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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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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