Posted on May 27, 2026
KURE BEACH | Bill Franklin marched up to the sand crossover pushed up and over the rusty-colored pipe carrying sand from Carolina Beach Inlet to near the southern end of Kure Beach and paused.
“It’s nice to see the wide beach back,” said the Kentucky tourist and frequent visitor to Pleasure Island. “We needed the fresh sand after all those storms.”
While Southeastern North Carolina hasn’t seen a direct hurricane strike in several years, Mother Nature hasn’t let folks forget Wilmington is located along the coast.
No-named storms, passing strikes by systems like Hurricanes Chantal and Helene, and general nasty nor’easters have chewed up the region’s beaches over the years. The erosion woes in Carolina and Kure beaches were compounded by a year delay in the towns’ federal nourishment project due to sky high bids.
But with the latest nourishment of Pleasure Island this spring, officials feel confident they are well placed to weather whatever Mother Nature has planned for the region.
Still, they also know the new sand won’t last − nor will the sense of security that comes with it.
So is periodically pumping new material onto a beach the best solution to long-term questions about erosion and impacts like sea-level rise from climate change?
Pumping sand
The two New Hanover County towns weren’t the only Wilmington-area beach towns to see a fresh injection of sand during the 2025-26 winter dredging window.
In Brunswick County, Oak Island saw a series of projects add sand to most of the town’s 10 miles of oceanfront. According to the town’s website, the placement of the nearly 2 million cubic yards of sand is the largest non-emergency nourishment project in more than 25 years. Caswell Beach, which occupies the east end of Oak Island, also saw fresh sand as part of the Army Corps of Engineers’ dredging of part of the Cape Fear River shipping channel.
In Pender County, Surf City saw fresh sand added to its beach as part of a $19.3 million project during the 2024-25 dredging window. The pumping of sand and dredging of inlets is generally only allowed during the fall and winter months to limit impacts on nesting sea turtles, shorebirds and other marine life. A year before that, Topsail Beach at the southern tip of Topsail Island saw new sand put on its beach.
But all of those projects had one glaring difference than the Pleasure Island nourishment: how they were funded.
‘Really no long-term solution’
While the Outer Banks have become North Carolina’s poster child in recent years for collapsing homes and the inevitability of Mother Nature winning the oceanfront battle as seas continue to rise and climate change fuels bigger and stronger storms, a beach town closer to the Cape Fear region shows how difficult it could soon be for many coastal areas to keep battling the encroaching sea.
Thanks in large part to the adjacent New River Inlet and a flat topography, the north end of North Topsail Beach has been an erosion hot spot for decades.
“No, there really is no long-term solution that will bring the beach back,” said Dr. Robert Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, told the StarNews in November 2024. “These areas near inlets are the most dynamic areas along barrier islands, and unfortunately that’s what we’re seeing and have been seeing in North Topsail Beach.”
Sandbags now protect dozens of homes near the town’s northern tip. And while sand is often dumped onto the beach by the Army Corps when it dredges the nearby inlet, it doesn’t last very long. Other parts of the town’s 11 miles of beach also are dealing with erosion woes.
That’s prompted North Topsail Beach to aggressively move to shore up its beachfront with several different nourishment projects. But a big chunk of the town is in a Coastal Barrier Resources Act (CBRA) zone, a classification that prevents the expenditure of federal dollars on projects − including beach nourishment − in hazardous coastal areas. That means the town has to ask Onslow County for help, dip into its own budget to fund the work, or seek aid from the state.
But there’s only so much money to go around. Those budgetary pressures played a large role in the town withdrawing from Surf City’s federal nourishment project, which originally was supposed to also include nourishing 4 miles of beach in North Topsail. Town officials said the price tag of North Topsail’s portion jumped nearly 200% between 2012 and 2021 to almost $34 million.
Surf City is now pushing for its own federal nourishment project, with local officials traveling to Washington, D.C., in late April 2026 to reaffirm the town’s commitment to the 50-year project that could cost nearly $187 million over its lifetime.
Dare County, which includes the Outer Banks, also is facing the reality that it simply doesn’t have the funds to protect all of its beach areas. County officials have told residents in Rodanthe, an unincorporated village where more than 10 oceanfront homes have washed away since 2020, that a one-time beach nourishment could cost as much as $40 million. Maintaining the village’s beach over 30 years, where sand is washing away upwards of 20 feet a year in places, would cost more than $175 million − money the county simply doesn’t have as it works to reinforce beaches in Avon, Buxton, Kitty Hawk, Nags Head and other parts of the popular tourism destination.
The state also is reviewing its strategies for living with Mother Nature at the coast. The N.C. Department of Transportation has started a public engagement study to see whether trying to maintain a fixed road − N.C. 12 − on the Outer Banks that’s constantly threatened by blowing sand and tidal flooding is beneficial to local communities and the environment, guarantees the best form of connectivity, and is the smartest way to use limited taxpayer funds.
Rising costs and rising risks
Since 1964 when the first federal nourishment project pumped sand onto Carolina Beach’s eroded beach, mining offshore sand to rebuild battered beaches has been North Carolina’s go-to to keep its sandy strips plump for tourists and to protect pricey oceanfront property.
But pumping sand isn’t practical for all parts of the coast and is increasingly becoming more challenging, partly to a declining supply of compatible sand to meet all the demands.
An even bigger issue staring beach towns in the face, however, is the rising costs of nourishment projects.
The cost of beach-building projects has been increasingly rapidly in recent years. Factors that are helping send the cost of beach nourishment surging is the high demand for projects to rebuild beaches all along the Gulf and East coasts battered by recent hurricanes and the few number of American companies out there in the dredging business.
The just completed Pleasure Island beach project, for example, was delayed for a year after bids came in well above the corps’ estimate.
According to a review of 2020 imagery by the N.C. Division of Coastal Management, more than 750 of the state’s 8,777 oceanfront structures were considered at risk from oceanfront erosion, with no dune or vegetation between them and the Atlantic. That number has likely gone up in recent years. But what to do about disappearing beaches often divides communities, with no easy answers.
Getting the federal government to agree to largely fund a periodic nourishment, with Washington generally picking up 65% of the cost and local/state governments funding the remaining 35%, is the optimum solution for the state’s beach communities. But only four North Carolina towns have federal nourishment projects − Wrightsville, Carolina and Kure beaches in New Hanover County and Ocean Isle Beach in Brunswick County.
That leaves communities without guaranteed federal funding either relying on help from the state, their counties, or leaning on local revenue sources to help finance nourishments. Both the biggest part of the Oak Island nourishment and last season’s Surf City project were partly funded by one-time state grants.
But funding for beach building could become a heated issue in a world of tighter budgets in both Washington and Raleigh when many see nourishment projects as only benefiting oceanfront property owners and that the work needs to be done every several years to be truly effective.
That’s led some environmentalists and others to push managed retreat, in effect surrendering the most vulnerable areas of the coast where fighting the waves is expensive and has only questionable benefits and long-term chance of succeeding.
A study by Young’s group at Western Carolina, for example, found a buyout of Rodanthe’s most threatened structures would require significant upfront costs, but would give the village a viable beach for 15-25 years versus the five years or less a nourishment project would guarantee.
