A weakening Tropical Storm Nicole doused large areas of Florida with heavy rain on Thursday after battering the east coast overnight as a rare November hurricane and leaving at least two people dead.
The late-season cyclone made landfall close to Vero Beach at about 3am, delivering 75mph winds and a storm surge that collapsed buildings and swept away roads as far north as Daytona Beach.
Authorities said two people were electrocuted in an Orlando neighborhood when they touched a fallen electricity line.
By lunchtime on Thursday, more than 330,000 customers had lost power, many in areas recovering from Hurricane Ian, which caused damage across Florida in September.
But Nicole, which gained category 1 hurricane strength on Wednesday afternoon over the Bahamas, hours before its Florida landfall, lacked the intensity of its 150mph predecessor, which killed 114.
Nicole was quickly downgraded to a tropical storm with maximum sustained winds below 50mph as it headed on a diagonal north-west path past Orlando and towards the Gulf of Mexico.
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami said in an update the storm would continue to lose power through the day, but remain dangerous with heavy rainfall and inland flooding the biggest risks as its remnants turned north-east on a path through Georgia and the Carolinas and towards New York.
“Nicole is a large storm with hazards extending well to the north of the center, outside of the forecast cone,” senior NHC hurricane specialist Robbie Berg said in the bulletin.
“These hazards will continue to affect much of the Florida peninsula and portions of the south-east US. Flooding will also be possible on Friday in the south-east through the central Appalachians, including the Blue Ridge mountains, and extending northward through eastern Ohio, west central Pennsylvania, into western New York by Friday night into Saturday.”
Nicole is only the third hurricane to strike the US mainland in November, usually a quiet month as Atlantic storm season winds down. The most recent was Kate in 1985, which hit the Florida panhandle.
Nicole is also the eighth hurricane of an active 2022 season. Storm-weary residents along Florida’s east coast were ordered to evacuate from vulnerable barrier islands and waterfront communities, including Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. Staff at the club, where the former president spent Wednesday analysing midterm election results, hung up when a reporter called to ask if Trump was leaving.
In Daytona Beach, several buildings at the shoreline were swept into the sea and a number of multi-story residential blocks damaged by Hurricane Ian were evacuated. Authorities went door-to-door telling people to grab possessions and leave. In Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, a large section of the fishing pier collapsed into the ocean.
Schools in more than a dozen Florida districts were closed, as were theme parks in Orlando.
The Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed an emergency declaration for dozens of counties. Joe Biden also declared an emergency, freeing federal resources and assistance to supplement state, tribal and local response efforts. Federal Emergency Management Agency personnel are already in the state, responding to Hurricane Ian.
“The storm is still very large and the impacts stretch far beyond the center track with much of the state experiencing tropical storm force winds,” DeSantis said at a mid-morning briefing from Tallahassee on Thursday.
“You have downed trees, you have power lines, you have some road washouts, combined winds and storm surge. We’ve seen beach erosion, especially in areas that have already seen erosion from Hurricane Ian.”
Engineers at the Kennedy space center were assessing damage to Nasa’s $4.1bn Artemis moon rocket, which was left on its launchpad through the storm ahead of its scheduled blast-off on 16 November.
Nicole forced mission managers to push back the launch attempt two days but engineers were confident leaving Artemis at the pad, insisting its Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule were designed to withstand sustained winds of up to 85mph.
The Orlando Sentinel reported that sensors on the launchpad tower at Cape Canaveral recorded at least one gust of 100mph.
“Technicians will perform walkdowns and inspections at the pad to assess the status of the rocket and spacecraft as soon as practicable,” the space agency said in a statement.
