BILOXI, Miss. (AP) – Hurricane Nate brought a burst of flooding and power outages to the U.S. Gulf Coast before weakening rapidly Sunday, sparing 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, with its winds diminishing to a tropical depression as it pushed northward into Alabama and toward 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.
A crew from Gulf Power works to repair a damaged line from Hurricane Nate on Sunday Oct. 8, 2017, on Okaloosa Island in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. (Nick Tomecek/Northwest Florida Daily News via AP)No storm-related deaths or injuries were immediately reported.