Residents assess damage as storm soaks East Coast
WILBUR-BY-THE-SEA, Fla. — Heavy rain from the remnants of Hurricane Nicole covered the eastern United States from Georgia to the Canadian border Friday while hundreds of people on a hard-hit stretch of Florida’s coast wondered when, or if, they can ever return to their homes.
Parts of otherwise intact buildings hung over cliffs of sand created by pounding waves that covered the normally wide beach in Wilbur-by-theSea, near where Nicole made landfall. Dozens of hotel and condominium towers as tall as 22 stories were declared uninhabitable in Daytona Beach Shores and New Smyrna Beach after seawater undercut their foundations.
A man and a woman were killed by electrocution when they touched downed power lines in the Orlando area, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office said. Another man died as waves battered his yacht against a dock in Cocoa, despite efforts to resuscitate him by paramedics who managed to get on board as the boat broke away from its moorings, police said.
As waves washed over pieces of lumber and concrete blocks that once were part of homes at Wilbur-by-the-Sea, workers tried to stabilize remaining sections of land with rocks and dirt. It was too late for some, though: The front of one house laid on the sand, where it was sheared away from the rest of the structure.
Restoring Daytona Beach and surrounding beaches will likely require a major, multimillion-dollar sand renourishment project and improved sea walls to protect property, said Stephen Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University.
“It was known worldwide for driving on the beach,” said Leatherman, known as “Dr. Beach” for his annual ranking of U.S. beaches. “They don’t even have a beach to think about right now.”
As Nicole’s leftovers pushed north, forecasters issued multiple tornado warnings in the Carolinas. Downgraded to a depression, Nicole could dump as much as 8 inches of rain over the Blue Ridge Mountains, forecasters said, and there was a chance of flash and urban flooding as far north as New England.
Wrecks added to Atlanta’s notoriously bad traffic as rain from Nicole fell across the metro area during rush hour, and a few school systems in mountainous northern Georgia canceled classes.
The situation was a lot worse in eastern Florida. One roughly 15-mile-long area of the coast was severely eroded, with multiple seawalls destroyed. Much of the destruction was blamed on unrepaired damage from when Hurricane Ian crossed the state from west to east just six weeks earlier, killing more than 130 people and destroying thousands of homes.
For storm-weary Floridians, Nicole was the first November hurricane to hit their shores since 1985 and only the third since record-keeping began in 1853.