Hurricane Emily No Longer Any Threat : Storm: North Carolina residents assess the damage--and most feel lucky. Officials credit mandatory evacuation with reducing the risk.

Hurricane Emily headed into the Atlantic to die Wednesday, and the residents of North Carolina’s Outer Banks emerged from their homes to take inventory--and in most cases to consider themselves among the fortunate.

The storm, packing winds of more than 115 m.p.h., left pockets of extensive damage from Avon to Hatteras, but did not kill or seriously injure anyone on the Outer Banks, which only Monday morning had been packed with some 20,000 residents and more than 100,000 tourists.

“We dodged a very big bullet,” said Nags Head Fire Chief Doug Remaley. “Hurricanes Andrew and Hugo were in the back of my mind, and when you put it in that context, we were lucky. And getting most of the people out of here before Emily struck was a smart move.”

Dare County officials said that the orderly, mandatory evacuation of the tourists Monday afternoon and evening had greatly reduced the risks posed by Emily and would enable them to expedite cleanup activities in the hopes of reclaiming some of the lost tourist dollars during the Labor Day weekend.

North Carolina Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. toured the hardest hit areas by helicopter Wednesday and lifted the state of emergency in the northern section of the banks. Within minutes of the announcement, tourists started streaming back to the rental homes that they had vacated Monday. They returned to find most stores and restaurants still closed but life otherwise more or less normal.

But along the southern banks, where the emergency remained in effect and the National Guard was on duty, villages like Buxton looked as though they had been attacked by an invading army. Stores were torn apart, roads were littered with debris and doors had been blown off their hinges.

Corky Whitehead slogged through the wreckage of his convenience store, not quite sure what to do except wait for the insurance adjuster. A six-foot tide had swept through the store and an adjoining drive-through beer and soft-drink facility, and not much was salvageable. With no electricity, the ice cream was melting fast.

“I’ve lived here since the ‘50s, and what I do next is anyone’s guess,” he said. “Have I thought about leaving? Yeah, it’s crossed my mind. But, you know, I love it down here. It’s a good place to live. So unless you want to buy a convenience store cheap, I’m staying.”

Three small homes washed into the sea in Kitty Hawk. To the south, tractors had to plow knee-deep sand off Route 12 and flooding was widespread on both sides of the highway. Officials, mindful of the 15-year-old surfer who was believed to have drowned Tuesday in Virginia Beach, Va., declared the Outer Banks’ beaches closed to swimmers Wednesday.

Electricity and water were not expected to be returned to the southern towns for two or three days because of downed power lines and ruptured pipes.

But elsewhere on the barrier islands and in the coastal region, life Wednesday began to return to normal.

On Roanoke Island, protected from the hurricane’s fury by the outer banks, residents emerged Wednesday to find little evidence of the storm.

“The March blizzard was much worse,” said Gary Trew over breakfast at the only Roanoke Island restaurant that opened Wednesday morning.

“I think most of the people who live on the island stayed through it,” said Diane McGovern, who said that she weathered the storm at home, despite the mandatory evacuation order issued for Dare County. “When they learned that it (the hurricane) wasn’t going into the sound, people decided to stay put.”

Further up the coast, Virginia Beach had been braced for the hurricane but was spared. Tuesday night it looked like it was dressed up for a macabre party that never occurred. Sightseers waiting for disaster patrolled the beaches, defying warnings and wading into the angry surf.

But Wednesday morning, visitors and residents were wondering what all the fuss was about.

The storm was delivering winds of no greater than 50 m.p.h. by the time it reached the Virginia-North Carolina border, with its eye pushed safely out to sea by a high-pressure cold front moving eastward over Virginia.

Times staff writers Eric Harrison on Roanoke Island and Jim Gerstenzang in Virginia Beach contributed to this story.