Don't Build There

Saturday, 8:31 pm

By Kate

May

28

2005

There is a story in my local newspaper, this evening, about really upset coastal residents who bought huge beach homes and now find, after this last nor’easter, that the footage between their foundations and the ocean just got a lot shorter. They are upset and want someone to do something about it.

Like what, for example? When the ocean gets riled up like it was in this storm, nothing much can hold it back. People build big expensive houses on the dunes with all sorts of romantic visions in their minds. And when the ocean suffers a violent storm, the dunes are progressively licked away until the houses sit on the very unromantic raw edge of nothing. That’s the way it works.

I am certainly sympathetic to their fears that, with another couple of storms like this one, they will be watching their houses fall into the ocean and sweep away. But I’m not sympathetic to their anger over nature just doing what nature does. Coastlines are not static. They change.

People need to stop building their homes at the edge of the ocean. That, I would suggest, is the bottom line. If they don’t, nature will eventually take care of it in a terrible and dramatic way.