Fencing in Avon — the dune-fencing rulebook in working order

Avon is where the dune line stops being scenery and becomes infrastructure. The village's oceanfront faces the open Atlantic with the whole fetch behind it, and the fence work that matters there is the kind the state's coastal rules were written for: sand fencing that builds dunes, under a specification that doubles as its own permit exemption.

The exemption and its condition. 15A NCAC 07K .0212 — sand fences exempt from CAMA major permit — sand fences installed and maintained to the coastal rule criteria are exempt from the CAMA major permit requirements as a listed class. On an Avon oceanfront lot that is the difference between a project that proceeds on specification and a project that waits at a desk, and the hinge is the same either way: the fence must actually meet the criteria, and it must stay maintained — damaged and unsecured sections are the owner's to remove on discovery, not to ignore.

The specification, in the numbers that matter on this strand. sand fence ≤ 5 feet, 1–1.5 inch slats — evenly spaced vertical slats about an inch to an inch and a half wide, wired together, standing no more than five feet, on posts within the stated dimensions. And 10-foot sections, 7-foot gaps — sections no longer than ten feet, gaps no less than seven feet, nothing on the wet sand, nothing more than ten feet waterward of the first line of stable vegetation, the frontal dune's toe, or the erosion escarpment. Those numbers are not suggestions tuned by taste; they are the state's design for a fence that traps sand without trapping turtles or trespassing on the public's beach.

What the numbers buy, in Avon terms specifically. A compliant sand fence slows the winter winds' sand load and drops it in place, year over year, into a dune that stands between the village's oceanfront and the next named storm — and the exemption means the work does not wait on a permit cycle. The same fence off-spec — too tall, too solid, too far seaward, left storm-damaged — is neither a dune builder in fact nor exempt in law, and on this stretch of island that distinction is the whole fence conversation.

The boundary of the subject, said plainly: this is the dune-fencing rulebook, not the whole rulebook. A privacy fence on an Avon lot is a different structure with different questions — the AEC definition, the CAMA permit, the village's own desk — and no verified exemption covers it. The posts of any fence here, dune fence included, owe the state locate notice — notice 3 working days before digging — before the first hole in the sand.

Oceanfront in Avon? Dune fencing built to the rule numbers is exempt, effective, and the best fence money buys on that beach. Call us — we build to the specification because on that strand the specification is the design.