Photo: Katherine Hafner/WHRO News. Retrieved from vpm.org
Standing on a boat bobbing off Tangier Island, James “Ooker” Eskridge points to a tall pole sticking out of the water. It’s several feet deep in the Chesapeake Bay, yards away from the shoreline.
But decades ago, it was a utility pole standing on a strip of beach, said the 65-year-old Eskridge. He recalls berry bushes growing there.
“It’s hard to imagine that you could pick blackberries down here,” he said. “It’s all underwater now.”
Eskridge is the mayor of Tangier, one of the last inhabited islands in the Chesapeake Bay. He’s gotten used to explaining the massive changes happening here.
That’s because Tangier faces an existential threat. Erosion and sea-level rise compounded by sinking land have gobbled up more than two-thirds of its land mass since 1850. The town’s now predicted to morph into uninhabitable wetlands within a few decades.
Leaders on the island, and at the state and federal levels, are now racing to save it.