Experts: Hurricane could annihilate the OBX

In "Deep Impact," a meteor screams toward Earth, plunges into the Atlantic off of Cape Hatteras, sending a tidal wave toward the Eastern Seaboard that will eventually make its way to the Ohio Valley region, virtually (I assume) destroying much of the Eastern U.S. coast.

Now hurricane experts say that a major hurricane could have devastating affects on North Carolina's Outer Banks.

" 'If we had a Katrina-sized storm, 75 percent of these islands could be gone,' said Stan Riggs, a geologist at East Carolina University who has studied the Outer Banks for four decades. 'You can count on it cleaning the clock,'" Riggs told the Associated Press.

Dozens of hurricanes have hit the Outer Banks since the English landed on Roanoke Island in 1585. Today, though only about 35,000 people live here permanently, each year some 5 million visit the islands that jut out into the Gulf Stream as if they were inviting Atlantic hurricanes to strike.

In the place where the Wright brothers first took to skies, they spend the summer in vacation and rental homes — some with a dozen bedrooms, private pools and elevators — that have a tax-assessed value of about $27 billion.

But Riggs and other scientists fear the right hurricane — an especially powerful storm packing a deep surge — could drown the islands with sea water, smash buildings with 25-foot waves and force map makers to redraw the state’s signature coastline.

Riggs said such a storm would break the chain of long, narrow islands into a perforated series of many smaller spots of sand. Instead of Pamlico Sound to the west, sailors would find Pamlico Bay. ...

Yet North Carolina’s Division of Emergency Management estimates that, even if a Category 5 hurricane turns toward the Outer Banks, several hundred defiant homeowners will try to ride the storm. Many will die as the violent weather destroys structures across the islands and carves several new inlets where land now stands up from the sea, said Orrin Pilkey, a professor emeritus of geology at Duke University. ...