Posted on June 3, 2026
By
BUXTON, N.C. — The ocean has always shaped life on the Outer Banks. In Buxton, erosion is now reshaping the shoreline in ways that are hard to miss.
The National Park Service says 31 privately owned homes in Dare County have collapsed since 2020. Twenty-six of those have fallen in just the last two years.
When many of the homes were built, there was plenty of beach between them and the ocean. Over time, that buffer disappeared. While work is underway to slow the damage, there is no easy fix.
A peaceful vacation, a troubling view
Every year, millions of people come to the Outer Banks looking for a break and a chance to feel far away from everything else.
That’s what brought musician Braden Bales to Buxton.
“I live in L.A. It’s busy all the time,” Bales said as he was on vacation. “Sitting out here looking out, it lets you slow down.”
Bales had been using the quiet in Buxton to work on new music. But from the patio, another part of the view caught his attention.
“I was most surprised to see this house behind us, like literally tipping into the ocean,” he said.
For someone seeing Buxton for the first time, it was jarring. For photographer Jenni Koontz, it is part of a change she has documented for years.
“I’m always trying to use my photography to tell a story of what’s happening here,” said Koontz, who owns a photography business.
Some residents refer to Koontz as their eyes and ears. She has watched the ocean move from the backdrop to the doorstep. In some places, the water is no longer far off in the distance. It is under homes and where homes used to be.
“It was almost like I was in a horror movie just watching this town that I lived around and worked in for so long, just kind of floating away in the ocean and nobody was doing anything about it,” Koontz said, recalling the day five homes fell into the ocean in October 2025.
A changing beach, captured over time
The changes also show up in family portraits Koontz has taken.
For years, she photographed the Withey family from nearly the same spot in Buxton. While the people grew up, the beach around them shrank.
Koontz said the damage is not only physical. It is emotional, too.
“Just seeing all the debris on the beach and knowing that I have so many memories around these houses with surfing, vacation memories with friends and family, photographing families that have memories here,” Koontz said. “It was really devastating.”
For Carol Dillon, the memories run even deeper.
Her roots on Hatteras Island go back generations.
“My people were shipwrecked here back in the 1620s, and my grandfather is buried in our graveyard where I’ll be buried,” Dillon said.
At 97, Dillon still shows up to work, overseeing the Outer Banks Motel, which she opened with her husband in 1955. But as more of the beach disappears, so have the bookings.
“This year we lost I don’t know how many dollars, but it’s a lot from people canceling because there is no beach,” Dillon said. “I mean, there’s nothing there to maintain.”
Another round of beach nourishment
Dare County is in the midst of another beach nourishment project, similar to the one completed in 2022.
The work is expected to add sand along a stretch in Avon and Buxton, totaling more than five miles. Crews are placing 375,000 cubic yards of sand in Avon, with the work expected to take about two weeks. In mid-June, the project is expected to move to Buxton, where crews plan to place 2 million cubic yards of sand over 95 days.
“This is now a hot spot and we’ve got to watch it very carefully,” said Bob Woodard, chairman of the Dare County Board of Commissioners. “Every project we do is designed to last five years. But that last one didn’t last three years.”
Images from Coastal Science & Engineering, a company that consulted on the 2022 project, show Buxton before the last round of nourishment and after the work was completed. The difference was clear. The beach was wider, and homes had more room between them and the water. But the relief did not last.
Woodard hopes the next round will help.
“Hope and pray that the next nourishment will buy us some more time,” he said.
The high cost of buying time
Buying time is expensive.
Dare County has spent more than $300 million on beach nourishment over the last 10 years. In 2022, Woodard said it cost about $8 a cubic yard. Now, he said, the cost is upwards of $13, an increase of about 60%.
Woodard said the work is necessary to protect N.C. 12, the main artery through the Outer Banks.
“That’s our economic engine, is beach nourishment,” Woodard said. “And because that keeps our visitors coming and enjoying the beaches that we have here.”
The cost of holding on is not only falling on the county.
Dillon said she has spent more than $200,000 to put out sandbags to help protect her beach houses.
“If we had not done that, we would have lost all our beach houses,” Dillon said. “Every one of them.”
Tourism is central to Dare County’s economy. Visitors spent $2.1 billion in Dare County in 2024, fourth highest among North Carolina’s 100 counties. That generated more than $147 million in state and local tax revenue.
“We can’t not afford to do this,” Woodard said. “This is the livelihood of Hatteras Island.”
Every option comes with tradeoffs
County leaders hope plans to repair a groin in Buxton will help the next round of nourishment hold longer.
A groin is a man-made structure that sticks out from the beach into the water to catch sand moving along the shoreline. It can help build up one side of the beach, but add to erosion on the other.
Reide Corbett, executive director of East Carolina University’s Coastal Studies Institute, said shoreline projects can help deal with one problem but also create new issues elsewhere.
“From beach nourishment to a bulkhead to a groin, all of these will have tradeoffs,” Corbett said. “You have to really think through what it is we are trying to protect.”
One option tested in Rodanthe is less about holding the beach in place and more about getting homes out of the way before they fall.
The National Park Service bought two threatened homes through a pilot program and had them demolished before they could collapse and scatter debris across the beach. The goal was to reduce risks to visitor safety, public health and wildlife habitat, while limiting debris on the beach and restoring the sites for public access. The park service continues to evaluate whether the pilot could be expanded into a larger program.
At the same time, lawmakers in Raleigh are considering a bill to lift North Carolina’s longstanding ban on hardened structures along ocean beaches.
Woodard said county leaders are not asking to build those structures everywhere.
“We’re not saying let’s build them every 600 yards,” Woodard said. “We’re just saying let’s build them in the hot spots that’ll help us protect the beach.”
Corbett believes the future may require more than one solution.
“I think we need to consider a multi-pronged approach, which might include something like nourishment or even deconstruction or moving homes,” Corbett said. “We can’t remove that as part of the solution.”
In Buxton, some homeowners have already chosen that route and hired crews to move their houses farther back from the ocean.
Living with the waves
For Dillon, leaving has never been an option.
She has watched the island change for decades, through storms, erosion and generations of people coming and going. But Cape Hatteras is still where her family history is, where her business is and where she says she plans to stay.
“When you live on a barrier island, you take what comes,” Dillon said.
For Koontz, that resilience is visible across Buxton. She has photographed the damage, the debris and the homes that have disappeared from the shoreline. She has also watched homeowners move houses farther back from the ocean, trying to hold on to the place they love.
“You have to have a certain toughness about you to live here, to own a home here, to thrive here,” Koontz said. “You have to just go with the tides.”
