Penny Finally Drops For Outer Banks Homeowners - 19 Homes Gone In 1 Year, Some Putting Beach Homes On Wheels

EDIT

Since September, 19 homes have been lost to waves that tore them from their pilings, sending them crashing into other structures like bumper cars before breaking up in the ocean. Spooked homeowners have turned to the unusual services of Barry Crum, a lifelong Hatteras resident who has become the island’s main house mover.

More than a dozen homes are set to be moved or raised higher on stilts by Crum and his small crew, who on a recent balmy April day were jacking another large dwelling on to girders, ready to be carefully wheeled a few hundred feet back from the crashing waves to tenuous safety. The house, aptly, is called Cape Point Retreat. “It’s never been this busy,” said Crum. “I’ve seen a lot but I hadn’t seen this kind of erosion this quickly before. I’m glad I can do this to help, but it stinks what’s happened in the community.”

Coastal erosion has long been a feature of life on the Outer Banks, a string of constantly shifting sandy barrier islands that includes Hatteras, with some hotspots here losing more than 10ft of land a year to the seas. This has always been a tempestuous landscape to settle on – even the Cape Hatteras lighthouse had to be moved, by a team including Crum’s father, in 1999 after losing more than 1,000ft of land in front of it. But longtime locals were still staggered by the recent erosion, which wiped out the entire beach and sand dunes of Buxton, a town on Hatteras, and swallowed up part of a neighborhood. On some days, hefty waves downed homes like dominoes at an astonishing rate – on 30 September, five houses collapsed within just 45 minutes.

EDIT

“What we are seeing is a real scramble to try to address these changes,” Moore said. “But there is no easy solution. Sea level’s rising, we’re on a mobile landscape, there really is no long-term way to hold things in place up and down the entire eastern seaboard.” Since 2020, 31 houses have been lost on Hatteras Island, but this hasn’t triggered obvious despair here. Resilience and ingenuity have long been required to live on the Outer Banks, the bow-shaped string of barrier islands, barely a mile wide in places, that bend into the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/29/north-carolina-outer-banks-homes