The eventual fate of the tall home standing just off the beach on pilings, totally surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, was clear.
And the tourist from Ohio looking at it had the same question a lot of people have asked about the houses collapsing into the sea here at an increasing pace.
“Why can’t they just tear them down?” said Tim Manbevers. “I just wonder why they just let them go into the ocean?”
Manbevers was asking the right guy: Dave Hallac, the superintendent of Cape Hatteras National Seashore and other national parks in Eastern North Carolina. Hallac had been thinking about that question a lot lately.
Six houses have collapsed into the waves at Rodanthe this year, and 11 in the past four years. With much of the buffering beach and dunes eaten away by erosion, more are poised to fall in any time.
“Because it's expensive to tear them down,” Hallac replied. “So I’m guessing most of them would rather wait for it to collapse, and then they would be able to get some reimbursement from their insurance company.”
Federally-backed FEMA flood insurance pays when erosion takes such homes, but only after they’re destroyed.
So the owners just let them fall, creating environmental and safety hazards. The collapsed homes can scatter debris 20 miles along the beach, which Hallac said can never really be fully cleaned up. It also can leave behind broken, potentially leaking septic systems.
More and more, the question is becoming not how to save such houses, but rather how to remove them before they collapse.
This dilemma and an unusually aggressive erosion rate have made Rodanthe a kind of lab for local, state, and national officials trying to figure out what to do about imperiled structures.
The problem is increasingly common around the country, thanks to the effects of human-caused climate change, sea level rise, and ever more frequent and powerful storms.
More than 750 homes along North Carolina’s coast are now considered threatened, according to an August report from the state and the National Park Service.
“We're looking at several hundred structures that could be put at risk due to a major storm or major erosion event that could happen pretty much any time," said Tancred Miller, Director of the N.C. Division of Coastal Management.
Like Hallac, he was part of the group that developed the report.
It recommended ways local, state and federal governments could move or remove houses before they fall. But none of them are a full solution.
“The bottom line is there really is no silver bullet,” Miller said.
And, he said, there’s little funding available for any of the approaches.
‘It’s all become a function of money,” said Bobby Outten, the Dare County manager and attorney. “You either pay to have beach nourishment, you pay to demolish homes, or you pay to remove homes, or you pay to clean up homes.”
By nourishment, he means rebuilding a beach by pumping sand onto it. That can protect homes or at least buy them time, but it’s costly.
This past summer, FEMA denied a county request for $40 million to rebuild the beach at Rodanthe. Maintaining that rebuilt beach was estimated to bring the total cost to about $120 million over 15 years.
“What's happening now is because there's no money to do the nourishment, and there's no money to buy or to move the houses, the houses are falling,” Outten said.
Outten said owners are responsible for cleaning up the remains of fallen houses. He said most owners use part of their $250,000 FEMA insurance money to clean up the mess as best they can, then pocket the rest.
"That's not good for the beaches," he said, "That’s not good for the neighbors, or anyone, but that’s what’s happening."
Different agencies are trying to figure out fixes.
“The folks that set the policy, they all get it,” Outten said. “It’s finding a way to pay for it.”
The park service bought out two threatened homes in a kind of pilot program to test the idea, but it doesn’t have funding for more.
Dare County has applied for a FEMA grant to buy and demolish perhaps 20 homes, while still trying to find money for nourishment.
And U.S. Rep. Greg Murphy, who represents the Outer Banks, is co-sponsoring a bipartisan bill that would let federal insurance pay for demolishing or moving houses, but its chances are unclear.
The problem looms in other states, too, said Rob Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.
“The homes that are being lost in Rodanthe are a harbinger for things to come on shorelines across the East Coast and the Gulf Coast,” he said. “And I don't think we've come to terms with the fact that we cannot hold every shoreline in place for forever, and we can't, especially with federal dollars, provide guaranteed protection for infrastructure that's along all of these shorelines.”
Especially as climate change accelerates erosion on the rebuilt beaches so they have to be rebuilt again and again.
“We are almost literally trying to build one beach from Saco, Maine to Padre Island, Texas by pumping sand and doing what we call beach nourishment projects,” Young said. “And we do this largely at federal expense, and right now we're trying to do it everywhere."
He said the nation hasn't come to terms with the idea that so many structures will have to come down.
Young said the wisest course in Rodanthe may be to find a way to buy out the most threatened homes and enact systemic fixes like those recommended in the report.
His project found it would cost about $43 million to remove about 80 homes, giving the village a viable beach for perhaps 15 to 25 years.
In some ways a managed retreat has already begun at Rodanthe.
The northern end of the village and the unpopulated seashore above that has for decades been a problem area for erosion and overwash by the sea, requiring repeated repairs and clearings of N.C. 12, the two-lane highway that runs the length of the island and connects it to the mainland.
Highway officials eventually concluded that stretch of the island was no longer viable for a road and shifted a 2.4-mile section of it onto a bridge over the Pamlico Sound. The $145 million offshore roadway opened in 2022.
And some waterfront houses have been moved back. Though it’s expensive, it often buys a little more time.
The iconic, towered house used in the Richard Gere film “Nights in Rodanthe" was moved to a more protected lot in 2010. But the sea followed it, eating away the beach in front.
Now, high tide is just a few yards from its pilings again.
