Posted on July 20, 2026
As Dare County prepares to place approximately 2 million cubic yards of sand along Buxton’s oceanfront and repair the southernmost of the village’s three Navy-built groins, the projects represent the latest chapter in a shoreline-management effort that stretches back decades.
Sand placement is currently expected to begin in late July and continue for approximately 95 days, depending on weather and ocean conditions. The project will cover about 2.9 miles of shoreline, extending from the Haulover Day Use Area south to the groin near the historic Cape Hatteras Lighthouse site.
A separate $8.6 million contract with SJ Hamill Construction Company will repair the groin, with construction expected to begin in August. Plans call for installing a new steel sheet-pile core and stone scour protection while maintaining the structure’s existing footprint, which extends approximately 640 feet into the ocean.
The two projects are intended to work together. Beach nourishment will create a wider sand buffer, while the groin repair is designed to help retain some of that sand and slow shoreline losses near the southern end of the project area. County officials have emphasized that neither project is expected to stop erosion permanently.
Although the scope of the 2026 work is significant, the approach is not new.
Long before “beach nourishment” became a familiar phrase on Hatteras Island, federal agencies, researchers, and engineers were experimenting with ways to stabilize Buxton’s shoreline.
During the past century, the area has seen sand fencing, artificial dunes, grass plantings, repeated nourishment projects, groins, sandbags, revetments, riprap, artificial seagrass, scour mats and, ultimately, the relocation of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in 1999.
Much of the early history is documented in a National Park Service report published in February 1974 titled 1973 Buxton Beach Nourishment Project: An Annotated Photographic Atlas.
The 47-page document was prepared by Robert Dolan, Bruce Hayden, Preston Riddell and John Ponton of Coastal Research Associates in Charlottesville, Virginia. It recorded shoreline conditions before, during, and immediately after a large 1973 nourishment project and was intended to serve as a baseline against which the project’s long-term history could be compared.
More than five decades later, the atlas provides a detailed record of how Buxton became one of the Outer Banks’ longest-running experiments in shoreline engineering.
Before nourishment
The 1974 atlas begins by placing the Buxton project within the natural history of the Outer Banks.
The researchers described North Carolina’s barrier islands as coastal features that developed over roughly the previous 5,000 years. As the ocean gradually rose following the last Ice Age, the islands migrated landward, while storms continually moved sand both along the shoreline and across the islands.
Under natural conditions, the researchers wrote, a barrier island typically included a broad beach, dune fields, overwash terraces, and marshes along the soundside. Storm-driven ocean overwash was not simply a destructive event; it was one of the processes by which sand moved across an island and helped it migrate landward.
Early settlement patterns reflected an awareness of those conditions.
Development on Hatteras Island was once largely concentrated along the soundside of the Outer Banks, indicating what the authors characterized as respect for the dangers of ocean overwash. Oceanfront areas were not viewed as stable, permanent ground in the same way they would be in later decades.
That began to change during the 1930s.
A large-scale dune-building program by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and under the direction of the National Park Service, installed sand fencing along broad stretches of oceanfront. The fences trapped windblown sand and gradually formed a nearly continuous chain of barrier dunes. Once the dunes were established, grasses were planted and periodically fertilized to promote rapid and dense growth.
The work was intended to restrict ocean overwash and create a more stable landscape. And for a time, it succeeded.
Except during the most severe storms, the artificial dune line largely contained ocean overwash on the seaward side of the dunes. That new margin of protection helped change development patterns throughout the Outer Banks.
Villages expanded toward the ocean. Stable roadbeds and utility lines were constructed along the islands. Homes and businesses increasingly occupied areas that had previously been exposed to routine overwash.
“The caution of earlier decades faded rapidly,” the researchers wrote.
In a 2003 Island Breeze article on the historic Avon Village or “Kinnakeet,” historian Danny Couch recounted a story where an Avon resident traded dozens of acres of oceanfront land for a washing machine. “He knew the oceanfront land was useless, and it was a really good bargain,” said Couch in the article.
By the mid-20th century, the dune system had indeed reduced overwash, but it did not stop longshore sand movement or shoreline recession.
The report explained that as beaches narrowed, waves and storm surge became increasingly concentrated along the oceanfront. Progressively smaller storms could reach and erode the barrier dunes, and steep dune scarps became common.
By essentially restricting the ocean to the beach side of the constructed dune line, the program also limited the natural movement of sand across the islands. The landscape appeared more stable, but the shoreline was still retreating.
For several decades, repeated maintenance of the dunes was enough to preserve that appearance of stability.
Then came March 1962.
The storm that changed everything
The Ash Wednesday Storm of March 7-8, 1962, marked a turning point in the history of shoreline management on the Outer Banks.
The powerful nor’easter caused widespread shoreline recession and breached dunes along the barrier islands. Ocean overwash, which the constructed dune system had largely suppressed except during the most significant storms, again became a dominant force.
Until then, officials had generally focused on maintaining the dune system across the Outer Banks as a whole.
After the storm, management became more site-specific. Agencies began directing resources toward individual erosion hotspots where buildings, roads, utilities, and public facilities faced immediate danger.
The shift was especially pronounced in Buxton.
The area surrounding the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse contained an unusual concentration of federal facilities, transportation infrastructure, commercial development, and private property. As the shoreline retreated, protecting that collection of structures became a priority for multiple agencies.
The 1974 atlas also documents how vulnerable the wider Buxton area remained during the years leading up to the 1973 project.
During a February 1973 storm, overwash in the village spread across an area up to 600 feet wide. North of Buxton, sand moved across the island and into Pamlico Sound, leaving as much as 4 feet of sand on N.C. Highway 12.
Those conditions closely resemble modern overwash events that periodically cover N.C. 12 and interrupt travel on Hatteras Island. But during the 1960s, the erosion problem carried an additional national significance: the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse remained only a few hundred feet from the advancing shoreline.
The first nourishment efforts
Between 1958 and 1966, the shoreline near the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse receded by more than 250 feet, according to the atlas.
By 1966, just 256 feet of beach separated the lighthouse from the ocean.
Within approximately four miles of the lighthouse, the report identified six categories of threatened development: the U.S. Coast Guard LORAN Station, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the National Park Service museum, the U.S. Naval Station, several private homes, and numerous businesses.
The National Park Service responded with a nourishment project.
In 1966, a contractor placed approximately 312,000 cubic yards of sand along the Buxton beaches considered most at risk. The sand was taken from a large tidal delta on the soundside, where it had been deposited during the Ash Wednesday Storm.
This first project did not perform as intended.
The atlas concluded that the borrow material was too fine to remain as part of the dry, above-water beach, and that the overall quantity was too small to have a significant effect on the inshore zone.
This finding is important because it identifies and separates two basic components of nourishment design: the type of sand and the amount placed.
A nourishment project can add substantial material to a shoreline, but sand that is significantly finer than the native beach may disperse more rapidly. At the same time, even suitable sand may provide limited protection when the total quantity is too small to influence the wider beach and nearshore system.
In Buxton, the 1966 project failed on both counts, according to the researchers.
The result was not the end of nourishment in Buxton. Instead, it began a pattern in which officials learned from one project and returned with a different design, a larger volume, or an additional form of shoreline protection.
Enter the Navy groins
By 1967, the lighthouse and the nearby Naval Facility were again considered vulnerable.
Though the Naval base is long gone – with the exception of underground foundations and debris that were supposed to be fully removed but weren’t – the roughly 50-acre property was once a busy hub of activity on the island. Built in the 1950s, the station monitored submarine activity during the height of the Cold War, and featured military structures as well as facilities for personnel stationed at the Buxton site, which included a gas station, oceanfront dance club, and a bowling alley.
Following a recommendation from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Coastal Engineering Research Center, the Navy contracted in 1969 for the construction of three permanent groins within the problem area. Construction occurred in 1969 and 1970.
Although the structures are frequently called “jetties” locally, they are technically groins. Groins generally extend perpendicular to a beach to interrupt the movement of sand along the shoreline. Jetties are typically built along inlet channels to stabilize an inlet and assist navigation.
The Buxton groins were constructed before North Carolina adopted the Coastal Area Management Act (CAMA) in 1974 and before the state’s modern restrictions on permanent oceanfront erosion-control structures.
The structures also did not remain exactly as first built. The southernmost groin was repaired in 1975 and 1994 and expanded during the early 1980s. Its landward side was extended by approximately 300 feet, while armor stone and additional scour protection were added during later work.
The 1974 atlas concluded that the original groin field provided protection for the lighthouse and Naval Facility. But the benefits were very much localized.
Shorelines immediately north and south continued eroding at rates equal to or greater than those previously recorded, and large embayments – or recesses or indentations in a coastline – formed on both sides of the groin field.
A photograph taken in December 1972 showed a beach approximately 40 to 50 feet wider on the updrift, or northern, side of the middle groin. That accumulation was described as a characteristic effect of a groin interrupting sand moving along the shore.
The same photograph showed that the northernmost groin was already damaged. A roughly 150-foot center section had failed soon after construction, preventing the same pattern of sand accumulation from developing there.
The record therefore presents a more complicated history than a simple conclusion that the structures either “worked” or “failed.”
They retained sand and provided protection in one area, but erosion continued nearby. One of the three also experienced a significant structural failure just a few short years after it was constructed.
As the embayment north of the groins deepened, officials again turned to nourishment.
The forgotten nourishment projects of 1971 and 1972
According to the 1974 atlas, erosion north of the groin field became severe enough during the winter of 1970 that another nourishment project was planned for 1971. While the groins provided localized protection near the lighthouse and Naval Facility, they did not stop shoreline losses elsewhere along Buxton Beach.
The 1971 project placed approximately 200,000 cubic yards of sand along the shoreline. Researchers concluded that the effort was more successful than the 1966 nourishment project because the borrow material remained on the beach for a longer period of time. Even so, the report found that the overall volume was still too small to significantly affect either the beach itself or the broader inshore bar system.
Another nourishment effort followed in 1972, placing approximately 250,000 cubic yards of sand on Buxton Beach. However, by December 1972, researchers reported that little evidence of the project remained near the oceanfront motels. Storms in October 1972 had removed an estimated 80,000 cubic yards of beach material and prompted a sandbagging operation to protect the buildings. Dune erosion between “mileposts 41 and 42” continued to threaten private property and N.C. Highway 12.
The shoreline continued to require emergency and stopgap measures, including sandbag seawalls and the movement of sand with bulldozers. Together, the 1971 and 1972 nourishment projects reinforced a lesson that would reappear repeatedly in later decades: relatively small nourishment efforts could provide temporary relief, but they were unlikely to substantially reshape the broader beach and nearshore system for long.
By then, the National Park Service was preparing a project on a much larger scale.
The massive 1973 project
In 1972, Congress authorized $4.3 million for beach-restoration work within the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. That broader authorization included 1.3 million cubic yards of nourishment at Buxton.
The full $4.3 million was not described in the atlas as the cost of the Buxton project alone. It covered restoration work within the national seashore, of which the Buxton nourishment was a major component.
The volume was more than four times the amount used in 1966, more than six times the 1971 quantity, and more than five times the 1972 placement.
The project was also accompanied by an extensive research program.
Scientists evaluated the physical and biological effects of nourishment as well as the effectiveness of the project’s design.
The preferred strategy was not simply to build a high, flat platform of sand.
Instead, the project called for sediment to be discharged onto the active portion of the beach so that waves, swash, and nearshore currents could distribute it. National Park Service scientists and technical personnel wanted an elongated, sloping beach with more natural morphological characteristics.
That required allowing ocean processes to organize the pumped sediment after it reached the shoreline.
Winter storms, technical delays, and equipment breakdowns disrupted the original schedule, but the report stated that the basic strategy was maintained.
Conditions changed significantly before pumping began.
The Lincoln’s Birthday Storm of Feb. 10-12, 1973, caused dramatic recession near the large crescent-shaped embayment north of the groins. Several units of one motel were destroyed. After the storm, even spring tides crossed federal land and reached private property.
The shoreline had retreated so far that the planned dredge pipeline could no longer be placed entirely on federal land. Running it across private property raised legal concerns, forcing officials to revise the discharge plan.
The original plan had also called for pumping from north to south. Following the February storms, officials changed course and prepared to begin near station 2230 – near the oceanfront motels and just north of the Navy groin field – and work northward.
By March 19, 1973, approximately 200 feet of dune had eroded from the southern embayment since mid-February. A second embayment threatened the motels, while two additional deep embayments were present farther north.
The nourishment project began in late March, and by the end of May, more than three-quarters of a mile of shoreline had been nourished. The report said a protective beach had been established along the vulnerable northern shoreline, all of the embayments north of Buxton had been filled, and none appeared to be reforming at that point.
Relatively little nourishment material had been lost, producing a comparatively straight shoreline that roughly paralleled the discharge line.
Favorable weather helped the project’s early success. During much of the summer, calm seas and light winds limited the loss of newly placed sand, allowing the beach to widen and stabilize.
Scientists also observed significant changes beneath the water’s surface. The nourishment project didn’t just create a wider beach—it reshaped the area that was just offshore. New sand filled low spots and altered underwater sandbars, helping create a broader and more gradual transition from the beach into the ocean.
According to the report, these offshore changes affected where waves broke and how wave energy reached the shoreline, factors that play an important role in determining how quickly a beach gains or loses sand over time.
The atlas did not attempt to present the project as a permanent solution. In its preface, the authors called it “the most recent in a long series of management actions at Buxton.”
That description is especially notable in hindsight.
Even before the pumping began, Buxton had already undergone the 1966, 1971, and 1972 nourishment projects, the construction of the Navy groins, dune work, sandbagging, and repeated emergency movement of sand.
The 1973 project was not the beginning of the effort to engineer Buxton Beach, and it certainly wasn’t the end.
The lighthouse years
The National Park Service’s large-scale nourishment and dune-stabilization program ended in 1973, but efforts to protect the lighthouse continued.
According to a 2026 article by Coastal Review Online, over the following decades, managers used riprap, artificial seagrass, sandbags, and a scour-mat apron in attempts to reduce erosion near the tower. Earlier efforts had also included sheet-pile groins, dune building, grass planting, and revetments.
The Navy groins were modified and repaired during that period, but the shoreline continued retreating.
By 1999, the National Park Service had concluded that keeping the lighthouse in its original location presented an unacceptable long-term risk.
The solution represented a fundamental change in strategy.
Instead of continuing to move sand or construct defenses around the lighthouse, the agency moved the light station away from the shoreline.
Beginning June 17, 1999, the lighthouse was lifted and moved 2,900 feet to the southwest on a system of steel mats, track beams, roller dollies, and hydraulic jacks. The move was completed July 9. Other structures associated with the light station were also relocated while preserving their historic spatial relationships.
At its new location, the lighthouse was once again roughly 1,500 to 1,600 from the ocean – the approximate distance between the tower and shoreline when the lighthouse was completed in 1870.
The move protected the landmark, but it did not eliminate the underlying erosion affecting Buxton.
The old lighthouse site, former military property, motels, homes, local streets, and N.C. Highway 12 remained along the same changing shoreline.
The modern era
Dare County returned to large-scale nourishment in Buxton in 2017.
That first project was designed around an anticipated five-year maintenance cycle and generally lasted for the projected period. A second project began June 30, 2022, and was completed Aug. 16, placing approximately 1.2 million cubic yards of sand along roughly 2.9 miles of shoreline at a construction cost of approximately $18.1 million.
The shoreline began losing sand more rapidly than county officials anticipated after the 2022 project.
There is no single, conclusively established cause for that performance. Dare County Manager and Attorney Bobby Outten has said the deterioration of the southernmost groin is one major factor that county officials believe contributed to the accelerated loss.
“We believe that the groin deteriorated over time, and therefore that erosion accelerated,” Outten said in a May interview. “There’s no way to prove that one hundred percent, but that’s what we think.”
Other conditions may also affect the shoreline.
Coastal scientists have pointed to offshore geology and the configuration of submerged bars and troughs near Buxton, which influence how waves refract and where their energy reaches the beach. The 1974 atlas itself emphasized that changes to the offshore bar system were closely connected to the severe erosion visible onshore.
The consequences of rapid erosion became especially visible in 2025.
15 unoccupied oceanfront houses collapsed in Buxton between mid-September and late October, part of a larger series of collapses that extended into 2026, and which generated debris, prompted beach closures, and brought national attention to the village.
The damage also renewed local interest in the condition of the groins.
Surfers and other longtime users of the area had reported increasingly significant holes and structural losses beginning around 2015 and 2016. By 2021, large portions of the structures had been lost, according to accounts presented by the Buxton Civic Association.
Under current state regulations, only the southernmost groin qualifies for repair.
This is because state officials determined that at least 50% of that structure remained intact, allowing the work to be classified as a repair rather than reconstruction. The other two groins have deteriorated below that threshold and cannot be rebuilt under current North Carolina coastal regulations
So, the repair will not restore the entire three-groin field documented in the 1974 atlas. Instead, the county’s project is limited to the southernmost structure. It will retain the existing footprint while replacing deteriorated components, adding a steel sheet-pile core and installing stone to guard against scour.
The 2026 nourishment project has also grown since it was initially approved.
The county’s baseline plan called for approximately 1,351,616 cubic yards of sand in Buxton. On May 11, the Dare County Board of Commissioners authorized an increase to 2 million cubic yards in anticipation of federal reimbursement. In June, the county announced that confirmation of the requested FEMA reimbursement funding had been received.
The expanded project adds 648,384 cubic yards to the previously approved amount.
County officials have said the primary purpose of the nourishment project is to protect critical infrastructure, particularly N.C. Highway 12. Homes and private properties may also benefit from the wider beach, but Outten has described them as ancillary beneficiaries rather than the central justification for the public project.
The parallels to 1973 are difficult to miss.
53 years ago, federal officials were responding to severe erosion, vulnerable motels, threatened roads, damaged dunes, and deep embayments north of the Navy groins. They relied on a combination of nourishment and hardened structures while monitoring how waves, bars, troughs, and currents redistributed the sand.
Today, Dare County is again placing a large volume of sand along nearly the same shoreline while repairing part of the same groin system.
The scale has increased. Construction and monitoring technology have advanced. Engineers have decades of additional research on barrier-island processes, sand compatibility, and the effects of hardened structures.
But the underlying limitations identified in the 1974 atlas remain.
Barrier islands move, storms reshape beaches, and sand travels alongshore and offshore. Groins can retain sand in one area while shorelines nearby continue to change. Nourishment can rebuild a beach, but it does not permanently fix the shoreline in place.
When the atlas was published in February 1974, its authors said it was intended to serve as a baseline data log against which the long-term history of the fill could be compared.
That long-term history now includes the decline of the original nourishment project, repeated efforts to protect the lighthouse, the 1999 relocation, new rounds of nourishment in 2017 and 2022, the deterioration of the Navy groins, dozens of house collapses in Rodanthe and Buxton, and another major protective campaign in 2026.
The photographs in the report show a Buxton shoreline that is readily recognizable but substantially changed. The lighthouse, Naval Facility, motels, groins, and dunes appear in configurations that no longer exist, while locations that appeared securely inland now sit close to—or have already been claimed by—the ocean.
More than 50 years after the 1973 project, Buxton is again turning to nourishment and a Navy-built groin to buy time.
The history documented in the atlas suggests the work may reshape the shoreline and provide a wider buffer for several years. It also shows why no project should be mistaken for a permanent end to Buxton’s long struggle with the ocean.
