In 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused a breach at Fire Island (NY, USA), near Pelican Island. This paper aims at modelling dune erosion, overwash and breaching processes that occured during the hurricane event at this stretch of coast with the numerical model XBeach. By using the default settings, the erosion rates are substantially overestimated, which was also concluded in several previous case studies. If the discretization of bed roughness along with wave skewness and asymmetry are improved in the model, XBeach is capable of simulating the various morphological changes within the chosen model domain.