The first hurricane of the Atlantic season has hit the North Carolina coast, a wet and windy spoiler of the July 4 holiday for thousands of US residents as authorities ordered them to evacuate exposed areas.
Hurricane Arthur crossed the coast near Cape Lookout at the southern end of North Carolina’s Outer Banks at 11:15pm on Thursday, with maximum sustained winds of 160kph. This earned it Category 2 status on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity, the US National Hurricane Center said.
Moving northeast at 35.6kph, Arthur is the first hurricane to hit the US since Sandy devastated parts of New York and New Jersey in October 2012 and caused US$70 billion in estimated damage.
“It is moving through very quickly. That is good news, because the wind and the rain and the surge is not going to stay over eastern North Carolina for a long time,” National Hurricane Center meteorologist Chris Landsea said.
“We are expecting the eye of the storm to move back over the Atlantic Ocean by morning,” he said.
As of early yesterday morning, Arthur’s eye was moving near mainland Dare County and northern Pamlico Sound, with hurricane conditions spreading northward along the Outer Banks, according to the center.
More than 18,000 customers were without power near North Carolina’s coast as Arthur rushed through early yesterday, according to utility Duke Energy.
However, Arthur remained a medium-sized storm with hurricane-force winds extending outward only up to 65 km and lesser tropical storm-force winds 240 km.
After scything through the Outer Banks, Arthur was expected to move northeastward over cooler water yesterday, diminishing in strength and posing little risk to the densely populated northeastern US, forecasters said.
Tropical storm warnings were to be in effect throughout yesterday for eastern Massachusetts, including Nantucket. Arthur was expected to be around western Nova Scotia in Canada early today.
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