BUXTON, North Carolina — The hurricane that felled Bonnie Lattimore’s family bungalow in the late summer of 2025, sending memories and splintered wood into the ocean, was not even that bad of a storm.
But as Hurricane Erin churned 200 miles off the coast, it toppled more than a dozen houses along the beach — the worst single episode of home loss in the seashore’s history.
All told, 31 houses have collapsed along this small strip of coast since 2020, most recently in February.
Lattimore and other residents of Buxton, a village within the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, say the precarity of their reality hasn’t been met with an appropriate official response. Government at every level isn’t doing enough to help — and sometimes even allow them to help themselves, they say.
“It’s morally and environmentally wrong,” said Lattimore, a nonprofit executive whose grandfather built the bungalow, as well as a second beach house nearby, in the 1970s. Her family tried to move the bungalow away from the beach last year but failed to secure a county permit before it collapsed.
This spring some houses on the Buxton beach are on the move, relocated by their owners farther inland to avoid the fate of the Lattimore family home.
At the same time, the village’s predicament is rippling outward, potentially upending a state law designed to prevent local communities from building seawalls or other structures that would protect houses but harm the beach itself. Local politicians are also pushing for changes to the National Flood Insurance Program — run by the Federal Emergency Management Administration — seeking relief that could allow them to tap insurance before houses actually fall.
The destruction of houses on Cape Hatteras has raised questions about whether taxpayer dollars should be responsible for protecting private property that many people say shouldn’t stand so close to the shore anyway. Buxton beach is an erosion hot spot on a barrier island that erodes and moves — the beach loses approximately 10 to 15 feet of sand to the ocean every year, a natural process exacerbated by climate change and sea-level rise.
The solutions on the table this year look much like the solutions of the past: A $50 million beach rebuilding project underway to build up the sand standing between the houses and the ocean. The county is also planning to repair a groin — a jetty-like structure built by the U.S. Navy decades ago — to help slow erosion by trapping sand.
But scientists caution those fixes aren’t permanent, while many homes still stand dangerously close to the ocean.
“You are just buying time,” said Reide Corbett, a coastal oceanographer and geochemist at East Carolina University and one of the scientists tasked by the state to study the science of erosion to address the Buxton crisis.
‘Perverse incentives’
Lat Williams was lucky.
A neighbor’s home lurched sideways into his beachfront property during Hurricane Erin last year. Fearing their house would also fall, Williams, a retired insurance executive, and his wife quickly bought a nearby vacant lot and moved their gray clad coastal cottage a few blocks inland.
Standing in the sand where his home used to be located, on a blustery December morning, Williams points out where each of his neighbors’ houses also once stood. Other houses along the beach haven’t fallen yet but are tagged by the city as uninhabitable because their septic tanks have surfaced. One blue house leans precipitously towards the ocean. It bears a desperate “for sale” sign.
Williams shakes his head. Many of the houses belonged to friends and longtime acquaintances. Buxton is mostly a town of year-round residents, except for this beachfront, where many structures are second homes or vacation rentals.
Some other homeowners have followed William’s example, moving their homes to new land, or just farther from the ocean on their existing plot.
Barry Crum, a local contractor who grew up a half-mile from Buxton beach, said he has moved about six imperiled houses over the last year. The process — which involves lifting the house off its pylons and transporting the structure — costs about a quarter of a million dollars per house.
“I know it’s a lot of money. But at the same time, it’s probably about half to a third of what it would cost to build a new house,” he said. He expects business to slow down — his company is also doing repairs and upgrades to some beachfront houses to weather the severe erosion — after the incoming beach nourishment and groin repair.
Williams thinks an overhaul of the insurance safety net would allow more people to afford these kind of relocations. It’s an idea embraced by many in North Carolina’s political leadership.
North Carolina Rep. Greg Murphy, a Republican, introduced a bill last year to allow homeowners to tap $250,000 from their FEMA flood insurance policies before houses collapse, using the money to move at-risk properties or get payouts for condemned properties.
Currently, the National Flood Insurance Program policies only provide coverage if their homes collapse. And it’s needed: Property owners at the national seashore are responsible for removing the debris of their fallen homes — an expense that can cost tens of thousands of dollars, although the National Park Service often steps in if a homeowner doesn’t finish the job.
“I understand insurance really well,” Williams said. “I get that it’s for catastrophic kinds of things. But if you have zero incentive, or a very small incentive … and you have virtually no help from your insurance policy, it’s a perverse incentive to just let it go.”
Williams said the program could be designed to avoid abuses — like developers buying homes, moving them with federal dollars and selling at a profit. “The insurance plan wins, the homeowner wins, the community, the national seashore, everybody wins,” he said.
The bill has the support of Mike Causey, the state’s Republican insurance commissioner, and Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat.
But that legislation hasn’t moved out of committee in Washington. Changes that make the flood insurance program more expensive are likely to be hard sells as lawmakers have spent years trying to constrain its costs, which have exploded after recent, devastating hurricanes.
There are also FEMA funds available for home relocation through its Hazard Mitigation Grant Program and Flood Mitigation Assistance. But individual homeowners can’t apply. That funding has to be done at a communitywide level and requested by the state.
“While federal funding is available to help homeowners in flood-prone areas relocate or demolish threatened homes, these funds must be accessed through state or local government programs,” FEMA said in a statement when asked about its flood insurance program.
Like many coastal communities, regular property insurance is limited for Buxton beach homes. Considered high risk, many big insurance companies won’t underwrite them, noted Causey. About 70 percent of the North Carolina barrier island residents use a state insurance pool. The others fend for themselves or go without, Causey said.
Causey admitted that there’s been some overdevelopment in the beach areas of North Carolina and said new development must be done responsibly. But the problem in Hatteras is not an easy fix from an insurance or government perspective, he said.
“Everybody wants to live or work or have a home at the beach,” he said.
‘A false sense of security’
As it extends southward, the thin barrier island that makes up the southern tip of Cape Hatteras National Seashore drifts seaward until the coastal marshes of the Atlantic Seaboard disappear on the other side of the Pamlico Sound.
Where it’s not held down by scrub bush and seagrass, pale sand whispers across the blacktop of NC-12, the only road in and out of the island. For some stretches of the highway, water laps on one side or the other. When it floods, this road to Buxton, and other small beach hubs like the nearby village of Rodanthe, can be cut off from the mainland for days.
North of Hatteras Island are other wispy strips of land that together form part of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, including the well-known vacation spot of Nags Head with its gated communities, kayak rentals and summer condos. To the south of Buxton beach is open ocean.
Established in 1953, the Hatteras seashore was created to protect for posterity the wild and then-lightly developed barrier island ecosystem. Much of the land southwest of Buxton is scrubby woodlands and beach, protected for wildlife.
Brad Murray, a professor of geomorphology and coastal processes at Duke University, said the island naturally cycles through erosion on the ocean side and rebuilding on the sound side, where hurricanes deposit fresh sand.
Hatteras should be drifting westward as a result, gradually closing the gap between the island and the mainland coast but that’s been hindered by human development, buildings and roads.
The seashore is losing more than a half-mile of ground to the sea per century, a process accelerated by climate change and sea-level rise, Murray said. The coast is expected to face 15 to 22 inches of sea-level rise by 2050.
“That’s the fundamental problem,” Murray said. “The community was built on a landscape that doesn’t tend to stay in one place … this whole stretch of the Northern Outer Banks has more sand going out than coming in.”
To critics the homeowners in Buxton should have known the nature of the islands.
“When you build by the water, it’s only a matter of time before it’s reclaimed,” one Facebook user posted under a local news video of the Lattimore family house bobbing in the surf.
Bonnie Lattimore tried to weigh in, telling people that when her grandfather Tex Ballance built the home in 1976, it wasn’t close to the water.
Many of the endangered homes in Buxton were built around the same time, when the houses were protected from the ocean by grassy dunes and about a football field’s worth of sandy beach. The town grew up around the Navy base and a lighthouse — now owned by the National Park Service. To protect the military base, the Navy built a system of three groins at the southern end of Buxton beach in 1969 and 1970. Made of steel sheet pilings with rocks at the base to reduce damage from sand scour, the groins look like large, less penetrable, versions of the steel guardrails along highways.
Groins, which extend out into the water from the shoreline, are designed to capture sand carried by the ocean current. Sand is trapped on the upstream side of the groin, helping to maintain the beach, but then the downdrift side often ends up starved of sand.
Almost immediately after the groins were built, the ocean began damaging them, requiring frequent repairs by the Navy. When the lighthouse was moved inland in 1999 — due to erosion threatening its foundation — the condition of the groins got worse because no one was tending them anymore, said Jeff Dawson, a founding member of the Buxton Civic Association who was raised on the island. His family ran a beachfront hotel before selling to a developer. His grandmother still runs a property on the beach, and he owns the restaurant Fatty’s Treats and Tours across the street.
The military facility that sparked growth in Buxton was taken over by the Coast Guard in the 1980s and turned over to NPS in 2010.
Two of the old groins are mostly hiding under the water now. The farthest south groin peaks out, rusted and jagged, like the remaining foundation of a long-forgotten pier. The county plans to repair it under a provision of the state ban that allows repairs to old structures if they are still 50 percent intact.
NPS deferred questions about the groins to the Navy, noting that the park agency did not build them and was not responsible for their upkeep.
“This whole area here was built because the [groins] were there,” said Williams. “We had a false sense of security, I think, because they had been maintained, and then all of a sudden they weren’t.”
But Corbett, the scientist, disagreed. It’s true that more than a football field’s worth of sand and dune once stood between homes and the water line. But Buxton beach erosion — up to 15 feet every year — is part of a natural process that hard structures can’t fully stop, he said.
He pointed to the relocation of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse as evidence that erosion persisted even when the groins were intact.
“Those groins had been there and they had been functional. They didn’t have a bunch of holes in them. They had been there for three decades, yet we still spent millions of dollars moving that lighthouse so we didn’t lose it to the ocean,” he said.
His conclusion: “Those groins don’t stop the process of erosion. They do hold some sand … but they aren’t going to stop the process, that long-term process of erosion.”
‘A mile and a half of a problem’
North Carolina’s 1974 coastal management law largely prohibits hard structures like groins and seawalls, because while they can reduce erosion in one area, they often worsen it elsewhere. The phenomenon is visible south of Buxton beach and just south of the historic groins, where the coast carves sharply inland. That southern part of the island holds NPS facilities, the lighthouse and a protected nature reserve.
“It’s not developed, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing,” Corbett said of the southerly part of Hatteras. “There’s incredible habitat down drift.”
NPS approved a permit in April for the county to repair the southernmost of Buxton’s groins and North Carolina Division of Coastal Management has also approved the project.
The other two Buxton groins were too degraded to qualify under the coastal law exemption. But some local residents are still fighting for them to be brought back.
The Dare County Commission last year asked the Legislature for an exemption to the hard structure ban for Buxton. The Legislature hasn’t yet taken up the cause. But, last year, in the wake of the Buxton crisis, the state’s Coastal Resources Commission ordered its science panel to investigate alternatives to stop erosion. The results of the proposed report will be discussed at a meeting later this month.
The question in Buxton for now is whether one groin is enough to slow erosion when the three were built to work in tandem.
Dawson has his doubts. He noted that they were originally built to work together. When sand stacks up in front of one groin it starts to spill over to the next, and then the next. That “groin field” is more effective at stopping erosion.
Dare County will spend $50 million this spring to build up the beach, using its own money while also seeking some reimbursement of federal funds from FEMA.
Similar efforts were carried out as recently as 2022, but significant erosion occurred within just 2 years, according to areport to Congress from the National Park Service. Some residents, like Dawson, say the beach nourishments aren’t lasting as long because without the groins the sand has simply washed away.
Robert Outten, who serves as Dare County’s manager and attorney, said the renourishment is the country’s only tangible option in lieu of a law change, even though the combined impact of the new sand and the groin repair probably won’t prevent more houses from falling.
“Erosion is an issue, but it’s no different than flooding on the Mississippi River, fires in California,” he said. “Whatever you pick, everybody has the hazard that they have to live in and work their way around.”
Efforts to exempt Buxton from the state’s ban on hard structures have raised concerns among conservationists, who fear setting a precedent.
Emma Haydocy, senior manager of the coasts and climate initiative at the Surfrider Foundation, said North Carolina’s coastal law serves as a national model — other states like New Jersey have embraced hard structures and changed their beaches as a result. While the group has not taken a formal position on Buxton’s efforts, it is wary of damaging or altering protected areas south of the town by repairing groins and setting a precedent that encourages other North Carolina communities to lobby for hardened structures.
“We are very firm in wanting to ensure that the ban stays in place, and that other communities in North Carolina are not steered toward a similar fate as we’re seeing in Hatteras,” she said.
Surfrider supports government entities buying out homes and demolishing or moving them — to avoid more collapses and ocean contamination from debris, air conditioning chemicals and septic systems.
But that, too, is expensive. In 2023, NPS bought two threatened homes in Rodanthe, north of Buxton, for $700,000, tapping money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, then paid $72,500 to demolish them.
Outten said buying homes with taxpayer dollars isn’t on the table for the country, and he downplayed the collapsed Buxton homes as a threat to county tourism.
“On Hatteras Island, we got 60 miles of beautiful beaches, and we’ve got a mile and a half of a problem,” he said.
