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An early-season nor’easter is pounding a stretch of North Carolina’s Outer Banks where dozens of homes are already threatened by the advancing ocean — and officials warn the next row may not be far behind
On Thursday, Cape Hatteras National Seashore closed the beach from the northern edge of Rodanthe to the town’s pier because “multiple threatened oceanfront structures pose risks to public safety,” according to the National Park Service.
For locals, it’s an all-too-familiar scene. Since 2020, 32 homes have collapsed, as erosion has steadily redrawn the shoreline.
The losses have been concentrated around Rodanthe and Buxton, two small villages on Hatteras Island, one of the narrow barrier islands that make up the Outer Banks.
At a state meeting last November, officials said they were tracking 100 threatened structures in the two towns, and warned more could follow.
“If every one of those structures falls in,” Cape Hatteras National Seashore Superintendent Dave Hallac said, “there would be another 100 right behind them.”
Years of erosion have put more homes at the water’s edge
Already, at least five more homes have collapsed since Hallac’s warning, according to NPS records. And the latest storm is putting the remaining threatened properties through another round of punishment.
On Thursday, extreme tides broke through protective dunes on Pea Island, just north of Rodanthe, damaging roughly 500 feet of pavement and forcing the closure of N.C. 12. The National Weather Service warned of breaking waves peaking at 10 to 15 feet through Saturday evening.
The pounding surf is hitting a coastline that looks radically different from when many of its beachfront homes were built.
Michael McDaniel bought his Buxton beach house for about $500,000 in 2011, when roughly 250 feet—nearly the length of a football field—of dune separated its front porch from the Atlantic.
But in the 15 years since, erosion has erased that buffer and left his home uninhabitable.
That retreat is not unique to McDaniel’s property. The Outer Banks are barrier islands—narrow ribbons of sand that naturally shift as waves and currents move sand up and down the coast.
Erosion itself is part of that natural process.
In parts of Rodanthe, the shoreline has retreated an average of about 13 feet per year, according to Dare County. Around parts of Buxton, chronic erosion historically exceeded 20 feet per year.
Those long-term averages can hide much more abrupt losses during bad weather, too.
During Hurricane Erin in August 2025, for example, 75 residential structures were damaged in the two villages. Over the following two months, 16 homes collapsed during a succession of offshore storms.
And as the shoreline moves inland, it’s colliding development built decades earlier. County records show that most of the homes now threatened were built in the 1980s and 1990s when the ocean was much farther away.
Homeowners are running out of options
Homeowners facing this slow-moving threat have few options.
While flood insurance typically covers direct physical damage caused by flooding, it may not pay simply because erosion has put a home in danger.
“The NFIP policy pays for a direct physical loss from flood,” Lisa Sharrard, a North Carolina flood insurance agent and Certified Floodplain Manager, tells Realtor.com®. “So there has to [be] a flooding event, not normal high tide.”
“The SFIP does not cover damage caused by gradual erosion,” Sharrard adds.
That can leave homeowners like McDaniel in between a rock and a hard place: Stuck with a home they may no longer be able to safely use but one that has not yet suffered the kind of damage an insurance policy is designed to cover.
“If they have a policy, the policy may pay if the house collapses due to erosion,” Sharrard explains. “In the meantime, they have a house they cannot use and debris to clean up after. Most are trying to move if they can.”
Even when federal flood coverage does apply, the standard NFIP policy provides no more than $250,000 in building coverage for a single-family home—a sum that falls woefully short of what impacted homeowners need.
One Rodanthe couple previously told Realtor.com they spent more than $200,000 to move their house roughly 100 feet inland after erosion brought the ocean dangerously close. And they had something many threatened homeowners don’t: enough land left behind the house to put it somewhere else.
Protecting the shoreline costs millions—and doesn’t last forever
So where does that leave the homeowners farther back from the water—and the communities trying to keep them from becoming the next ones at risk?
One option is to try to keep the shoreline from reaching them.
But North Carolina prohibits most permanent seawalls, leaving communities to rely heavily on beach nourishment: the practice of pumping sand onto an eroding beach to try and rebuild a buffer in front of homes and roads.
Buxton spent about $18.1 million replenishing 2.9 miles of shoreline in 2022. Two years later, a coastal storm stripped away an estimated 175,000 cubic yards of sand. Engineers estimated replacing that loss alone would cost another $10.2 million.
So this summer, the dredges came back. By Sept. 16, crews had placed about 1.5 million cubic yards of new sand along Buxton—just over a week before the current nor’easter began pounding Hatteras Island.
Even under normal conditions, Dare County says nourishment projects generally last about five years before more sand is needed.
In Rodanthe, officials say even that solution is too expensive.
“In Rodanthe there isn’t enough money to solve the problem with beach nourishment,” Dare County Manager Bobby Outten told state coastal officials in November.
Meanwhile, the ocean is expected to keep rising. The Fifth National Climate Assessment projects 15 to 22 inches of sea-level rise around the Outer Banks by 2050, allowing future high tides and storms to reach farther inland.
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