Cape Cod Cottages Dismanted Due to Erosion

Mar 17, 2012; 1:09 PM ET

A sad story that isn’t receiving national media attention this week is the dismantling of five summer homes in Chatham, MA, due to continuing beach erosion on Cape Cod. Boston.com says “The barren stretch of dune and sand that make up North Beach Island, which had been part of the southern tip of Nauset Beach before the breach [in 1987 and again in 2006], has long been reshaped and buffeted by harsh and changing conditions. The No-Name Storm of 1991 ravaged many cottages in the area, and erosion spelled doom for others.”

CAPTION: In this Aug. 23, 2011 photo, Roger and Susan Carroll, occupants in one of the 11 cottages on North Beach Island in Chatham, Mass., stand on the island’s beach near three of the cottages. Five of the 11 dwellings, which are owned by the federal government and leased, are slated to be torn down and must be vacated by mid-September. The Carrolls lease one of the cottages scheduled for demolition. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia) A video of this news story is also available on YouTube, and an amateur video is shown below.

Some history: The “break” mentioned above happened when a winter storm split the barrier beach in two in 1987, according to the Chatham-by-the-Sea website. The breach was filled back in by local residents, but heavy damage was done during the Perfect Storm in 1991, and the breach was reopened by another Nor’easter in 2007. You can see how much the island changed between the full peninsula in 1995, and after the breach in 2008, by hovering over the Google Earth satellite images below (the location of the most northward house on North Beach Island is tagged).

Zooming in, it’s even more clear how much beach has been lost since 2006. In the latest shot, from 2010, nearly all vegetation is gone and the remaining houses appear ready to be swept into the sea. There’s an excellent aerial photo of the 5 houses on Flickr.

This subject is dear to my heart because it happened at my childhood vacation spot, Oak Island, during the late 1980s and early 1990s when many of the “front row” houses, including ours (see photo below after Hurricane Hugo in 1989) had to be condemned and removed due to the encroaching ocean, or were prematurely lost to the sea. Today, the beaches have been built back up, and this is no longer a problem.

The Superintendent of the National Seashore pointed out that the North Beach Island area was really granted a reprieve over the winter. What he means is that the lack of Nor’easters this winter let the houses survive one more season. I’m sure that arms the locals with verbal ammunition against the government, but we in meteorology know that this winter was very unusual and the houses are doomed – not because of global sea-level rise, but simply because of continued storms and local beach erosion, the likes of which I saw 25 years ago.