By Mark Darrough - September 8, 2019
As the Wilmington area awoke to minimal damages from Hurricane Dorian, one Coast Guard Crew took to the Cape Fear River to make sure all navigation buoys were in their proper positions before re-opening the Port of Wilmington.
WILMINGTON — The people of the Cape Fear region awoke to sunny skies and minimal damage from Hurricane Dorian on Friday morning.
Nearly a year after Florence dumped record rainfall and brought widespread flooding across the region, Dorian’s eye shifted further off-coast than expected and passed through the region quickly. At Fire Station 17 in Murrayville, only one call could be heard overnight for a downed tree, keeping first responders there much less active in an area that flooded heavily during Florence.
Other areas were not so lucky. By Saturday morning, the death toll in the Bahamas had risen to 43 and officials said the number would rise drastically in the coming days. North of Wilmington in the Outer Banks, approximately 800 residents were stranded on Ocracoke Island after Dorian’s storm surge flooded its streets and homes.
And hurricane season isn’t over yet, as experts keep an eye on two systems making their way across the Atlantic, including Tropical Storm Gabriel, which appeared to re-form sometime Friday night or Saturday morning.
In downtown Wilmington, Phil Williams from Raleigh was taking down plywood sheets from the windows of his daughter’s clothing business, Edge of Urge. He said the storm wasn’t nearly as bad as anticipated.
“I came out at about 2 o’clock last night,” Williams said. “The wind was strong and the rain was coming down, but the power stayed on for the duration. And the bars across the street were open. I saw people coming in and out.”
Down on the Cape Fear River at the Sawmill Point Marina, Coast Guard Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Dylan Hall was gearing up for a ride downriver to make sure all navigation buoys were in their proper locations so they could make the call to re-open the Port of Wilmington to commercial ships.
Aboard a 45-foot Response Boat-Medium (RB-M), he and machinery technicians Justin King and David Patnaude used the boat’s radar overlaid with a chart plotter to verify the position of each navigation aid on the river. If the chart plotter and radar mark of each buoy lined up, they knew it was in its correct location.
After reaching the mouth of the river, cutting through 8-foot waves about a mile off the coast, Hall turned the boat back north towards Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point, the country’s largest ammunition port. There, the crew checked the terminal’s own navigation aids and verified the depth of water along the pier.
When they returned to the Coast Guard station on the southern end of Wrightsville Beach, Hall made the call to his bosses — everything looked good to re-open the port to commercial ships. Aside from one sailboat washed up on Masonboro Island, and another still there from Florence, he said all damages seen on home roofs and piers along the river and Intracoastal Waterway were left-over from Florence.
On the island, Jef DeGroote was welcoming customers to his South End Surf Shop as a construction crew removed plywood sheets from the building’s windows. He felt relieved after waking up to find no extensive damages on the island.
“Florence was fresh on everybody’s mind, which was catastrophic for our area,” DeGroote said. “Everything worked out well, but it was a deadly storm for the Bahamas, and Okrakoke is getting it pretty bad right now … We were tracking the storm the whole time. At one point it got up to a Cat-3 and it was coming our way, so best to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”
He said he boarded the entire building for the second time since he’s owned it, and he now labels the boards with numbers to match each window location. Typically, he’d throw the boards out because storms of this size would only come around every six years or so. But Dorian was the second hurricane in less than a year.
“It seems like these storms are becoming a little bit more prevalent, and we’ve been in the hotspot for the past year. We’re still not done, you know. There’s still storms out there,” DeGroote said.
[See the story as published here.]