Cape Hatteras

North Carolina officials yesterday lifted their evacuation order for the Outer Banks, allowing thousands of tourists who left the area to return as Hurricane Felix edged away from shore. Emergency officials said the storm no longer posed an immediate danger to the 100-mile stretch of natural shoreline that attracts 6 million tourists a year. But they advised the estimated 100,000 to 150,000 people evacuated from the area Tuesday to remain inland until the threat of heavy rains and high winds had disappeared.

THEY'VE been telling us for weeks that the road to the Super Bowl had to pass through Philadelphia. Sure did. Passed the way a hurricane passes through Cape Hatteras or the way balls passed through the Eagles receivers' hands. And some of the great players who made this team the perennial contender it has been for the last four years will be passing through, too. But just before they break up this old gang of ours, it's worth nothing that this team has produced more wins in the last three years than any other team in the NFL. Let that pass through your mind a couple times and this won't seem such a failure.

Hurricane Dennis scared tourists, made beach houses sway like palm trees and pushed the water of Currituck Sound a good quarter of a mile west, leaving boats resting on the exposed bottom. That last thing has storm watchers worried. As Dennis moves away, its wind gusts of up to 98 mph - as clocked at Cape Hatteras - will begin pushing Currituck Sound back toward this narrow stretch of sand that separates the Sound from the Atlantic Ocean. "We're concerned about sound-side flooding," said Lt. Anthony Smith, of the Dare County sheriff's office.

HURRICANES have made landfall in New Jersey only twice in the past 200 years, but offshore storms have also wreaked havoc along the Shore. Sept. 3, 1821 - Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane comes north from Cape Hatteras, striking near Cape May and moving north along the Shore. Sept. 16, 1903 - Dubbed the Vagabond Hurricane by the Atlantic City Press, the storm rakes Atlantic City. Storms passing close enough to do damage included: Oct. 23, 1878 - The Great October Gale rakes southwestern New Jersey with hurricane-force winds.

Norma Hudson Gillman, 61, a local artist who taught art in elementary school in Gloucester Township for 23 years, died Sunday at West Jersey Hospital-Voorhees of lung cancer. Mrs. Gillman, a Magnolia resident, won numerous awards in South Jersey competitions during the last 10 years. Her work was exhibited frequently in Camden and Gloucester Counties. The day of her death, an exhibition of her works appeared at the Commerce Bank, on Route 70, in Cherry Hill. The exhibition was set up by her husband, John P. Gillman, but she was involved in the work until four or five days before her death, said her son, John N. Gillman of Magnolia.

With Hurricane Emily approaching the East Coast, millions of residents, not to mention vacationers, yesterday no doubt wanted to know exactly where the hurricane was going to hit. Weather forecasters had a resounding and unanimous answer: We don't know. Hurricanes, forecasters say, are simply too erratic, too volatile to predict precisely, and this one is particularly troublesome. "Every one, in some way, has its complexities and idiosyncrasies," said Ed Rappaport, hurricane specialist at the Miami center.

He works the room like a political candidate. Someone calls his name, and a well-practiced smile spreads over his face. His clear blue eyes twinkle. "Where is it going to hit, Bob?" is the question Bob Sheets, director of the National Hurricane Center has heard more than 100 times a day since Hurricane Hugo began threatening the United States. Civil defense officers ask him. Scores of newspaper and radio reporters ask him. And, for about two hours, three times a day, dozens of TV newscasters from Australia to Manhattan ask him. Sheets, 52, is comfortable in the eye of a storm, a real one as well as the human storm of activity that comes along with hurricane tracking.

Hurricane Felix, its once-fearful symmetry showing signs of deterioration, virtually spun in place for much of yesterday, a bigger threat to East Coast beaches than to human beings. With maximum sustained winds of 75 m.p.h., Felix barely qualified as a hurricane, and since it was likely to remain well offshore, hurricane warnings for the Outer Banks were lifted. Although a hurricane watch remained from Cape Lookout up to the Delaware shore beaches, in the minds of vacationers and localites, Felix already had been downgraded to a tropical nuisance.

The Lighthouse Service and the Coast Guard are celebrating bicentennials this year, and the U.S. Postal Service is heralding the observance with a booklet of 25-cent commemoratives. The booklet, whose stamps depict five lighthouses, will be issued Thursday in Washington at the National Archives, which is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the act of the First Congress that established the Lighthouse Service. The lighthouse theme ties in with the Coast Guard, which this year also is celebrating its bicentennial.

We ducked Marco. But there's apparently no way to dodge Lili. Except for a long-shot stray shower this afternoon, tropical storm Marco, which left parts of Florida a soggy mess, has passed to our west without a single drop of rain. But unpredictable Lili may throw us for a curve. Accu-Weather meteorologist Tom Kines said this morning the damp skirts of Hurricane Lili, the season's 12th hurricane and the first to threaten the Philadelphia area, will probably brush our town between 6 and 8 a.m. tomorrow.

HURRICANES have made landfall in New Jersey only twice in the past 200 years, but offshore storms have also wreaked havoc along the Shore. Sept. 3, 1821 - Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane comes north from Cape Hatteras, striking near Cape May and moving north along the Shore. Sept. 16, 1903 - Dubbed the Vagabond Hurricane by the Atlantic City Press, the storm rakes Atlantic City. Storms passing close enough to do damage included: Oct. 23, 1878 - The Great October Gale rakes southwestern New Jersey with hurricane-force winds.

Having secured a place in obscurity in local weather lore, once-mighty Hurricane Earl, now a tropical storm, sped toward dissolution in the North Atlantic on Friday, leaving in its wake perhaps the most splendid weekend of the summer. At the Shore, even at its worst, Earl wasn't all that bad, passing almost harmlessly 200 miles off the coast Friday, a far-lesser version of the behemoth it had been just the day before. Nameless thunderstorms have made far more of an impact, and by 5 p.m., the sun had reemerged on the Jersey Shore.

Having secured a place in obscurity in local weather lore, once-mighty Hurricane Earl, now a tropical storm, sped toward dissolution in the North Atlantic on Friday, leaving in its wake perhaps the most splendid weekend of the summer. At the Shore, even at its worst, Earl wasn't all that bad, passing almost harmlessly 200 miles off the coast Friday, a far-lesser version of the behemoth it had been just the day before. Nameless thunderstorms have made far more of an impact, and by 5 p.m., the sun had reemerged on the Jersey Shore.

THEY'VE been telling us for weeks that the road to the Super Bowl had to pass through Philadelphia. Sure did. Passed the way a hurricane passes through Cape Hatteras or the way balls passed through the Eagles receivers' hands. And some of the great players who made this team the perennial contender it has been for the last four years will be passing through, too. But just before they break up this old gang of ours, it's worth nothing that this team has produced more wins in the last three years than any other team in the NFL. Let that pass through your mind a couple times and this won't seem such a failure.

Though a hurricane is a real threat at the Jersey Shore in any given year, it is a remote one. By contrast, a nor'easter - a winter coastal storm - is all but a certainty. "Hurricanes are terrible, but they don't happen very often," said Robert Dolan, a leading expert on coastal storms. "I think there's a much higher probability of a nor'easter raising hell and havoc along the Atlantic Coast. " The Shore is hit by nor'easters every year. Every two years, a coastal storm causes significant damage.

Hurricane Dennis scared tourists, made beach houses sway like palm trees and pushed the water of Currituck Sound a good quarter of a mile west, leaving boats resting on the exposed bottom. That last thing has storm watchers worried. As Dennis moves away, its wind gusts of up to 98 mph - as clocked at Cape Hatteras - will begin pushing Currituck Sound back toward this narrow stretch of sand that separates the Sound from the Atlantic Ocean. "We're concerned about sound-side flooding," said Lt. Anthony Smith, of the Dare County sheriff's office.

At the turn of the century, Capt. William J. Tate was the postmaster here at Kitty Hawk, then an isolated outpost on the sandy barrens of North Carolina's Outer Banks. Descended from a Scottish shipwreck survivor on a coast known as "the graveyard of the Atlantic," Tate variously worked for the U.S. Lifesaving Service, was a notary public, and served as a Currituck County commissioner. But he was chiefly, in the words of one historian, "a one-man chamber of commerce," whose greatest success was in public relations.

The National Park Service says it's found a way to save the island's historic lighthouse from the maw of foamy sea that hungers just beyond the dunes. Pick it up and move it. Not by ship or crane. By constructing an elaborate system of tracks on which the soaring black-and-white lighthouse, trussed into a steel corset to help keep it upright, would be inched down the shore and away from the churning surf. Engineers and oceanographers say it will work. In fact, they say moving the light is the only way to prevent its certain destruction.

North Carolina officials yesterday lifted their evacuation order for the Outer Banks, allowing thousands of tourists who left the area to return as Hurricane Felix edged away from shore. Emergency officials said the storm no longer posed an immediate danger to the 100-mile stretch of natural shoreline that attracts 6 million tourists a year. But they advised the estimated 100,000 to 150,000 people evacuated from the area Tuesday to remain inland until the threat of heavy rains and high winds had disappeared.

Hurricane Felix, its once-fearful symmetry showing signs of deterioration, virtually spun in place for much of yesterday, a bigger threat to East Coast beaches than to human beings. With maximum sustained winds of 75 m.p.h., Felix barely qualified as a hurricane, and since it was likely to remain well offshore, hurricane warnings for the Outer Banks were lifted. Although a hurricane watch remained from Cape Lookout up to the Delaware shore beaches, in the minds of vacationers and localites, Felix already had been downgraded to a tropical nuisance.