SAVING TANGIER

Tangier Island

Tangier Island – America’s “soft crab capital” – is in the middle of Chesapeake Bay, about an hour’s boat ride from the Virginia mainland, rises only a few feet above the waterline and has been slowly eroded by the sea since it was first colonized in the 1600s.

Now its 500 remaining residents are desperate for federal support because it is on the verge of disappearing.

When they asked for support from Donald Trump to help them build a wall – a sea wall, this time, to hold back the eroding waves – the President called them to discuss the situation (6/14).

The story about Trump’s call prompted a barrage of hate from outsiders. Their crime, apparently, was to blame the island’s plight on natural erosion and not rising sea levels caused by man-made climate change.  And voting 87% for Trump.

According to CBS (7/07).:

The president’s call triggered other calls to the island – but these were different. Some condemned the people here for seemingly agreeing with the president’s controversial view of climate change. He has called it a hoax.

 

One business received a message that said, “You voted for Donald f***** Trump haha oh god I hope your whole f***** island sinks.”

 

“It was disheartening and it was upsetting,” said Laurie Thomas. She works for the town and said one man called to say that she and the people on the island deserved to die.

Their other crime was to be the kind of independent, hard-working, honest, all-American types – Tangier Island harvests more of the bay’s prized blue crabs, 13 percent, than any other town in Virginia – who inevitably voted for Donald Trump.

Eighty-seven percent of Tangier Island’s residents voted for the Donald. He noticed and in June spoke to the mayor James “Ooker” Eskridge who drew the president’s attention to the island’s plight.

“We need help from the erosion. If it was just sea level rise that we were worried about, we would be in good shape,” Eskridge said.

Help looks like a rock wall.  One was built on the island’s western side in the 1980s and the erosion there stopped. Now, they say their only hope is a wall around the entire island—costing an estimated $20 to $30 million, which they don’t have.

They’d like Congress to approve the money and Mayor Eskridge thinks President Trump could help cut through all the red tape.

“He’s gonna cut back on the time it takes to do studies for these projects — we don’t have that time to play with,” Eskridge said.

He thinks if Mr. Trump told Congress he wanted to save the island, it would be saved.

Oh – and the islanders are, of course, right to blame erosion and not “climate change” for their island’s plight.

As Paul Homewood shows in some detail here :

Tide gauges in the area, such Sewell Point, Norfolk, confirm that sea levels have been steadily rising for a long time, long before recent rises in emissions of CO2.

The rate of rise is 4.6mm/yr, nearly three times the global rate. But there is a very good reason for this – the land is sinking.
The entire region is the site of the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater, caused by a comet or meteor some 35 million years ago. As a result the land has been subsiding ever since. Estimates by proper scientists suggest it is sinking at a rate of up to 3mm/yr.

Clearly the residents of Tangier Island didn’t get the memo about how to play the global warming game. The rules are simple: if you live on an island – see the Maldives; Tuvalu; etc – you claim it’s about to disappear because of man-made climate change and then wait for the money to flood in.

Now they are getting hate mail for their honesty, and their support for Trump.

A young lady from the island named Jenny Roberts has made a moving documentary called Pieces of Tangier.  Here is the trailer:

This is a precious place of true Americana.  It deserves the support of Congress.

To help yourself, here is the island’s GoFundMe page.  There is also a Save Tangier Island Facebook page.  There is no question that Tangier Island is worth saving.

British writer James Delingpole is the author of such “fantastically entertaining” books as 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy, and Welcome To Obamaland: I’ve Seen Your Future And It Doesn’t Work