After its weekend landfall on the Gulf Coast, the remnants of Hurricane Nate continue to slog its way toward the northeast United States.
Nate is no longer tropical, in fact a closed circulation no longer exists but this morning a large area of rain has been moving through Pennsylvania, New York and New England.
Even though the rain is heavy, significant flooding is not expected as the low pressure area will be moving out by tonight.
- Nate now a post-tropical cyclone moving inland toward northeast
- No storm-related deaths
- Tropical Storm Ophelia in central Atlantic - no threat to land
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Elsewhere in the tropics, Tropical Storm Ophelia formed this morning far out in the Eastern Atlantic near the Azores. It is not expected to impact any land.
Meanwhile, Nate moved toward the northeast on Monday, dumping heavy rains and bringing gusty winds to inland states as a tropical depression, a day after Hurricane Nate brought a burst of flooding and power outages to the Gulf Coast.
Nate spared the region the kind of catastrophic damage left by a series of hurricanes that hit the southern U.S. and Caribbean in recent weeks.
Nate — the first hurricane to make landfall in Mississippi since Katrina in 2005 — quickly lost strength Sunday, with its winds diminishing to a tropical depression as it pushed northward into Alabama and Georgia with heavy rain. It was a Category 1 hurricane when it came ashore outside Biloxi early Sunday, its second landfall after initially hitting southeastern Louisiana on Saturday evening.
The storm surge from the Mississippi Sound littered Biloxi’s main beachfront highway with debris and flooded a casino’s lobby and parking structure overnight.
By dawn, however, Nate’s receding floodwaters didn’t reveal any obvious signs of widespread damage in the city where Hurricane Katrina had leveled thousands of beachfront homes and businesses.
No storm-related deaths or injuries were immediately reported.
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant praised state and local officials and coastal residents for working together to avoid loss of life.
Lee Smithson, director of the state emergency management agency, said damage from Nate was held down in part because of work done and lessons learned from Katrina.
“If that same storm would have hit us 15 years ago, the damage would have been extensive and we would have had loss of life.” Smithson said of Nate. “But we have rebuilt the coast in the aftermath of Katrina higher and stronger.”
Nate knocked out power to more than 100,000 residents in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida, but crews worked on repairs and it appeared many of the outages had been restored within 24 hours.
As of Sunday evening, Alabama Power said it had electricity back to more than 64,000 customers and some 36,000 remained without power, while utilities and cooperatives in Mississippi said it had restored power to more than 21,000 customers who lost power during the storm. In Louisiana, there were scattered outages during the storm, while Florida utilities restored power to more than 37,000 customers.
Mississippi’s Gulf Coast casinos got approval to reopen in midmorning after closing Saturday as the storm approached.
Sean Stewart, checking on his father’s sailboat at a Biloxi marina after daybreak, found another boat had sunk, its sail still fluttering in Nate’s diminishing winds. Stewart was relieved to find his father’s craft intact.
“I got lucky on this one,” he said.
Before Nate sped past Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula late Friday and entered the Gulf of Mexico, it drenched Central America with rains that left at least 22 people dead. But Nate didn’t approach the intensity of Harvey, Irma and Maria — powerful storms that left behind massive destruction during 2017′s exceptionally busy hurricane season.
“We are thankful because this looked like it was going to be a freight train barreling through the city,” said Vincent Creel, a spokesman for the city of Biloxi.
The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the four hurricanes that have struck the U.S. and its territories this year have “strained” resources, with roughly 85 percent of the agency’s forces deployed.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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• What exactly are the spaghetti plots?
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Remember that the spaghetti model plot does not indicate the strength of a system or even development at all. It only predicts where this broad area of low pressure is expected to go.