Blowhard Nate
THE REMNANTS of Hurricane Nate were set to hit New York Monday, a day after the storm soaked the Gulf Coast, knocking out power and flooding parts of New Orleans and Mississippi.
The Category 1 hurricane first took a swipe Saturday evening at southeastern Louisiana. It then made a second landfall outside Biloxi, Miss., Sunday morning before quickly losing power.
By Sunday afternoon — even with some flooding and power outages — it appeared Nate spared the U.S. from the disasters Harvey, Irma and Maria created.
That trio of deadly storms pummeled the Caribbean, as well as Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. On Sunday, a federal disaster recovery head said there are still “massive issues” in Puerto Rico.
More than 100,000 residents lost power in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida, but no U.S. deaths or injuries were reported in connection to Nate.
New Orleans had been getting ready to get clobbered, but a Saturday night curfew in the city got called off in about an hour, according to the Times-Picayune.
“Hurricane Nate had the potential to wreak havoc on Louisiana, but thankfully, we were largely spared major damage,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said in a statement.
On Sunday morning, Mississippi Department of Transportation crews were already cleaning up debris including sand, logs and a large trash bin on a Biloxi waterfront route.
Online video showed flood waters sloshing around vehicles at Biloxi’s Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.
At a beach in Pass Christian, Miss., 1,000 pumpkins lay scattered after being blown and washed away from a pumpkin patch.
Some of the region’s oil ports, producers and refineries that shut down ahead of Hurricane Nate were already planning reopenings.
“We dodged the bullet,” the city’s mayor, Andrew Gilich, said on Biloxi’s website.
Nate was the first hurricane to hit Mississippi since Katrina devastated the region in 2005.
Lee Smithson, director of the state’s emergency management agency, said authorities have learned a lot since.
“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.
The worst hurricane to hit Mississippi was Camille in 1969, which made landfall in Waveland as a Category 5 storm.
Nate killed at least 30 people in Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Honduras before it touched down in the U.S.
When Nate made its first landfall in the sparsely populated Plaquemines Parish, La., it sped in with 85 mph winds.
Nate was the Gulf of Mexico’s fastest-moving hurricane, but it steadily lost energy.
Forecasters said the storm would survive long enough to soak Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.
New York could get hit with more than an inch and a half of rain over 10 hours, and winds of up to 30 mph, according to the National Weather Service.