After leaving a trail of demolished and precariously perched coastal homes, damaged hotels and condos along Florida’s Atlantic coast, and at least four fatalities, Hurricane Nicole’s sopping remnants sent torrential rainfall to Georgia and the Carolinas on Friday.
Local authorities in Volusia County ordered the evacuation of 24 beachfront hotels and condos late on Thursday, hours after the storm made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane.
In Wilbur-by-the-Sea, a posh beachside neighbourhood just south of Daytona Beach, 25 single-family homes were deemed structurally unstable and evacuated, according to officials. About six homes completely collapsed into the water.
“The structural damage along our coastline is unprecedented,” Volusia County Manager George Recktenwald said in a statement. “This is going to be a long road to recovery.”
The beaches in the community of about 30,000 people were littered with piles of concrete, wood and rebar, the remnants of large homes with picturesque views of the ocean. Residents surveyed the ruins in disbelief.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, which cited the state Highway Patrol, two individuals died from electrocution in Orange County following the storm, and two more perished in a car accident on the Florida Turnpike throughout the storm.
The majority of two vacation homes that Krista Goodrich oversees in Wilbur-by-the-Sea crashed into the ocean.
Goodrich, 44, remarked, “I opened the front door and the rest of the house is just gone into the sea. It was like the “hand of God” took the house. Before calling the owners of that residence, she claimed to have sobbed for a half-hour.
“It’s very emotional, the owners are my friends,” Goodrich said. “I stood there and watched the waves pummeling what was left.”
She said that Hurricane Ian, which hit in September, took down a seawall and 30 feet (9 meters) of that home’s backyard. “Nicole took the rest and the house.”
Many of the damaged or destroyed buildings, according to engineers, date back to the 1950s, decades before stricter hurricane-proofing building rules went into place. They continued by saying that low seawalls and shallow foundations were no match for a storm surge that occurred during high tide.
“There’s no way to have the owners modify their house or hotel if it was built 50 years ago,” said Sinisa Kolar, a structural engineer with the Falcon Group located in Miami.
Owner of LAV Engineering in Ormond Beach, Volusia County, Louis Vigliotti spent the morning inspecting the harmed beachfront properties.
Many unsuitable designs that had been successful in the past have eventually run into trouble, he claimed.
HEAVY RAINS CONTINUE
On Thursday, the storm’s persistent gusts of 120 km/h (75 mph) also toppled electricity lines, cutting off service to more than 300,000 homes and businesses. According to PowerOutages.us, some 22,800 households and businesses were still without electricity as of Friday afternoon.
According to officials, Nicole’s storm surge also contributed to the collapse of some of the picturesque A1A highway, which runs along the Atlantic coast in Volusia County.
Nicole, downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone on Friday afternoon, proceeded out of northern Georgia and into western North Carolina and the Appalachians while cleanup operations started in Florida. Even while it was still raining heavily, the winds had decreased to roughly 20 mph (32 kph).
The storm will further dissipate on Saturday as it dumps rain on the Middle Atlantic states and New England, the National Weather Service said.
Portions of the Southeast, the Appalachians, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio may get as much as 8 inches (20 cm) of rain that could cause isolated flooding. The northern Mid-Atlantic up into New England may get 3 inches (8 cm) of rain, forecasters said.
Nicole is unusual in how late in the season it has arrived; it is only the second hurricane to ever make landfall in the continental United States after Nov. 4. Hurricane Kate came ashore near Mexico Beach, Florida, on Nov. 21, 1985. The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.
Hurricane Ian, a devastating Category 4 storm that first impacted Florida’s Gulf Coast before sweeping across the state to the Atlantic, caused $60 billion in damage and killed more than 140 people, particularly in numerous East Coast counties, including Volusia County.
People devastated by Nicole, especially wealthy residents, would be attracted to rebuild on the coastline, according to Peter Petrovsky, a structural engineer and building code specialist from in Los Angeles who has worked on oceanfront houses across the country.
But, he said, “that doesn’t make it clever. “The sea prevails,” they say.