BUXTON, N.C. — Since the first day the houses started collapsing, News 3 has been covering the Buxton oceanfront and coastal storm after coastal storm. The most recent impacts can be seen from this weekend's storm, which caused decks to fall on one threatened oceanfront home in the area.
It's the same area where I found James Hartshorne Tuesday morning.
"It gets sadder as time goes on. It was just kind of a surprise and a disappointment when it fell in. It's just really sad to find my chair back over here and all that kind of stuff," said Hartshorne.
Hartshorne calls Montana home, but he is the former homeowner of the eighth house that fell into the ocean in Buxton on Oct. 2.
"The house name was Windermere, and we bought that after renting it in 1993," said Hartshorne.
Looking out at where his home once stood, James reflects on three decades of memories here. He owned this oceanfront property for 30 years before selling it two years ago. On Oct. 2, neighbors watched as it became the eighth house to collapse into the ocean.
"I came down about two nights after the Windermere house fell in, number eight was what it was, and just took a picture with the full moon. We used to always sit in that top card playing area up on top that looked out on the ocean with my parents, and we'd eat peach ice cream when the full moon came up, and it was just kind of like, that's never going to happen again. That's kind of the big thing, just the memories you have with parents that have passed on, and it's just kind of like it's not there anymore," said Hartshorne.
Hartshorne also reminisced about a time when there was a dune and the house was hundreds of yards from the oceanfront.
"It had a dune in front of it, about 25 feet tall and all vegetated, and we thought it would never go away. It just took, Hurricane Isabel, to cut that dune in half. We used to have 27 steps that went down to the beach, and then it was 15, and then it was 10, and then it was none," said Hartshorne.
For Hartshorne, it was a feeling of complete surprise that eight homes fell into the ocean in the area.
"Complete surprise to me, for sure, because I didn't think that you'd see eight houses gone from here in just a week or two period. You may have one every once in a while, but I thought we were going to be 10 years down the road from what happened here this last month," said Hartshorne.
It was a painful but understanding experience of what Buxton is going through right now.
"We were talking, that jetty may help some, but I think that's still a temporary thing. When you look at the island, it is going to head west, and we'll just have to watch, I guess, how much building we do right on oceanfront anymore. This really, I think, taught us everything's very temporary when you're living on a sand bar. And that's probably the thing that bothers me the most, is all the 30 years of ownership and concentrating on every little nail and screw and that's all just gone an instant, that that's what really hurt," said Hartshorne.
The challenges continue for families throughout the area. Houses in Buxton are still holding on after our most recent coastal storm hit the Outer Banks.
On Tuesday, overwash once again broke through the dune on NC-12 in the area between the Marc Basnight Bridge and the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center. The flooding forced the bridge to close this afternoon for the second time since Sunday. As of 7 p.m. on Tuesday night, the area has reopened.
