Managing infrastructure along North Carolina’s Outer Banks is never easy. Remote, environmentally sensitive and continually reshaped by wind and waves, the course of the thin string of barrier islands is periodically altered by hurricanes and coastal storms. That, in turn, heightens the North Carolina Dept. of Transportation’s ongoing challenge of maintaining State Route 12, the sole highway providing access to villages dependent on beach-based tourism.
Some parts of the Outer Banks are changing faster than others, however, including an increasingly unstable and erosion-prone and overwash-susceptible section of Route 12 known as the “S curves,” just north of the village of Rodanthe. After years of trying to preserve the existing road with sandbag embankments and pavement rebuilds, NCDOT is bypassing the area for good with a $145-million elevated structure currently under construction by the design-build team of Flatiron Construction and RK&K.