Cape Hatteras Lighthouse Newspaper Articles

Reprinted by permission of The News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina

June 17, 1999

The News & Observer

A beacon for the curious

By Jerry Allegood; STAFF WRITER

Page: A1

BUXTON -- Explaining the relocation of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse to spectators sometimes sounds a little like a Dr. Seuss book.

Will they move it in a boat? No, the lighthouse will not float.

Will they move it through the sky? No, the tower will not fly.

Tom Gibney, a ranger at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, hears all sorts of bright ideas as he patiently answers questions for visitors at the lighthouse site.

"Some people think they are going to come in and lift it with a helicopter," he said. Others imagine it loaded onto a flatbed truck, or dismantled and moved in sections.

For the record, when the move begins today or Friday the historic beacon will be placed on steel rollers and rails and pushed with powerful hydraulic jacks. It will move so slowly - 70 to 100 feet a day - that it will barely seem to move at all. re than 1,000 by midmorning Wednesday - visit the site each day to get one last glimpse of the vanishing vista of Cape Hatteras versus the Atlantic.

Jay Anderson of Alexandria, Va., took photographs of his wife, Betsy, and two young sons standing on a chunk of granite with the lighthouse in the background.

"We wanted to see it again before it moved and have a memory of it beside the ocean," Anderson said.

Many want to see just how a 4,800-ton brick structure is moved over more than a half-mile of soft sand. They pepper rangers and volunteers at the Cape Hatteras National Seashore with the same questions over and over and over.

Gibney, standing on a deck overlooking the moving route, said the most common questions are when is it moving, why, and how far. (The answers: The horizontal move is imminent, to protect it from erosion, and 2,900 feet.)

"Has the lighthouse moved at all yet?" asks Clayton Smith, a tourist from Canton, Ohio.

"It has moved - up," Gibney answers. He explains that the lighthouse has been lifted about 5 feet.

Engineering explanations give way to the imaginations of village entrepreneurs. Tourists sport T-shirts showing a lighthouse with legs strolling on the beach and the observation, "I swear I saw it move."

Another design depicts the spiral-striped lighthouse in the back of a little red wagon. Nearby is a change-of-address form with the new address "2,900 feet to the southwest."

Even local residents such as Kevin McCabe, who oppose the relocation, have acknowledged the inevitable. His girlfriend designed a shirt with the neutral message, "History moves south." When the lighthouse is moved, it will be visible between treetops from the deck of McCabe's home, but he prefers the place on the beach where the lighthouse has stood since 1870.

"It's hard to build history in a new spot," he said.

Artists and photographers have spent six months recording the vista for posterity and posters. Buxton photographer Scott Geib specializes in artistic shots of the lighthouse in unusual lighting, such as the black spirals visible through fog or the lighthouse shown in three lights: moonlight, sunlight and its own beam.

But he has also found a market for 4-by-6 prints that show phases of the relocation. Visitors pay $2.50 each for shots of workers cutting away the granite foundation, the lifting of the structure on jacks, or the new site with the lighthouse in the distance.

Park service volunteer Mike Booher probably has the record for most photographs of the relocation - 14,000 slides and counting. By the time the lighthouse is settled in its new home, he figures he will have snapped 21,000 frames. Booher will give the park service at least 2,800 shots as a record of the project. He plans to use others for a book.

In exchange for volunteering his time and the film, Booher has access to all phases of the work. He has crawled under the lighthouse to photograph workers wielding jack hammers, climbed out on a narrow ladder leaning against the outside and hiked up the tower dozens of times. He and his wife, Sally, observed their 40th wedding anniversary on the lighthouse balcony June 5 while workers below activated equipment that lifted the lighthouse about a foot.

"I don't expect to be around anything like this in my life again," said Booher, 58. "This is unreal. It's kind of like being in a movie."

A former resident of the Hatteras Island community of Avon who moved to Asheville in the mid-1980s, he volunteered to shoot photographs along the Blue Ridge Parkway and in other national parks before taking on the lighthouse. Booher, a short, feisty man with a penchant for big cigars, is an encyclopedia of information about the move, rattling off official and arcane statistics. He can tell you how many jackhammer tips broke on the granite foundation - 48 - and how long it took to complete digging out around the base - 81 days.

The movers and shakers with International Chimney Co., a Buffalo, N.Y., company that received a $9.8 million contract for the relocation, said they have planned for contingencies that might threaten the historic light.

For instance, the track toward the new site is lower than the surrounding terrain so a storm that causes overwash will tend to wash sand in, not out. If a hurricane blows in while the move is under way, the structure will be lowered and the rollers locked down, said Joe Jakubik, project manager for ICC.

He said the first 850 feet of the move will be critical because that's when the ocean will be closest.

Booher is so confident of the work that he plans to be in the balcony when the lighthouse moves. "This time next week this sucker will be a ways down the road," he said.

### The online version of this story includes a link to a Web camera that will show the moving of the lighthouse. Find it at www.news-observer.com

Section: News
Edition: Final
Estimated Printed Pages: 4

Index Terms:
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse
NC
coast
Buxton

Caption:
c photo; c graphic; Moving the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse; Woody Vondracek/Staff

Merchants in Buxton are capitalizing on Cape Hatteras Lighthouse's move.

Staff Photo By Chuck Liddy

Copyright 1999 by The News & Observer Pub. Co.

Record Number: 1999167036