RODANTHE — Following the collapse of an unoccupied house into the Atlantic Ocean in Rodanthe early Tuesday morning , debris spread along 15 miles of beach and had filled 53 pickup trucks as of Wednesday afternoon. And officials say there are two dozen more homes in danger. The collapse of the two-story, five-bedroom, 2.
5-bath house at 24131 Ocean Drive in Rodanthe, just south of Rodanthe Pier, led to a two-day closure of over a mile of beach. Cape Hatteras National Seashore in a Thursday morning press release announced the reopening of approximately seven-tenths of a mile of the beach in front of Rodanthe Village. It said the current closure spanned approximately a quarter mile, from S.
Holiday Boulevard to the north end of Ocean Drive in Rodanthe. This is the sixth house in that stretch of Hatteras Island to collapse into the ocean in the past four years. With local beach erosion rates that can exceed 10 feet a year and about two dozen other oceanfront houses currently threatened, there is a high probability for this to not be the last.
When the ocean washed away the house — a beach box built in 1970 — it removed the physical site for many cherished memories, according to a former renter. “The first time I got there, I spun around in a circle: ‘We have surround-sound ocean!’” Helen George of Crozier, recalled in a Wednesday phone interview. She had posted on social media that it was her and her husband’s favorite house to rent, and “it’s very sad to see h.