Home Care In Carolina Beach, NC

The sand is vanishing faster than the community can react — and now, new 3D maps show just how much of Buxton’s beach has been erased.

In just five stormy weeks, the shoreline here lost the equivalent of 800 dump trucks of sand and nearly nine feet of elevation, according to new data from RCOAST, a North Carolina-based coastal research firm. The findings reveal an unprecedented rate of erosion that scientists say has left the beach “drowning.”

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“This is the highest erosion rate we’ve ever measured, hands down,” said Christy Swann, founder of RCOAST. “The shoreline just hasn’t had time to recover between storms. It’s a super-weakened and vulnerable system.”

Swann’s team uses high-resolution 3D mapping to track changes in the beach’s elevation and footprint, data that can pinpoint exactly where and how fast the land is retreating. After back-to-back tropical systems pummeled Buxton this fall, those maps show a beach collapsing in real time.

“You can think of it like being caught in waves that never stop coming,” Swann said. “The beach hasn’t had time to come up for air.”

The series of storms, from Hurricane Erin to Humberto, didn’t just knock down homes. They stripped away the foundation beneath them — the vertical support that kept oceanfront structures stable. As the beach dropped nearly a story in elevation, the ground beneath homes crumbled into the surf.

Sixteen houses have fallen into the Atlantic since mid-September, each collapse scattering debris for miles and forcing federal cleanup crews to shut down stretches of Hatteras Island.

More are teetering on the Edge.

"We have several threatened oceanfront structures that are in a state of potential imminent collapse,” said Dave Hallac, superintendent of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

Swann says Buxton’s collapse can’t be blamed on one factor alone. Natural barrier islands are meant to move, but decades of development, highway construction, and now accelerating climate change have pushed that process into overdrive.

“Sea level rise and stronger storms are absolutely accelerating what’s already happening,” Swann said. “But the bigger issue is how we’ve built and how we’ve trapped sediment in a system that depends on movement.”

Humans have been drawing permanent lines in impermanent places. Roads like Highway 12, built to connect fragile barrier islands, now act as hard barriers that block dunes from migrating inland. Rivers that once carried sediment to the coast are dammed upstream. And homes still rise on top of sand, the most mobile substance in nature.

“The system is starved,” Swann said. “We’ve cut off its sediment supply and then demanded that it stay in place. You can tell nature to do that, but it’s going to do whatever it wants.”

That imbalance, she says, has turned Buxton into “a case study in maladaptation” — a place where scientists say efforts to protect infrastructure are actually accelerating its destruction.

Former Dare County commissioner Danny Couch, a lifelong Hatteras resident, said the community feels trapped between tides and bureaucracy.

“Everybody tends to pass the buck,” Couch said. “The county says it’s the state’s issue, the state says it’s federal, the feds say it’s not theirs. Meanwhile, we’re out here picking up the pieces.”

In recent months, residents and business owners have tried to shield homes with sandbags, hoping to buy time until Dare County’s $45 million beach nourishment project begins next spring. But Swann’s data shows that those makeshift fixes may worsen erosion nearby.

“When you put sandbags in front of one property, you can actually create more erosion around it,” she said. “That’s not good for the adjacent homes. Coastlines like to be straight, and when you make them bumpy, you accelerate erosion at the edges.”

It’s a dynamic seen in other coastal states, where hard armoring such as walls and bulkheads can protect one stretch of beach while starving another. “North Carolina banned most hard structures for a reason,” Swann said. “The goal was to protect the coast as a whole, not one house at a time.”

But that policy leaves communities like Buxton with few options. County Manager Robert Outten said Dare County has the funds and contracts ready for nourishment but can’t move faster than nature, or bureaucracy, allows.

“We plan in five-year cycles,” Outten said. “Buxton has sped up to about three. We’ll add more sand this time and hope to get back on schedule.”

Swann worries that timeline may be too slow. “They’re making good plans, but Buxton doesn’t have time,” she said. “We’re heading into nor’easter season, and the beach is incredibly vulnerable. More homes are going to go before the mitigation even starts.

The interactive map above shows the shoreline in Buxton, North Carolina. The picture on the left shows the shoreline on Oct. 8, 2023. Use the slider tool on the picture to see how the shoreline has moved west. The picture on the right depicts the area as of Oct. 4, 2025. It shows how several homes have collapsed into the Atlantic.

When Stacy Morgan and her husband, Brandon Dodick, bought their beach house in Buxton, North Carolina, in May, they imagined one day spending their retirement there.

Five months later, the house was gone.

Theirs was one of 27 beachfront homes in Buxton and Rodanthe, two villages on Hatteras Island, part of North Carolina’s barrier islands, that have collapsed into the ocean since 2020. Rising sea levels and relentless storms are erasing land faster than locals – or officials – can respond.

The collapses are happening on a thin, sparsely populated stretch of coast. But some experts warn that what’s happening in Hatteras could be a glimpse of what’s to come in other coastal areas as climate change fuels more powerful storms and hastens erosion.

In North Carolina, the losses are accelerating. Sixteen of the 27 homes have collapsed since September, all of them unoccupied at the time. Meanwhile, the safety net designed to financially protect homeowners from flooding sits frozen amid the government shutdown.

In a statement last week, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore indicated that additional homes could collapse in Buxton in the coming days.

Many of the homes that have collapsed were hundreds of feet away from the ocean’s shoreline when they were initially built, said Reide Corbett, the dean of the Coastal Studies Institute at East Carolina University.

But over the past few decades, “that shoreline has been edging its way closer and closer until these houses are now truly at the water’s edge,” he said.

Morgan and Dodick knew there would come a time when they would have to physically move their home further away from the shoreline, due to the area’s coastal erosion. But they thought they had years to figure that out.

In late September, a wave carrying debris from a nearby home that had already collapsed slammed into theirs, undermining its foundation. Less than three weeks later, on October 18, Dodick logged onto Facebook and saw a video, filmed by a neighbor, of his home being swept off its foundation, falling into the waves.

“And then our neighbors started calling us because they heard it. It was at night, but they heard it go down,” Morgan said.

One of those neighbors was Lat Williams, who has lived full-time on the same stretch of beach as Morgan and Dodick for decades. His family has owned the home for nearly 45 years.

During Hurricanes Humberto and Imelda in late September and early October, Williams said he could hear the thuds of waves slamming into nearby houses — and then the sounds of collapsing.

Williams’ home sustained damage from the storms, but for now it’s still standing. Williams is racing to move the home before it is also claimed by the ocean.

He recently purchased a plot of land farther inland and hired a company that specializes in lifting houses off their foundation and relocating them. The move alone will cost about $55,000, he said. He’s hoping the debris-strewn roads in his neighborhood are cleared in time for the movers next week.

“This is an expensive undertaking, and we won’t get any help from our flood insurance, but we don’t want to lose that house,” Williams said. “It’s got so many memories and so much history. If we can save the house, we’re going to do that, rather than let it fall in and collect the insurance money.”

Williams, who spent 40 years in commercial insurance before retiring, said it frustrates him that the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, won’t help cover the cost of relocating his home. Under the current rules, he’d only get a payout if he let it collapse into the ocean.

FEMA did not respond to a request for comment. The agency is not operating at full capacity during the ongoing government shutdown.

“The consequences of allowing your home to collapse is that you’ve got the debris, you’ve got pollution, you’re damaging neighboring structures and all the mess that goes with it,” Williams said. “Nobody wants to have their house collapse and go into the ocean, but if you move the house, which is what we’re doing, we get no help from that policy whatsoever.”

A ‘canary in the coal mine?’

It had been a longtime dream of Morgan’s to buy a beach house. She and her husband fell in love with their “perfectly imperfect” cottage in Buxton as soon as they saw it.

In May, when they purchased the house for $495,000, Morgan said it looked as if there was “at least a football field” worth of sand between the ocean’s shore and their home.

And they knew there had been efforts to stem erosion in the area. Most recently, in 2022, the county had completed a more than $18 million project for beach nourishment, which is the process of adding sand to an eroding beach to widen it. Another nourishment project was scheduled for 2026.

Laura Moore, who researches coastal environments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that while the beach renourishment projects may stave off erosion, they aren’t keeping up.

“When you have a place that’s eroding so fast that you need to bring in so much sand so often, it’s really hard to counter that process,” she said. “This is an area where the natural processes are adding up to take more sand away than is naturally coming in.”

While some locals expressed frustration that the government doesn’t maintain jetties or groins in the area to halt erosion, Moore said that would only move the issue to another place on the island.

“The amount of erosion that’s occurring is going to occur,” Moore said. “You can change the distribution of it, but it doesn’t make the problem go away.”

Moore said it may be only “a matter of time” before stretches of coast in high-erosion areas succumb to a similar fate, calling Buxton and Rodanthe the “canary in the coal mine.”

The office of North Carolina Governor Josh Stein did not reply to a request for comment.

Dodick said they had thought they would have at least five to 10 years before they faced any issues with the house.

But their home’s foundation sustained damage on September 30. The next day, Morgan and Dodick tried to update their $250,000 flood insurance policy to better cover their belongings — but they couldn’t. The NFIP has been unable to issue, renew or modify policies during the ongoing government shutdown.

“I woke up every day after those storms with an absolute pit in my stomach,” said Dodick.

They had spent a summer making the home their own. Then one night, it was gone.

“We would love to stay in the community, but now we’re very nervous about purchasing another house there,” Morgan said. “It’s almost like, now we see nobody is helping us. It feels like nobody is doing anything to help the situation.”

If beer is love, there’s a lot of love at The Fat Pelican.

The bar at 8 S. Lake Park Blvd. in Carolina Beach started in 1986 as a bottle shop built in the remnants of a garage that burned down around 1951. Then owner Jim Kelly installed the refrigerated trailer of an 18-wheeler and turned it into a walk-in beer cooler that is still a focal point of the business.

Danny McLaughlin, a veteran and former caterer for bands like Van Halen, Aerosmith and The Rolling Stones, took over the business about 30 years ago. He said he doesn’t necessarily consider it a dive bar.

“It’s a laid-back beach bar,” he said. “And we serve 400 kinds of cold beer.”

But he does understand the reputation. Ten years ago, the former Cincinnati-based entertainment website impulcity.com published the list of the best dive bars in the country. They named Fat Pelican the best in North Carolina, and among the top 25 in the United States.

The look

“You want me to tell you how to build a dive bar,” McLaughlin asked. “I like to make stuff out of nothing.”

Walking through the space, he has the story for just about every piece of furniture and memorabilia. On the floor are hand-made Savannah bricks from a former molasses factory in Wilmington. He created a tabletop out of a mosaic wall at a former Carolina Beach boutique. And the old sign from the Deck House restaurant is now the back of a bench.

“And that is not a gazebo,” he said. “That’s just where I store my camper shell.”

Many of the Fat Pelican staff, some of whom have worked there more than a decade, like to call him a mad genius.

“That’s the redneck fountain,” McLaughlin said. “It goes from a tub, into a tub, into a tub, into a bathtub. And a broken Sailfish that I found on the side of the road after Hurricane Fran. The owl don’t give a hoot.”

The vibes

But what really makes Fat Pelican special is the people.

"This is a great place, and it's got great people,” McLaughlin said. “Cheers ain’t got nothing on me. ...You don’t find the yee-haw, raisin’ hell bunch here."

But for those who like the unique space and varied clientele, Fat Pelican is just right. You can select your own beverage from the walk-in cooler stocked with an impressive selection of beer, as well as wine, cider, THC seltzers and non-alcoholic options. The bartenders will also pour you a beer or glass of wine.

Fat Pelican is open year-round until 2 a.m. and is filled with locals and tourists. The annual bikini contest is a popular event on the Fourth of July weekend. And McLaughlin said he's already planning a party for Fat Pelican's 40th anniversary in 2026.

STAY CONNECTED: Keep up with the area’s latest food news by signing up for the Port City Foodies newsletter and following us on Facebook and Instagram.

Allison Ballard is the food and dining reporter at the StarNews. You can reach her at [email protected]

SEASIDE HEIGHTS, N.J. – A mighty nor'easter pounded the majority of the Eastern Seaboard throughout the weekend, closing beaches from Virginia to New York and creating coastal flooding in storm-weary areas that recently experienced flooding from back-to-back hurricanes brushing the U.S. East Coast.

The weekend started with heavy rain in the Southeast, leading to coastal flooding in Charleston, South Carolina. Roads were inundated with water, leading to closures for the city.

Some of the strongest wind gusts were reported from the Carolinas over the weekend, with a gust of 58 mph on Pine Island, North Carolina, and gusts over 50 mph in multiple other locations along coastal areas.

Along North Carolina's Outer Banks, road crews with the Department of Transportation worked furiously to clear Highway 12 for the storm-battered areas of Hatteras Island. Parts of the highway were closed on Sunday due to significant flooding.

FOX Weather Correspondent Katie Byrne reported from Buxton, North Carolina, where nine homes collapsed over the past two weeks from coastal flooding and erosion caused by multiple tropical systems in the Atlantic. Yet another home appeared at risk of collapse with the latest round of relentless waves.

Nor'easter impacts crawled up the coast, as beachside communities prepared for the wind and coastal flooding to come.

Significant tidal flooding was forecast to peak in Virginia on Sunday and continue on Monday. FOX Weather Correspondent Brandy Campbell was in Virginia Beach, where officials were concerned about river flooding due to high tides.

In Ocean City, Maryland, FOX Weather Correspondent Robert Ray watched as the conditions rapidly worsened Sunday morning. Waves overtook the sandy beachfront, and winds near 50 mph blasted the area.

On Monday, the surf continued to pound the coastline.

As high tide approached, massive waves crashed onshore in Ocean City.

(Robert Ray / FOX Weather)

By Sunday, winds and nasty surf reached the Jersey Shore area, with big waves pounding areas in Ocean and Monmouth counties. The boardwalk in Seaside Heights was closed up ahead of the worst impacts.

Winds topped 60 mph at Barnegat Lighthouse on Long Beach Island on Sunday and continued to blast the Jersey Shore with 30-mph sustained winds on Monday.

New Jersey was placed under a state of emergency ahead of the worst weather impacts. On Sunday, New York was also placed under a state of emergency.

The wind and flooding threat from the nor'easter continued Monday, farther north, including New York and New England.

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The new, full-service restaurant and bar is Riko's first location in North Carolina and its 10^th nationally

Riko's of Carolina Beach features a one-of-a-kind menu anchored by Riko's famous bar pie recipes—such as the iconic Hot Oil—as well as salads, wraps, wings, sliders, appetizers, and desserts

CAROLINA BEACH, N.C., Oct. 8, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Riko's Pizza ("Riko's" or the "Company" or "Brand"), a highly differentiated tavern-style ("bar pie") franchise concept, announced today the grand opening of its Carolina Beach location at 1000 N Lake Park Blvd in the Proximity Complex. This new restaurant is the Company's first in the state of North Carolina and its 10^th location overall, with additional restaurants in Connecticut, Florida, and New York. Famous for its tavern-style pizzas, local neighborhood atmosphere, and extensive selection of delicious shareables, desserts, and craft beverages, Riko's newest location is situated just minutes from the beach and near many popular business, residential, and leisure areas.

Key features of Riko's Pizza of Carolina Beach include:

Riko's has partnered with a new franchisee, accomplished businessman John Greco, to own and operate the brand's Carolina Beach location. Mr. Greco brings 35 years of experience and a deep understanding of the local Carolina Beach community.

"Our team is blown away by the incredibly warm welcome we have received from the local community here in Carolina Beach—which has never had pizza options like Riko's," said Rico Imbrogno, Founder and CEO of Riko's Pizza. "We're thrilled to bring a slice of heaven to this beautiful coastal town. With its wholesome charm and spirit, it is the perfect place to expand our bold and growing brand into the Carolinas. At Riko's, it's more than just running a restaurant. We strive to be the go-to destination for customers to enjoy a delicious meal, catch their favorite televised sports, and create lasting memories with friends and family. And John Greco is just the man to create this one-of-a-kind atmosphere. So come in and check out our brand-new spot in the Proximity Complex—we can't wait to serve you!"