Nate marches across East Coast, dumping heavy rains

BILOXI, Miss. — Nate slogged its way across the U.S. East Coast on Monday, dumping heavy rains and bringing gusty winds to inland states as a tropical depression, a day after Hurricane Nate brought a burst of flooding and power outages to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Nate spared the region the kind of catastrophic damage left by a series of hurricanes that hit the southern U.S. and Caribbean in recent weeks.

Nate — the first hurricane to make landfall in Mississippi since Katrina in 2005 — quickly lost strength Sunday, with its winds diminishing to a tropical depression as it pushed northward into Alabama and Georgia with heavy rain. It was a Category 1 hurricane when it came ashore outside Biloxi early Sunday, its second landfall after initially hitting southeastern Louisiana on Saturday evening.

The storm surge from the Mississippi Sound littered Biloxi’s main beachfront highway with debris and flooded a casino’s lobby and parking structure overnight.

By dawn, however, Nate’s receding floodwaters didn’t reveal any obvious signs of widespread damage in the city where Hurricane Katrina had leveled thousands of beachfront homes and businesses.

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant praised state and local officials and coastal residents for working together to avoid loss of life.

Lee Smithson, director of the state emergency management agency, said damage from Nate was held down in part because of work done and lessons learned from Katrina.

“If that same storm would have hit us 15 years ago, the damage would have been extensive and we would have had loss of life,” Smithson said of Nate. “But we have rebuilt the coast in the aftermath of Katrina higher and stronger.”

Nate knocked out power to more than 100,000 residents in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida, but crews worked on repairs and it appeared many of the outages had been restored within 24 hours.

As of Sunday evening, Alabama Power said it had electricity back to more than 64,000 customers and some 36,000 remained without power, while utilities and cooperatives in Mississippi said it had restored power to more than 21,000 customers who lost power during the storm. In Louisiana, there were scattered outages during the storm, while Florida utilities restored power to more than 37,000 customers.

Mississippi’s Gulf Coast casinos got approval to reopen in midmorning after closing Saturday as the storm approached.

Before Nate sped past Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula late Friday and entered the Gulf of Mexico, it drenched Central America with rains that left at least 22 people dead.

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the four hurricanes that have struck the U.S. and its territories this year have “strained” resources, with roughly 85 percent of the agency’s forces deployed.

“We’re still working massive issues in Harvey, Irma, as well as the issues in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and now this one,” FEMA Administrator Brock Long told ABC’s “This Week.”

The federal government declared emergencies in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

At landfall in Mississippi, the fast-moving storm had maximum sustained winds near 85 mph, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said. Nate steadily weakened after its first landfall in a sparsely populated area of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.

Nate was expected to bring 3 to 6 inches of rain to the Deep South, eastern Tennessee Valley and southern Appalachians through Monday. The Ohio Valley, central Appalachians and Northeast could also get heavy rain before the storm exits Maine on Tuesday.

Also Monday, a new tropical depression formed far out over the Atlantic. The depression’s maximum sustained winds were near 35 mph. It was expected to strengthen to a tropical storm later in the day or overnight, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. The depression did not pose a threat to any land.