Homes are collapsing in North Carolina. It could spell trouble for other coastal areas, too

By Samantha Delouya, CNN

(CNN) — When Stacy Morgan and her husband, Brandon Dodick, bought their beach house in Buxton, North Carolina, in May, they imagined one day spending their retirement there.

Five months later, the house was gone.

Theirs was one of 27 beachfront homes in Buxton and Rodanthe, two villages on Hatteras Island, part of North Carolina’s barrier islands, that have collapsed into the ocean since 2020. Rising sea levels and relentless storms are erasing land faster than locals – or officials – can respond.

The collapses are happening on a thin, sparsely populated stretch of coast. But some experts warn that what’s happening in Hatteras could be a glimpse of what’s to come in other coastal areas as climate change fuels more powerful storms and hastens erosion.

In North Carolina, the losses are accelerating. Sixteen of the 27 homes have collapsed since September, all of them unoccupied at the time. Meanwhile, the safety net designed to financially protect homeowners from flooding sits frozen amid the government shutdown.

In a statement last week, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore indicated that additional homes could collapse in Buxton in the coming days.

Many of the homes that have collapsed were hundreds of feet away from the ocean’s shoreline when they were initially built, said Reide Corbett, the dean of the Coastal Studies Institute at East Carolina University.

But over the past few decades, “that shoreline has been edging its way closer and closer until these houses are now truly at the water’s edge,” he said.

Morgan and Dodick knew there would come a time when they would have to physically move their home further away from the shoreline, due to the area’s coastal erosion. But they thought they had years to figure that out.

In late September, a wave carrying debris from a nearby home that had already collapsed slammed into theirs, undermining its foundation. Less than three weeks later, on October 18, Dodick logged onto Facebook and saw a video, filmed by a neighbor, of his home being swept off its foundation, falling into the waves.

“And then our neighbors started calling us because they heard it. It was at night, but they heard it go down,” Morgan said.

Insurance shortfalls

One of those neighbors was Lat Williams, who has lived full-time on the same stretch of beach as Morgan and Dodick for decades. His family has owned the home for nearly 45 years.

During Hurricanes Humberto and Imelda in late September and early October, Williams said he could hear the thuds of waves slamming into nearby houses — and then the sounds of collapsing.

Williams’ home sustained damage from the storms, but for now it’s still standing. Williams is racing to move the home before it is also claimed by the ocean.

He recently purchased a plot of land farther inland and hired a company that specializes in lifting houses off their foundation and relocating them. The move alone will cost about $55,000, he said. He’s hoping the debris-strewn roads in his neighborhood are cleared in time for the movers next week.

“This is an expensive undertaking, and we won’t get any help from our flood insurance, but we don’t want to lose that house,” Williams said. “It’s got so many memories and so much history. If we can save the house, we’re going to do that, rather than let it fall in and collect the insurance money.”

Williams, who spent 40 years in commercial insurance before retiring, said it frustrates him that the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, won’t help cover the cost of relocating his home. Under the current rules, he’d only get a payout if he let it collapse into the ocean.

FEMA did not respond to a request for comment. The agency is not operating at full capacity during the ongoing government shutdown.

“The consequences of allowing your home to collapse is that you’ve got the debris, you’ve got pollution, you’re damaging neighboring structures and all the mess that goes with it,” Williams said. “Nobody wants to have their house collapse and go into the ocean, but if you move the house, which is what we’re doing, we get no help from that policy whatsoever.”

A ‘canary in the coal mine?’

It had been a longtime dream of Morgan’s to buy a beach house. She and her husband fell in love with their “perfectly imperfect” cottage in Buxton as soon as they saw it.

In May, when they purchased the house for $495,000, Morgan said it looked as if there was “at least a football field” worth of sand between the ocean’s shore and their home.

And they knew there had been efforts to stem erosion in the area. Most recently, in 2022, the county had completed a more than $18 million project for beach nourishment, which is the process of adding sand to an eroding beach to widen it. Another nourishment project was scheduled for 2026.

Laura Moore, who researches coastal environments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that while the beach renourishment projects may stave off erosion, they aren’t keeping up.

“When you have a place that’s eroding so fast that you need to bring in so much sand so often, it’s really hard to counter that process,” she said. “This is an area where the natural processes are adding up to take more sand away than is naturally coming in.”

While some locals expressed frustration that the government doesn’t maintain jetties or groins in the area to halt erosion, Moore said that would only move the issue to another place on the island.

“The amount of erosion that’s occurring is going to occur,” Moore said. “You can change the distribution of it, but it doesn’t make the problem go away.”

Moore said it may be only “a matter of time” before stretches of coast in high-erosion areas succumb to a similar fate, calling Buxton and Rodanthe the “canary in the coal mine.”

The office of North Carolina Governor Josh Stein did not reply to a request for comment.

Dodick said they had thought they would have at least five to 10 years before they faced any issues with the house.

But their home’s foundation sustained damage on September 30. The next day, Morgan and Dodick tried to update their $250,000 flood insurance policy to better cover their belongings — but they couldn’t. The NFIP has been unable to issue, renew or modify policies during the ongoing government shutdown.

“I woke up every day after those storms with an absolute pit in my stomach,” said Dodick.

They had spent a summer making the home their own. Then one night, it was gone.

“We would love to stay in the community, but now we’re very nervous about purchasing another house there,” Morgan said. “It’s almost like, now we see nobody is helping us. It feels like nobody is doing anything to help the situation.”

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