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- Oliver Milman reports on dozens of North Carolina homes in the Outer Banks area being washed away by the sea and some being moved on wheels due to the rapidly rising sea level.
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Moving house has a more literal meaning on Hatteras Island, the slender hook of land that juts off the coast of North Carolina. After a slew of houses toppled spectacularly into the Atlantic Ocean recently, entire coastal North Carolina homes and buildings are now being lifted on to wheels to flee the rapidly eroding coastline.
Since September, 19 homes have been lost to waves that tore them from their pilings, sending them crashing into other structures like bumper cars before breaking up in the ocean. Spooked homeowners have turned to the unusual services of Barry Crum, a lifelong Hatteras resident who has become the island’s main house mover.
More than a dozen coastal North Carolina homes are set to be moved or raised higher on stilts by Crum and his small crew, who on a recent balmy April day were jacking another large dwelling on to girders, ready to be carefully wheeled a few hundred feet back from the crashing waves to tenuous safety. The house, aptly, is called Cape Point Retreat.
“It’s never been this busy,” said Crum. “I’ve seen a lot but I hadn’t seen this kind of erosion this quickly before. I’m glad I can do this to help, but it stinks what’s happened in the community.”
Coastal erosion has long been a feature of life on the Outer Banks, a string of constantly shifting sandy barrier islands that includes Hatteras, with some hotspots here losing more than 10ft of land a year to the seas.
This has always been a tempestuous landscape to settle on – even the Cape Hatteras lighthouse had to be moved, by a team including Crum’s father, in 1999 after losing more than 1,000ft of land in front of it.
But longtime locals were still staggered by the recent erosion, which wiped out the entire beach and sand dunes of Buxton, a town on Hatteras, and swallowed up part of a neighborhood. On some days, hefty waves downed homes like dominoes at an astonishing rate – on 30 September, five houses collapsed within just 45 minutes.
Read the full article about North Carolina homes being moved on wheels by Oliver Milman at The Guardian.