THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 31, 1995 TAG: 9512290327
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 05 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: 1995: YEAR IN REVIEW
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
For close to a week last August, a hurricane named Felix swirled, twirled, danced and darted just off the coast confounding old salts and professional weather watchers alike.
In the end, Felix took a couple of extra spins, then meandered on up to the Canadian Maritimes. As far as coastal Virginia and the Carolinas were concerned, Felix had proved himself the Big Cat Who Couldn't.
Before getting to that point, however, he was responsible for the emptying out of hundreds of Oceanfront hotel rooms and campground spaces, the opening of dozens of emergency shelters and the disappearance of lanterns, camp stoves, bottled water, candles and batteries from the shelves of just about every store in Virginia Beach.
Meteorologists and disaster personnel who had been watching Felix since his birth off the coast of Africa a week before were seriously worried by Tuesday, Aug. 15. The big cat, by then as wide as the North Carolina coastline is long, had the whole East Coast and the western Atlantic as his playground. Not a single weather front headed in from the west to block or control his path. He could go where he pleased.
The predictions were dire. Felix could slam flat into the coast like the great storm of 1933 and cover low-lying areas of Hampton Roads with 7 to 9 feet of water. Even worse, he could take aim on the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, push a solid wall of water ahead of him, act like a giant plug and cause even more flood damage.
By Wednesday, just about everybody was worried. The tourists went home, the locals went shopping and the city opened its shelters. Several hundred residents, along with a few tourists, spent the night on cots and blankets at more than a dozen public schools.
On Thursday morning, they looked out the shelter doors and found things pretty much as they had been the day before: drizzly and windy. After having come as close as 145 miles offshore, the cat named Felix had retreated to the 200-mile mark, spun a few more circles and taken a snooze. His winds, once clocked at 135 mph, were down to 75.
``Don't untape those windows yet,'' Friday morning's paper warned, ``he's just curled up a safe distance off the coast.''
As all cats do, Felix finally tired of the game, did a couple more loops over the weekend, then headed for points north and east. By Sunday he was on his way to Nova Scotia, via Cape Cod.
To the joy of surfers, he left behind at least a week's worth of good waves. To the despair of innkeepers and restaurateurs, he siphoned off more than 20,000 tourists for the month of August.
And to the consternation of gardeners, he didn't even have the courtesy to drop enough rain to break the summer-long drought.
- Jo-Ann Clegg ILLUSTRATION: AP photo
A surfing Felix the Cat adorned a boarded-up bar along Atlantic
Avenue as the curious strolled by on Aug. 17. Felix the hurricane
emptied hotel rooms while churning relatively harmlessly off the
coast.
Staff photo
This movie theater marquis seemed to sum up things nicely, and the
hurricane finally complied.
by CNB