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DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
This is what it sounds like when a destroyed house is loaded into a dump truck.
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ELLIOTT: Thirty-two houses in Dare County, North Carolina, have collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean since 2020 because of beach erosion and sea-level rise. NPR's Rebecca Hersher looked into what it takes to clean up a house that falls and found it's almost impossible to pick up all the pieces.
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REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: When I say that these houses collapsed, I mean they fully fell into the ocean with everything still inside them - fridges, steak knives, decks of cards and deck chairs and bottles of shampoo and roof shingles and water heaters and broken windows and mops and boogie boards, and lots and lots and lots and lots of nails. Nelson Pendleton was overseeing the cleanup the day I visited.
NELSON PENDLETON: I'm the park engineer.
HERSHER: It had been six months since these houses fell. The pile of debris was still 30 feet tall.
PENDLETON: Six houses pile all up, and it ends up being about 30 truckloads.
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HERSHER: To understand what happened here, you have to go back to when these houses were built, starting in the 1970s. That's when Bonnie Clarke Lattimore's grandfather built a cottage in Dare County that the family affectionately called Dreamhouse 1. It was just a little thing.
BONNIE CLARKE LATTIMORE: It's a one-bedroom, 800-square-foot house - tiny, but it's the character in that house. It was magical, you know?
HERSHER: They'd pack two or three families in, kids sprawled on the floor, cousins sleeping on the deck. Clarke Lattimore's mom, Sue, remembers there was so much sand between the house and the water back then.
SUE CLARKE: The houses were behind three rows of dunes.
HERSHER: But a jetty in the area deteriorated over time, so the beach was less protected from natural erosion. And sea-level rise meant erosion happened even faster than it would have.
CLARKE: And I'll never forget the first time I came up on the deck, and I could actually see people walking on the beach.
HERSHER: Eventually, the dunes were gone. And the houses started falling - 32 of them since 2020, with hundreds more at risk. Once it became clear what was happening, the Clarke family tried to move their house, but it was hard to get permits. They ran out of time.
ALDEN: When No.1 Beach House fell, it fell right there.
HERSHER: Four-year-old Alden, Clarke Lattimore's daughter, took a break from playing in the waves to walk with us down the beach to where the house used to be.
ALDEN: I was doing some body surfs. Some body surfs.
HERSHER: Whoa.
ALDEN: Ah.
HERSHER: Oh. You OK?
ALDEN: This shoe
HERSHER: It's important to wear shoes here, huh?
ALDEN: Yeah, 'cause it's just a little bit messier, right?
HERSHER: Yeah. It's a little messy. Maybe some sharp stuff.
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CLARKE LATTIMORE: It would be right here.
HERSHER: The house itself.
CLARKE LATTIMORE: Yeah.
HERSHER: There's drone footage of the day the house fell. It aired on Fox Weather.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Coastal erosion.
HERSHER: Sue Clarke says she hates watching it.
CLARKE: You can see the bed that we used to sleep on just - and then there's a picture of the refrigerator bobbing in the surf, which is environmentally disastrous.
HERSHER: That's bad for ocean creatures. Things like refrigerators and air conditioners have toxic chemicals in them. And it's not good for people either, who fish and surf and swim. The Clarkes paid tens of thousands of dollars to clean up what was left of their house. But there's always debris left behind, says Dave Hallac. He runs the National Park Service office in Cape Hatteras, which manages the beach there.
DAVE HALLAC: You're talking about very large and, in some case, hazardous building debris - pilings, washers, dryers, jacuzzis. In many cases, within, let's just say, 24 hours of the house collapsing, we can have debris that's already spread 10 miles or more.
HERSHER: Some of the beaches here have had to close for months on end. The Park Service estimates that its employees have collected more than 500 truckloads of junk here in just the last year. And that's just the stuff they can find.
HALLAC: If it sinks, it's on the ocean floor, and it does not get removed. If it floats away from the shore, it's not removed, and it stays out in the ocean.
HERSHER: Coastal management experts point out it's possible to prevent a lot of this pollution. It's pretty clear which houses are threatened. They could be removed before they wash away, which most people can't afford to do, and new houses would need to be built in places that are safe from rising seas. But the Trump administration says federal money for disaster preparedness is wasteful and should be handled by states. They've also scaled back flood-zone regulations. Meanwhile, the water is coming. Another house fell in North Carolina just this summer.
Rebecca Hersher, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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