Fighting against the tide

Shifting sands, powerful waters of the Atlantic threaten Chatham homes

Fred Truelove walked on the beach by his home on North Beach in Chatham, which is scheduled to be torn down before it is washed away by the ocean. (DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF)

CHATHAM - Fred Truelove gave up his battle yesterday with the relentless tides.

For the previous five days, the wind-whipped Atlantic had scoured sand from under his North Beach summer camp, carrying off two sets of stairs and leaving the house perilously perched on 15 feet of exposed pilings.

"We always hoped it wouldn't happen," said Truelove, 58, a Kingston accountant who visited the house yesterday morning before dejectedly calling a company to tear it down before the sea did. His family has been going to the property, outfitted with a wood stove and no electricity, for 50 years to hunt, vacation, and swim. "The ocean is just eating it away," he said.

At the elbow of Cape Cod, Chatham has long been known for its shifting sands. But even those familiar with the coast say they have rarely witnessed the brute power of the ocean as they have since April, when a northeaster punched a hole through the long sandy spit known as Nauset Beach peninsula.

The breach is now one-third of a mile wide, and counting Truelove's, it has claimed four houses on North Beach, either outright or when owners tore them down. All of the remaining eight houses in the tiny settlement are vulnerable, town officials say.

Meanwhile, several mainland homeowners whose houses were once protected from the Atlantic by North Beach are fearful that the break will channel the ocean's energy toward them, and they are considering using seawalls or boulders to defend their property. "It's just the tides cutting away the beach; we don't even need the storms to do it," Ted Keon, Chatham's director of coastal resources, said as he carefully navigated a boat toward North Beach yesterday morning. "It's truly amazing."

The sea, some in Chatham say, gives to the town as much as it takes away. The Atlantic constantly erodes the coastline, but also replenishes it with sediment washed from elsewhere. The only problem, says Leo Concannon, Chatham assistant harbormaster, is that the giving and taking "is often not where people want or need it." The region so incessantly reshapes itself with new shoals, sandbars, and breaks that Concannon's office updates navigational charts with pencils and erasers.

In 2006, the ocean deposited enough sand to reconnect mainland Chatham to South Monomoy Island for the first time in 50 years. In 1987, the change was more abrupt: The Atlantic breached North Beach about 2 miles south of the current break. That gap, now more than a mile wide, eventually destroyed 10 houses on the mainland.

Nine months ago, some coastal geologists and town officials thought April's breach was merely a gentle reminder of the sea's power and was likely to close up within a few weeks. The breach separated two small settlements of summer cottages: First Village, where Truelove's house is, and Second Village, which was made an island by the break.

But as the months went by and the breach widened, many began fearing it could become the main tidal route for Chatham Harbor and Pleasant Bay, creating new erosion problems for the mainland and interfering with fishing and recreational boating in unpredictable ways. Houses in First Village were also threatened.

Some town officials and owners of threatened houses proposed a fix: Fill in the gap by pumping some 500,000 cubic yards of sand from inside the harbor through a pipe. Town Meeting members, however, overwhelmingly rejected the $4 million proposal in July.

Now, houses in Second Village appear to be relatively stable, but First Village is losing several feet of shoreline every day.

"On Saturday, we had dunes behind the house; the sand was a foot above my head," said Truelove as he walked under lobster buoys hanging from beneath his house.

His family inherited the house from a family friend who wanted to keep it out of the hands of the Cape Cod National Seashore, which owns much of Nauset Beach. Truelove began going to the house as a child and remembers long summers there with his own children.

Still, Truelove is pragmatic, saying the house had been destroyed once before, during a fierce northeaster in 1991. Even though it was rebuilt, he and his family knew it probably wouldn't stand forever.

Instead of letting the ocean topple the house and having to pay to pick up the litter from area beaches, he decided to hire a demolition company to tear it down today, for $14,000. The house was deemed uninsurable after it was destroyed in 1991, so Truelove must pay for it himself.

Local officials say they still don't know what the ocean has in store for Chatham. Yesterday, Keon noticed a long finger of sand stretching out from the last remnants of Truelove's property toward the mainland.

"It's hard to predict," Keon said. But in any contest between man and Mother Nature, he said, "Mother Nature will win. We try to be thankful for the time we have with the land here, but we know it's always borrowed."

Beth Daley can be reached at bdaley@globe.com.