Even with the storm hundreds of miles offshore, Hurricane Ernesto was still being felt Saturday along much of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, with dangerous rip currents forcing public beaches to close during one of the final busy weekends of the summer season.
The storm’s high surf and swells also contributed to coastal damage, including the collapse of an unoccupied beach house into the water along North Carolina’s narrow barrier islands.
Hurricane specialist Philippe Papin from the National Hurricane Center said Ernesto, which made landfall on the tiny British Atlantic territory of Bermuda early Saturday, was a “pretty large” hurricane with a “large footprint of seas and waves” affecting the central Florida Atlantic coastline all the way north to Long Island in New York.
“That whole entire region in the eastern U.S. coastline are expecting to have high seas and significant rip current threats along the coast,” Papin said. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describes rip currents as “powerful, narrow channels of fast-moving water” that move at speeds of up to 8 feet (2.44 meters) per second.
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