Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 19, 1994 TAG: 9411210045
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEVE STONE LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``I've been doing this about 50 years, and this is the weirdest I've ever seen,'' said John Hope, veteran hurricane forecaster at The Weather Channel in Atlanta. ``I've never seen quite so many changes as rapidly as we've seen with this hurricane. It's been quite an odyssey.''
At 4 p.m. Friday, Gordon had been downgraded to a tropical storm with top winds of 70 mph. Its center was about 165 miles south of Cape Hatteras and moving south at about 6 mph, a weak course expected to continue through this morning.
The storm might even make a third visit to Florida, where it already has wrought havoc.
``It's been the most difficult, complex system we've had to deal with,'' said Bob Sheets, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. ``We expect the storm to continue drifting toward the south for 24 to 48 hours, but after that, we'll just have to follow it and see what happens.''
Even with the last-minute turn to the south Friday - and without actually having come ashore - Gordon left its mark on the Outer Banks and along the Virginia coast.
At least four oceanfront homes in Kitty Hawk, N.C., collapsed into the roiling surf and a dozen more were in danger. Residents could do little more than watch and cry.
The surf also swept over the sandbags around the historic Hatteras lighthouse, which has grown increasingly vulnerable to coastal storms as protective beaches around it have vanished over the years. But Friday's damage did not appear to be serious.
N.C. Route 12, the sole highway linking the Outer Banks to the mainland, was closed in places, covered with storm debris, floodwater and up to 4 feet of mud.
Storm tides carved a 3-foot-wide strip under the highway on Hatteras Island, four miles north of Rodanthe, closing the road there.
The Hurricane Center had not anticipated Gordon's 90-degree turn to the west. And even as it was happening, forecasters said they thought Gordon would turn back to a more traditional route.
At midnight, however, that hope faded and the warning went up.
On Portsmouth Island, 61 anglers staying in summer rental cabins were taken off by boat Friday morning as the hurricane threatened.
In Virginia Beach, a once-controversial effort to save homes in the Sandbridge area met an inauspicious demise. An extensive system of costly bulkheads was breached Thursday, and by Friday morning the relentless surf had ripped some of the barrier apart.
Several homes were in imminent danger of collapse, and homeowners wondered if the expense and fighting to build the bulkhead were worth it. Among them was Ed Jones, 53, who watched helplessly as his Sandbridge home teetered on the brink of extinction.
``Yesterday, we had sand all the way out to there,'' Jones said, pointing 30 yards offshore where waves broke over the shattered remnants of his wooden sea wall. ``And now we got nothing.''
Roads in the area were littered with debris, mud and sometimes raging torrents of ocean overwash.
At the Virginia Beach oceanfront, a 75- to 100-foot section of the 14th Street fishing pier was sliced away by 20-foot waves. Much of the tangled debris washed up near 35th Street. None of the businesses on the pier was damaged.
The heavy surf broke on the Boardwalk in sometimes spectacular explosions of foam that left portions of the walkway caked in inches of sandy mud.
And surfers flocked to favored wave-riding locations all along the coast. At Buckroe Beach in Hampton, they continued climbing the swells well past dusk.
Meanwhile, forecasters did their best to warn simply: It ain't necessarily over yet.
The storm lost some of its punch Friday, but Gordon's southerly course will bring it back into the storm-sustaining, warmer waters of the Gulf Stream, where it could regenerate.
by CNB