KITTY HAWK, North Carolina, 19 September 2003 — The eye of Hurricane Isabel roared across the US East Coast yesterday, ripping roofs of buildings, cutting power to hundreds of thousands of homes and bringing Washington to a standstill.
Towns along the North Carolina and Virginia coasts were desolate and boarded up as the storm brought 165 kilometer per hour (100 mph) winds and started moving toward the US capital. Isabel headed up the Atlantic seaboard and a tropical storm warning had even been issued for New York by the National Hurricane Center.
Four hundred thousand homes in Virginia were without power, its governor, Mark Warner, said, and electricity companies said tens of thousands more had been hit in North Carolina. Warner told CNN television the blackouts could last “a few days.”
In Elizabeth City, North Carolina, city manager Tommy Combs said there were widespread outages. “It’s going to get much worse as the winds pick up. Lines are knocked down by the wind and stuff like branches flying around,” he said.
The federal capital came to a virtual stop with an estimated 350,000 government workers given the day off and public transport ordered closed down.
The hurricane put the US capital in crisis mode, shutting the city’s metro for the first time, closing government offices and putting famous museums off-limits long before the storm hit.
Schools and government departments closed and President George W. Bush hunkered down at Camp David in Maryland.
Downtown Washington was empty of the usual hustle and bustle, with few cars on the road. But a handful of employees were seen dashing into offices to pick up work and send some last-minute e-mails.
