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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 kra44 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.

Stacy Morgan and her husband Brandon Dodick visited their beach house on October 9 to assess damage to their deck, HVAC system and foundation after a storm in late September. A little more than one week later, they learned via Facebook that their home's foundation had collapsed.

Stacy Morgan and her husband Brandon Dodick visited their beach house on October 9 to assess damage to their deck, HVAC system and foundation after a storm in late September. A little more than one week later, they learned via Facebook that their home's foundation had collapsed. Stacy Morgan

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