Sept. 16, 2003
Photo: Hurricane Isabel's tightly wound eye is visible in a television image taken Monday from the International Space Station.
Following a first wave of evacuations, thousands more residents of North Carolina’s Outer Banks prepared Tuesday to flee Hurricane Isabel, which continued a path towards the barrier islands. The hurricane’s winds were around 115 mph, less than its peak Sunday of 160 mph but still more than strong enough to be deadly.
ON ITS current path, Isabel was headed for the Outer Banks, a low-lying island chain more than 100 miles long and home to 55,000 permanent residents.
Ocracoke Island, a tiny barrier island southwest of Cape Hatteras and reachable only by boat or plane, was under a mandatory evacuation order. All 921 residents of the island left Monday.
In other islands on the Outer Banks, residents started boarding windows, moving their vessels inland and checking up on their generators.
Evacuation orders were expected by Tuesday for all 100,000 residents of the Outer Banks and other low-lying areas along North Carolina’s coast, NBC News reported.
At 5 a.m. ET Tuesday, Isabel’s fastest sustained wind had slowed to near 115 mph, making it a Category 3 storm.
Forecasters said sustained winds would not likely dip lower. “We aren’t forecasting too much more weakening for the next 24 hours,” said Krissy Williams, a meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
PREPARING FOR WORST
Emergency officials in North Carolina and other states wasted no time putting emergency plans in place even though Isabel was not expected to hit land until Thursday night. They said they were anticipating what could be the worst hurricane to hit the East Coast since Hugo, which killed 49 people and caused more than $7 billion in damage in 1989.
Hugo was strong enough to blow 150 miles inland, causing major damage as far west as Charlotte, N.C. Forecasters said Isabel, could do the same from Raleigh, N.C., through Washington to Philadelphia.
“This has the potential to cause large loss of life if you don’t take it very seriously and prepare,” said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center.
Dangerous swells and rip currents were already being felt at Wilmington, N.C., NBC affiliate WECT-TV reported.
Virginia Gov. Mark Warner declared a state of emergency, placing the National Guard and the State Police on full alert. The Department of Veterans Affairs began evacuating patients from the VA Medical Center in Hampton.
Baltimore canceled leave in the police, fire, transportation and public works departments, Newschannel 8 of Washington reported. “Right now, we are preparing ... as if the storm is coming right at us,” Mayor Martin O’Malley said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency placed urban search-and-rescue teams on standby and was preparing to send cots, blankets, emergency meals, portable toilets, plastic sheeting, bottled water and generators to hard-hit areas.
FEW TROOPS, NO MONEY LEFT
Isabel was bearing down at a time when government agencies and private charities were especially ill-prepared to respond.
Military officials told NBC News that the National Guard, traditionally a major component of disaster responses, could be hamstrung because so many members are on active duty in Iraq and other hot spots.
Units in Virginia and the Carolinas are especially depleted, officials said, and those states may be forced to request assistance from neighboring states that will also be struggling with Isabel’s aftermath.
Lt. Col. Pete Brooks, a spokesman for the South Carolina National Guard, said more than a fifth of the state’s Army National Guard and Air Guard members were deployed to Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba.
The deployment took the Guard’s best large dump trucks, backhoes and other heavy equipment with it. “The engineers we have here could operate chain saws, but most of their trucks are in Iraq,” Brooks told The State newspaper of Columbia.
Likewise, half of North Carolina’s 12,000 National Guard troops are either deployed or on active alert, state officials told The Associated Press.
Photo: Thousands of coastal residents, like this family in Wrightsville Beach, N.C., boarded up as a precaution against Hurricane Isabel.
The American Red Cross, meanwhile, said its Disaster Relief Fund was empty. Without an infusion of new donations, hurricane-hit East Coast residents could expect it to provide only the most immediate basic needs: food, clothing, shelter and medicine replacement.
Alan McCurry, the Red Cross’ chief operating officer, described the disaster fund with an analogy: “If you were driving your car, the needle would be bouncing on zero.”
The charity said in a statement that it spent $114.3 million from July 1, 2002, to this June 30 but took in only $39.5 million. It appealed for public donations on its Web site, www.redcross.org, or by calling 1-800-HELP-NOW.
STORM SPECIFICS
The storm was moving northwest at around 7 mph and was about 660 miles southeast of Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, the hurricane center reported.
Large ocean swells and dangerous surf conditions were already being felt along portions of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic coasts, and a hurricane watch may be issued for portions of the Mid-Atlantic coast later Tuesday, the weather service reported.
Williams said the Carolinas could begin to feel the storm’s fury Wednesday evening because the tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 200 miles.
A five-day computerized track by the hurricane center, which has a large margin of error, forecast the storm moving onshore Thursday with 130-mph winds and then roaring north along the Chesapeake Bay near Washington, through Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
But forecasters said several factors, including a high-pressure ridge north and east of the storm, could push it farther west or east.
BEACH, NAVY CONCERNS
City leaders in Virginia Beach, Va., said they feared that Isabel could wipe out the beach that their tourist economy is built on.
“If this thing hits us in its worst possible scenario, it’ll be the worst one in 200 years,” City Council member Richard Maddox told NBC News.
The Navy, meanwhile, decided Monday to put two of three aircraft carriers in port at Norfolk, Va., to sea as early as Tuesday morning to take them out of Isabel’s path. The third carrier, the USS Eisenhower, would remain behind as it is under repair.
Two other carriers ported at Norfolk were already at sea, NBC News’ Robert Hager reported. At least a dozen other ships and scores of aircraft could also be moved to bases away from the projected path.
Officials at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware were meeting to decide whether to move the base’s fleet of giant C-5 cargo aircraft to bases out of the storm’s path.
“Because of the size of the planes, it’s got to be bases with very large air fields,” said Lt. Olivia Nelson, a base spokeswoman.
BAHAMAS WARNING
The State Department, meanwhile, issued a travel warning advising tourists to avoid the Bahamas. Large ocean swells and dangerous surf were forecast for parts of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Bahamas during the next few days.
The Atlantic hurricane season began June 1 and ends Nov. 30.
NBC’s Robert Hager and Michael Williams in Virginia Beach, Va.; Kerry Sanders and Donna Gregory in Wrightsville Beach, N.C.; and The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/961894.asp?0cv=CA01