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Houses are falling into the ocean on North Carolina's Outer Banks

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

The destruction that Hurricane Helene left behind in North Carolina's western mountains has overshadowed another climate-related disaster at the other end of the state. Rising sea levels there are causing houses to fall into the ocean at an accelerating pace. It's a slow-moving disaster with implications for coastal communities around the country. Jay Price of member station WUNC reports on North Carolina's Outer Banks.

(SOUNDBITE OF OCEAN WAVES)

JAY PRICE, BYLINE: Rodanthe is among more than half a dozen communities scattered along the 70-mile-long Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Houses here are built on pilings high above the sand. But where the seashore's superintendent, Dave Hallac, was standing on a recent day, they're no longer out of reach of the Atlantic.

DAVE HALLAC: Before those three houses collapsed, we had a house collapsed here on August 16. So it's been four houses just within the last couple of the months.

PRICE: Bringing the total to 10 collapsed houses in the tiny village in the past four years. And more are poised to fall in any time because the beach is washing away. That erosion has been turbocharged by rising sea levels fueled by human-caused climate change. Hallac pointed to one house now at sea, totally surrounded by water. Nearby other houses have waves wash under them at high tide. More and more, the problem on the minds of officials like Hallac isn't how to save such houses. It's how to remove them before they collapse into the sea and leave leaking septic systems and scattered debris for miles down the beach.

HALLAC: Hi. How are you?

TIM MANBEVERS: Good.

PRICE: Hallac's uniform had drawn the attention of Tim and Heather Manbevers, late-season tourists from Ohio visiting Nags Head, about 30 miles north. They'd driven down just to see the place where houses are falling in. Tim Manbevers gestured at the house surrounded by water and asked the question a lot of people have.

HEATHER MANBEVERS: Why wouldn't they?

T MANBEVERS: I was just wondering why they'd just let them go into the oceans instead of...

HALLAC: Because it's expensive to tear them down.

H MANBEVERS: Really?

HALLAC: I'm guessing most of them would rather wait for it to collapse, and then they would be able to get some reimbursement from their insurance company.

PRICE: Otherwise, the owners may have to pay out of their own pocket for tearing down a house before it falls. Rodanthe isn't the only place where key buffers of dune and beach have been eaten away by erosion. More than 750 homes along North Carolina's coast are now considered threatened, according to a report released in August by the state and the National Park Service.

TANCRED MILLER: So we're looking at, you know, several hundred structures that could be put at risk due to a major storm or a major erosion event that could happen pretty much any time.

PRICE: Tancred Miller is director of the state Division of Coastal Management, and like Hallac, was part of the group that developed the report. It made recommendations for ways the local, state and federal governments could remove houses before they fall. But there's little funding for any of it.

MILLER: The bottom line is there really is no silver bullet.

PRICE: The problem looms in other states, too, says Rob Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.

ROB YOUNG: The homes that are being lost in Rodanthe are a harbinger for things to come on shorelines across the East Coast and the Gulf Coast of the United States of America.

PRICE: Those regions are especially vulnerable to climate-driven sea level rise. He says the nation is far from coming to terms with the idea that so many structures will have to come down, let alone coming up with long-term plans and funding for what he calls a managed retreat from the sea.

YOUNG: We cannot hold every shoreline in place for forever. You know, at the moment, we are almost literally trying to build one beach from Saco, Maine, to Padre Island, Texas, by pumping sand and doing what we call beach nourishment projects.

PRICE: Young says the wisest course in Rodanthe may be to find a way to buy out the most threatened homes - something the county is trying to do now - while working to put systemic fixes in place like those recommended in the report.

YOUNG: What we're learning from Rodanthe is that we don't have a great approach in place for how we can keep these homes from toppling into the sea.

PRICE: But whether we manage that retreat from the water or let it happen chaotically on its own, it will happen. The sea, he says, is coming.

For NPR News, I'm Jay Price, in Rodanthe, North Carolina.

(SOUNDBITE OF STATIK SELEKTAH SONG, "TIME") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Jay Price
Jay Price has specialized in covering the military for nearly a decade.