USA - On The Brink: What happens when erosion, rising seas, a national park and a beach community collide?

Shortly after sunrise in mid-January, I parked my car behind a few pickup trucks on South Shore Drive in the village of Rodanthe, North Carolina — one of seven villages on Hatteras Island. Wearing a lightweight jacket and shin-high yellow rubber boots, I walked past mounds of sand and piles of wood planks toward a house raised about 20 feet on temporary risers that looked like giant Jenga blocks. Workers busied themselves around the construction site, and in the background, trucks grunted and generators hummed, drowning out the sound of the Atlantic Ocean.

This cheery, aqua-colored house, with two stories and five bedrooms, belongs to Cindy Doughty, a retired nurse. She and her late husband were enthusiastic world travelers, but over the years, they had fallen in love with the simplicity and calm of the area. They kept returning, and two decades ago, the couple purchased their own place. Their vacation home, where they brought their kids (and later, their grandkids) looks out to Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which protects 75 miles of Atlantic coastline in the Outer Banks.

Doughty recalled how her family used to lug gear out a long boardwalk and over a dune to reach the surf. But over the years, the distance between the ocean and Doughty’s house shrank, and that’s when her troubles began. First, a storm blew out some stairs from the house; that was a relatively easy thing to fix. But in 2019, a hurricane came through and wiped out the entire dune between her house and the ocean.

“Once that was gone,” Doughty said, “water came up under the house with every storm.” In February 2022, a house on Ocean Drive, 300 yards to the north, collapsed into the water, hungry waves devouring the entire structure and then spitting two-by-fours, drywall, shingles, tar paper and furniture onto the shoreline for miles. Large chunks of concrete slammed into Doughty’s house and broke the oceanside door. Then when two more homes fell a few months later, the detritus destroyed the back of her home. Water lines snapped, the pilings broke, and the house became uninhabitable.

Doughty had a seasonal job managing a clothing shop in Duck, about an hour away, so she slept in her boss’s guest room for several months. Some evenings, she returned to Rodanthe and sat in her home, alone. There wasn’t any electricity, but the moon reflected off the ocean and lit up the house. She thought about how she used to keep her bedroom sliding door open, the sound of the waves lulling her to sleep.

“This sounds silly, but I wanted to keep the house company,” Doughty said. “I know every detail of that house like I know the wrinkles on my face. It was heartbreaking to see it all hurt and busted up.” Yet she was luckier than most: The home was on a double lot, so she had room to shift it away from the water, like scooting back your beach towel as the tide comes in. Moving her house, she decided, was the only option.

I arrived in Rodanthe when Doughty was mid-move. I’d traveled there not only to talk to homeowners but also to learn more about the messy situation that washes up when coastal erosion, private homes and a national park cross paths. A warming climate — which is causing rising seas and more intense, frequent storms — has been catastrophic for coastal regions around the world. Here in the Outer Banks, a string of fragile barrier islands, the sea has been engulfing beach homes one by one, which is a nightmare for homeowners and a disaster for the local government and the National Park Service. Beaches covered with dangerous debris are terrible for wildlife, and viral videos of house collapses are awful for tourism. Even if most of the beach is unsullied, “if you’re in Iowa and you’re deciding about the Outer Banks and see news of 2 miles of Rodanthe covered with debris from fallen houses, you’re going to go somewhere else,” said Bobby Outten, the manager of Dare County, which stretches along 110 miles of the coast.

But the search for solutions has laid bare some inherent tensions between those with competing priorities. On the one hand, the Park Service is in the business of protecting this beautiful, beloved beach and the wildlife here — from hundreds of bird species to five endangered or threatened species of turtles. Because the shoreline has shifted so dramatically and the national seashore’s boundary is based in part on that shifting shoreline, it is likely that some Rodanthe homes in danger of collapse now partially or completely sit inside the national park site. Moving or removing the houses, which would please many environmentalists, likely would be the best way to protect the seashore.

On the other hand, many owners of imperiled homes are reluctant — or unable — to move their houses. They tend to prefer the idea of beach nourishment, an engineering feat and temporary fix that involves adding tons of sand to the eroding shoreline to protect residences.

Figuring out what to do will require answering some important questions: Where exactly are the national seashore boundaries today in relation to private property? What is an appropriate role for the Park Service, which once actively protected the coast from erosion? What are the responsibilities of homeowners, some of whom made the decision to buy oceanfront properties in recent years even though waves were pushing toward the houses and the low selling prices underscored how risky the investments were? Should the government or anyone else bail them out? By the time I arrived in Rodanthe, the tightknit village was consumed in a heated debate about all of this. As I looked at Doughty’s house, I began to understand the complexity of the situation.

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