Busy hurricane season
Nate marches across East Coast, dumping heavy rains
Nate slogged its way up the northeastern U.S. on Monday, dumping heavy rains and bringing gusty winds to inland states as a tropical depression less than two days after it roared ashore in Mississippi and Louisiana as a hurricane.
Nate spared the region the kind of catastrophic damage left by a series of hurricanes that hit the southern U.S. and Caribbean in recent weeks. Alabama endured relatively little damage, but authorities said it could still take days to deal with the storm’s worst effects.
On Dauphin Island, Mayor Jeff Collier said workers were using heavy equipment to remove as much as 1.8 metres of sand that washed across a more than 4.8-kilometre stretch of the island’s main road and more than 20 side streets.
Collier says Nate “moved the beachfront on to the roadway,” and neither power company nor city water workers can begin repairing damage until the road is clear.
To the east, at Gulf State Park, waves from the storm washed out removable flooring panels on a fishing pier that was rebuilt after being destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Workers were replacing the panels Monday with a goal of reopening the pier in time for the National Shrimp Festival, which opens Thursday in nearby Gulf Shores.
Nate — the first hurricane to make landfall in Mississippi since Katrina in 2005 — quickly lost strength Sunday, with its winds diminishing to a tropical depression as it pushed northward into Alabama and Georgia with heavy rain. It was a Category 1 hurricane when it came ashore outside Biloxi early Sunday, its second landfall after initially hitting southeastern Louisiana on Saturday evening.
Mississippi was largely spared damage, although a few residents suffered losses. Ruth Adams, a Massachusetts native riding out her first hurricane in her beach house near Ocean Springs, says Nate stripped off her metal roof.
Lee Smithson, director of Mississippi’s emergency management agency, said damage from Nate was held down in part because of work done and lessons learned from Katrina.
“If that same storm would have hit us 15 years ago, the damage would have been extensive and we would have had loss of life,” Smithson said of Nate. “But we have rebuilt the coast in the aftermath of Katrina higher and stronger.”
Nate knocked out power to more than 100,000 residents in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida, but crews worked on repairs and it appeared most of the outages had been fixed by Monday morning.
Also Monday, the Hurricane Center said a depression in the open Atlantic had strengthened. Tropical storm Ophelia did not pose a threat to any land, however.