Forecasting Our Future: Rodanthe homes will continue to be taken by the sea
With multiple homes already collapsing in Rodanthe, existing homeowners are looking to protect their current structures, either by raising them up or moving them entirely.
"We're going to see more houses likely succumb to the power of the sea. These won't be the last," David Hallac, superintendent of National Parks of Eastern NC, said.
Oceanfront homeowners in Rodanthe are hoping to avoid seeing images like these of houses collapsing and joining a club of those in the four homes that have already collapsed in the last two years.
"Those houses collapsed mostly as a result of eroding beaches, which eroded the sand under which the pilings were helping to stabilize the house in the sand. That erosion rate in Rodanthe is quite high, we've measured it between three and four meters per year. So, you're talking about maybe 10 feet of beach that is lost every year," Hallac said.
Ten feet may not seem like a lot, but as time passes, it adds up. And it brings the Atlantic Ocean closer and closer to homeowners' front doors.
"I think it's important to see those not as, 'What did those property owners do wrong?' [or] 'Why did they build there?' This is a problem that is ongoing. When most of these property owners purchased that property, they probably had hundreds of feet of beach in front of them," Reide Corbett, Coastal Studies Institute executive director, said.
One homeowner told WXII their home has already flooded several times, to the point where they expect it when severe storms come.
House-moving companies have been busy here and more and more homes are going up on stilts or pushed back further from the ocean.
"We're doing everything we can with house owners to see if they can take proactive action to stabilize, move or remove their homes. If that is not done, it's likely more homes will collapse," Hallac said.
Though it is a problem in Rodanthe, now experts warn this area is one of the few that can still handle the increased risks.
"It is at sea level, obviously, and that's one of the fewer places where you have higher income people at flood risk. That's not the case for most of the rest of the state," Frank Lopez, extension director of the NC Sea Grant, said.
The homes that already have collapsed are causing headaches for more folks than just the homeowners themselves.
"The broken-up debris from the home was carried by the waves and currents, some cases, more than a dozen miles from the collapse site. In tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of pieces of debris, so the cleanup was very significant and as a matter of fact, it's still ongoing now," Hallac said.
Several homes in this Rodanthe neighborhood are up for sale and there is uncertainty about the value of the oceanfront property that is here today and could be gone tomorrow.
"Property owners should be able to find information about the vulnerability of their property easily. And we should be looking for ways to make sure these property owners [will] be less vulnerable moving forward. We should use these houses that have fallen as an example of, 'Where did we go wrong?' and, 'What can we do moving forward to make sure we don't have the same problem happening?'" Corbett said.
