BUXTON — It started two weeks ago, when one small, unoccupied house here fell into the ocean, long before two powerful tropical storms were approaching Hatteras Island.
But by mid-afternoon Tuesday, shortly before high tide, both hurricanes Humberto and Imelda, while well offshore, had supercharged the ocean off Cape Hatteras, where the Outer Banks bend out farthest into the Atlantic. In a highly unusual spate of structural surrender, five houses along the beach in Buxton — all unoccupied and all off Tower Circle Road or Cottage Avenue — collapsed, apparently one after another and all within 45 minutes after 2 p.m.
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Before midnight, another nearby house gave way to the pounding surf.
Then, at about 8 p.m. Wednesday, the eighth house fell onto the same stretch of beach, adding to a staggering amount of debris scattered along the oceanfront and buffeted by swirling surf.
“We’ve got at least one or two more tides to go before this thing calms down,” John Robert Hooper, the owner of Lighthouse View Oceanfront Lodging in Buxton, told Coastal Review Thursday. “It’s a messy situation right now.”
Debris is spreading south through much of the village oceanfront, which is part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore. But unlike in Rodanthe, Hatteras Island’s northernmost village that experienced 12 house collapses from 2020 to 2024, the debris has not spread as far or as wide along the beach. Instead, much of it has been trapped under houses and driven by wind and surf into neighborhoods.
“We are working very closely with Dare County to coordinate cleanup activities,” said Dave Hallac, superintendent of Cape Hatteras National Seashore.”
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Hallac told Coastal Review Thursday that the National Park Service had been in contact with the property owners before the homes collapsed and is working to again communicate with them.
“We are implementing emergency cleanup activities to protect these federal lands and waterways and to prevent continued impact from the spread of debris,” he said. “We’re planning on starting tomorrow (Friday) morning.”
From what he had seen, Hallac said that it appears many of the houses still had contents inside when they fell. He said the park service had also observed “pieces and parts of septic drainfield lines and other wastewater system components.”
About two dozen park service personnel were planning Thursday to start collecting debris Friday between the southern end of Buxton and Cape Point.
The entire stretch of beach from the north end of the village to the Off-Road Vehicle Ramp 43 will remain closed until further notice.
Dare County Board of Commissioners Chairman Bob Woodard said Thursday that county and park officials expected to meet with the county’s contractor in Buxton Friday morning to assess the site and coordinate the cleanup response.
“We’re trying to get the homeowners to get contractors to move that debris to the road, so that our guys can come in with bucket trucks and pick it all up and haul it all away,” Woodard told Coastal Review.
Woodard said he believed that most, if not all, of the fallen houses were owned by out-of-town people. But there are an additional dozen or more homes along the same area of beach that are still vulnerable to collapse, he added.
“We thought there would be a lot more going down yesterday, with that high tide at three o’clock,” Woodard said, referring to Wednesday’s rough conditions.
Considering the extensive impact of the offshore storms, the chairman couldn’t help lamenting the bad luck in the storm’s timing, saying it wouldn’t have happened if a beach nourishment project now planned for 2026 had been in place.
“We were all praying once we’ve moved the nourishment from ’27 to ’26, just hoping and praying that we wouldn’t have any damages until then,” he said. “But unfortunately, with Mother Nature in 2025, we’ve had three weather systems that kicked us in the butt down there.”
Hooper, who was born in Buxton in 1954, said that these multiple collapses over such a short period of time is dramatically worse than he can recall happening before.
“Oh, yes, it is,” he told Coastal Review. “There is something else going on here, rather than this normal erosion. You know, clearly the ocean’s higher, but … where is the equilibrium?”
A beach nourishment project in Buxton a few years ago seemed to have mostly ended up at Cape Point a couple of miles south, he said. Yet, Hooper, who had served as a Dare County commissioner from 2000 to 2004, said he has seen ebb and flow of the shoreline over the years, a slow rebalancing.
“And we may be there today, and this may be the end of it, I don’t know,” he said. “But clearly, as quick as all this stuff happened, this is a new element.”
Hooper has had sandbags – technically, a temporary measure only — in front of his oceanfront motel and cottages in Buxton since about 1992, he said, and he repaired and expanded them in 2013.
“Until now, we’ve been able to manage,” he said. The cottages, located south of the motel have been most affected by the swell.
“I’ve been here fighting this thing for 50 years now, off and on, and probably this morning it’s my first house (that’s) unsafe because of the sewage,” he said. “It’s been tough, but it’s been really tough this fall with some of the PR, and certainly storms like this don’t help”
Since about Aug. 20, he said, visitation in Buxton had been hurting. Since mid-August, he said, he figures that businesses are off 60-70%.
Still, Hooper said that even though it hurts in the short term, losing the houses that were so close to the surf was a looming threat that seemed inevitable.
“But at least in my viewpoint, you know, we got that over with,” he said. “Because nothing is worse than a house sitting out in the ocean.”
