Retreat in Rodanthe Interactive Feature – the Washington Post

Rodanthe Homes (by Rick Rowland CC BY 2.0 via Flickr).

Along three blocks in a North Carolina beach town, severe erosion is upending life, forcing hard choices and offering a glimpse of the dilemmas other coastal communities will face…

Early last year, a house crumbled into the sea in this small Outer Banks community, home to some of the most rapid rates of erosion and sea level rise on the East Coast.

Not long after, another house fell. And then another…

Can Development Laws Elevate Us Out of Sea Level Rise?

Watch Hill, Rhode Island (by Patrick Franzis CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

Watch Hill is an old neighborhood, where houses with names like Windridge, Waveland and Sea Swept began to take their positions on the ridge more than 160 years ago…
But Watch Hill’s most implacable foe has always been Mother Nature. In 1938, the Great Hurricane wiped fifty houses off Napatree Point, a finger of land curling into the sound. Today, the village is under the increasingly frequent assault of water coaxed by tidal force or blown in by Nor’easters over streets and parking lots, cutting off access to Napatree and giving the old house names a sardonic twist…