Waves battered a pier in Southern Shores, North Carolina on Thursday as Hurricane Earl neared the Atlantic coastline.
After whipping the North Carolina coastline with heavy wind and rain -- but not with the power that nervous officials, residents and tourists had anticipated --Hurricane Earl weakened further on Friday as it churned north through the Atlantic, setting a course toward the seaside communities along Cape Cod.
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Emergency officials in Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and other waterfront towns throughout eastern Massachusetts were still bracing for what the National Weather Service called a "large hurricane," but at least some of Earl's menace had diminished by midday Friday. Forecasters downgraded the storm, which is entering cooler waters, to a Category 1 hurricane from a Category 2, and lifted some tropical storm alerts for parts of Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Long Island. The National Hurricane Center said the hurricane's top sustained winds had slowed to 85 miles per hour as it lumbered through colder waters.
New York City, which had also braced for some of the storm's lashing, was removed from a tropical storm watch, which means no heavy winds and at most rain. Suffolk County on Long Island remained under a warning and has already received heavy showers. With swells as high as 16 feet, swimming was being discouraged on parts of Long Island until Saturday and boats were being secured more carefully than usual.
Officials on Nantucket said that all harbors would be shut down at noon and flights would cease when wind gusts reached 35 miles per hour, leaving the island without a direct connection to the mainland. On Friday, they warned residents against a lax attitude toward the hurricane, which is expected to reach the area by early Saturday.
"It's still a dangerous storm, and it still has tremendous impacts here on the island," Police Chief Bill Pittman said at a news conference outside Nantucket High School, which had been converted into an emergency shelter, stocked with cots and supplies.
Officials are anticipating a two-foot storm surge on top of a tide about a foot higher than normal, meaning that flood-prone areas of downtown could not only see water, but "waves, and water splashing over the barriers," Chief Pittman said.
Earl was big enough to empty the Outer Banks of Labor Day tourists, but not close enough to wreak much havoc.
Officials in the Outer Banks said they had escaped the worst, including hurricane-force winds. Hyde County, which encompasses the south-facing part of the Outer Banks that took the brunt of the storm, had widespread power outages and two or three feet of flooding in some places, but no injuries reported, Justin Gibbs, the deputy incident commander there said. Highway 12, which runs down the Outer Banks and is highly susceptible to flooding, was closed in places, as many residents expected.
"I don't think we received the impact that we were expecting to get from this storm," he said.
Justin O'Neal, 25, spent the night on Hatteras Island, despite a mandatory evacuation order, to help look after the mobile homes in his family's business, the North Side Campground. Mobile homes are particularly vulnerable to storms, but Mr. O'Neal said they, as well as the sand dune protecting them, had held up. "The wind came more out of the north and that seemed to actually push the swell off the beach," he said. "We got really lucky on this one."
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SOURCE: The New York Times
