4,000 Residents Return to Towns Belted by Bertha

Two days after Hurricane Bertha peeled off house roofs, flattened crops and turned roads into waterways, residents returned Sunday to put their battered beach towns back together.

More than 4,000 residents of Topsail Beach and Surf City were allowed to return to their evacuated homes, but vacationers were still being steered away.

Property damage in Topsail Beach was estimated at $2 million, including major damage to 40 residential units, Town Manager Eric Peterson said. The loss of vacation rentals is about $90,000 a day, Peterson said.

The island’s southern end was under more than a foot of water at one point during the storm, and sand was still piled 5 feet high on some roads.

“Removing the sand and debris is the largest job we have,” Peterson said.

Towering drifts of sand covered the streets of Surf City on Sunday. The town’s two major piers had partially collapsed, leaving broken pilings jutting from the surface of the water.

Richard Erickson, a spokesman for USAA Insurance Co., which has about 45,000 policyholders in coastal North Carolina, said Sunday that the company had received more than 1,600 claim notices.

“We expected by this time to have four times the number of claims we’ve gotten,” he said. “So it looks like we dodged the bullet.”

By Sunday evening, the American Red Cross estimated that nearly 5,800 North Carolina homes had been damaged by the hurricane. Of those, nearly 180 were destroyed and another 900 were uninhabitable, spokeswoman Elizabeth Quirk said.

Five Red Cross shelters remained open Sunday evening, and Red Cross vehicles were delivering two hot meals a day to heavily affected areas.