On Planet Warming, The Storms Don’t Even Need to Hit You to Take Your House Down

On an island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, a house fell into the ocean. A few hundred miles to the east out over the Atlantic, a hurricane laughed.

Hurricane Ernesto turned right at Puerto Rico last week and headed north and then northeast, crossing directly over Bermuda on Saturday (the island lost power but largely avoided significant damage). Though far from the East Coast, it has been sending strong waves and rip tides toward the Carolinas, Virginia, and the rest of the coast, and those emanations helped doom the seventh house in the past four years in Rodanthe, North Carolina, to the deep.

You know the houses. The absurdities on stilts, hovering out over the waves like they took a wrong turn from back on land. The houses that weren’t exactly a solid idea even before climate change, before the sea began rising and the beaches began eroding and the storms got bigger and stronger. The houses that now, with all that happening, look like ghosts that don’t know they’re dead yet.

Sea levels in North Carolina — a state that once tried to legislate sea level rise out of existence — have risen by around six inches just since the turn of the century, and the pace is likely accelerating. The Outer Banks has long been among the most hurricane-vulnerable spots in the country, or even on the entire planet, even before the waves began climbing. But now every high tide starts a half-foot higher than it used to, and every storm that swings past sends swells toward Rodanthe that have that much less sand to climb up before they start knocking those stilts out entirely.

It’s those juiced baselines that make even a storm like Ernesto scary. For more than a week now its path has seemed largely benign as far as the East Coast is concerned, arcing out over the Atlantic like it wanted nothing to do with the millions of people to the west. But the added inches, as well as the extra rainfall and potential for hurricanes to explode in power like they never have before, means out of sight is no longer out of reach. The same way that people across South Florida now have to manage “nuisance flooding” at what used to just be a normal high tide, anyone with a house at risk from coastal storms now in some sense faces down that menace on a day that thirty years ago might have just been a nice one to stare out at a mildly angry sea.

Hurricane messaging — the watches and warnings, the detailed NHC updates, the rhetoric around the “season” itself — is intended to reduce risk and improve resilient action, to help people prepare and make plans and get out of the way when necessary. It’s getting harder for all that to matter, when a storm no one used to fear can still rip the stilts out from under us.