Track Hurricane Arthur live

Looks from the morning news coverage that there was some flooding in the outer banks, Not buildings being washed away but water into the first levels. I’m sure most of the shop keepers will open soon but there will be clean-up to do. At least one highway looked pretty broken up, so travel might be a bit slow as well. I looked at the Wonder Map this morning and places like Hatteras are missing wind data from the lowest pressure times, so hard to tell from that what the max sustained winds may have been.

Robert of Ottawa says: It’s OK folks, it will only hit Newfoundland :^)
Just tell them US wind turbines accidentally collected too much electricity and we had to bleed some off by having them act as big fans. We figured Newfies like things cooler so we pointed them their way; they’ll understand..

For what it is worth, we were directly hit by Arthur last night. We spent most of Thursday preparing our house and the house of a close friend in Marshallburg who is out of the country for hurricane weather, anticipating that it was going to miss offshore, but as it turned out it went directly overhead between 10 pm and 11 pm. By directly, I mean that we actually experienced the cessation of the ~70 mph winds hitting us almost due east, went outside in the dead calm of the eye to check on things (which were fine) and then went back in as the winds picked up from first the west, then rapidly shifting around to the northwest and north. Our neighbor lost some of his soffits in his (new construction) house — a few houses including the one we are staying in lost a few shingles — but most of these houses have weathered 20 to 40 hurricanes already and category 2 or not, they weathered this one. The single annoying thing about the hurricane was the loss of electricity around 9 pm as the wind reached 60+ mph until this morning around 10 when stalwarts at Duke Power, working at a dozen places all over Carteret county, brought it back to us and most of the rest of Beaufort. We drove to Marshallburg and our friends (whose house is right on the sound) had a big branch down on the roof, but no roof damage I could see — he’ll be able to chainsaw it up in place when he gets back tomorrow. I’m hoping they get back electricity by then — we didn’t mess with their freezer — but Duke Power was working replacing broken poles and clearing away trees as we drove down 70 on the way to their house.
As far as I know, nobody died or even got seriously hurt in this storm, which fortunately sped up to make landfall three hours before high tide instead of at high tide — it was pushing water OUT to sea from 11 pm on so our storm surge was minimal, about a foot (which happened to be right up to the top of the sea wall behind our house, but not up into our yard.
Kudos to the National Weather Service, that really did an excellent job providing tracking information right up to the point where we lost power and internet service. Compare the damage done by this category two storm here, where most sensible construction is hurricane-proof “or else” as NC gets hit by hurricanes up through category 3 all the time, and category one Sandy up where decades of shoddy beach construction had occurred.
Anyway, that’s twice now that we’ve experienced the eye of a hurricane — Fran went right over our house in Durham as well — but Fran did far more damage moving slowly and after 12 inches of rain in 12 hours. Arthur was comparatively dry and very, very fast.

This is the first Hurricane to hit the U.S. in how long?
The first Category 2 since Hurricane Ike in 2008 — six years. And it was (trust me) BARELY category 2. That is, a few stations recorded gusts of 100 mph, but the storm had sustained winds well under that, probably under 90 mph.
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