RODANTHE, N.C. — For the third time in less than a week, a house has collapsed on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
It was the second home to collapse in Rodanthe in less than 24 hours.
The Chicamacomico Banks Fire & Rescue shared a video on social media of the aftermath.
The Chicamacomico Banks Fire & Rescue shared a video on social media of the aftermath.
The house was along GA Kohler Court and was not occupied at the time. So far, the ocean has taken nine Outer Banks homes since 2020, but three in just the last six weeks.
The homeowners had reportedly hired a contractor to remove the home, but elevated tides and other weather factors delayed that work.
The National Park Service is warning beachgoers to watch out for debris.
According to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, seashore law enforcement rangers confirmed that the unoccupied, one-story home is the same house that sustained damages after another house on GA Kohler Court collapsed earlier and washed out into the ocean.
Courtesy: Cape Hatteras National Seashore Facebook
“The biggest concern is just cleaning everything up, you know?” said Paul Troy, the homeowner of the first collapsed house. “We get a lot of slack, all of these homeowners do that they don’t care. These are money machines and that’s not the case. We lose sleep over littering the beach.”
Troy and his family have owned the home since 2008 and hoped to move it before the collapse.
“At the beginning of the summer, we lost 13 vertical feet. We lost the staircase. We lost part of the septic system,” he said. “We chose not to rent it out the rest of the summer because we were going to wait and see what the beach did, see if it came back.”
The issue of what to do with the structure is complex. At this point, it’s not clear what the solution is and that’s from all parties involved.
This is the sixth house to collapse along the Outer Banks in the past four years.
Troy said he believed that homeowners are getting the short end of the stick, even when they are doing their best to prevent it from happening.
“Our biggest concern was stopping what’s happening right now from stopping, and we get nothing but hurdles thrown at us. I don’t blame just Dare County, I blame the insurance companies, too,” he said.
Local, federal, and state stakeholders have released a report of short- and long-term solutions. This includes offering more assistance to people to tear down their homes before they collapse into the ocean.
CNN contributed to this report.
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