The Secret Lives of Parks

A Reporter ‘On the Brink’ at Cape Hatteras

Episode Summary

In Rodanthe, North Carolina, near Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the rising ocean is causing homes to collapse, creating devastating losses for homeowners and dangerous conditions for park-goers. Journalist Melanie D.G. Kaplan shares what she learned in her new story on the ongoing crisis.

Episode Notes

Barrier islands naturally undergo erosion. But in the tiny town of Rodanthe, North Carolina, near Cape Hatteras National Seashore, sea-level rise fueled by climate change has intensified this process, creating difficult and dangerous conditions for the community. Four homes have collapsed into the ocean since February 2022, and the park’s dunes and beaches are washing into the sea, making the boundary between public and private land harder to determine.

Journalist Melanie D.G. Kaplan covers this issue in her new story, “On the Brink,” in National Parks magazine. This episode, host Jennifer Errick asks Kaplan what she learned from her reporting and why the community is starkly divided on how to handle the ongoing crisis.

The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.

Episode 23, A Reporter ‘On the Brink’ at Cape Hatteras, was produced by Jennifer Errick with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton, Linda Coutant and Vanessa Pius.

Special thanks to Rona Marech and Katherine DeGroff.

Original theme music by Chad Fischer.

Read “On the Brink” by Melanie D.G. Kaplan at www.npca.org/onthebrink. Get a year’s subscription to National Parks magazine by visiting www.npca.org/subscribe.

Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org.

For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America's national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation's only independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.

Learn more and join us at npca.org.

Episode Transcription

The Secret Lives of Parks

Episode 23 
A Reporter ‘On the Brink’ at Cape Hatteras

Jennifer Errick: In the tiny town of Rodanthe, North Carolina, near Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the rising ocean is causing homes to collapse, and the boundary between the park and private land is becoming harder to determine.

Journalist Melanie D.G. Kaplan covers this issue in her new story, “On The Brink,” in National Parks Magazine. We'll hear about what she learned from her reporting and why the community is starkly divided on how to handle the ongoing crisis.

I'm Jennifer Errick, and this is The Secret Lives of Parks.

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The country's first national seashore, Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, draws millions of visitors each year to its scenic beaches and its laid-back, small-town atmosphere. Part of the barrier island system known as the Outer Banks, the seashore sits on the southern end of a thin strip of land separating the Pamlico Sound from the Atlantic Ocean.

People use words like charming and quaint to describe the seven villages spread out along the two-lane byway near the park that serve as base camps for tourists and hardy year-round residents. Romance novelist Nicholas Sparks even featured the community of Rodanthe as the setting for his 2002 book, “Nights in Rodanthe.” Diane Lane and Richard Gere starred in the 2008 movie adaptation, falling in love on windswept beaches and boardwalks and sharing meals in a historic inn, a six-bedroom beach house with blue shutters that has become locally famous for its role in the movie.

But the rising seas are working against this romantic vision of the seashore, eroding the very substance these communities were built on. In Rodanthe, four homes have collapsed into the ocean since February of last year. The loss of property is devastating for the homeowners and the aftermath is treacherous for the entire area. After a collapse, debris can continue to wash ashore for weeks on end and spread across as much as 20 miles of the coast. The slew of trash can include carpeting and appliances, nails and broken glass, and even exposed septic tanks, forcing beaches to close and creating dangerous conditions for people and wildlife. Park staff must quickly address the hazards on park lands even though the debris is from private property or what remains of it.

“On The Brink,” a new story by journalist Melanie D.G. Kaplan in the latest issue of National Parks magazine, delves into this complicated problem and explores how residents and park staff alike are grappling with what to do next.

Kaplan herself traveled to Rodanthe last January in the off-season to see these effects firsthand.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: It was actually lovely. I love the beach in the winter, and I was there for four days on this assignment and I planned it around a community meeting that was being held to talk about what was happening with these homes in the park. And so, the meeting was one night and then I spent time with environmental scientists, ecologists, the superintendent of the park and homeowners and locals.

Jennifer Errick: This was far from Kaplan's first trip to the area. She had traveled to the outer banks numerous times as a child and young adult visiting with friends and even hang gliding off the dunes at the Wright Brothers National Memorial about 30 miles north of Cape Hatteras, but she hadn't appreciated how the fragile ecosystem of a barrier island functioned until her visit this year.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: I've experienced the Outer Banks, and I know why people love them. It's not built up like so many other coastlines. I appreciate the quiet and the calm and why people go there, but I did not understand the geology. That was just a real eye-opener for me.

Jennifer Errick: Although a few videos of collapsing homes have circulated widely on social media since early 2022, Kaplan hadn't seen them or known much about the problem until she began researching the story.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: This particular area is eroding quickly. These barrier islands naturally are supposed to move toward the mainland over time. When I was there, I saw water rushing under the pilings of these houses and you can't walk in front of the houses anymore. I mean that beach that is Cape Hatteras National Seashore at sometimes, at some points, that isn't even there.

Jennifer Errick: The first question that Kaplan thought to ask turned out to be one of the hardest to answer.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: Wait a minute, are these houses on national park property? Because I know different parks have different agreements with private landowners. I couldn't get my question answered, and it wasn't until I went down there and talked to the superintendent that I realized that these boundaries are shifting and really dynamic and why it can be considered that some of these houses are on park property now.

Jennifer Errick: The park boundary is measured in relation to the median high and low tides. As the shoreline has shifted and dissolved, so has the distance between the town and the park. Sea level rise driven by climate change has intensified this erosion, wearing away the park dunes and beaches that once served as a buffer between homes and the sea. Once that buffer disappears, waves will wash alongside and under area houses — an image that might appear romantic in movies and postcards, but in real life, Kaplan insists that's just not the case.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: One guy said that he would stand on his balcony and look down and felt like he was on a cruise ship. And on top of the way that it feels — that it's a little scary — it's of course terrible for these structures. I mean the pilings — I believe that they have to go 16 feet underground, but they're not made to be sitting in saltwater.

Jennifer Errick: Ironically, as the park and the town have moved closer together, solutions to the problem have only become more polarizing.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: A lot of the homeowners want beach nourishment, which I also didn't know much about before I started this, and it involves dredging up tons of sand and basically re-engineering a new beach, and it's incredibly expensive. It can cost $10 million a mile or more. They just did a study to see what it would cost in this stretch of Rodanthe that's a little bit over two miles, and they're estimating $40 million and the county doesn't have it, and there aren't funding sources federally or with the state.

Jennifer Errick: Other solutions include buying out the homes and clearing them from the beach to revert the area to a more natural state. This would also be costly, however, and it would require landowners for dozens of properties to agree to a deal and walk away from the places they love.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: I wanted to come out of this understanding, okay, here's the answer and this is the right way to go, and here's the path, and there was absolutely no right answer or clear path.

Jennifer Errick: Even if the community were able to raise the millions of dollars to support beach nourishment, the erosion would continue, and the efforts would be erased in a matter of years.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: The ecologists and people who've been studying this coast for decades, they're able to provide some really sound commentary on why this is such a short-term solution, but this conflict is as old as we have been on the land as humans.

[Music break]

Jennifer Errick: Here's a passage that moved me from early on in Kaplan's story featuring a longtime member of the community, Cindy Doughty, whose beachfront home became uninhabitable due to damage from erosion and debris. Kaplan writes:

Doughty had a seasonal job managing a clothing shop in Duck about an hour away. She slept in her boss's guest room for several months. Some evenings she returned to Rodanthe and sat in her home alone. There wasn't any electricity, but the moon reflected off the ocean and lit up the house. She thought about how she used to keep her bedroom sliding door open, the sound of the waves lulling her to sleep.

"This sounds silly, but I wanted to keep the house company." Doughty said, "I know every detail of that house, like I know the wrinkles on my face. It was heartbreaking to see it all hurt and busted up."

Yet she was luckier than most. The home was on a double lot, so she had room to shift it away from the water, like scooting back your beach towel as the tide comes in. Moving the house, she decided, was the only option.

I asked Kaplan how she connected with Doughty and with some of the other townspeople whose stories add depth and color to the piece. Did she just walk into that community meeting and meet people willing to share such personal details about their lives? Not quite.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: One of the early calls that I made was to expert house movers that had moved a couple of the houses, and so the woman who runs that company was able to put me in touch with some of the homeowners and then they put me in touch with others and I met some more at the community meeting.

Jennifer Errick: You may have put this together already, but Expert House Movers is not, as I first thought, a company that shows up with a van, packs up your belongings and carts them to your next house. This is the company that coordinates the long and complicated process of trucking entire buildings to new lots. When Kaplan began working on the story, Doughty was midway through this process, and she wasn't alone in her decision.

In 1999, Expert House Movers helped relocate a historic 200 foot tall lighthouse, the Hatteras Light station, from the edge of the ocean to its current location, 1500 feet from the shore. And remember that historic inn I mentioned from the “Nights in Rodanthe” movie? That building was condemned not long after the movie was filmed. Storms and erosion had left its foundation standing partly in the ocean. Expert House Movers put the entire structure on a flatbed in 2010 and transported it down the area's narrow scenic byway to higher ground.

I watched a video of the building moving ever so slowly behind a white truck while townspeople stood by the side of the road watching. The truck had a rumpled yellow wide load sign that seemed too obvious to be truly necessary. The house took up the entire road, overhanging both shoulders. Nobody was getting past it.

Any decision to uproot a home requires time, money and patience, and not everyone can make it work.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: I spent quite a bit of time with these homeowners and went into some of their homes, and frankly, I could write entire articles on each one of their stories because it's heartbreaking, whether they've been there for 20 years or they just bought their dream vacation house a few years ago. Now many of them are in a situation where they don't have the rental income because the house is uninhabitable, because their septic system has been washed out, and so they're having trouble paying the mortgage, and then how do they get the money to move the house? You've got that up against, well, this is supposed to be a national park for all Americans, and what does that mean if that's not protected and if you have a house falling over and boards and nails and everything inside the home spread all over the beach for 20 miles?

Jennifer Errick: It's easy to understand Kaplan's concern for homeowners at risk of losing the places they love. Yet her research digs into the history of beach maintenance on these barrier islands showing how difficult it is to engineer a manmade solution to the problem.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: I ended up going to the Outer Banks History Center and I asked the archivist to pull some information from me on erosion over the centuries. I really dug in and looked into all these old documents, and there's a really long Park Service document that tells the story of the creation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore and talks about the dune-building program, which was a massive program in the 30s to build up these dunes to protect the shore. That happened until World War II, and then they stopped building the dunes for a time and then they restarted again, until the 70s, when they learned more of the science and realized that building these dunes and protecting from erosion was not the best thing for the shore, and then they kind of changed course.

Jennifer Errick: Kaplan does an expert job of balancing the different views in the story, but if she'd had more room, she says she would've published a much longer piece.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: I have to laugh because I turned in a very, very over-long story. I would've loved to have included a lot more of the history and more about each of the homeowners who I spent time with and got to know their stories.

Jennifer Errick: Fortunately, it wasn't all work for Kaplan. She also found time to walk along the beaches with her beloved beagle and traveling companion, Hammy. She appreciated the beauty that brings so many people to the Outer Banks and got to remember the joy of traveling and reporting on location from a newsworthy spot.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: It was really fun just being able to go to a place and go to a community meeting, reporting one-on-one, which I haven't done in a very long time, and hear what people are saying and being invited into people's homes and walking the beach with locals. That just really felt good. I mean, particularly after our last three years when all of my travel writing stopped, it was just great to be there. I had my beagle with me. He usually travels with me. We stayed in an Airbnb on the sound side, and it was right on the water, so we would just walk on the sand and I took him on the beach a few times and we both love the beach, so it was perfect.

Jennifer Errick: Kaplan has been reporting for National Parks magazine for more than 10 years, thanks to a chance encounter she had with a former editor along a different shore, the banks of a river near her home in Washington D.C.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: It was a really lucky meeting. More than a decade ago, I was volunteering with an organization called Team River Runner that teaches wounded veterans how to whitewater kayak. The group would go every week to kayak in the Potomac and National Parks magazine. Ended up writing a story about it, and so I got to meet the editor at the time and a few years later, he saw one of my travel stories in the Washington Post and he said, "Hey, would you want to write for us?" And I said, "Yes."

Jennifer Errick: Since that day, she's written on a range of subjects for National Parks magazine, from musical traditions along the Blue Ridge Parkway, to 19th century whale art at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, to efforts to translate park materials into more languages throughout the country, to one of my personal favorites, a five-day pandemic cycling trip she took along the entire C and O Canal in 2021. All these among many other stories. She's currently working on a book inspired by her beagle, Hammy, the same pup who joined her on her four days at Cape Hatteras.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: Hammy was in a research lab for four years before I adopted him, and I just got really curious about his background. I don't know what he was used for, but I think that the whole idea of dog testing and dog research is something that most people don't know about. Dogs are used often for drug testing, and we all have benefited from research that's been done on dogs. If we take any medication, if we have medical procedures, there's a good chance that dogs have been used in that research. But I hope that Hammy's story and our connection will balance out the difficult part of that to read.

Jennifer Errick: The book, “Science and The Hound,” will be available in 2025. Although Kaplan says she never expected to have a career as a freelance writer, she's delighted with how it's worked out.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan: I just like approaching a topic like this one, knowing very little about it, and then being able to learn because my whole life I've just been super curious and love learning about new things. It's like being in a library my whole life.

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Jennifer Errick: The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.

Episode 23, A Reporter ‘On the Brink’ at Cape Hatteras, was produced by me, Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton, Linda Coutant and Vanessa Pius.

Special thanks to Rona Marech and Katherine DeGroff.

Original theme music by Chad Fischer.

To read “On the Brink” by Melanie D.G. Kaplan in the latest issue of National Parks magazine, visit npca.org/magazine. Better yet, for a small donation, you can receive a year’s worth of national park news expertly reported and delivered right to your door by visiting npca.org/subscribe.

Learn more about this podcast at the secretlivesofparks.org.

For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America's national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation's only independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.

And we're proud of it, too.

You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org.