MANTEO — More awareness. Safer swims.
Dare County Emergency Management’s “Love the Beach, Respect the Ocean” campaign has worked toward these goals since 2018 and has now been recognized as a success on the national level.
The International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) awarded Dare County Emergency Management the 2023 USA Preparedness Award for its “positive impact on beach safety,” community collaboration and the team’s “willingness to share the successful model without proprietary restrictions,” according to a Nov. 28 news release.
The Preparedness Award recognizes efforts for “activities such as training, public awareness, education and outreach to promote personal and family readiness, as well promoting physical mitigation actions that can reduce disaster damage by the public or public entities,” according to the award description.
The campaign is a joint effort on the part of county emergency personnel, all six Dare County municipalities and their respective ocean rescue agencies, the National Park Service, local nonprofits and other local organizations and businesses, according to the release.
“Our goal is to make sure everybody goes home safe,” Dare County Emergency Management Director Drew Pearson said of the campaign.
Pearson accepted the award during the IAEM’s annual conference, which took place Nov. 3-9 in Long Beach, California.
He said he was honored the campaign was selected from among 14 nominees nationally, but he was adamant that the campaign’s success is because of community-wide efforts.
“It’s a humbling experience to be selected for an award that has that much reach,” Pearson said. “It’s even greater to bring it home and present it to the folks that actually made it happen.”
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Educating about nature’s risks
Ocean hazards include rip currents, shorebreak and longshore currents, Pearson said.
“Rip currents are the third most deadly weather-related hazard in the U.S. and have needlessly claimed lives in Dare County over the years,” according to a Nov. 29 county video announcing the award.
Rip currents account for 80% of beach rescues in the country, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website.
Pearson said he doesn’t want to scare people away from enjoying the ocean, but to note the vastly different environment from a pool that it presents.
The campaign’s website, www.LoveTheBeachRespectTheOcean.com, contains informational videos — including how to avoid rip currents, heat stroke and sneaker waves — and lists lifeguarded beach locations across Dare County and Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
The campaign also includes public service announcements on local radio stations and posters and informational flyers at local businesses.
Through the campaign website’s link to www.DareNC.com/alerts, people can sign up to receive daily beach conditions emails and other local alerts. People can also text “OBX beach conditions” to 77295 to receive daily beach conditions texts.
The program is always seeking to grow its business partnerships, he noted. Duck Donuts has been a partner for years, offering a free donut to each person who signs up for beach conditions text alerts.
Subscribers to text and email beach conditions alerts totaled about 5,000 in 2018, and this summer reached a peak of 15,200 people, according to Pearson.
“When I ask people if they know about the program they go, ‘Yeah! Yeah, it’s great,’” he said.
He and Emergency Management Planner James Wooten pull the information from the National Weather Service’s daily forecasts for surf, tides and rip currents.
The goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to check how risky conditions are before they head to the beach — pushing information to beachgoers instead of hoping they’ll pull it themselves.
“We’ve found if you have to go looking for something — and you have to look hard for it — somebody’s who’s coming down on vacation isn’t going to do that before they decide to go to the beach,” Pearson said.
The alerts are for everyone, he stressed.
“People that have lived here, surfed here and grown up here … they’re already in tune with their environment better, but we have a lot of new residents that may not be as in tune,” Pearson said. “We hope they’re taking advantage of it as well.”
He said each campaign video emphasizes, “Live like a local: Love the beach, respect the ocean.”
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Campaign launch
The initiative launched during an especially tragic year, 2018, when Dare County was the site of over a tenth of the deaths — 10 of 97 — attributed to ocean hazards nationally.
One of those deaths especially upset the local community: A 4-year-old boy named Wesley who was swept out to sea while walking the beach in Kitty Hawk with his mother while on vacation.
In 2017, Dare County had seen three deaths caused by ocean hazards, and there were eight in 2016.
Finding exact data on ocean deaths is difficult, according to Pearson, as there is “no repository that is clean and across multiple jurisdictions.”
It is also nearly impossible to determine how many deaths may be circumstantial, compared to those directly caused by ocean hazards.
Some people “maybe shouldn’t be going into the water at their stage in life and in the conditions, even on a beautiful day with cold water,” Pearson noted. “There may not be a rip current that makes them go into cardiac arrest. It could just be their stage in life and (them) going into shock.”
Still, from Pearson’s numbers of total deaths due to ocean hazards, fewer have taken place since the campaign began.
In 2019, four people died from ocean hazards in Dare County, including a NOAA employee in Duck.
Two deaths were recorded in 2020, and zero in 2021, Pearson said.
One death happened in 2022 when a 37-year-old went swimming at midnight with a friend, he said.
This year, three drownings occurred over a four-day period in September. Each of those visitors had swum at a time of elevated ocean danger associated with the effects of Tropical Storm Idalia.
The campaign ties back into the role of emergency management, according to Pearson. “One of the threats we want to mitigate is the loss of life from the ocean.”
Ocracoke Island is in Hyde County but is part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore and is also included in the campaign. Most of the forecasts for Ocracoke and Hatteras Island are the same, he said, and they all come out of the same forecasting office, located in Morehead City, North Carolina.
Currituck County and north receive forecasts from the Wakefield, Virginia, office.
Pearson said he’s frequently asked why the campaign doesn’t include Currituck’s beaches, but responds that Currituck County has its own campaign for the Currituck Outer Banks.
“The partnership between Currituck and Dare is strong, but they have their own program,” he said.
