Tropical Storm Nicole topples beachfront homes into ocean

WILBUR-BY-THE-SEA(AP):

Tropical Storm Nicole sent multiple homes toppling into the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday and threatened a row of high-rise condominiums in places where Hurricane Ian washed away the beach and destroyed seawalls only weeks ago.

“Multiple coastal homes in Wilbur-by-the-Sea have collapsed and several other properties are at imminent risk,” Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood said in a social media message. He said most bridges to the beachside properties have been closed to all but essential personnel and a curfew was put into effect.

Wilbur-by-the-Sea is an unincorporated community on a barrier island with only beachfront homes. Next door in Daytona Beach Shores, a strip of high-rise condominiums were evacuated ahead of Nicole’s landfall, and while they remained standing after the storm, their future depends on safety reviews.

The homeowners association at the Marbella condominiums had just spent US$240,000 to temporarily rebuild the seawall Ian destroyed in September, said Connie Hale Gellner, whose family owns a unit there. Live video from the building’s cameras showed Nicole’s storm surge taking it all way.

knew it wasn’t meant to stop a hurricane, it was only meant to stop the erosion,” Gellner said. But after Nicole, the building’s pool deck “is basically in the ocean”, Gellner said. “The problem is that we have no more beach. So even if we wanted to rebuild, they’ll probably condemn the building because the water is just splashing up against the building.”

Nicole was sprawling, covering nearly the entire weather-weary state of Florida while also reaching into Georgia and the Carolinas before dawn on Thursday. Tropical storm-force winds extended as far as 450 miles (720 kilometres) from the centre in some directions as Nicole turned northward over central Florida.

Nicole’s winds did minimal damage, but its storm surge was more destructive than might have been in the past because seas are rising as the planet’s ice melts due to climate change, said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer. It adds up to higher coastal flooding, flowing deeper inland, and what used to be once-in-a-century events will happen almost yearly in some places, he said.

Nicole made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane at about 3 a.m. on Thursday near Vero Beach, but caused no significant damage there, officials said on Thursday. Part of a fishing pier washed away in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. But the brunt of the storm hit north of its centre. By 1 p.m., Nicole’s maximum sustained winds were down to 45 mph (70 kph) as it moved toward Tallahassee.

The rare November hurricane left south Florida sunny and calm as it moved up the peninsula, but could dump as much as six inches (15 centimetres) of rain over Blue Ridge Mountains by Friday, the hurricane centre said. Flash and urban flooding will be possible as the rain spreads into the eastern Ohio Valley, Mid-Atlantic, and New England through Saturday.