All meetings in Truro are remote only. Go to truro-ma.gov and click on the meeting you want to watch. The agenda includes instructions on how to join.
Tuesday, August 17
- Board of Health, 4:30 p.m.
Wednesday, August 18
- Planning Board, 5 p.m.
Thursday, August 19
- Climate Action Committee, 10:30 a.m.
Conversation Starters
Life on the Edge
The owner of the house at 112 North Pamet Rd., a two-bedroom residence precariously perched next to Ballston Beach, is close to having all the necessary permissions to allow the house to be demolished and rebuilt farther away from the rapidly eroding dune cliff.
When the house was built by Anne Peretz and her former husband in 1991, its back porch was 175 feet from the edge. Now, the house is just six feet away — and it’s been that way for “two or three years,” Peretz told the Independent on Aug. 10.
Peretz’s plan to demolish her house and reconstruct it farther back from the cliff’s edge was approved by the zoning board of appeals on June 21, and by the planning board on July 7. Both boards’ approvals required multiple hearings and extensive revisions to the plan.
Still, Peretz said that she was confident it would get approved eventually. “I knew that if a big storm came and my house was hanging off the edge, they would get going,” she said. “No one wants the house to fall, not even the people on the planning board.”
The Peretz house is one of a number of dune-front properties at risk due to erosion. An analysis by Annabelle Daoust, an environmental design student at the University of Quebec, predicts that 64 buildings on the Outer Cape will need to be demolished or moved in the next 30 years, the Independent previously reported.
But Ballston Beach is eroding faster than other parts of the coast, Mark Adams, the mapping specialist at the Cape Cod National Seashore, previously told the Independent.
Peretz will still need the Truro Conservation Commission to sign off on several aspects of her plan. Only then will she be able to apply for a building permit. She has no estimate of when work on the ground will actually begin. Despite the fact that the dune has receded as much as 45 to 50 feet in a year because of storms, Peretz said she is not nervous.
“I go out every day to take a look and make sure” the house is not about to fall off the cliff, Peretz said. “It’s kind of nice living on the edge like this.” —Ben Glickman