“Hey, Rick, is that you?” asked the stranger, who was also on the Hatteras Island beach, surveying houses being whacked by waves and likely fated to fall into the Atlantic. He said he recognized Shaftan from Facebook and appreciated his beach “coverage.”

After chatting about the threats to the vacation homes, Shaftan turned back to videoing his beach walk and said with a grin, “Man, I’m famous.”

To the legions of absentee homeowners and tourists who rent summer houses on Hatteras, from Corolla to Ocracoke 120 miles to the south, Shaftan has become an important source of information about the shifting sands on the barrier island.

Recent storms and high tides have eaten away at the beaches, and several houses have crumbled into the ocean. And he has Facebooked the changes in his town, where 16 years ago, the romance movie Nights in Rodanthe, starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane, was filmed.

“I just started doing this, and people started watching. People want to see what’s going on,” Shaftan told Secrets, likening it to public service.

Even when not at his Rodanthe home, where he has lived for nine years, he feels compelled to post videos and photos from friends and other sites.

While there are others posting videos of the recent damage to the beaches and waterfront homes, Shaftan has an easygoing style that attracts a larger audience and many comments on his posts.

He usually takes his car or bike to the beach and turns his phone video on for two to 15 minutes, sometimes walking with a can of Coors beer and always in an open-collared shirt. He often talks about politics, too.

Reacting to one recent post, a viewer asked if he had only one “Hollywood” shirt he used in the videos. Shaftan told Secrets his “wardrobe” consists of L.L. Bean button-down shirts. “I just buy like five or 10 every year, and I just kind of ruin them rapidly,” he said.

While he said it has been fun being a disaster correspondent, he also has a political agenda for his videos: to counter federal officials who often cite climate change and sea rise for the erosion and tumbling houses.

“It’s not sea rise. Sand comes, and sand goes,” he said, explaining the basics of barrier islands and the impact of erosion protection walls that can cause damage miles away.

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“The whole National Park Service has been taken over by left-wing ideologues. And the problem is that there are no right-wing ideologues to counter them,” he said.

He plays that role sometimes, such as when he was filming while standing on a newly piled-up sand “dune.” Someone yelled at him to get off it. “That’s not a dune,” he barked back. “That’s a pile of sand that will be gone in hours.” And hours later, it was washed away in the surf.