Hurricane Nicole causes four deaths, forces evacuation of unsteady buildings

Hurricane Nicole whipped through Florida on Thursday, a rare November storm that crashed huge waves along the coast, collapsed houses into the Atlantic Ocean, required the evacuation of unstable waterfront condo buildings and washed away roads and beaches.
Nicole, the first hurricane to come ashore on the state’s Atlantic coast since Katrina in 2005, became a tropical storm shortly after making landfall as a Category 1 hurricane at around 3 a.m. local time south of Vero Beach. At least four deaths were attributed to the storm as it crossed the peninsula, and then swung offshore over the Gulf of Mexico and turned north, going back over land in the Big Bend region of Florida, just east of the Panhandle.
The storm mostly spared southwest Florida, the area worst hit Hurricane Ian, which slammed into the state as a Category 4 storm in September. But Ian was such a large system that it also damaged parts of the Atlantic coast, leaving them particularly vulnerable to Nicole, a far weaker storm.
The double whammy was most evident in Volusia County, where officials said that building inspectors had deemed 24 hotels and condominiums unsafe, leading to the evacuation of about 500 mostly older residents, according to a spokesperson for Daytona Beach Shores. At least 25 houses in Wilbur–the-Sea, an unincorporated community on a barrier island in the Daytona Beach area, were also evacuated.

“The structural damage along our coastline is unprecedented,” George Recktenwald, the Volusia County manager, said in a statement, adding, “This is going to be a long road to recovery.”
Chrian Oehmke, a 27-year-old filmmaker and photographer who has lived in Wilbur–the-Sea his entire life, described seeing a house “hanging a thread over the dune.”
“We were standing there watching and we started to hear some crack, and the house started to fall into the beach,” he said. “It made such a huge sound, a crashing, like a car accident. Insulation and glass started flying up. It was wild.”
Oehmke said even police officers appeared shocked the sight.
“It’s pretty surreal,” he said, adding that storms these days “are a lot more powerful than when I was growing up.”
There is broad scientific consensus that climate change is one of the central forces driving increasingly extreme weather, including hurricanes. This has produced more powerful storm surges.
Shea Lopez, a 48-year-old surf instructor who has lived in Wilbur–the-Sea for 25 years, said houses began to cave into the water at sunrise, not long after the storm made landfall further south.
“You can’t imagine how much stuff has been tossed on our shoreline,” he said. “It’s terrible to see such destruction to people’s property.”
In the near city of Daytona Beach Shores, which is also on a barrier island, 23 buildings had been compromised, Mayor Nancy Miller said.
“We’re only 5 1/2 miles long,” she said.
The back-to-back storms left the city with little time to begin beach restoration efforts after Ian. Miller said the beach, which is managed the county, had not been replenished yet, and several high tides prevented repairs to condominiums’ damaged sea walls.
“Ian did the initial damage, and this was just on top of that,” she said. “If this had been a stand-alone storm, we still would have had property damage but not as much as we see together.”
Local officials issued a mandatory evacuation Monday for the barrier island where Daytona Beach Shores is. But most people had not heeded it as of Wednesday, Miller said, when the Sheriff’s Department went door to door and evacuated some 200 people.
“They waited until someone came knocking on their door, saying it was unsafe and that they needed to get out,” she said.
As the storm moved out and the tide subsided, it became clear that more condos were in peril, Miller said, and more than 300 additional people were evacuated Thursday. The city’s chief building inspector was visiting every property, with more officials working or en route to ass.
At the Tower Grande condo on South Atlantic Avenue, Abhaysinh Rajput, who rode out the storm in Unit 701, said the fire alarm had gone off at around 4 a.m. A short time later, he and his neighbors had to evacuate the building. A glass fence around the pool was shattered, and a cement barrier on the sea wall below had led out toward the lapping waves.
“I want to get out some stuff,” he said Thursday, looking up at the empty premises, “but unfortunately, I don’t know if we can go inside or not.”
Miller was standing outside one of the compromised condos and looked up to see a balcony barely hanging onto the building. Several minutes later, she said, it came down.
“It’s Florida, so there are a lot of structures built way too close to the beach,” said author Carl Hiaasen, who lives not far from the ocean in Vero Beach and frequently writes about protecting Florida’s environment from voracious development. “If you look at pictures of what the beach was 50 years ago and what it is now, it is a sliver compared to what it used to be.”
Even before Nicole, Hurricane Ian’s hefty financial toll threatened the state’s shaky property insurance market and prompted Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, to call for a special legislative session to try to address the problem.
As Nicole came ashore, more than 30 million people were under some type of storm-related warning, and more than 300,000 customers in Florida were without electricity early Thursday afternoon, mostly in Brevard, Indian River and Volusia counties, according to poweroutage.us, a site that tracks power interruptions. early evening, the number without power had fallen below 200,000.
Two people in Orange County, home to Orlando, were electrocuted a downed power line, the Sheriff’s Department said. Two other people died in a crash on the Florida Turnpike, Mayor Jerry L. Demings of Orange County said.
The big, messy system left damage in many parts of the state. More than 500 homes in Port Orange, south of Daytona Beach, were at risk of flooding after a critical dam was swept away in the storm, said Mayor Donald O. Burnette of Port Orange, adding that the city was still recovering from flood damage from Ian.
In Vilano Beach, on a barrier island north of St. Augustine, State Road A1A, a major north-south coastal road, collapsed or flooded, stranding residents. Mark Fetz, 43, a resident since 2007, said Ian had compromised many of the dunes that protected A1A, the only way in and out of town.
“All the dunes — all the shore — that was protecting that highway is gone and the ocean is basically lapping up against the highway,” he said, adding that he was concerned about his older neighbors who were unable to leave their homes and had no electricity.
As far south as Lauderdale–the-Sea, in Broward County, Nicole washed away a large chunk of a well-known pier. As far north as Jacksonville, the St. Johns River caused some flooding. There were downed tree limbs, debris and rivulets of water in the streets of Orlando, which experienced significant flooding six weeks ago from Hurricane Ian. But Nicole moved at a brisker pace, lessening the amount of rainfall over the region.
Nicole first made landfall Wednesday in the Bahamas. Abaco Island suffered extensive flooding but minimal damage, officials said. The storm is forecast to bring heavy rain from the Carolinas to New England through the weekend.
The uneven storm season, with a quiet July and August, busy September and now a storm making landfall in November, struck Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, as odd.
“We had more storms form in November than we did in August,” he said. “That seems very crazy to me.”