Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 1, 1993 TAG: 9309010117
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MANTEO, N.C. LENGTH: Medium
But the hurricane's eye, with 115 mph wind swirling around it, stayed just offshore. Forecasters said it likely would be the storm's closest encounter with the U.S. mainland, though hurricane conditions were expected overnight in southeastern Virginia.
"The house is shaking terribly from the wind and waves. Water is pouring in everywhere, from cracks in the doors and windows and from the roof," Irene Nolan said from her home in the tiny seaside village of Frisco, where she rode out the storm.
"Everything under the house . . . is floating down the street with the current," she said.
The storm howled near the southern tip of the Virginia coast late Tuesday, bringing strong winds and driving rain in its slow northward journey along the Atlantic seaboard.
The center of the storm, including the eye wall where the strongest winds are found, was approximately 35 miles offshore as Emily approached Virginia Beach's remote southern farming area, where few people live.
But hurricane force winds still were predicted to reach the shore, and rain and storm surge threatened to flood low-lying areas near the ocean and Chesapeake Bay. Police recommended but did not order an evacuation of Sandbridge, a vulnerable stretch of oceanfront beach.
Earlier Tuesday, a 15-year-old boy apparently drowned in the pounding Atlantic surf while swimming, said Virginia Beach police spokesman Mike Carey. The search for Anthony J. Turner of Chesapeake was suspended about 1 p.m. because of the weather, said Lewis Thurston, another police spokesman.
As the storm approached, residents stocked batteries and bottled water and tied down everything that might blow away.
Many buildings along Ocracoke and Hatteras islands lost their roofs as wind gusts topped 90 mph, said Dare County emergency management officials, who abandoned their operations center on Hatteras because of flooding.
Cars were floating in a bank parking lot in Buxton, and fallen trees were blocking roads, said the National Weather Service in Buxton, which also reported flooding in the yard of its office, a mile inland from Pamlico Sound.
The extent of the damage wouldn't be known before morning. "It's too dark to say. There's no power down there. But at the crack of dawn, we'll be down there," Dare County spokesman Ray Sturza said.
But on Ocracoke Island, immediately southwest of Hatteras, Hyde County Commissioner David Styron said there didn't immediately seem to be a great deal of damage.
"All in all, Ocracoke Island came through this one pretty good," said Styron, who lives on Ocracoke and spent the storm there.
The center of the hurricane got as close as about 20 miles due east of Cape Hatteras late Tuesday afternoon, and the eye wall - the region of strongest wind around the calm eye - moved over Hatteras Island, said Bob Sheets, director of the National Hurricane Center.
No part of the eye crossed land, however. The eye had grown to 45 miles wide Tuesday evening and was 35 to 40 miles due east of Oregon Inlet at 10 p.m.
The slow-moving hurricane passed the Outer Banks as the tide, higher than normal because of the full moon, peaked about 8 p.m. The storm was expected to create a tidal surge 6 to 8 feet high, though the Weather Service said flooding reports on Hatteras indicated the surge was even higher.
The storm also was forecast to dump 4 to 8 inches of rain in its path.
Two houses at Kitty Hawk that had been damaged by previous storms fell into the Atlantic. Fifteen-foot waves were reported at a pier in Duck, just north of Kitty Hawk.
The Weather Service in Buxton recorded gusts to 98 mph. The Diamond Shoals light tower 14 miles southeast of Cape Hatteras had sustained wind of 102 mph with gusts as high as 132 mph.
Tens of thousands of residents and tourists had fled the Outer Banks, the chain of narrow, low-lying sandy islets off the North Carolina coast, though hundreds remained.
Farther north, hurricane warnings were in effect to Cape Henlopen, Del., while heavy surf caused minor flooding along the southern shore of New York's Long Island, where 20,000 people on Fire Island were ordered to evacuate.
But forecasters were expecting the hurricane to skirt the mid-Atlantic coast on Tuesday night, then turn to the northeast sometime today and veer offshore, sparing the Northeast its worst fury.
by CNB