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Second Home Falls into Sea on Storm-Battered Massachusetts Island
'This is the end of Plum Island,' one professor says
WHDH-TV reporter Steve Cooper tweeted this photo early Saturday of a home on Plum Island that had fallen into the sea, writing, "Second house collapse on plum island #7news pic.twitter.com/nFSnvj4TTI"
A second house slid off its foundation and into the Atlantic early Saturday on a Massachusetts barrier island that has been hard struck by a series of winter storms.
Three more Plum Island homes were to be torn down Saturday, WBZ-TV reported, and a total of 12 have been condemned following Friday's storm and previous ones. The first house fell into the ocean early Friday; no one was home at the time.
The 11-mile island on Massachusett's North Shore has suffered severe erosion after being pounded by a series of storms, beginning with Superstorm Sandy, a storm in December, and then the Blizzard of 2013.
Island resident Bob Connors told the Newburyport Daily News that he couldn't remember a series of storms in such quick succession.
"I don't think the storm is as bad (as the blizzard), but we have a fully compromised coastal dune system now so we have absolutely no storm protection," Connors said. "So these homes are at risk at every tide."
"This is the end of Plum Island," Orrin H. Pilkey, Duke University professor emeritus of earth and ocean sciences, told the Boston Herald. "If nothing is done, the houses will fall into the sea one by one. It's a futile effort. You need to retreat. It's the same thing up and down the East Coast and Gulf Coast."
Federal and state governments spent $5.1 million to stabilize another section of Plum Island five years ago, but the erosion problems simply shifted to the south, the Newburyport Daily News reported.
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