WILMINGTON – Five people were killed yesterday when a vehicle skidded off a road that had been slicked by a massive rainstorm that drenched the east coast, the North Carolina Highway Patrol said.
The storm flooded parts of coastal North Carolina, driving some people from their homes, and snarled train, air and car traffic in the north-east. Tornado watches extended from the Outer Banks to New Jersey.
State Highway Patrol Sergeant J.E. Brewer said five people were in the car that wrecked in Creswell, about 145 miles east of Raleigh. The car hit a patch of standing water, hydroplaned and skidded into a ditch, Brewer said.
The hardest rain fell in North Carolina, where Jacksonville picked up 12 inches of rain – nearly a quarter of its typical annual rainfall – in the six hours between 3:30 and 9:30 a.m.
The rain was part of a system moving ahead of the remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole, which dissipated over the Straits of Florida on Wednesday.
“This more like what you’d expect from a tropical system. But this is not a tropical system. It’s just a storm with a deep feed coming straight off the Atlantic,” said Hal Austin, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Newport, North Carolina., office.
Much of the mid-Atlantic and north-east were starting to move into a drought after the dry summer. But the early fall storm spread several inches of rain across the region.
Farmers in northern New England rejoiced. Erin Bickford of Walpole, New Hampshire, said the deluge was a welcome sight for her eight acres of vegetables.
“We had almost no rain at all. Often, we could see it raining across the river, but it didn’t come here. It was just dust. Even if it did rain, it would be a tiny bit, maybe half an inch,” she said. (AP)
