Hurricane Erin was the first major hurricane of the 2025 Atlantic season.

It even briefly became a Category 5 storm.

Fortunately, it didn't make landfall, but North Carolina still felt its effects up and down the coast in the form of storm surge that took out not just homes, but made roads like Highway 12 impassable.

What happened?

To find out, we talked with Dr.

Janna Haddad, who's a coastal resilience specialist and an expert on wind and waves.

So Hurricane Erin, it was miles out, but we felt it here.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

Sure, that's right.

Hurricane Erin never made landfall, but a hurricane doesn't have to make a direct hit for us to really feel its effects.

And that was the case with Hurricane Erin, because it was a really big storm.

It had a really, really big wind field.

The wind field of a hurricane is the distance winds are felt from the eye.

Some wind fields are relatively small, like 15 miles in the case of Hurricane Charlie, which hit southern Florida in 2004.

Hurricane Erin's eye traveled 200 miles off the North Carolina coast, but its wind field was between 600 and 650 miles wide, second only in size to Hurricane Sandy, which hit New Jersey hard in 2012.

Hurricanes are essentially pushing water toward our coastline.

So that causes a storm surge.

For Erin, more importantly, was how much wave energy it drove toward our coastline.

And that's also wind-driven.

So the wind from the large wind field of Erin pushed a lot of wind over the surface of the ocean, driving big swells, large waves that were created where the storm was, but propagated onshore.

The North Carolina Outer Banks, those low-lying and narrow barrier islands, took much of the brunt from Erin.

Even though the storm was far offshore, houses were lost, dunes were flattened, and Highway 12, the only artery that links the island, was washed over.

Those homes were not built on a beach face.

They were built probably next to a roadway.

They were built at a time when the beach was still far out, but has since eroded.

And so Hurricane Erin is, again, another reminder of the kind of precarity that they are in.

Nadad says beach nourishment and parts of the coast are helpful, but it will take a long-term effort to ensure those precarious parts of the North Carolina coast remain stable and able to withstand the constant changes.

We simply can't allow the dune and beach system to naturally move the way that it would.

We need to protect those folks.

And so as a result, we need to make sure that our dune and beach system is as robust as it can possibly be, or enact other coastal resilience strategies on top of them.

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