Beaches were closed in two communities on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and visitors were warned to stay away, after five houses collapsed into the ocean on Tuesday, swept off their pilings by stormy weather and high winds.
The homes, which were unoccupied, wobbled, buckled and broke up as pounding water churned ashore in Buxton, a community of about 1,400 people on Hatteras Island, one of the barrier islands that make up the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
It was the second time in two months that a group of houses in the same area of Buxton had been claimed by the ocean.
On Wednesday, officials warned visitors to avoid the beach and to stay out of the water in Buxton, as hazardous debris and building materials littered the beach and were tossed in the surf.
“There is the potential for additional house collapses in Buxton in the coming days,” the Cape Hatteras National Seashore said in a statement.
The national seashore, a protected area of the Outer Banks, encompasses a narrow strip of barrier islands, including Hatteras, Bodie and Ocracoke, that is more than 70 miles long. Some of the islands are reachable by ferry.
Since 2020, 27 privately owned, unoccupied houses have collapsed into the water, 16 of them in the past six weeks alone, in Buxton and Rodanthe, a community of a few hundred people on Hatteras Island, according to The National Park Service, which owns and operates the national seashore.
Officials in Dare County, which includes Buxton and Rodanthe, said most of the homes that have been swept away had been built several hundred feet from the ocean in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. But as the shoreline has narrowed from erosion, the houses have neared the water’s edge and become more vulnerable.
Some of the houses that have collapsed were unoccupied because they did not meet state building code, including requirements for functioning septic systems, according to a statement on Dare County’s website.
The wet sand beaches of the Outer Banks have continuously changed shape, shifting in worsening weather on the narrow barrier islands, with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and bays and sounds on the other.
Dave Hallac, the superintendent of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore and the Outer Banks Group for the National Park Service, said barrier islands naturally tend to grow in some areas while eroding in others, maintaining their size but shifting westward. During storms, sand from one side of the island settles inland, a process known as over wash. New sandbars are formed.
“The ocean is just continually getting close to the development that is getting constructed behind the dunes,” he said.
Surging waters, erosion, powerful winds, rising sea levels and storms have left officials working for decades on approaches to shoreline conservation and debris removal.
The debris from the houses, including wood planks, stilts and personal objects, are swept into the ocean or are eventually regurgitated onto beaches. In 2023, the Park Service initiated a pilot program to get ahead of the destruction when it purchased two oceanfront buildings in Rodanthe and tore them down before the ocean could.
Beaches in Buxton and Rodanthe were closed on Monday after weather forecasts warned of strong winds, large waves and ocean over wash, threatening dozens of oceanfront structures with collapse or breakage.
The Cape Hatteras National Seashore said in its statement that it was reaching out to the owners of the houses that collapsed on Tuesday about cleaning up the debris, but some national seashore staff members were already gathering large pieces of debris from above the high tide line. A larger-scale plan for cleaning up the lumber will be developed this week, the statement said.
Christine Hauser is a Times reporter who writes breaking news stories, features and explainers.
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