Bonnie Roars--Then Yawns--Over Virginia’s Shore

Hurricane Bonnie slapped the Virginia coast with intense winds and rain Friday, peeling off roofs and flattening trees before weakening to a tropical storm for the second time.

Officials reported only two known deaths caused by the storm: A 12-year-old girl was killed in North Carolina’s Currituck County, near the Virginia state line, when a tree fell on her house Thursday night, and a 50-year-old man in Myrtle Beach, S.C., was electrocuted Wednesday while checking his generator after his apartment lost power.

By late Friday, Bonnie’s winds dropped to 70 mph, below the hurricane minimum of 74 mph. The storm was 240 miles south-southwest of Nantucket Island, Mass., and moving northeast at 13 mph.

All tropical storm warnings for the East Coast were canceled late Friday.

Before moving out to sea, the storm sat nearly motionless for hours, battering a shore lined with resort hotels. The initial damage estimate for Virginia Beach was $13.3 million, officials said.

Along the oceanfront Atlantic Avenue, shop and hotel windows were blown out. Small trees and limbs lay beside the road.

The storm lifted the roof off one end of David’s Beach Shop and dropped it into the store, leaving a jumbled mess of insulation, rafters and crushed groceries.

Thick mooring cables holding two massive cargo ships to piers at the Norfolk terminal snapped in the wind. One ship broke free, but tugs were able to secure both vessels in their berths.

As many as 300,000 Virginia Power customers were without electricity at one point.

It’s rare that Virginia’s coast receives such a direct lashing from hurricane winds. North Carolina’s Outer Banks jut into the Atlantic and usually bear the brunt of storms moving up the East Coast.

North Carolina residents Friday welcomed brilliant blue skies and mopped up from the storm, which dropped 10 inches of rain and caused $1 billion to $2 billion in damage, much of it to farms.

Evacuated Outer Banks residents were allowed to return.

On barrier islands east of Cape Lookout, thousands of tires that formed an artificial reef off Pine Knoll Shores and Atlantic Beach washed up along a 21-mile stretch of beach in Carteret County.

“If there’s one, there’s half a million,” Pine Knoll Shores Chief Building Inspector Roy Brownlow said.

The tires had been part of a fisheries reef but apparently broke loose from their anchors, Brownlow said.

Flooding closed major highways in the Morehead City and Jacksonville areas. The coastal town of Belhaven on the mainland was swamped by a 4-foot storm surge up the Pungo River. The coastal town of Washington, N.C., also was flooded, said Sara Kempin, a state emergency management spokeswoman.

In South Carolina, Bonnie caused at least $27 million in damages, according to preliminary estimates.

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Bonnie blew ashore Wednesday afternoon in North Carolina with 115-mph winds. Its winds had dropped to 65 mph on Thursday before unexpectedly strengthening to above hurricane force again late that night.

Out in the Atlantic, meanwhile, Hurricane Danielle was 330 miles north of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and strengthening with 90-mph winds. It was moving west-northwest at 16 mph.

Danielle could close to within 300 miles of Wilmington, N.C., by Sunday, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.