Beaches were closed in two communities on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and visitors were warned to stay away, after five houses collapsed into the ocean on Tuesday, swept off their pilings by stormy weather and high winds.

The homes, which were unoccupied, wobbled, buckled and broke up as pounding water churned ashore in Buxton, a community of about 1,400 people on Hatteras Island, one of the barrier islands that make up the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

It was the second time in two months that a group of houses in the same area of Buxton had been claimed by the ocean.

On Wednesday, officials warned visitors to avoid the beach and to stay out of the water in Buxton, as hazardous debris and building materials littered the beach and were tossed in the surf.

“There is the potential for additional house collapses in Buxton in the coming days,” the Cape Hatteras National Seashore said in a statement.

The national seashore, a protected area of the Outer Banks, encompasses a narrow strip of barrier islands, including Hatteras, Bodie and Ocracoke, that is more than 70 miles long. Some of the islands are reachable by ferry.

Since 2020, 27 privately owned, unoccupied houses have collapsed into the water, 16 of them in the past six weeks alone, in Buxton and Rodanthe, a community of a few hundred people on Hatteras Island, according to The National Park Service, which owns and operates the national seashore.

Officials in Dare County, which includes Buxton and Rodanthe, said most of the homes that have been swept away had been built several hundred feet from the ocean in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. But as the shoreline has narrowed from erosion, the houses have neared the water’s edge and become more vulnerable.

Some of the houses that have collapsed were unoccupied because they did not meet state building code, including requirements for functioning septic systems, according to a statement on Dare County’s website…