Home Care In Carolina Beach, NC

CAROLINA BEACH, N.C. (WECT) - A nonprofit focused on improving Carolina Beach through fundraising for parks and greenways has outlined a new project.

The Friends of Carolina Beach Parks and Greenways (FoCB) announced several beautification projects it plans to complete this winter due to a collaboration with the Cape Fear Garden Club.

Mike Hoffer, who completed his term on the Carolina Beach Town Council, said that as the chairman of the Carolina Beach Tree Project, his new goal is to keep the town green and healthy.

“Like most people, it saddens me to see mature trees come down in the name of development,” Hoffer said. “Our best solution to offset this is to continue planting the canopy trees of tomorrow, so that’s what we’re doing.”

Hoffer said the Tree Project, a subcommittee of FoCB, began in 2022 and since then volunteers have planted 72 future canopy trees as well as grasses, palms, shrubs and wildflowers.

One of the goals, to expand the wildflower garden along the Island Greenway at the Alabama entrance, was completed in early November. The garden is now 8-by-125-feet and will be an even larger perennial pollinator garden.

FoCB is now focusing on planting 30 canopy trees in the median of Harper Avenue, which is made possible through the Cape Fear Garden Club’s Tree Endowment and its commitment to plant 100 trees, according to FoCB organizers.

The garden club donated 12 live oaks for the project. Hoffer said he is still seeking 18 additional trees from the community.

The third goal FoCB has set out to complete is to enhance the gardens and Friends Nursery along the Island Greenway near the State Park.

FoCB received a $7,500 Cape Fear Garden Club Azalea Garden Tour Grant after it applied in early summer to help with the enhancement.

Grants were awarded at the October Garden Club monthly meeting. FoCB plans to kick off additional beautification at the nursery property in winter 2026, including native plants, pollinator-friendly bushes, fruit trees and a long-needed irrigation system.

“We will need the full support of our volunteers and neighbors. Planting is the easy part. Watering the trees for the first year is of paramount importance and it will take a dedicated team,” Hoffer said.

To volunteer, visit FoCB’s website.

Atlantic Coast beaches have a charm all their own, but they don’t often get the same level of gushing admiration that their counterparts on the Gulf Coast are so accustomed to. While Florida beaches get praised for looking like the Caribbean and having out-of-this-world blue waters, beaches in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia have to work a little harder to earn their fans.

However, there’s one beach in North Carolina that has sand and surf to rival even the dreamiest of Gulf Coast beaches, and it’s Emerald Isle. Part of the 85-mile barrier island that’s affectionately known as the Crystal Coast or the Southern Outer Banks, Emerald Isle is the kind of laidback family getaway that makes you want to return year after year. Its white sand and crystal-clear, emerald waters (hence its name) are a bit of a best-kept secret, but once you discover their beauty, you'll be devoted—hook, line, and sinker.

What Makes Emerald Isle’s Water And Sand Different?

While the water at beaches in other parts of the state are typically murky and appear dark blue or even brownish in color, the water off the coast of Emerald Isle is much clearer and takes on a signature blue-green hue. Last summer, North Carolina locals were astounded by a rare but entirely natural phenomenon that caused the ocean along the Crystal Coast to sparkle with a brilliant blue radiance that folks previously only associated with places like the Bahamas or Turks and Caicos.

The phenomenon, caused by an uncharacteristically low number of tropical storms and hurricanes coupled with unseasonally light offshore winds, allowed sediment to settle closer to the ocean floor and the water to exhibit its true vibrant turquoise color. During the middle of the day when the sun was brightest, visitors swore they had been transported to a faraway tropical island.

While Emerald Isle’s sand can’t claim the same sugar-white distinction that Florida’s quartz sand beaches can, its stretches of shoreline do trend toward the light khaki and even off-white, which is a far cry from the mineral-heavy, graham cracker-colored sand found on other beaches in North Carolina.

How To Experience Emerald Isle’s Water

Spending consecutive days alternating between sunbathing in the soft sand, then taking a dip in the sea when it gets too hot, is a must. But once you’ve mastered the fine art of “beaching” in Emerald Isle, you may want to graduate to exploring the ocean from new angles. See the water from above by hanging ten with a surf lesson from Hot Wax Surf Shop or testing your balance on a stand-up paddle board. When you’re ready to dive deeper, you can experience Emerald Isle from underwater by snorkeling or diving. The clear conditions and light-colored water make it easy to spot all kinds of fish and marine life, as well as remnants from long-ago shipwrecks in an area that’s known as The Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Take Diana Cawood, who skipped Florida altogether and relocated to North Carolina from New Jersey at the end of 2019.

"Florida was not an option," Cawood told Business Insider, adding that it was important that she be in reasonable driving distance back to New Jersey to see her children and grandchildren.

"We can drive back to New Jersey in about nine hours," she said. "That's a day trip rather than a couple of days."

Cawood, 61, started looking for places five years before she retired in 2019. She knew she wanted a warmer climate than New Jersey, more favorable taxes, and a quieter life than the city provided. Wilmington, North Carolina, didn't quite fit the bill, and neither did Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Then she discovered a retirement town that's less crowded than Florida cities like Naples or Tampa and is a shorter commute back to the Northeast: Calabash, North Carolina.

The coastal town near the border of South Carolina is about 27 miles northeast of Myrtle Beach and offers a quiet, beachy lifestyle for retirees. Cawood and her husband settled on Kingfish Bay, a housing development about four miles from the nearest beach — and 569 miles from Medford Lakes, New Jersey, where they moved from. But that's still a better commute than driving home from anywhere in Florida.

Florida isn't for every retiree

Kathie Yllanes, 64, grew up on Long Island and moved to Calabash in 2017 from Raleigh, North Carolina. She's been retired for just over a year and said she travels to the Northeast about six times a year.

"Our oldest son still lives on Long Island, our grandkids are on Long Island, our daughter just moved to Boston, and we have a son who's in the Charlotte area," Yllanes told Business Insider. "Being able to get to Long Island, even though it's not easy to get there, is a lot easier than if you were in Florida."

Although the weather isn't as warm year-round in North Carolina as it is in Florida, it's still significantly warmer than in the Northeast — a plus for many retirees.

"The weather was a big factor in why we wanted to move here," Cawood said. "We love the fact that this area gives us all four seasons without the dramatic effects of winter. It gets pretty hot in the summer, but I don't know that it gets any hotter than where we were from in New Jersey. It may stay hot a little bit longer, but it's certainly not uncomfortable. But that is the reason we did not want to go to Florida, because we just didn't want to deal with that heat all the time."

Florida still is one of the better places to retire, though that depends on what you're looking for. While cities like Fort Lauderdale and St. Petersburg offer a lot for retirees, some lament that they've become overcrowded and expensive.

North Carolina real estate agent Darren Bouley said that not only has he seen an uptick in Northeasterners choosing the Calabash area, he's also seen "half-backs," or people originally from the Northeast who move to Florida and then move halfway back up the coast, leaving Florida for North Carolina.

"From the feedback we've been getting, Florida has lost a little bit of its allure simply because the costs have changed down there," Bouley said. "Also, the population has just gotten a little more dense than people are interested in having."

Yllanes' parents were half-backs who moved from Deerfield Beach, Florida, to Calabash, North Carolina. She said Florida wasn't for her, either.

Ex-Floridian retirees are finding a lot to like in North Carolina

The pandemic years were a boon for people moving to Florida, helping it become the fastest-growing state in 2022 thanks to its sunny weather and generally affordable cost of living. But as factors like home insurance price increases have people leaving Florida, states like North Carolina are capitalizing.

State-to-state migration data from the US Census shows nearly 40,000 people moved from Florida to North Carolina in 2023, the highest number from any state — including neighbor South Carolina.

Samuel Miller, a representative for Kingfish Bay, told Business Insider that Calabash, North Carolina's cost of living is on par with Florida's, and maybe better.

"We've had people come up from Florida to the development and particularly from the Northeast because they see the value down here, both in the housing prices and what you get for your buck," Miller said.

"When you talk of the state tax rates, for example, it's better in North Carolina than the Northeast, and that's obviously not a comparison for Florida," he added. "But in Miami, the cost of living is higher. You're going to get areas in Florida that are less expensive, but certainly the big centers are going to be more expensive. On the whole, Calabash is generally a very cost-effective place to live."

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.”

Other WRAL Top Stories

“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.”