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'There was nothing': Homeowner recounts how sea claimed Nantucket house

E-mail|Link|Comments () December 18, 2009 01:19 PM

Photos courtesy Jim Wyland

The wood-shingled home slipped down a bank and into the ocean Monday. Below, how it looked before.

By Jack Nicas, Globe Correspondent

Jim and Donna Wyland closed up their Nantucket beach house for the winter on Dec. 7. They had laid down sandbags, locked the door, and said good-bye until next year.

But on Monday, they were back. The Atlantic Ocean had already shredded the front of the home and swallowed their refrigerator, sofas, and television. They scurried to salvage what they could as the waves kept crashing.

'"The front of the house was gone," Jim Wyland, 58, said from his Ohio office Thursday. "It was empty; it was sand; there was nothing. The waves just totally stripped everything. We were in shock."

The Wyland's wood-shingled home slipped down a bank and into the ocean Monday, the fifth dwelling in the past decade lost to erosion off Madaket, the southwestern end of the island, officials said.

Wyland said that after hearing of his home's precarious position, he had asked a construction company that specializes in protecting beach-front properties from erosion to move the building over the weekend. The move was scheduled for Monday; but instead of pulling the house onto a neighbor's lot that day, the work crew was reduced to dodging waves and pulling possessions from the ruins.

"When we got there, it was clear the house was a loss,'' said Dave Lager, 63, owner of the construction company. "At that point, it was get whatever you can."

And as the day wore on, conditions worsened. "We had to have somebody watching the incoming waves so we could get out of the way of the big ones,'' Lager said. "At one point, they were crashing over the top of the house."

The Wylands, who have five adult children, bought the Sheep Pond Road property in 2005 for about $500,000. Wyland said he was comfortable with a house 40 feet from the coastal bank because research of the past century's erosion rates in the area showed the building had another 20 years before the sea would claim it.

"Did we think two-and-a-half years later we could've lost the house? No," Jim Wyland said. "But we watched this beach, which was lovely, just sort of shrink and shrink."

By 2007, the house was on the edge of the bank, having just barely survived a hurricane.

Wyland said he then knew the house needed to be moved, but he had trouble bypassing the town's red tape.

"It is very difficult," he said. "It happened partly because I didn't take the action I should have, but partly because it could've been done so much more easily. There needs to be some logic and reason [in the process]."

But over the next two years, accretion built the beach back up, Wyland said, leaving the home with a comfortable buffer.

Starting in September, a steady barrage of storms reversed the trend, he said. By early this month, at least 20 feet of beach had been lost.

Then last week, particularly on Friday, nearly 20-foot waves devoured at least 15 feet of the beach.

When the Wylands arrived in Nantucket on Monday, they were not only greeted by the shell of their home but an insurance agent who told them they lacked flood insurance.

"That was a heartbreak," Wyland said. "It's bad enough to lose a house, but I thought, I'll at least get part of this back. Now it's a total loss.''

Jim, owner of a wealth management company, and his wife Donna, a writer, are now back in Ohio, planning their next move on the island where they took their first vacation together.

"We don't know what we're going to do yet," he said. "We're still in mourning, sadness, and shock."