THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 24, 1995 TAG: 9508240540
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY BETTY MITCHELL GRAY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, N.C. LENGTH: Long : 112 lines
Telephone lines serving Dare County became clogged sooner than expected, and evacuation of Ocracoke Island was somewhat delayed because many vacationers mistakenly believed N.C. Route 12 on Hatteras Island was closed.
Otherwise, emergency response to Hurricane Felix when it threatened the region's coastline was very good, according to Virginia and North Carolina emergency planners who met in Washington on Wednesday.
``It was an extremely good job,'' said Dare County Commissioner Clarence Skinner. ``The plan that we had in place worked well. The people came together, and we were all poised to help in the recovery efforts.''
Skinner was one of about 45 state and local officials, law enforcement officers, National Weather Service forecasters, American Red Cross volunteers and others who met to evaluate their response to Felix and begin preparing for northeastern North Carolina's next storm.
They weren't asked to attend the meeting just to pat themselves on the back, said Doug Hoell of Washington, coordinator of the Division of Emergency Management's northeastern region.
``We need to talk about what we did - what we did right and what we did wrong,'' Hoell said. ``So that when the next storm comes, we'll be even more ready than we were for this one.
``Every time something happens to us, we learn something else,'' he said.
Hoell oversees emergency response in a 15-county region in northeastern North Carolina generally north of the Pamlico River and east of U.S. Route 17, known as Area A.
Local emergency workers began to prepare for the storm almost a week before Felix began to harass the North Carolina coast. By the weekend of Aug. 12 and 13, when the offshore hurricane reached its maximum strength, emergency workers began activating regional emergency management operations centers.
At 6 a.m. Aug. 15, county emergency planners ordered the evacuation of Ocracoke Island. One hour later, Hatteras Island was ordered to do the same. By the afternoon, evacuation of the entire Outer Banks was under way, and hundreds of thousands of people were on the move as Felix moved within 150 miles of the state's coast.
After the storm stalled offshore and began to move slowly away from the coast Aug. 15 and 16, the evacuation orders were lifted and vacationers were allowed to return to the beaches.
While property damage from the storm was said to be minimal, Outer Banks businesses lost an estimated $15 million in income because tourists were ordered away from the state's beaches onthe busiest weekend in the best tourist season in 10 years, according to Charles Hartig, Dare County spokesman.
And while some Dare County business owners may have grumbled about the lost business, local emergency planners said ordering the evacuation was justified in the face of the storm.
``The damn storm was as big as the state of Texas,'' Hartig said. ``When you've got a storm that big, it would have affected an incredibly large area.''
``If we had not evacuated and the storm had hit, the headlines would have been `50 people killed in storm,' '' he said. ``We can't take that risk.''
Emergency managers from Dare to Pitt counties discovered that communication with the mainland quickly slowed as people leaving the coast Tuesday morning began telephoning family and friends as they arrived at motels and shelters inland, overloading communications equipment.
This created a problem for emergency workers on the Outer Banks who lost telephone contact with emergency management coordinators on the mainland, Skinner said.
``This tells us that we could lose our communications capabilities to the counties before a storm makes landfall, and we'd be out of business,'' Hoell said.
Solutions generally lie in soliciting local help from amateur radio operators and working with local telephone companies to re-route telephone calls, he said.
Generally, evacuation of the beaches went smoothly, except for a delay on Ocracoke Island when most tourists headed south for the Cedar Island and Swan Quarter ferries because they believed flooding on N.C. Route 12 had already cut the southern part of Hatteras off from the mainland.
Emergency planners became aware of the problem when ferry operators sent word just a few hours into the evacuation that there was no traffic using the ferries on the northern end of Ocracoke Island.
Officers with the State Highway Patrol on Ocracoke broke the log-jam by sending tourists to the northern end of the island.
In addition to communications links to the mainland and the glitch in evacuating Ocracoke Island, North Carolina emergency planners are also concerned with traffic flow in emergencies.
About 200,000 people were evacuated from the Outer Banks during one of the busiest weekends in the summer tourist season, prompting officials to push plans to widen Interstate 64 and N.C. 168 to the Virginia line.
But despite these and other concerns, officials are generally pleased with how things went.
One Felix success story for emergency planners was an effort to move tourists to shelters further inland.
In past years, coastal shelters quickly became flooded with tourists forced off the Outer Banks, leaving little space for residents when they had to leave their homes.
But a plan to delay opening of most coastal shelters and send tourists to inland shelters in Edgecombe, Nash and Halifax counties - used for the first time in response to Felix - left more space in coastal shelters for residents, emergency planners said.
But what most troubles emergency planners is the response by local residents to impending storms. An estimated 20,000 people - most of them among the 26,000 year-round beach residents - did not leave.
And emergency planners hope that repeated near-misses by hurricanes won't make coastal residents complacent about the next storm that heads towards North Carolina. MEMO: SALT WARNING
North Carolina Power has issued a salt warning until further notice,
because salt accumulation on electrical equipment has caused power
interruptions. Story on page B3.
by CNB