Bill Lohmann: Tangier Island fights for its very existence

As the sun peeked over the crab houses of Tangier's harbor the other morning, James "Ooker" Eskridge steered his boat toward the open water of the Chesapeake Bay to collect his daily catch of blue crabs.

On the way to check his scores of crab pots, Eskridge pointed to a deserted patch of low-lying marshland that once had been home to a vibrant community called Uppards, which until the 1930s had been dotted with homes and connected to Tangier's main island by footbridges.

Now a few gravestones are the most notable pieces of Uppards that remain. The bay has claimed most everything else — the result of the region's rising sea levels and sinking land — and it's creeping ever closer to washing the whole place away.

Tangier itself, sadly, could be next.

Other once-inhabited islands in the bay are already gone or slipping under the water, so I asked Eskridge, who is Tangier's mayor and who loves the place and his work as a waterman as much as anyone, if he can bear to consider if the island will exist in 50 years.

"I don't know what to say," he replied. "That's in God's hands. If he wants the island here, then nothing can take it away. If he doesn't really want it here, I don't know."

You'll have to pardon the residents of Tangier for feeling besieged. They feel unfairly targeted by government regulations, particularly those involving the crabbing industry, which watermen believe are largely to blame for their economic woes. Mother Nature looks to be an even more formidable foe.

The facts are this: Tangier is losing jobs and population — the island once had more than 1,000 residents but now has fewer than 500 — and land itself. By one estimate, the low-lying island, which is more marsh than solid ground anyway, is shrinking at the rate of 9 acres a year.

But the people of Tangier, known for their deep faith and stubborn independence, aren't going without a fight. But they need help. A stone seawall constructed years ago halted erosion on the west side of the island and has so far saved Tangier's airstrip, but the rest of the island remains unprotected and vulnerable.

In recent years, the Army Corps of Engineers has proposed a seawall extension and a series of breakwaters, but funding for those projects, totaling more than $12 million, is not available, and no one knows when or if it ever will be.

That irritates Eskridge and other Tangiermen, who say the island now needs the help of the government; they figure they've earned it.

In World War II, for example, the tiny island sent 139 men into service; nine didn't come home. Eskridge said he just can't understand how the U.S. government can finance the construction of bridges and roads in nations such as Iraq but can't find the money to preserve an American town with 400 years of history and tradition. He half-jokingly suggested that if watermen could gain endangered species status, the money might come pouring in.

Meantime, Eskridge and Rep. Scott Rigell, R-2nd, who represents Tangier, met in the spring to float the idea of sinking old barges off the coast of Tangier — not terribly unlike the World War II-era concrete ships that were partially sunk to form a breakwater (as well as a habitat, as it turned out, for fish and birds) off the shore of what is now Kiptopeke State Park, near the southern point of the Eastern Shore. The barges would be donated at no cost to taxpayers, Rigell said.

The paperwork for that proposal is in the works, Eskridge said. The Corps of Engineers, in coordination with other state and federal agencies, would have to approve a permit for the project, said a spokesman for the corps. Rigell has said he hopes there will be no government interference, and a spokeswoman for the congressman said last week that he remains optimistic the barges might soon be in place.

However, all of the efforts to control erosion might matter little, said Carlton H. Hershner Jr., director of the Center for Coastal Resources Management for the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

"They can put whatever they want along the shoreline," Hershner said Friday. "They're all going underwater eventually."

Sea level has been rising, very slowly, for the past 5,000 years at the rate of about a foot per century, Hershner said, because of a combination of climate change and local geology. In other words, the water's coming up, and the land is going down.

That's a deadly combination for Tangier, which sits barely above sea level as it is and already with some regularity finds itself covered with water during bad storms or exceedingly high tides. If all of that wasn't bad enough, Hershner said current scientific studies project that sea levels could begin to rise even more rapidly.

"They're going to be underwater certainly within a hundred years," he said, "and maybe within 50 or less."

That's a pretty sobering prediction. Some would suggest the good people of Tangier ought to just up and move and start over on higher ground, and there certainly is merit in that logic. But put yourself in their boots. Tangier is not merely their current address, but for many it has been their family's home for generations. It's where they were born and where they intend to die. It's not easy to give up on a place like that.