Beach Towns Labor to Salvage Weekend

Crews rushed to repair oceanfront homes as some of North Carolina’s popular Outer Banks beach towns lifted evacuation orders and tried to salvage what they could of the Labor Day weekend despite damage left by Hurricane Dennis.

As Dennis, now a tropical storm, began to drift west-northwest back toward the coast, a tropical storm warning remained posted along the hardest-hit islands of the Outer Banks, from Cape Lookout north to Oregon Inlet. Tropical storm watches also were issued north to the Virginia border and south to Surf City, N.C.

“There’s no certainty at all to the situation,” National Hurricane Center meteorologist Miles Lawrence said. “The course of the storm has been uncertain for days now, except that it happens to be drifting more to the north now.”

On Friday, Dennis ended a five-day stay off Cape Hatteras spent battering the barrier islands with gale-force winds and damaging surf and drifted south. The storm likely cost the popular resort islands millions of dollars in lost tourist business during the unofficial final week of summer.

“I think it’s too early to call, with the storm doing what it’s doing, but until Dennis is gone it’s a total wash,” said John Wynne, owner of the Boyette House, a cedar-shingled hostelry in Ocracoke.

At nightfall, the storm was centered about 175 miles south-southeast of Cape Hatteras, with tropical storm force winds extending about 120 miles from the center, the hurricane center said.

Local forecasters predicted the storm would turn slowly west-northwest back toward the North Carolina mainland, making landfall somewhere along the state’s southern barrier islands over the holiday weekend.

In Dare County, home to the popular beach towns of Nags Head, Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk, a mandatory evacuation was lifted at daybreak Friday, but officials said water and sand could still cover parts of state Highway 12, the only highway on the island.

Carolyn McCormick, managing director of the Dare County Tourist Bureau, said about 75% to 80% of the island’s beach-house rentals had been booked well before the storm, but vacationers were canceling hotel reservations.

The vacation resorts faced a similar problem in 1998 after Hurricane Bonnie swept past about a week before the Labor Day weekend, but an advertising campaign assured vacationers the island was largely spared by that storm.

“This week, I pulled back the ad campaign because we still have some weather and some questionable conditions,” McCormick said.

A fleet of 181 construction vehicles and a crew of 400 workers, including 200 inmates, was sent to clear tons of sand that had washed over Highway 12, the two-lane road that runs nearly the length of the 130-mile chain of barrier islands.