In a season of monsters, Gulf Coast feels lucky all it got was Category 1
BILOXI, Miss. — As Hurricane Nate cut a path through the central Gulf Coast overnight with roaring winds and a rush of storm-surge flooding, a limb snapped from a tree and landed on the windshield of Terry Gentry’s convertible, cracking the glass and bending the hood.
His reaction? Intense relief.
“I feel blessed; my dog’s still good,” Gentry said Sunday. “All my family is good.”
With the devastating wounds left by three monster hurricanes in six weeks still raw from Texas to Florida to Puerto Rico, the impact of an ordinary Category 1 storm like Nate felt gentle by comparison.
As it sped northward, the storm brushed over the mouth of the Mississippi River in southern Louisiana, skipped to the east of New Orleans and drove ashore again near Biloxi, the first hurricane to make landfall in Mississippi since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It ripped trees from the ground, flooded lowlying areas, and sprayed the beaches with debris and the roads with sand and tree limbs.
Part of Highway 90, the main road along the beachfront, was still closed Sunday afternoon, and tens of thousands of customers in Mississippi and Alabama were without power.
Officials in Mississippi and Alabama said they were still assessing the full scope of the damage on Sunday. But according to preliminary reports, the storm mainly left an inconvenient mess, with widespread debris but only small pockets of more serious problems.
“We are very fortunate this morning,” said Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi, a Republican, though he was quick to warn against minimizing the harm caused by Nate’s 10-foot surge, strong winds and heavy rains. “Some damage has been done, particularly into some of the individual homes that are on the bay,” Bryant said.
The storm ground a large stretch of the Gulf Coast to a halt, and led President Donald Trump to approve emergency declarations for the states of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, though Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana, a Democrat, said his state had been spared major damage.
The storm weakened rapidly as it sped inland, first to a tropical storm and then to a tropical depression. By late Sunday afternoon, as the center of the system was crossing into Tennessee, its maximum sustained winds had slowed to 35 mph. The main threat it poses now is flash flooding: Forecasters said the storm could drop as much as 10 inches of rain in parts of its path through the South and the Ohio Valley toward the Appalachian Mountains.
“We’re not seeing widespread areas with major structural damage,” Yasamie Richardson, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, said Sunday morning. “Some counties are reporting a few homes, a few structures here and there.”
Still, there were hairraising moments during the storm. Kayleigh Terrell, 29, of Orange Beach, Ala., got a tornado warning on her phone on Saturday night, and then saw the wind tear the screen door off her house.
“It hadn’t quite touched down,” Terrell said of the funnel cloud. “It hit the tree, pulled the door, and we have one shingle left.”