Imagine being the owner of a nice oceanfront home that ends up on a YouTube video as it collapses into the Atlantic. The unfortunate owner declined to speak with The Washington Post, but a neighbor whose house met the same fate in the unnamed storm, said, “It was a shock. I didn’t realize how vulnerable it was.” He had bought the coastal retreat just nine months earlier.
The two properties were in Rodanthe, North Carolina, the easternmost town in the Tar Heel State. Another home there was wiped out February 9. That had prompted Dare County and National Park Service (NPS) officials to urge other homeowners along the coast to either move or remove their homes before they met a similar fate. Officials identified 11 other homes that were in danger of collapsing. (The area is part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore.)
These weren’t the first homes in North Carolina to be swallowed up by the Atlantic, and they won’t be the last. Since the early 1980s, the sea level along some parts of the state has risen by roughly three inches, according to NASA.
Reacting to the latest house collapses, David Hallac, superintendent of the national seashore, told The Post, “What was surprising to me is that they lasted as long as they did. This is a rapidly eroding area … [and] I don’t have any reason to believe that erosion will stop. If anything, the scientists I’ve spoken with and publications I’ve read suggest that erosion will be exacerbated by sea level rise.”
Fortunately, no one was injured, but debris from the two homes is now scattered up and down the national seashore and will likely require an extensive cleanup process, Sarah Kuta wrote in Smithsonian.
Patricelli, a Californian who hadn’t spent a single night in the house, had teamed up with his sister to buy it for $550,000. According to a CNN story, coastal erosion in the United States costs around half a billion dollars each year in the form of deteriorated structures and land that is lost to the rising ocean.
Of course, North Carolina is not alone. Oceanographer John Englander, author of Moving to Higher Ground and a member of our Advisory Board, wrote, “At present the rate of global average sea level rise is about five millimeters a year, roughly a quarter of an inch. The rate is now triple what it was last century. And it’s accelerating. On the current path it could rise a meter higher in the next fifty years.”
The threat is abundantly clear to occupants of 337 summer cottages at Roy Carpenter’s Beach in Rhode Island. Their treasured piece of coastline is eroding faster than any other part of the state — an average of 3.3 feet a year. In 2012 the community took an indirect hit from Hurricane Sandy, which damaged 11 homes and washed three of them out to sea.
Tony Loura, who has summered in Roy Carpenter’s Beach for almost 20 years, estimates that he used to be 1,000 feet from the water. Now, the ocean is only about 150 feet away. “Every time they say there’s a storm, I get worried,” he told The Post. “Some residents want the beach’s owners to fight off the sea. They think they should build a sea wall, they should bring in tons of sand. Last year, they spent a lot of money on sand. Guess what: It’s all gone.”
For a variety of reasons, The Post’s Brady Dennis noted, Americans continue to flock to disaster-prone areas of the country, despite growing risks of floods, fires and other catastrophes. And as sea levels rise, storms intensify and heat waves grow hotter, even places that once seemed relatively free of risk could face more serious threats to health and homes.
“It’s important for people to recognize that coastal systems are feeling the effects of sea level rise and climate change today,” said Reide Corbett, a coastal oceanographer at East Carolina University and executive director at the Coastal Studies Institute. “It’s not something that’s a decade off. It’s something that is happening.”