the signing of the agreement as “historic” and said it set a precedent for future joint endeavors.

“Water does not respect municipal boundaries, and this study will provide a holistic look at flood risks for the Peninsula,” she said.

Hampton announced the planned collaboration in January. The city said the study will involve a comprehensive investigation of coastal storm risks and risk management solutions for the Peninsula, potentially including Hampton, Newport News, Poquoson and Williamsburg, as well James City and York counties.

In the event the scope of the project expands, Bunting said other localities would be expected to pay a 50% share for work in their communities.

Norfolk worked with the Army Corps of Engineers on a similar Storm Risk Management Feasibility Study several years ago. That work preceded Norfolk’s approval of a $2.6 billion flood mitigation plan that includes construction of a floodwall downtown.

Josh Janney, joshua.janney@virginiamedia.com

The students were looking for microplastics as part of the weeklong Camp Answer environmental science program. The camp allows students to study a community problem and develop solutions. This year, they were studying littering.

“This is a camp that brings out thinkers and doers,” said Monique Taylor, who has taught Camp Answer for four years.

Taylor takes students to sites and on neighborhood walks to track litter and check for microplastics — tiny bits of plastic that result from degraded plastic items such as bottles. They can be harmful to wildlife and aquatic animals. The students use an app — Marine Debris Tracker — to log the litter. They bring samples back to the classroom to check them under a microscope.

One of the biggest hits is when they check food from fast food locations.

“Once they’ve seen it — oh boy, the spark is now here,” she said.

Malik Jones, 12, said as he pulled apart a chicken nugget under a microscope and saw strings of microplastics inside. He had one word for the discovery: “Disgusting.”

Studies have found that microplastics can get into processed food through conveyor belts, packaging or workers’ clothes. The Churchland Middle School student said he feels motivated to encourage people to stop littering.

Waters Middle School student Alisia Staton, 13, signed up for the camp so she could do something productive during the summer. Alisia enjoyed the experiments and contributing to a solution by picking up trash during their neighborhood walks.

The students have made a poster showcasing their findings, which will be featured on the division’s website and used to help spread awareness about the impact of littering on the environment.

The camp has also sparked longer-term interest, including for Daijha Riddick, a sophomore at Chesapeake’s Western Branch. Riddick attended Camp Answer when she was a middle schooler in Portsmouth and she now, after graduation, wants a career as a water quality specialist. She came back this year as a volunteer.

“I see myself in them,” she said.

During camp, students also made reusable lunch bags from beeswax to minimize their use of disposable plastic sandwich bags. Janae Washington, a 13-year-old at Churchland Middle School, said the activity helped her understand the importance of using alternative materials. She looks forward to sharing the idea with her friends and family.

Nour Habib, nour.habib@virginiamedia.com

The sea cows were spotted about 10 a.m. by a Daily Press/Virginian-Pilot staff photographer, who said they were about 6-8 feet long, from the Hague’s pedestrian bridge. A small group of people stopped to watch as the pair floated in the Hague. Just three weeks ago, a manatee surprised passengers coming back to the dock from a dolphin-watching excursion in Rudee Inlet.

The Hague has 25-30 large water outfalls entering it, according to the Elizabeth River Project. Because of that, pollution affects the water quality of the Y-shaped inlet. Still, there’s plenty of diversity in the water. From cownose rays to dolphins and seals, creatures often associated with the ocean can sometimes be spotted along the Elizabeth River.

Shrimp and oysters tend to thrive, as well.

Research suggests manatee populations — more often associated with Florida waters — will gradually double over the next 50 years, and sea cows will move north as water temperatures warm in South Florida. This is due to threats to seagrass (manatee food) and a rise in “red tide,” a toxic form of algae, according to a 2017 report from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Eliza Noe, eliza.noe@virginiamedia.com

The advisory affected areas at the end of South Resort Road by the James T. Wilson Fishing Pier and the Buckroe Beach Park and pavilion. Samples collected on July 23, 2024, by the Hampton Health District showed that bacteria levels in the water exceeded the state water quality standard.

The Virginia Department of Health measures public waters regularly for enterococci bacteria during the warmer months. Enterococci bacteria are a group of organisms used to measure fecal contamination in recreational waters. While they do not cause illness, the health department reports that their presence is “closely correlated to the presence of other disease-causing organisms.”

People swimming or playing in waters with higher bacteria levels have an increased risk of developing gastrointestinal illness, often caused by swallowing the water.

Signs were posted in the affected area

Gavin Stone contributed to this report.

Eliza Noe, eliza.noe@virginiamedia.com

The advisory was issued Wednesday after tests showed that bacteria levels did not meet state water quality standards. Retested results show bacteria levels have returned to a safe level in water near the Neptune Statue and boardwalk in the popular tourist area.

The Virginia Department of Health measures public waters regularly for enterococci bacteria during the warmer months. Enterococci bacteria are a group of organisms used to measure fecal contamination in recreational waters. While they do not cause illness, the health department reports that their presence is “closely correlated to the presence of other disease-causing organisms.”

People swimming or playing in waters with higher bacteria levels have an increased risk of developing gastrointestinal illness, often caused by swallowing the water.

Swimming and wading are now allowed.

Eliza Noe, eliza.noe@virginiamedia.com

In a study published last week, researchers tested 13 sharks off the coast of Rio de Janeiro and found that all had traces of cocaine in their liver and muscle tissues. The levels of cocaine found in these sharks were reported to be as much as 100 times higher than in previously observed marine life.

“We were actually dumbfounded,” said Rachel Ann Hauser Davis, a co-author of the study and a biologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil. “We were excited in a bad way, but it’s a novel report. It’s the first time this data has ever been found for any top predator.”

This was the first study to analyze cocaine in sharks, following various studies on smaller species, including mollusks, crustaceans and even eels. All 13 sharks examined were found to have unfiltered cocaine in much higher concentrations than in previous studies on other animals, indicating chronic exposure to the drug.

But the study examined only a small sample, leaving many questions about whether the exposure harms the sharks or the humans who eat them.

The study in Brazil was conceived earlier this year after researchers discovered high levels of cocaine in the rivers that form Rio de Janeiro’s watershed. Other marine experts had looked into whether sharks in the Gulf of Mexico were ingesting cocaine from the numerous packages lost or dumped in the waters in a 2023 documentary titled “Cocaine Sharks,” which served as an inspiration for the title of last week’s study.

The team of biologists from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation — an organization affiliated with Brazil’s Ministry of Health — were particularly interested in testing top predators inhabiting these watersheds. Having previously conducted tests on sharks for other contaminants, they sent to a lab samples of the Brazilian sharpnose — a relatively small species of shark from Rio de Janeiro’s coastal waters often consumed by locals.

Hauser Davis said there were several hypotheses as to how cocaine found its way to the marine creatures, including illegal labs refining cocaine or cocaine packages lost or dumped by traffickers. But she believes these account for only a small amount of the drug found in the ocean.

“We feel that the major source would be excretion through urine and feces from people using cocaine,” she said. Most wastewater treatment plants worldwide cannot effectively filter these substances, leading to their release into the ocean.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

“The Navy conducted an investigation into the events from last spring,” according to Ted Brown, co-director of media operations/installations and environmental public affairs officer. “The waste that washed ashore was confirmed to have been from USS George H.W. Bush. Appropriate action was taken as a result of the investigation and Sailors [sic] from the ship participated in cleanup efforts.”

Previously, in May 2017, “processed plastic disks” from USS Whidbey Island washed ashore on the Outer Banks, Brown said in an email. The sailors found responsible following that investigation similarly “were held accountable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”

The 2017 event totaled approximately 860 pounds of garbage. About 43 disks were recovered, each with an average weight of 20 pounds, according to Brown.

“The Navy has very strict procedures for [the] processing of trash and waste while at sea,” Brown said.

“Plastic waste is not permitted to be released into the ocean,” he continued. “All plastic waste is separated onboard, then processed into disks which are stored onboard until they can be properly disposed of ashore.  No fuel or oil waste is permitted to be released into the ocean. Other trash (i.e. metal, paper, food waste) must be processed, and there are requirements for how far offshore the vessel must be to dispose of these trash substances. These requirements have been in place for decades.”

Aside from the Navy’s two confirmed incidents of ocean dumping impacting the Outer Banks, “I think that we have a very strong reputation and history of being extremely environmentally friendly,” Capt. Dave Hecht said in a phone call.

Cape Hatteras National Seashore reported last year that beginning on April 27, its staff and the Town of Nags Head observed “plastic, metal, paper and textile fabric debris washing up in low densities along approximately 25 miles of beaches, from Nags Head to the villages of Rodanthe, Waves and Salvo,” according to an April 30, 2023, National Park Service press release.

The park service reported the incident to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Sector North Carolina. Staff from Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, the Coast Guard, the Navy and the Town of Nags Head had been removing debris for three days at the time of the release and would continue to do so over the coming days, it said.

David Hallac, superintendent of the National Parks of Eastern North Carolina, said in a phone interview this month that staff called him at the time to report beach debris that was “all very similar—lots of flip-flops and Crocs, empty toiletry bottles like shampoo [and] food supplements like protein powder.”

Paper with “identifying marks,” Navy clothing and a Navy-issued boot clued them into the debris’ likely origin, Hallac said. The Navy “sent dozens of sailors down” to help clean up the beach once the park service got in touch with officials.

“Certainly truckloads of debris” were removed from the beach, Hallac said. His understanding was that the loose debris that washed up originated from bagged trash dumped off the ship.

“Two hundred fifty to 300 bags or sacks of trash may have been dumped over the edge of the vessel,” he said. “Presumably a lot of that sunk. A significant amount of debris did leave that ship…including things that are not normally dumped in the ocean, like plastics.”

On the north end of Hatteras Island, Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge experienced similar debris on its 12 miles of shoreline.

Staff on the beach doing nesting shorebird work last spring reported an “abundance” of plastic and trash, “almost that would be like your household waste-type plastic,” according to Dawn Washington, refuge manager for Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge and Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge.

The refuge had an interim manager at the time, but records indicated items like water bottles, containers for protein shakes and powder, shampoo and other toiletry bottles, laundry detergent and cleaning product bottles washed up, she said.

Meanwhile, Roberta Thuman, town of Nags Head spokesperson, said “very little” debris washed up in Nags Head last spring from the Navy ship, and she didn’t recall any washing up from the 2017 incident.

___

A larger issue with debris

Some trash can always be found on area beaches, from a variety of sources, according to both Hallac and Washington.

“You’re going to see stuff out there, either washing ashore anytime of the year or [from] people leaving it because people are allowed to be on the beach and not everybody does the right thing—pack their stuff out,” Washington said.

“We do have debris washing up every day from offshore,” Hallac said, “from a variety of land-based and marine-based sources.”

Ocean dumping for land-generated waste was common worldwide until its “harmful impacts” became more widely known in the 1970s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website.

The Outer Banks Surfrider Foundation partnered with several northern towns in Dare County years ago to coordinate regular beach cleanups through the Adopt-A-Beach program.

This year, for the first time, the National Park Service launched its own Adopt-a-Beach program for its 75 miles of coastline.

Washington, who became refuge manager in December, started organizing monthly beach cleanups this year. The next one is slated for Aug. 1 at 10 a.m. Interested volunteers can meet participating staff at the Pea Island refuge’s visitor center, located at 14500 N.C. 12 in Rodanthe.

Hallac encourages visitors and residents to do their part to keep beaches clean, but to call the park service if any trash isn’t immediately identifiable as safe to clean up.

“Sometimes we find things that are actually hazardous,” Hallac said. During his tenure, fuel containers, flares, “training bombs” and torpedoes have been found on the beach.