Hurricane Erin hasn’t had to make landfall on the East Coast to batter it.
Churning more than 200 miles offshore Thursday, the storm has brought flooding, life-threatening waves and rip currents and strong winds to coastal communities from Florida to Maine, according to the National Weather Service. Erin rapidly intensified to a Category 5 over the weekend, making it the first major hurricane of what’s forecasted to be a particularly active season.
It has since weakened from the top category to a 2, and while states have seen widespread flooding, destruction has been minimal and no deaths have been reported so far.
But the storm is unusual because of its vast size, with hurricane-force winds spanning a more than 600-mile diameter area. That can mean unexpected consequences in places far from the eye of the hurricane, according to Brian Tang, an associate professor of atmospheric science at the University at Albany.
“It doesn’t take a big Category 5 hurricane to produce really big impacts at times,” he said. The main impacts are “the surge and the wave effects, and I think that can be a sneaky thing.”
Coastal towns in the Southern and Mid-Atlantic U.S. have been most affected both by the storm-fueled waves and their cascading economic consequences. Some communities were forced to evacuate or shut down beaches and businesses during one of the busiest tourism seasons of the year—a situation that is becoming increasingly common as climate change accelerates.
The Outer Banks of North Carolina, for instance, faces dual threats from hurricanes and coastal erosion. Some beachfront homes have collapsed into the ocean in recent years.
“It’s part of life down here in a coastal town on a barrier island,” said Daniel Pullman, a photographer in Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks, which was taking the brunt of Hurricane Erin’s storm surge Wednesday and Thursday. “We’re just so far out in the Atlantic, the tiniest little storm will impact us. … It could be drop-dead beautiful outside, not a breath of wind and just perfect. Or the very next week, it’s 70-mile-an-hour winds, 20-foot seas and the ocean’s washing the road out.”
Deadly Surf
Hurricane Erin formed in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean off the coast of West Africa last Friday as a Category 1 storm. By 2 p.m. the next day, it had strengthened into a Category 5, with winds reaching 160 miles per hour, making it one of the Atlantic’s fastest-strengthening storms on record. That type of rapid intensification is becoming more common, likely fueled in part by climate change.
Since then, the storm has traveled across the Atlantic through Puerto Rico, and is now horseshoeing around the East Coast of the continental United States. While models have been spot-on about the storm’s path, rapid intensification can be notoriously difficult to predict, Tang said.
“I think some of the intensity forecasts have been more challenging with Erin,” he said. “It really rapidly intensified quickly when it was approaching north of the Caribbean and then it weakened, but then it grew really big in size, so it has had a lot of really interesting intensity fluctuations along its evolution.”
Erin is expected to ultimately turn away from the coast by Friday morning, but not before leaving a trail of chaos in its wake. Earlier this week, the National Weather Service warned of potentially deadly ocean conditions along the coast, prompting beach closures in areas across New Jersey, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Maryland.
On Wednesday, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein declared a state of emergency, deploying water rescue teams and 200 National Guard troops to prepare for dangerous swells.
While most of the state has avoided any major damage, Hurricane Erin is lashing the Outer Banks, which are made up of more than a dozen major islands. On Hatteras Island, storm surge has inundated neighborhoods that line the beach. Daily winds, waves and tides, along with rising sea levels and storms, have eroded coastlines and destroyed dunes on Hatteras and other islands, leaving little protection from the waves.
In recent years, storms and rising tides have swallowed more than 10 homes in the area. Experts say more collapses are expected soon; photos showed two beachfront homes on stilts in nearby Rodanthe getting battered by hurricane-fueled waves this week, with signs of major wear and tear.
“We don’t have any beach down there, so it’s just pretty much the houses and the sandbags, and it’s getting pounded,” said Jennifer Koontz, who has lived in the Outer Banks for 17 years. “There’s a lot of debris everywhere right now” and pieces of houses are falling off, she said.
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Portions of Highway 12—the main byway that connects the islands and peninsulas—are also flooded, cutting off access to some areas for emergency crews and locals. Hurricane Erin pulled away from the North Carolina coast earlier Thursday, but forecasters say evening tides could bring severe flooding.
As of Thursday afternoon, homes were still holding firm and there had not been any reported injuries or water rescues in the Outer Banks.
Ebb and Flow
As tourists left Hatteras and Ocracoke islands in the wake of mandatory evacuation orders on Monday and Tuesday, so too did a crucial source of income for island residents in one of the final weeks of the summer season, said Koontz, a photographer who runs an Airbnb from part of her home. She said all her planned photography sessions were cancelled this week and she had to evacuate her rental guests.
“This is our tourist season,” she said. “We’re all kind of devastated, because we’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is a good money-making week.’”
Koontz and Pullman, the other Hatteras resident, both decided to stay despite evacuation orders, largely due to the costs associated with leaving and finding lodging. Many other locals have also decided to stay to protect their homes and belongings, having weathered storms in the past.
“As a kid, I loved hurricane season because your only responsibility was to go surfing … you didn’t have that grown-up responsibility of owning a house,” Pullman said. “As an adult and a business owner, I hate hurricane season.”
The key to getting through hurricane season is to follow the forecasts, have an escape route planned and secure backup water and power sources, Tang said.
“My advice is that people should be prepared if they live along the coast [or] if they live even inland in a flood-prone area,” he said. “Now is the time to think about those things so that one isn’t scrambling to do these things when a hurricane hits.”
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Kiley Price is a reporter at Inside Climate News, with a particular interest in wildlife, ocean health, food systems and climate change. She writes ICN’s “Today’s Climate” newsletter, which covers the most pressing environmental news each week.
She earned her master’s degree in science journalism at New York University, and her bachelor’s degree in biology at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Scientific American and more. She is a former Pulitzer Reporting Fellow, during which she spent a month in Thailand covering the intersection between Buddhism and the country’s environmental movement.
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