Posted on: Saturday, September 20, 2003
East reels from storm's fury
Advertiser News Services
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| The grounds near the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., flooded after Isabel passed through yesterday. The storm closed three branches of government.
Associated Press |
NAGS HEAD, N.C. — Isabel, once a hurricane, became a no-name Canadian rainstorm yesterday, but the mayhem it left behind assured it wouldn't be forgotten soon.
As many as 21 people were killed in its one-day sweep across the eastern United States. More than
5.5 million homes lost electricity. Property damage estimates ran to $4 billion. Pieces of American history were erased. And coastal
geography changed dramatically.
Trees falling on homes, cars and roads caused most of the deaths and the record power failures. At least three people in Virginia and Rhode Island drowned. Two others died in Virginia from carbon monoxide poisoning, and a North Carolina power worker was electrocuted.
While North Carolina's Outer Banks suffered the most damage — homes, hotels, piers and roads were simply lost — Virginia had the most deaths, 14, and the most people without power — nearly 1.9 million.
Although its winds merited only a Category 2 designation on the five-category Saffir-Simpson intensity scale, Isabel was one of the largest hurricanes to hit the United States in recent memory, said National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield. Death and damage spread as far north as Rhode Island, where a man drowned after he was swept up by choppy waters at Narragansett Beach.
"You get to a point where it's out of your control," said Trish Kaidanow, who sloshed out of her Broadway Deli onto Baltimore streets flooded as high as 7 feet from the storm-swollen Chesapeake Bay.
Almost 200 people and even a dog or two had to be rescued when flood waters spilled over the seawall onto the storefronts of the city's Inner Harbor and to the windowsills of row houses and suburban homes.
An elderly couple in Bowleys Quarters was rescued from the attic after their house filled with water, county officials said.
Martin O'Malley, mayor of Baltimore, where 63,000 people were without power, said: "We never thought we'd have enough sandbags to hold back the Chesapeake Bay, and that's what we're dealing with now."
President Bush has declared federal disasters in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. Delaware officials said they probably would make a disaster request next week.
But none of the damage compares with the Outer Banks.
"It looks like an atom bomb went off," said Reid Harris, a builder helping tally the damage in Nags Head. "The west side of the road is better; they've all got shingles gone or power lines down, but the houses are still there. Along the beach, every one out of two or three houses is damaged or destroyed. I just can't believe it."
A key road and the vital sand dunes that gave the Outer Banks their shape were washed away. Some areas were accessible only by helicopter late yesterday.
The North Carolina Electric Cooperative had to chopper in an engineer to a backup power plant in what had been the southern portion of Hatteras Island because the storm had cut the island in two.
The dunes that people associate with the Outer Banks — rebuilt at great cost by the state — have disappeared, baring the huge pink sandbags used to reinforce them.
The roof of the Whalebone Motel, one of the first structures on the road into south Nags Head, collapsed. The 15-foot dune in front of the building was washed out, and the brick wall facing the ocean was pounded to pieces by storm surge.
"I don't think they'll let us rebuild," said motel manager Hunter Stewart.
The main north-south beach road, Route 12, was all but gone in Kitty Hawk, the pavement in pieces or missing. In front of the Bonanza Cottage Court apartments, the storm left an 8-foot-deep hole where the road had been.
A little farther north, in Virginia Beach, Va., oceanfront hotels and homes were mostly unscathed, but not the Colony Trailer Park, set in a forest of hundred-foot oak trees. About a fifth of the 120 trailers were destroyed by falling trees. Many residents did not have insurance.
"It's the trailers — they always get it," said Elliot Coleman, 62, as he inspected his demolished home against the sound of chain saws. "With the ground so wet (the oaks') roots just let go."
Karen Saum pressed her hand to her face and said: "I've got to turn this around in my mind and think of it as a gift. ... But I can't stop crying."
Disaster experts found it easier to consider the storm's victims lucky. When the hurricane came ashore with winds of about 95 mph, it already had weakened considerably from 160 mph winds six days earlier.
"If this had not weakened to a Category 2 at landfall ... the damage would have been catastrophic," Mayfield said.
Insured losses were estimated at $1 billion, though another $3 billion in damage probably wasn't privately insured, said Bob Hartwig, chief economist for the Insurance Information Institute in New York. "Had it just gone a bit north and east and, say, gone directly over Washington and clobbered Baltimore ... we would be easily looking at the area of $4 (billion) or $5 billion" in insured losses, he said.
Hurricane Isabel ranks third this year in terms of homeowners' insurance losses, behind massive tornados in Georgia and Tennessee in March, and throughout the Midwest in May, Hartwig said.
American history also took a beating. Virginia's Jamestown, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Mount Vernon and Richmond all were damaged, though not severely.
A tree thought to have been planted by George Washington was shattered at Mount Vernon, home of the first president. Historic Fells Point in Baltimore flooded with thigh-high water, leading boaters to maneuver in the streets. A tree hit the Governor's Palace in Colonial Williamsburg, and the main visitors' center at the national park in Yorktown was in 6 feet of water.
But the storm did not drop a large nearby tree on the Mount Vernon mansion, as some feared.
"We dodged a huge bullet," said chief horticulturist Dean Norton. "The place is littered with debris. It was pretty devastating."
Knight Ridder News Service and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
