Wednesday is Dare County’s deadline for FEMA house acquisition or elevation applications. Interest survey remains available for future grants

A house is elevated through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program. (Photo courtesy Dare County)

By Corinne Saunders

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Dare County has a Wednesday deadline for homeowners to apply for a federal grant program that would potentially purchase threatened homes or raise homes in several years’ time. Homeowners interested in future cycles of that program or in other similar grant programs can fill out an ongoing county survey to be contacted about future grant opportunities.

“Our interest form has few questions essentially just to get on a list, and then I’ll reach out to you when the grant opens up,” Barton Grover, the grants and waterways administrator for Dare County, said during a public meeting about at-risk oceanfront structures the evening of Thursday, Sept. 18, at the Coastal Studies Institute in Wanchese.

He said interested homeowners can also email him directly, at Barton.Grover@DareNC.gov.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funding becomes available following a presidentially declared disaster, according to the FEMA website.

Current funding, for which FEMA has an Oct. 31 deadline, is available in North Carolina following the effects of Hurricane Helene and Potential Tropical Cyclone Eight (PTC 8), according to Grover.

The Oct. 15 deadline allows him some turnaround time to process the applications, which he will then send to the state, where North Carolina Emergency Management repackages them and submits them to FEMA, Grover said.

Steve McGugan, assistant director of hazard mitigation for North Carolina Emergency Management, noted that FEMA has the final say.

“The state, while it will work with you to build the application and get that application submitted to FEMA—FEMA is the one that approves whether anything can be done and provides the funding,” McGugan said while speaking virtually to attendees at the Sept. 18 meeting.

Dare County has received funding in past cycles of FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program to elevate homes, but Grover told Outer Banks Insider that this is the first time Dare County has also submitted applications for homeowners seeking to have their homes purchased through the program.

As of Tuesday, he’d received approximately 44 house elevation applications and 19 house acquisition applications since winter, when the funding cycle opened following Helene and PTC 8, both of which hit in September 2024.

He attributed about five of the house acquisition applications, all Buxton properties, to the Sept. 18 meeting. One Rodanthe house for which Grover previously received a house acquisition application collapsed since that time, or “there would be 20” acquisition applications, he noted.

From the Oct. 31 deadline, the timeline is “two to three years plus,” Grover said, acknowledging sometimes it can take more like four or five years.

Grover told Outer Banks Insider that he encourages homeowners who may even think they’d be interested in several years to apply when possible because there is no cost or obligation.

“There’s no cost out of the homeowner’s pocket for those, and so people…can apply for either one, just to kind of see if that’s something they want to pursue eventually,” he said.

House acquisitions often involve purchase prices far less than for what houses are sold on the market, he noted.

But as oceanfront sections of Buxton and Rodanthe have deteriorated in recent years, this seems to be among options homeowners are considering—and they can also change their minds later.

“It’s a long-range solution…and obviously not the preferred one for a lot of people, but it is a kind of something they could have in their back pocket,” Grover said. “Until it’s time for acquisition, until they sign the closing documents, they can pull out of the program.”

Barton Grover, the grants and waterways administrator for Dare County, speaks during a public meeting about at-risk oceanfront structures the evening of Thursday, Sept. 18, 2025, at the Coastal Studies Institute in Wanchese. (Photo by Corinne Saunders)

Approximately 130 homes across Dare County have been elevated through the program at no cost to homeowners or to the county over more than two decades.

The federal government provides 75% of the funding and the state provides 25%, Grover said.

Before a house can be elevated, an engineer checks to make sure the house is below the “base flood” level and is therefore eligible for the program, Grover said.

“Typical home elevations take 60 days,” Grover said in a May 23, 2023, Dare County video on elevating homes. “Once the contractor selects a home to be elevated, they notify the homeowner and arrange for housing for those 60 days, until they can return once a certificate of occupancy is received.”

“Elevated homes reduce flood insurance claims,” Dare County Emergency Management Director Drew Pearson said in the same video.

“The families that are in those homes, it makes them safer,” Pearson continued. “It gets them up out of the flood area [and] makes it a safer place to be.”

Hurricane Bonnie, which affected North Carolina in 1998, opened up funding beginning in 1999, and the initial house elevation project completed in Dare County in 2002, Grover said in a phone interview. Other projects have been funded with program funding that has followed hurricanes including Isabel, Irene, Florence and Dorian.

With the last grant cycle following hurricanes Florence in 2018 and Dorian in 2019, Grover noted that homeowners were likely not as interested in acquisition then because houses were not yet falling into the ocean.

“At that point, Buxton was probably obviously eroding, but the houses were not collapsing at that point; there probably wasn’t interest in acquisition,” he opined.

Dare County announced in a Feb. 12, 2024, press release its receipt of a FEMA hazard mitigation assistance grant of over $5 million “to improve disaster resilience by elevating 31 flood-prone homes throughout the county in 2024.”

FEMA awarded the grant in December 2023 “due to extensive damage that area homes sustained during Hurricane Dorian, which was declared a federal disaster in 2019,” the release said.

McGugan said at the meeting that another facet of the program allows houses to be moved—but this would be rare on the Outer Banks.

“To be able to move it, it has to be to a property that is not located in the special flood hazard area,” McGugan said. “Unfortunately, most of the Outer Banks, as you know, rate as a special flood hazard area—meaning that it is going to be covered with water at some time. That makes it very difficult to do the moves.”

If a homeowner owns a property not in a special flood hazard area, McGugan said he would work with the county and homeowner “on a case-by-case basis” to determine if moving the house would be possible.

To take Dare County’s survey, which does not obligate the homeowner or the county to participate in any grant programs, interested homeowners can click here.

For more information about FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, visit www.fema.gov/grants/mitigation/learn/hazard-mitigation.

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