This article was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partner InsideNoVa.com. Sign up for InsideNoVa.com’s free email subscription today.
This article was written by WTOP’s news partner InsideNoVa.com and republished with permission. Sign up for InsideNoVa.com’s free email subscription today.
Last June, hundreds of high school students celebrating graduation descended on the quiet North Carolina Outer Banks village of Corolla for “Beach Week,” creating chaos, causing untold damage and leaving locals vowing it won’t happen again this year.
A majority of those teens, aided by parents and adults willing to break the rules and the law, hailed from the Washington area — Northern Virginia in particular, authorities in North Carolina said.
Trashed vacation homes, indoor furniture dragged into the surf, drunken teens relieving themselves or passing out on neighborhood lawns. Property owners and law enforcement say they saw it all — and more.
“We saw kids roll up with the moms, unload their stuff, including cases of beer and hard cider, and the moms just leave,” said Corolla Civic Association President Barbara Marzetti. “There had to be 14 or 16 kids.”
In the fall, the Corolla Civic Association hosted a meeting with law enforcement, property owners and vacation rental property managers to review the problems caused by thousands of high school students descending on the community from early- to mid-June.
The past two years, Corolla has seen huge crowds of teens descend for beach week, which isn’t one week, but follows graduations the last three weeks of June.
“The goal was to develop strategies and tactics to inhibit the over-the-top ’22 Beach Week shenanigans and confrontations during the upcoming 2023” beach week, the association said in a news release.
Visitors growing in droves
The entire Outer Banks has seen record visitors over the past two years, with nearly 100% occupancy for the 2022 summer season in Corolla, on the northern Outer Banks in Currituck County.
Last year, “in an effort to contain the hooliganism,” North Carolina alcohol enforcement agents and deputies made 116 arrests over a two-day period in June, including 66 charges for underage drinking, 32 fake identification charges, 23 drug-related offenses and two businesses receiving ABC violations, the Currituck County Sheriff’s Office said.
“The community strongly felt that the escalating number of Beach Week mobs of kids engaging in atrocious, intolerable behavior is jeopardizing (Corolla’s) hard-earned reputation as a family-oriented vacation destination,” the release said.
The association is drafting a letter to high school principals, superintendents, school boards and private schools in locations that have been the largest source of beach week high school graduates, mainly in Northern Virginia and the Washington area, with some New Jersey schools thrown in. Officials declined to identify the school divisions to which the letters will be sent.
Brook Sparks, owner and property manager at Coast Realty, said she’s been in the business a long time, and beach week has been an issue for years, and just not always just in Corolla.
‘First bottle of Cristal I ever saw’
Eight or so years ago, it was Nags Head, with hordes of spring breakers and no shortage of cash. “That’s the first bottle of Cristal I ever saw,” Sparks said. “Just floating in the bathtub.”
Nags Head authorities made spring break unpleasant for revelers in following years, but now young students celebrating life’s milestones have discovered Corolla.
Sparks said property managers are working with each other and law enforcement to quickly catch and stop bad behavior, sometimes even before the contracts are signed.
“We now run their names through a database,” Sparks said. “Sometimes we’ll call and say, you can cancel now without any type of fees or damages. If I evict you, you get none of your money back.”
Once the crowds arrive, property managers are “doing drive-bys and spot checks” for each other to make sure vacationers aren’t getting out of hand.
There’s even “Operation Filter,” in which maintenance arrives to perform “mandatory” air filter checks, during the week, Sparks said.
This year, Sparks said they’re “pulling out the stops.” There will be extra security, double last year’s numbers of law-enforcement officers, and zero tolerance for illegal activity or lease violations.
“They’re taking people to jail,” Sparks said. “These kids need to think, they’re making decisions that could affect the rest of their lives.”
Law enforcement, awareness
Many owners have stopped renting during the last three weeks of June because of the young crowds. “For them, the risk is just not worth it,” Sparks said.
Almost all Outer Banks rental agencies require that vacationers be family groups and the renter must be 25 or older. But that hasn’t stopped beach week rentals.
“A disturbing trend is the increasing disregard that many parents/chaperones have for the law and obligations under rental leases, apparently wanting to be the ‘cool’ parents,” the civic association release said.
Currituck officials found parents and other adults renting properties online for groups of teenagers, and never showing up. A high school newspaper in Herndon even had a story on how to prepare for beach week, including getting “a parent or older sibling” to sign the rental agreements.
This year, Marzetti said, deputies and property managers will concentrate on “wayward chaperones” with criminal charges and evictions for not being present, over-occupancy and property damage. Sparks said some agencies are performing background checks on the main renters before any contracts are signed.
Marzetti said owners and property managers are urged to go to the county magistrate to accelerate vacation rental evictions, with deputies evicting immediately upon receiving a court order.
“The key message is that Corolla is a great place for families to visit and a terrible place for wild, out of control partying that leads to confrontations with other residents and visitors, who then become fearful for their safety,” the association release said.
“The hope is that this information will be shared with students and parents so that there is a clear understanding that ‘gone wild’ behavior will not be tolerated here.”
