Past Oak Island Hurricanes
After Hurricane Ernesto hit my beach [JessePedia] last week (see this blog entry), I wondered how many storms have actually come ashore on Oak Island. There have been plenty of close calls, but storms actually hitting the island itself are rare, even though it's an unusually long island. To answer this question, I consulted the NOAA Historical Hurricane Tracks site.
The results shows that 3 hurricanes and 15 tropical storms or depressions hit within a 10 mile radius of Oak Island. But if you look at the map itself (see above), the only storms that hit the island were:
- Unnamed 1888
- Unnamed 1901
- Unnamed 1907
- Unnamed 1920
- Dennis 1981
- Fran 1996
I don't believe hurricane data before the advent of satellites (1960's) are precise enough to place a storm on the island, so that leaves only Tropical Storm Dennis in 1981 and Hurricane Fran in 1996.
This a simple proximity check, statistically meaningful but not meteorologically because of the RFQ [JessePedia] rule (the last storm to completely decimate the island was Hazel in 1954, which hit at the NC/SC border, putting Oak Island and Long Beach in the worst part of the eyewall RFQ. Before that, the only hurricanes to hit within 25 miles of Calabash, NC (nearest town to the border) moving perpendicular to the coast were unnamed storms in 1883 and 1944. Hurricane Charley hit the border at an angle in 2004.
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