Stunning drone footage shows oceanfront houses on the brink of collapse in the Outer Banks

Stunning drone footage shows vulnerable oceanfront houses that dot the Outer Banks on the brink of collapsing into the sea.The footage — recorded Friday by WRAL News in Raleigh-Durham — caught a cluster of homes in Rodanthe, North Carolina, that the water seems particularly intent on claiming.The banks have already foreclosed on some of the houses, which once stood about 100 yards away from the rising surf, one homeowner said.“So many people say hateful things [and] ask why we built our house in the middle of the ocean,” said Sharon Troy, whose family has owned one of the homes for 16 years.“It was not like this when we bought it,” she said of her house, which is near a pile of sand that used to be GA Kohler Street.“There was a football field of beach behind these houses.”Not anymore.

Now it stands in the path of waves with a group of other homes after years of beach erosion and high winds as sea levels rise.The waves splash wildly against the wooden footings of the houses — even at low tide, the station said.And their septic tanks have cracked open, spilling sewage into the water.“It wasn’t like this just a few years ago.

And, we aren’t rich people.We are hard-working normal people.

We can’t afford to move it,” she said.“There is nowhere to move it,” Troy continued.“The insurance company won’t pay out until it falls over.”The troubling scene has played out time and again along the Outer Banks, a 200-mile string of barrier islands off North Carolina and Virginia.Last month, another house in Rodanthe collapsed into the sea in a caught-on-camera disaster —and it was the seventh house to be carried away by rising tides in just the last four years.David and Teresa Kern of Hershey, Pennsylvania, had bought the four-bedroom, two-bathroom vacation home in 2019 for $339,000.The destruction left the couple scrambling to salvage what they could of their finances.“That’s what happens for all these houses,” Dare County Manager B...