The first hurricane of the Atlantic season hit the North Carolina coast early Friday, a wet and windy spoiler of the Independence Day holiday for thousands of Americans, causing minor flooding but no deaths or injuries.
Hurricane Arthur crossed the coast near Cape Lookout at the southern end of North Carolina's Outer Banks at 11:15pm on Thursday (0315 GMT Friday), shaking and rattling vacation homes on the Outer Banks, flooding roads and cutting off island communities from the mainland.
It contained maximum sustained winds of 100 miles per hour (160 kph), earning it a Category 2 status on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity, the US National Hurricane Center said.
It weakened to a Category 1 with maximum sustained winds of 90 mph on Friday morning, the NHC said.
"The house was shaking. Pictures were falling off the wall," Paul Jones, a retired Maryland state police helicopter pilot, told Reuters by telephone from his oceanfront house on Hatteras Island after riding out his first hurricane on the island.
"My wind meter was destroyed ... it stopped at 85 (mph) somewhere around 2 o'clock in the morning," he added, saying his neighborhood was flooded with about two feet (60 cm) of water, with up to four feet (120 cm) in places on Highway 12, the narrow 50-mile (80-km) road connecting the island to the mainland.
“We have no reports of any major flood or damage at this time,” said Rick Martinez, a spokesman for North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory. State officials said 41,500 customers were without power after the storm.
Arthur is the first hurricane to hit the United States since Superstorm Sandy devastated parts of New York and New Jersey in October 2012, causing an estimated $70 billion in damage.
The storm remained out at sea with maximum sustained winds of 70 mph (113 kph) on Wednesday, about 220 miles (355 km) south-southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, the Miami-based weather forecasters said.
The storm could produce dangerous rip currents along the coasts of several Southern states, forecasters said, dumping up to 2 inches (5 cm) of rain across the Carolinas and causing flooding from storm surge.