Hurricane Nate sped ashore in Mississippi as a Category 1 storm and quickly weakened, leaving Gulf Coast residents relieved that it wasn’t worse.
BILOXI, Miss. — As Hurricane Nate cut a path through the central Gulf Coast overnight with roaring winds and a rush of storm-surge flooding, a limb snapped from a tree and landed on the windshield of Terry Gentry’s convertible, cracking the glass and bending the hood.
His reaction? Intense relief.
“I feel blessed, my dog’s still good,” Mr. Gentry said on Sunday. “All my family is good.”
With the devastating wounds left by three monster hurricanes in six weeks still raw from Texas to Florida to Puerto Rico, the impact of an ordinary Category 1 storm like Nate felt gentle by comparison.
As it sped northward, the storm brushed over the mouth of the Mississippi River in southern Louisiana, skipped to the east of New Orleans and drove ashore again near Biloxi, the first hurricane to make landfall in Mississippi since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It ripped trees from the ground, flooded low-lying areas, and sprayed the beaches with debris and the roads with sand and tree limbs. Part of Highway 90, the main road along the beachfront, was still closed on Sunday afternoon, and tens of thousands of customers in Mississippi and Alabama were without power.
Officials in Mississippi and Alabama said they were still assessing the full scope of the damage on Sunday. But according to preliminary reports, the storm mainly left an inconvenient mess, with widespread debris but only small pockets of more serious problems.
“We are very fortunate this morning,” said Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi, a Republican, though he was quick to warn against minimizing the harm caused by Nate’s 10-foot surge, strong winds and heavy rains. “Some damage has been done, particularly into some of the individual homes that are on the bay,” Mr. Bryant said.
The storm ground a large stretch of the Gulf Coast to a halt, and led President Trump to approve emergency declarations for the states of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, though Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana, a Democrat, said his state had been spared major damage.
“Hurricane Nate moved at an unprecedented speed towards the Gulf Coast,” Mr. Edwards said in a statement. “Because it moved so quickly, the damage was minimal in Louisiana.”
Col. Michael Clancy, commander of the New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers, said the city, whose flawed hurricane defenses were overwhelmed by Katrina, had dodged a bullet this time. “God was on our side,” Colonel Clancy said.
For many in New Orleans, Nate barely registered as a blip on the radar. “A Category 1 is just like a little storm for us here,” said Brandon Garrett, 24, a construction worker. “In a way, I was disappointed that we got nothing at all. I barely got any days off.”
The storm weakened rapidly as it sped inland, first to a tropical storm and then to a tropical depression. By late Sunday afternoon, as the center of the system was crossing into Tennessee, its maximum sustained winds had slowed to 35 miles an hour. The main threat it poses now is flash flooding: Forecasters said the storm could drop as much as 10 inches of rain in parts of its path through the South and the Ohio Valley toward the Appalachian Mountains.
“We’re not seeing widespread areas with major structural damage,” Yasamie Richardson, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, said on Sunday morning. “Some counties are reporting a few homes, a few structures here and there.”
Still, there were hair-raising moments during the storm. Kayleigh Terrell, 29, of Orange Beach, Ala., got a tornado warning on her phone on Saturday night, and then saw the wind tear the screen door off her house. “It hadn’t quite touched down,” Ms. Terrell said of the funnel cloud. “It hit the tree, pulled the door, and we have one shingle left.”
In Biloxi, the storm surge powered by Nate, which made landfall near a time of high tide, inundated some streets and the ground floors or parking garages of some of the city’s low-lying casinos overnight. Residents and workers set about cleaning up on Sunday and marveled at their luck that the storm had not been worse.
Beckey and Saul Sampson plucked a broken plastic chair off the beach and filled a bag with other detritus left by the storm. An engineer used an enormous pump to pull water out of the bottom of the elevator shaft at Harrah’s Gulf Coast hotel and casino. And onlookers flocked to a large sailboat, the Reliance, that had been blown on to the beach and was leaning precariously on its side on the sand.
Everyone’s first thought seemed to be to compare Nate with Katrina, which wrecked this area in 2005 even as it was flooding New Orleans.
“It’s not that bad at all,” said Eva Karnes, 53, as she returned to her home to find little more wrong than a pool of water in the yard and a piece of sheet metal flapping off a trailer next to her house. “Katrina took the whole house and everything,” she said.
As with many of the structures built or rebuilt here after Katrina, the living space in Ms. Karnes’s house is now elevated high above the ground, and officials said that was one reason Nate’s damage was not worse.
“We did not dodge a bullet,” Lee Smithson, the executive director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, insisted on Sunday. “If Nate would have hit us 15 years ago, the damage would have been much more extensive, we would have had loss of life. But we have rebuilt the coast in the aftermath of Katrina higher and stronger.”
None of that, though, could have prevented another kind of damage suffered in Pass Christian, west of Biloxi: The storm surge snatched thousands of pumpkins from a patch where they had been arrayed for a church fund-raiser, and scattered them over the highway and the shore.
“It’s like searching for Easter eggs,” said Jeanne Tagge, a school librarian who had organized the pumpkin patch.
