By UNC College of Arts and Sciences
James P. Collins, a doctoral student in city and regional planning, spent the summer Down East interviewing North Carolina residents about chronic coastal flooding.
James P. Collins will never forget the night he boarded a working shrimp boat on Adams Creek, a tributary of the Neuse River in northern Carteret County. The captain put down his nets for about 15 minutes, then pulled up over 6,000 pounds of shrimp.
“We spent the next five or six hours picking through shrimp — the whole deck was covered,” he said. “I really got a sense of why commercial fishing comes up so often in local conversations and why people want to continue to make a living that way.”
Collins, a doctoral student in city and regional planning, spent the summer in the coastal communities east of Beaufort in Carteret County known as “Down East.” He interviewed residents about the chronic coastal flooding that happens outside of major storm events — also known as “sunny day” or high-tide flooding. With local sea-level rise, land subsidence and development increasing in coastal areas, the frequency of flooding along low-lying properties and roadways is also growing.