Fortunately for some, not so much for others, Hurricane Dorian did just about everything forecasters in the region predicted several days before it reached the Carolina coast.
After destroying much of the Bahamas, the storm delivered high seas, localized flooding and plenty of rain as it crept its way up the coast before making its fourth overall and first U.S. landfall at Hatteras Island on Sept. 6.
Hampton Roads didn’t get much of anything other than high winds, a couple inches of rain and nuisance flooding.
“We hardly got 2 inches of rain in Norfolk and the winds were starting to die down around high tide,” said Jeff Orrock, lead forecaster at the National Weather Service’s Wakefield office, after releasing his post-storm briefing this week. “That was fortunate.”
Areas to the south weren’t so lucky.
While it wasn’t the kind of fury seen in the Bahamas, Dorian raised Cain on Ocracoke Island, bringing Category 1 winds between 74 and 95 mph, lots of rain and a double-dose of flooding — first from the ocean and second from the sound as the storm passed by and winds switched direction.
Hatteras Inlet saw sustained winds of 101 mph for a short time, according to follow-up data from the weather service. Winds peaked at 99 mph at Oregon Inlet, and winds hurricane strength were reported from Nags Head to the south.
Orrock said that forecast winds were “pretty well dialed in,” with the wind pushing into the coast and coming down the bay.
“It helped that after the storm went over Hatteras, it really accelerated, really quickly,” he said.
While Ocracoke suffered the worst damage overall in the mid-Atlantic, only 5.32 inches of rain fell there.
Nags Head got 7.75 inches of rain, with totals of 7.33 inches in Elizabeth City’s Mariner’s Wharf Park, 7.25 in the Perquiman’s County town of Chapanoke, and 6.99 inches at the Elizabeth City airport.
Orrock said city responses for potential threats seemed appropriate.
“There were very targeted evacuations, and schools closed in the appropriate places,” he said. “I think that’s because we were getting pretty confident about what this thing was going to do. This storm did what it was pretty much supposed to do. There were trees down, power outages and some flooding.”
Lee Tolliver, 757-222-5844, lee.tolliver@pilotonline.com
