Watch This House Being Raised Out of the Floodplain

Gloucester County, Virginia, has spent $11.8 million in FEMA grants to raise 61 homes out of the flood plain. Another 42 families are in line.


What’s it like to stand by as your house is ripped from its foundations and hoisted six feet in the air? “It’s a dream come true,” says Sue Graf, who owns a getaway cottage in Gloucester County, Virginia. “It’s surreal. It’s exciting,” she says. “This is the eighth summer of worrying about flooding with all the storms. We finally don’t have to worry about that any more.” So we rigged the house with cameras for the event. Watch above as Expert House Movers—a company that has been raising houses with the help of FEMA grants for about four years—excavate Sue’s house, and elevate it onto a new foundation. 

In Part Two, below, watch ?Mother Jones reporter Kate Sheppard explain why this historic stretch of the Virginia coastline, some of the first areas in America to be settled by Europeans, is so susceptible to sea level rise. “It’s becoming very real here,” says Skip Stiles, the executive director of Wetlands Watch. “If you want to see what’s going to happen to your East coast city, come here, because we’re getting it now. This is America’s coastal future here.”

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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