Houses are falling into the ocean in North Carolina.
A waterfront house in Rodanthe, N.C. — a coastal town located on Hatteras Island in the Outer Banks — collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean the morning of May 28. The five-bedroom house built in 1970 was unoccupied at the time, and local officials closed a one-mile stretch of beach around the property for two days to remove debris.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. According to the National Park Service, last month’s collapse is the sixth such event on the barrier island in the past four years. A video capturing a similar instance in 2022 went viral after a storm took down two houses along Rodanthe’s Ocean Drive.
Intense coastal erosion is largely to blame for the collapse, according to officials from the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. They expressed that the trend will likely not slow down anytime soon, as climate change continues to exacerbate such erosion through more frequent and intense storms that create stronger currents and greater sediment loading — sediment that is washed away from riverbeds and coastlines.
Rising erosion rates present a serious problem for North Carolina. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Climate Resilience Toolkit suggests an average coastline recession rate of 25 feet per year on some barrier islands in the Southeast. With nearly 30% of the U.S. population living in coastline counties as of 2017, even losses of just one to two feet can be devastating.
Martin Smith, George M. Woodwell distinguished professor of environmental economics at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, has spent much of his career researching marine policy and economics, specifically looking in recent years at coastal responses to climate change.
He explained that coastal communities are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts, listing “sea level rise, storms, flooding events associated with storm surge [and] potential compound flooding where you have heavy rainfall compounding with … storm surge,” as standard challenges in addition to erosion.
Betsy Albright, Dan and Bunny Gabel chair of environmental ethics and sustainable environmental management at the Nicholas School, cited a recent study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that predicts sea levels will rise 10 to 12 inches on average along American coastlines in the next 30 years. Along the East Coast, estimates average 10 to 14 inches.
“That’s something that North Carolina — particularly the Outer Banks — and other regions of the coast will have to contend with,” Albright said.
In 2019, parts of Rodanthe displayed average annual long-term erosion rates of over 14 feet, according to an interactive map viewer on The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s website that shows shoreline change rates across the state’s eastern coast going back to 1980.
Albright noted that many of the houses that have collapsed thus far have been vacation homes as opposed to primary residences but clarified that the distinction does not make the situation “less tragic,” just “different” than if it were “families who have lost their one and only home or families who are renters who don’t have a home.”
“I’m not at all discrediting the challenges of the homes on [the] Outer Banks,” Albright said. “I just think that the issues are broad.”
Smith explained that migrations to coastal areas, which are often seen as desirable locations by retirees and wealthier demographics for their aesthetic appeal, put upward pressure on property values in those regions in spite of their environmental vulnerability. He described a tension between wanting to avert unnecessary environmental threats and preserving the individual agency of consumers.
“It’s up to individual people to decide how much risk they want to incur — and if they want to invest in places that are known to be vulnerable, should we really be stopping them?” he said, noting that it is still important to ensure that people are not damaging the surrounding environment and that they should be held liable for such damages. “… As an economist, it’s difficult to argue that we should absolutely put a stop to that,” he said.
Local, state and federal agencies have taken action to try and mitigate the worst impacts of erosion on the nation’s coastlines to protect the most vulnerable. The U.S. loses around $500 million annually in the form of coastal erosion-induced property damage, per the Climate Resilience Toolkit, and the government spends another $150 million each year to fund programs to counteract this damage.
One prominent strategy is beach nourishment, which is a process by which sand or other sediment is added to a beach to artificially bolster its shore from additional erosion. The method has been used for over a century in the U.S. and has become common practice in vulnerable coastal regions since the creation of the first federal Beach Erosion Control project in 1964 in Carolina Beach, N.C.
However, many have cast doubts in recent years on its effectiveness. Since 2018, Congress has approved over $770 million in emergency beach “nourishment” programs after a slew of particularly intense hurricane seasons hit the Southeast. Critics argue that such spending — far in excess of the $150 million budget allotted for scheduled beach repairs — wastes taxpayer dollars in a futile attempt to protect coastal regions that will soon flood again anyway.
“I don’t think we want to be putting public money into adaptive infrastructure like that, that really encourages people to live in vulnerable areas,” Smith said. “We should be thinking more creatively about how we use public money to adapt in a more meaningful way to what’s coming in the future.”
Eroding shorelines and falling houses aren’t the only environmental problems threatening North Carolina’s coastal communities. Smith explained the concept of “sunny day flooding,” also known as “nuisance flooding” or “king tide flooding,” which presents a number of additional challenges for the region.
“... In the coastal zone, many properties are on septic systems. And so you have sort of a rising water table associated with sea level rise, and that can disrupt septic systems,” Martin said. “You can end up with sunny day flooding, where you might have raw sewage sort of bubbling up and sitting around in puddles by the side of the road.”
The Washington Post published an article Tuesday with time-lapse videos of such occurrences in Carolina Beach. Spontaneous floods can be seen rising out of storm drains in the middle of the day, turning streets into shallow streams and regularly inundating the drainage infrastructure meant to combat them.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University are collaborating on the Sunny Day Flooding Project to study the phenomenon. By installing cameras and sensors in flood-prone locations along the coast and tracking water levels, they documented 60 days over the past year where a major roadway in Carolina Beach flooded — often during clear weather.
Work is also being done at Duke to study climate impacts around the state and devise solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems.
Duke launched its Climate Commitment in the fall of 2022, which is overseen by the recently-created Office of Climate and Sustainability. The office incorporates the preexisting Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability, Sustainable Duke, Duke Forest, Sarah P. Duke Gardens and the Campus Farm — all of which collaborate to further the Climate Commitment’s goals for education, research, sustainable operations, external engagement and community partnerships.
A number of research teams comprising students and faculty within the Nicholas School are also working on projects directly tied to mapping and combating climate impacts on the Carolina coast.
But coastal regions are not the only areas in the state that are facing the climate crisis head-on.
As Smith and Albright both noted, North Carolina is also projected to experience increasingly erratic hurricane seasons and extreme heat stress in the coming years, which affect all residents. The state is already beginning to grapple with these threats, which Albright noted often affect under-resourced communities more intensely.
“It’s long been found that white people and educated community members become wealthier after disaster, while communities of color become less well-off,” Albright said.
Albright worked on a team that studied disparities in disaster relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, which hit North Carolina in September 2018. Albright said the distribution of disaster recovery funds to different counties in the state has emerged as an area of growing interest, posing questions of equity and capacity.
Despite the seemingly looming threat of worsening climate impacts, Albright expressed hope for the state’s future.
“I think [in] younger generations … there’s greater climate awareness, greater concern, greater willingness to act, greater willingness to think creatively about solutions,” Albright said. “I’m hopeful that climate change will become less of a partisan issue over time … [and] that the economics of a just energy transition will move us forward to more renewable resources. But between now and then, I think there will be challenges.”
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Zoe Kolenovsky is a Trinity junior and news editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.