The coastal low pressure that formed off the southeast coast over the Labor Day weekend took its own sweet time moving north and was not a tropical system.
Thus, it was not a named storm.
However the rainfall totals ranked right up there with a tropical system, and the wind wasn?t that far from tropical storm status.
The storm pretty well ruined the Labor Day weekend for many visitors who were taking advantage of the last summer holiday.
Saturday was the best day of the weekend ? mostly sunny.
Sunday was cloudy. and the rain hung right offshore all day, occasionally bringing in some sprinkles to Hatteras and Ocracoke beaches.
According the National Weather Service office in Newport, N.C., Hatteras Island had 6.82 inches of rain in the 24-hour period from early Monday morning until early this morning.
That rainfall caused ponding of water on many roads on the islands.
Four to six inches of water covered Highway 12 from Avon to Salvo.
The worst was apparently Avon.
?I floated to work this morning,? said Donna Peele who commutes from her Hatteras village home to her job at REAL Watersports in Waves.
?When I hit Avon, it was horrible,? she said, adding that the highway was somewhat better between Avon and Salvo.
Side roads, backyards, and driveways were also under water.
There was some wind damage in Buxton.
Two tents that had been set up by Ocean Atlantic Rentals at the Fessenden Center ball field for the Stand in the Sand 2 Beach Bums Barbecue event on Sunday were literally blown away.
Rob Alderman, who organized the Stand in the Sand 2, said the tents had 3-foot stakes holding them down. They were just ripped up and destroyed. In the process, the fence around the county?s Fessenden Center was also damaged.
Alderman said he was told the damage to the tents alone was about $30,000.
Craig Scarborough, grounds and facilities supervisor at the Fessenden Center, said about 130 feet of fence was damaged and that Ocean Atlantic Rentals had been ?very responsive? to the problems.
Also the top part of the canopy over the gas pumps at Dillon?s Corner was blown off.
?It was the main tourist attraction this morning,? Alderman said of all the traffic filing by to look at the damage.
Some thought a tornado had come through the area.
However, Chris Collins, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Newport, and some of his colleagues looked over the photos that accompany this blog.
?It looks like to us like straight-line winds,? he said. ?And it wouldn?t take a ton of wind to cause the damage.?
Collins says the highest official wind gust on Hatteras in the early morning hours was 30 knots from the northeast ? or about 35 mph ? measured at Billy Mitchell Airport in Frisco.
A gust of about 40 mph in Buxton could have caused the damage to the tents, he said, especially since the ground was so wet from rainfall, which could have contributed to the stakes coming more easily out of the ground.
When I talked with Collins this morning, he said the coastal low was just passing by Hatteras. Sure enough, as I write this in the early afternoon, the wind has shifted to the northwest as the low moves north of Hatteras.
It?s still windy and the tide is rising on the soundside, as it does when a tropical system passes.
However, it doesn?t look as if sound tide will be much of a problem.
The no-name storm, however, did provide an unpleasant end to the last holiday weekend of the summer.
I am sorry for your troubles, I watched the storm on radar and it looked like a bad one. It just stayed in one place and ground away. People wonder why I would spend $600 t0 $800 on a tent to camp at Buxton and a storm like this reminds me that I am right. In all the years we have been camping we have seen results like that with individuals tents, but have never gone home early ourselves.
further north in coastal NJ, the whole labor day weekend was a washout with clouds, wind and rain ?along with a warm but wild ocean. no beach, no fishing, no sitting , so all the tourists left early taking their $$ with them, but the lousy weather is still here this morning bring on september / october !