Another North Carolina home collapses into the sea, the third this year

Yet another home has fallen into the sea in Rodanthe, North Carolina, the small community on a sliver of the Outer Banks that has been battered by fierce storms, rising seas and relentless erosion.

Officials said the unoccupied home at 23001 G.A. Kohler Ct. collapsed overnight into Friday. A small section of beach in the area already had been closed to the public because the house and several others nearby have been considered threatened for months. No injuries were reported. It is the third house that has fallen into the ocean in Rodanthe this year.

“Unfortunately, it is all too common these days,” David Hallac, superintendent of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, said in an interview. “I’m actually surprised it didn’t collapse sooner. It’s been perilously perched above the ocean for quite some time now.”

Given the wind and tides, the remnants of fallen homes can stretch for miles along the shoreline. Hallac said that already had happened Friday, with some debris drifting as far as five miles down the coast. The property’s owner already had lined up a contractor to remove the debris, officials said, and that work was expected to begin Friday.

This stretch of the North Carolina coast has long been known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” given the many shipwrecks that have taken place in its treacherous waters. But Rodanthe in recent years has emerged as its own sort of graveyard for homes that have been swallowed by the encroaching surf.

Friday’s collapse marks the eighth since 2020. It probably won’t be the last.

National Park Service officials said Friday that they are monitoring an adjacent house that also sustained damage overnight.

“When the house collapsed, it hit the next house and took out several of the pilings on the northern side of that house,” Hallac said. “Now that house is going to go at some point.”

Noah Gillam, the planning director for Dare County, detailed to the Washington Post in an email last month nine homes in Rodanthe that at the time had their power turned off and that local officials had tagged as unsafe. Five of those were on G.A. Kohler Court, including the home that collapsed Friday.

Gillam cautioned that the “unsafe” designation did not mean that all the homes are at risk of falling into the sea, and that some had their power turned off by the county because they could not meet requirements for maintaining a functioning septic system.

Still, the list hints at the vulnerability of homes in this Outer Banks community, home to some of the most rapid rates of erosion and sea level rise on the East Coast.

In recent years, numerous homeowners here have scrambled to lift and move their homes farther from the shoreline – often at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Others have raced to relocate their homes, only to run out of time.

The latest home collapse came amid a stormy week along the East Coast with higher-than-normal tides.

Early in the week, an unnamed storm swept ashore near the South Carolina-North Carolina border, producing a storm surge of 1 to 3 feet and washing over sections of Highway 12 along the Outer Banks. The storm also unleashed wind gusts topping 60 mph at the shore and dumped more than 20 inches of rain in Carolina Beach, North Carolina, which lies just south of Wilmington.

The deluge, which engulfed neighborhoods under feet of water, qualified as a 1,000-year rain event – or one so rare it has a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year. Even after the storm mostly dissipated, tides have remained above normal because of persistent winds blowing from the ocean into the shore.

On Friday, coastal flood advisories stretched from the Florida Keys to Long Island for water levels generally between half a foot and 2 feet above normal through the weekend. National Weather Service offices cautioned that elevated seas would produce minor to moderate flooding and also warned of high surf and dangerous rip currents in some areas.

The latest home collapse came amid a stormy week along the East Coast with higher-than-normal tides. The moon met the criteria for a “supermoon” because it was near the closest point to Earth in its orbit, strengthening the pull. Supermoons are associated with what are known as king tides, which are typically the highest of the year.

Last fall, in a test case to remove imperiled homes in Rodanthe before they fell, the Park Service purchased two homes on East Beacon Road, not far from Friday’s collapse.

Hallac tapped funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund – established by Congress in 1964 to safeguard important cultural and natural areas and to expand recreational opportunities – to purchase the vacation homes for more than $700,000. They promptly were torn down, and the area became public beach access.

“It will be a safer beach,” Hallac said at the time.

On Friday, he acknowledged that numerous threatened structures remain – more than the government can reasonably purchase – and that finding ways to mitigate the risks will require numerous strategies.

In the meantime, more homes are likely to end up in the surf.