“There were boats and piers and propane tanks littering the road, and huge mounds of marsh grass and vegetation that the storm brought with it.”Īydlett parked his truck near the entrance of the battered road, and he and his wife headed off on foot toward their house-a cedar-shingled prefab built in 1974 on four-foot stilts. “You couldn’t even drive down Bay Drive,” Aydlett recalls. The water that had piled up along the western shore of the sound began rushing back eastward…right toward the Aydletts’ neighborhood. What had been a coastal inlet now looked like a massive empty ditch lined with mud.īut hours later, that all changed. While the Aydletts were driving around, winds from Hurricane Irene had shifted from the north to the west and stalled for several hours, forcing the water westward and draining the sound. “We were riding around the bypass and all the sudden we could see that the storm literally blew all the water out of the sound,” says Aydlett in his calm southern drawl. As they approached Albemarle Sound minutes later, Aydlett’s stomach tightened. The towering dunes along the oceanfront row of stilt homes weren’t being inundated, and there was no storm surge flirting with the main road the way it often does during hurricanes.Īydlett and his wife walked the beach for a while with a group of friends before climbing back into their truck and heading back over to the sound side of the island to check out conditions there.
If there was a hurricane going on that day, you might not have known it from standing on the beach. To Aydlett, 65-mile-per-hour winds didn’t seem like a huge deal-he had seen far worse in the two decades he’d been living there and making a living building seawalls and putting houses on stilts. When they got to the beach off Ocean Bay Boulevard around noon, the seas were heavy, but the storm had already been downgraded to a category 1. Aydlett and his wife, Dana, drove their Chevy Avalanche pickup from their house on the Albemarle Sound side of the island in Kill Devil Hills to the Atlantic Ocean side to see what kind of muscle the storm was bringing. It was Sunday of Labor Day weekend 2011, and Hurricane Irene had made landfall on the North Carolina coast the previous morning. At least that’s what they call it in North Carolina’s Outer Banks when a storm’s barreling in, the tourists run for the hills, and locals take advantage of the day off from work to see friends and drive around watching Mother Nature do her thing.
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