Washed-away home shows danger of living on edge on OBX

Jeff Akins and his wife picked up the key to their vacation rental in Rodanthe, looking forward to a glorious week in July relaxing at the beachfront home they had so enjoyed the summer before.

After the long trip from their Highland, N.Y., home, they were the first to arrive at the six-bedroom house they were to share with friends. They parked under the house, the view of the ocean obstructed by slats. But something didn't seem right this time.

"We pulled in and watched the surf explode through the boards," Akins said. "We said 'Wow! There must've been a lot of erosion.' "

That same house, he said, had 50 to 75 feet of beach in front of it the summer before.

When their friends arrived from Raleigh, they were nervous about the safety of the house. Akins, a civil engineer, made a cursory check of the house's structure and didn't see anything awry. He did note that the sand fence that had been back behind the dunes last year was now at the high-tide line.

The next day, with the surf crashing up the beach right under the deck, the four friends lined their beach chairs up on a little hill of sand at the tide line by the house. Then one of them happened to glance over at the piling under the deck and exclaimed, "Oh (expletive)! " Akins recounted.

"Tide was splashing against the post, " he said, "then it slid under the post. We said 'noooooo...' Then we realized that there's three of them hanging in the air."

Akins said they immediately called the rental company, which helped them pack up and move to another house. Before they left, Akins saw one of the pilings swinging in the air like a pendulum.

The 5-year-old house, named Caramore, collapsed into the ocean two weekends ago during a coastal storm.

According to Dare County records, the 3,958-square-foot house was valued at $488,800; the oceanfront parcel is valued at $453,600.

Caramore was demolished by an excavator this week. Contractor Carroll Midgett said there were probably 10 to 12 tractor-trailer loads of rubble to haul away, as well as a dozen small truck loads of other debris.

Owners Daniel and Lindora Sargent, from Whitehouse Station, N.J., can hardly believe that, within 24 hours, Caramore was gone.

"Shock is not the word," Daniel Sargent said in a telephone interview Friday. "We had a tremendous amount of sweat equity in that house. This is a disaster for us."

Nothing, he said, was able to be salvaged from the house.

Sargent, 61, said he had an insurance policy with a face-value of $600,000, and he was told he was insured adequately. But recently he has learned that he has only $250,000 of coverage from his federally subsidized flood insurance policy, and maybe minimal coverage from his private insurance for the contents.

"If you're a mortgage broker or a banker, you'd think they would know," he said. "Why the heck would they give me that mortgage? You ask all the questions, then you hire professionals to answer them."

Sargent, a retired police officer who does construction work part time, said he put a big kitchen upstairs, a small kitchen on the ground floor and did all the tile work. His wife, a teacher, delighted in buying upscale decor for the house. Every fall, they would come and reinforce the sand fence with Christmas trees and push the dune back up.

The property, which rented for $5,495 a week at the height of the season, was booked from April to November.

"It was a tremendous investment," Sargent said. "It paid for itself."

Caramore, Gaelic for "friend," was "a dream" to the couple, who have been regularly visiting the Outer Banks for 30 years, Sargent said.

"When we looked at this piece of property, it was absolutely beautiful," he said. "It was 200 feet from the dune to the water. Anybody would have bought it. It had a very spectacular view, both to the north and south."

Buddy Shelton, the chief building inspector for Dare County, said the Sargents met all the conditions that were required before building their house. When it was built, the house was 70 feet back from the first stable line of vegetation - 10 feet more than required by state Coastal Area Management Act regulation.

Since the deed was platted and recorded before the CAMA regulations were implemented in 1979, the setback requirements were grandfathered. Currently, CAMA rules mandate that oceanfront structures must be set back from the first line of vegetation to a distance equal to 30 times the annual erosion rate, or a minimum of 60 feet.

The annual erosion rate of the beach in front of Caramore is an average of 9.5 feet, said Jim Meads, county flood plain manager. The highest rate of erosion on Hatteras is about one mile north at Mirlo Beach, which has an average 14 feet a year. The lowest is 2 feet a year.

Before building, Meads said, oceanfront property owners are required by CAMA to sign a hazard notice that informs them of the erosion rate, the possible number of feet the shoreline could move in a storm and the predicted number of feet of floodwaters during a major storm.

Meads said Caramore is the first house on Hatteras Island to fall into the ocean since Hurricane Isabel in 2003. But oceanfront houses in Kitty Hawk and South Nags Head, also plagued by severe shoreline erosion during nor'easters and hurricanes, have been damaged or destroyed by the ocean over the years. And in every significant storm, houses must be condemned, usually temporarily, because of damage to steps, decks, roofs, septic systems, power supplies or water systems.

Parcels adjacent to Caramore had washed out, but Meads said even that is not necessarily predictive of future disaster. With the way the shoreline erodes and accretes with the seasons, he said, sometimes a parcel comes and goes.

"It sounds crazy, but down the road, that lot could come back," he said. "It's unlikely, but it has happened."

When people see the photographs of the practically brand-new Caramore collapsed pitifully in the ocean, Sargent said, he knows that "everybody thinks he's an idiot" for building a house there without checking into the risk.

"Well, we did check. We asked people," he said. "Perhaps I wouldn't have built if I knew I couldn't insure the structure for the cost it took to build it.

"We're not bitter with anybody we've dealt with professionally. It's just that we would like other people to be aware that your life savings could be out the window in a blink of an eye."

Catherine Kozak, (252) 441-1711, cate.kozak@pilotonline.com