The quest to save Outer Banks homes

 August 2025

 

From WP by Brady Dennis, John Muyskens, Kevin Crowe and Daniel Pullen

Brady Dennis, a North Carolina native, has covered erosion and flooding across the Southeast for years, most recently reporting from Buxton in March as homes were being moved back from the surf.

Daniel Pullen, a five-decade Hatteras Island resident who currently lives in Buxton, has been cataloging storms and the Outer Banks transformation for 20 years.

John Muyskens and Kevin Crowe analyzed satellite and aerial survey data from Boston and Puerto Rico, respectively.

BUXTON, N.C.
— One afternoon in late October, as Lat Williams stood near the roiling ocean, he called his wife, Debby.
“I think we’re going to lose the house,” he told her.
“I think it’s going down within the hour.”
For weeks, they had watched with dread as the ocean claimed their neighbors’ homes along this erosion-battered stretch of beach, where once-towering dunes have been leveled, entire sections of streets have disappeared and at least 19 homes have collapsed since September.
At their place on Cottage Avenue, the clawing surf had left their septic system exposed.
Floating debris knocked out part of their foundation, and the churning tides sent water rushing under the house.
“Suddenly, we were beachfront,” Lat, 71, recalled.
“We were on the beach,” said Debby, 68.
“We were in the beach.”

 Buxton beach with the GeoGarage platform (NOAA nautical raster chart)

 

Buxton beach with the GeoGarage platform (NOAA nautical ENC vector chart) 

 

It wasn’t always this way.
Debby still has a photo from the day her parents bought the home back in 1980, the two of them smiling beside a “for sale” sign.
Healthy dunes and hundreds of feet of beach stretched out behind them then.
Four generations have enjoyed the modest cottage, where Lat and Debby retired and have lived full time since 2017.
“I always wanted to live here,” Debby said.
“I love the ocean, even when she tries to do us in.”

Debris from fallen houses is piled up on the beach in Buxton.

Multiple homes collapsed into the ocean in Buxton as strong winds from Hurricane Imelda ravaged the coastline on Sept. 30. (George Huffmon via Storyful) 

Survey data obtained by The Washington Post from RCOAST, a company that uses aerial 3D mapping, reveals how tides began to encroach on the homes of the Williamses’ neighbors as Hurricane Erin passed offshore in August.
Weeks later, waves from Hurricane Humberto claimed nearby homes, sometimes within minutes of one another.
The survey data also shows how the Williamses’ home sat atop a higher part of the beach as of August, a seemingly safe distance from the water.
Cross-sections of the beach at the Williamses house from August and October of 2025.
In August, the house is surrounded by small dunes.
In October, much of the sand has been carried away, leading to as much as a 9 foot drop in beach elevation.

 

Much of sand would soon wash away.
Debris from nearby homes damaged their house’s newly exposed foundation.
Contractors raced to shore up the structure until it could be moved.
The numerous home collapses, including six in a 24-hour period in October, generated national headlines and inflicted trauma — to homeowners who have seen investments crumble, to a community dependent on the tourism that attracts people to this picturesque corner of the coast, and to the beaches choked by mountains of debris.
But the disaster of recent months has also forced hard questions about what comes next, what to try to protect — or not protect — and how to prepare rather than merely react when disaster strikes.
It has left many property owners desperate for a beach nourishment planned to begin later this month, even as they wonder how long that reprieve might last.
And the episode has shown the kinds of quandaries researchers say other coastal areas will have to confront as rising seas and stronger storms further encroach on human development.
“We didn’t end up with threatened oceanfront structures overnight,” said Dave Hallac, superintendent of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
“And we probably won’t find a solution overnight.”

‘No buffer at all’

Sand fills a broken swimming pool after multiple storms and broad erosion. 

To Reide Corbett, an oceanographer and the executive director of the Coastal Studies Institute at East Carolina University, Buxton has become a “poster child of coastal change.”
There is no shortage of opinions here about what has hastened the vanishing of the shoreline and led to the demise of so many houses.
Was a deteriorating terminal groin, a structure that juts from the shore south of town and is designed to trap sand, a key factor? What about the succession of storms this winter? Have rates of erosion sped up?
Corbett acknowledges there’s no single cause but rather a complex web of factors, including the underlying geology and the nature of ocean currents.
One piece is clear: The area faces some of the highest erosion rates in North Carolina and possibly all of the East Coast.
“Over the last decades, the beach has retreated to where the shoreline is at their doorstep,” Corbett said.
“There is no buffer at all anymore.”
The homes built decades ago on these spots once were far from the ocean.
But a dynamic landscape like the Outer Banks is meant to shift and move, and constant change is normal, said Laura Moore, a coastal geomorphologist and the director of the Coastal Environmental Change Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“Barrier island coastlines have to move landward and build upward to stay above sea level as it rises,” Moore said.
That’s part of a natural and necessary process, driven by storms that deposit sand atop the islands.
Scientists such as Corbett say the steady rise in sea levels over recent decades presents an additional challenge to homes and infrastructure along this vulnerable coastline.
According to federal tide gauge data, relative sea levels have risen eight inches near Buxton in the last 30 years, a trend that shows no signs of slowing.
For every inch the ocean rises, water can reach farther inland at high tides and during storms.
“It’s becoming more of a problem,” Corbett said.
“It’s not going away.”
The constant thrum of erosion often happens with little fanfare, Hallac said — until it begins to butt up against human development, as it has in Buxton.
“The ocean is finally catching up to them,” he said.
“They are highly exposed to one of the most energetic ocean areas in the country.”

Buying time?

Cullen Gaskill removes a wire from an erosion-threatened house as a rainbow stretches across the sky behind him. 

A reprieve, one many locals are desperate to see, is scheduled to arrive soon.
The project to widen more than two miles of beach along Buxton and the neighboring village of Avon, as well as repair a crumbling jetty, is scheduled to take several months.
The price tag for taxpayers: roughly $50 million, paid for with a mix of federal and local funds.
How much time it will buy is uncertain.
The most recent renourishment in Buxton, in 2022, was supposed to provide five years of protection.
It didn’t.
A chart titled "Buxton's vanishing beach" showing satellite-derived data on the monthly average distance between the Williamses' house and the average water line.
This stretch of shore has been retreating at an average rate of five feet per year.

 

A Post analysis of satellite-derived shoreline data from CoastSat found that in one particularly vulnerable spot, erosion had narrowed the beach back to its pre-nourishment width within about two years.
“It became apparent in year two that it wasn’t going to last the whole five years,” Dare County Manager Bobby Outten said of the 2022 project.
As a result, officials decided to undertake the upcoming beach nourishment a year earlier than originally planned.

A Cape Hatteras Electric Cooperative employee stands on an exposed septic tank in October to inspect a meter on an endangered house.

The past two nourishment projects, including another completed in early 2018, cost a combined $38 million, according to data maintained by the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association.
“What’s happening in Buxton is not a surprise,” said Christy Swann, founder of RCOAST, the firm that uses 3D mapping to assess coastal erosion.
Here, as in many places, she said, erosion is happening more quickly than decisions about how to adapt to and manage it.
“When I look at Buxton, I see it as more of what’s to come,” she said.
Corbett believes that beach replenishments often “provide a false sense of security,” as the shoreline inevitably erodes again, sometimes rapidly.
“Nourishment has become a crutch,” he said.
“What are you buying that time to do?”
Instead, he said, communities should use that time to move imperiled structures out of harm’s way and prepare for future changes.

 

A recently moved house on the beach in Buxton, bottom right, stands alongside others slated to be shifted back from the encroaching ocean. 

 

 

Lat Williams tends a plant in his recently relocated home last November. 

 

Locals wait on a covered porch for another house to fall on Oct. 12. 

Outten agrees that merely pumping more sand isn’t a sustainable strategy.
“In the long term, we’ve got to have some other tools, because the cost of nourishment is growing faster than our revenues are growing,” he said.
One challenge he and others cite is North Carolina’s decades-old ban on permanent erosion-control structures, such as sea walls, which scientists say can worsen erosion farther down the beach.
The law has long been a source of frustration for property owners and some local officials.
“Our ability to be proactive, to avoid some of the problems erosion creates, is very much limited in North Carolina,” Outten said.
The home collapses of recent years in the Outer Banks have spurred pressure to revisit the policy, and a state-backed science panel has been assessing alternatives for managing oceanfront erosion.
As that policy fight shows, Corbett said, state and local leaders must now confront a difficult but critical question.
“What are we trying to protect?” he said.
“Are we trying to protect those homes and that property? Or are we trying to protect those beaches and the people who come for recreation?”
The upcoming beach nourishment’s stated goal is to protect the main artery that runs the length of the Outer Banks, not to defend exposed homes.
The precarious nature of Highway 12, which snakes along the fragile coastline, has long been a concern both for the state and for the local communities that depend on it.

 

Barry Crum, owner of Crum Works Inc., has been moving one imperiled house after another from the oceanfront in recent months, and helping shore up others at risk.
“It’s like triage,” said the Buxton native.
“I’ve never seen anything like this.”

 

A 2023 task force report on threats to the road included long-standing “chronic erosion” and flooding and overwash from storms.
But it also found that “sea level rise, and projections for a higher frequency of damaging flooding events, will exacerbate coastal hazards in the future.”
Flooding, overwash and bad weather have forced officials to close sections of the road 79 times across Hyde and Dare counties since 2012, according to a Post analysis of data from the North Carolina Department of Transportation through early February.
The closures added up to 9,290 hours, or more than a year in total.
Those closures have real-world consequences, Outten said.
People can’t get to medical appointments.
Ambulances can’t access certain areas.
Grocery and fuel trucks can’t reach towns.
“The list goes on and on,” he said.
“And these closures aren’t always like one day at a time.
… It’s a big economic problem.”
There is broad agreement that the current situation is untenable.
Evidence of that lies in nearly every direction.
You can find it in a parking lot in the shadow of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, where massive debris piles remind passersby of all that has been lost.
You could see it in the tenuous state of Buxton’s beachfront this spring, even after officials used mechanized rakes to sift through the sand and volunteers organized multiple community cleanups.
Long after houses had fallen, once-buried septic tanks sat exposed.
Busted concrete swimming pools were full of sand.
On one March afternoon, pieces of dinner plates, broken tiles, shards of glass and an old paint roller lay among the ruins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Billy Dillon, whose family has owned and operated the Outer Banks Motel for more than 70 years, can recall other times when storms and erosion caused damage.
But nothing like these past months.
The collapses have brought “a tremendous amount of bad publicity,” he said, along with “a lot of cancellations because there is no beach.”
His mother, Carol Dillon, still arrives to work most days at the hotel she started with her husband in 1955.
Now 97, she blames the National Park Service for not keeping what she said were long-ago assurances to maintain the beach along this majestic seashore.
“I feel like the government let us down,” she said, adding that she hopes the planned renourishment can hold the sea at bay.
“I’m hoping it’ll last until I leave this Earth.”

Last fall, the home of Lat and Debby Williams was slowly moved several blocks to a new lot.
(Lat Williams)
Lat and Debby Williams, for their part, engineered their escape just in time.
A contractor was able to brace their house until it could be moved in early November.
They purchased another lot several blocks inland, and crews picked up the home and slowly moved it along the Buxton streets, dodging trees and power lines.
An annotated aerial photo showing the Williamses' house being moved.
The graphic shows the original location of the house and the route along Old Lighthouse Road to its new location.

 After clearing land, and paying for a new septic system and new pilings; after pouring concrete and rebuilding their stairs and deck; they were able to return home in mid-February after six months of staying in friends’ homes.
Amid what Lat Williams called so much “profound” loss, the couple feels grateful.
They tacked up a sign out front that reads, “Answered Prayers.”
They estimate that the hasty retreat cost them roughly a quarter-million dollars.
Was it worth it? Should they stay in Buxton for the long haul?

Hard questions to answer in this moment, though they feel certain that if they hadn’t moved the house, it wouldn’t be standing.
From the deck in their new spot, the couple can see the ocean that once thrashed at their doorstep.
The sound of the waves is more distant now.
But they have a clear view of the homes still teetering at the water’s edge, including those that a crew was busy moving, one by one, farther from the sea.

 

Lat and Debby Williams spend time on the porch of their newly relocated house.

Methodology

To determine the change in relative sea level near Buxton, The Post analyzed monthly tide gauge data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for relative mean sea levels for the gauge at Oregon Inlet Marina near Buxton.

A linear regression model was applied to the annual means for the gauge to determine the trend from 1994 through 2025, the time period when the gauge had the most complete data.