Shrieking Winds Herald Unwelcome Arrival in Ghost Towns of Outer Banks

NAGS HEAD, N.C. — The plywood boards nailed over the windows of oceanfront houses rattled in the wind. Fields of cattails and beach grass bowed. Little girls on the beach leaned against the gales, and hulking pickup trucks wobbled on the rain-slicked roads.

Hurricane Florence announced its looming arrival on Thursday with a blustery, stomach-twisting shriek. While the storm with its torrential rains and storm surge lurked offshore, the 50-mph winds that lashed the Outer Banks gave these emptied-out islands and other coastal cities across the Carolinas a preview of its power.

“It rocks the house,” said Traci Stafford, one of a couple of hundred people who decided to stick it out on Ocracoke Island, now entirely severed from the mainland. Stafford had abandoned her trailer to weather the storm at a friend’s bed-and-breakfast.

As the sky turned the color of steel wool and more and more cars headed toward the mainland, these summertime vacation islands turned into ghost towns populated mostly by wind and rain. Power lines vibrated like guitar strings. Snowballs of sea foam sailed over dunes and splattered in the streets. Bushes bent and twirled like modern dancers.

The wind roared a constant soundtrack. Sometimes a booming bass line as it scoured the open shores. Sometimes an urgent whistle as it swirled through cracks in walls and doors. It was a hot damp bully that pushed people around, snatched paper from their hands and slammed their car doors shut.

Officials in Dare County estimated that some 300,000 tourists had fled the Outer Banks since mandatory evacuations were imposed early this week. Businesses were closed and boarded up, the signs outside restaurants saying, “See You After the Storm,” and “Florence — Be a Nightingale!” One was more direct: “Best Wishes, Leave Now.”

But thousands of residents up and down these skinny barrier islands defied the evacuation orders and stayed, betting that they could cope with Florence’s rain, wind and flooding by gassing up their generators, buying canned food and positioning their lawn furniture so that a chair didn’t come crashing through the window.

They pulled into empty beach parking lots where they took selfies against the waves, danced with the foaming sea and checked out what the storm had disgorged on the beach. A plank from a pier. A lifeguard sign.

Darryl Roquemore and Sierra Scarborough, who moved to the area a couple of years ago, said they had never seen the waves or surf as powerful as this. They squinted into the storm and let the wind suck their shirts taut against their skin.

“It’s perfect out here because we’re enjoying it, but it makes me a little nervous about tomorrow,” Roquemore said. “If it really comes, we’re going to have a problem.”

Residents drove into still-open gas stations and lunged against their car doors to heave them open. Amid the gusts, they bought gas, grabbed bags of ice, sodas and snacks and ran back to their cars through the spitting rain. Amy Cahoon, who has lived in the Outer Banks since 1970, said she had gotten so bored sitting at home that she decided to drive out to the beach to watch the tide swell and the waves pulse their way into low-lying roads and walkways. “It’s already coming over the dunes,” she said. “The ocean coming through.”

About 200 miles to the southwest, Danny Donathan used a tractor to load sandbags onto the roof of a camping trailer next to his home near Myrtle Grove Sound. He was a few miles south of Wilmington, North Carolina, near where Florence is expected to crash ashore.

Donathan, 64, and his wife, Priscilla, 67, have survived several hurricanes since they moved into their house 40 years ago, watching storms like Fran and Diana rip up trees or bring floodwaters to within 50 feet of their one-story house.

They know Florence could be worse, and so were getting ready. They had plenty of ice, flashlights, batteries, canned food and a first-aid kit. They wrapped family photos in plastic and towels. Donathan has also prepared life jackets and rope for what he hopes is the unlikely prospect that floodwaters overwhelm his house.

He was sweating profusely after he loaded the sandbags, then moved on to clearing items from his yard to prevent them from becoming projectiles in the winds.

“I’m wore out and the storm hasn’t even got here yet,” he said.

Officials in the Outer Banks said there were already reports of water washing over the road on Hatteras Island, toward the southern end of the Outer Banks, where emergency officials estimated that a few thousand residents remained.

“It’s just starting to make its approach,” Drew Pearson, director of Emergency Management for Dare County in the Outer Banks, said.

In the middle of it was Myron Sykes. He was part of a four-person crew of state transportation workers scooping up sand and sludge on Hatteras Island in a losing battle to clear the only major road for emergency vehicles and any residents who wanted to evacuate. Saltwater spattered their windshields, and jets of ocean punched through the dunes that separated the road from the sea.

“Mostly we’re just trying to keep the road open long as we can, before Mother Nature takes us over,” Sykes said.

A half-mile up the road, Jeff Ryder sat in a pickup truck, directing the workers who were answering reports of flooded roads and the crews trying to buffer and build dunes being reshaped by Florence’s winds. Highway 12 was a “lifeblood” road that tied remote parts of Hatteras Island to the mainland, and Ryder was determined to keep it clear as long as possible.

Calls rolled in. Someone reported a big hole in the road and wanted to know if emergency vehicles would still be able to make it through. Water levels were rising and the wind was hurling debris into the road.

“We’re running, chasing things,” Ryder said. “It’s a futile effort. There’s going to be a point where we close the road.”

That point came about an hour later. The county blasted an alert saying that the lifeline was now closed because of seawater washing over it. “Reopening time is unknown,” it said.