![]() ![]() No telephone service either, so I couldn't call the city desk to ask when and where I would be needed.īut soon it became known that the broad eye of Dora came ashore at 3:14 that morning over Anastasia Island with 125-mph winds and a 12-foot storm surge. There was no power, so I lit the Sterno stove and warmed a bottle for my son and heated water for instant coffee for me. They got stuck in high water when they tried to ford a flooded intersection. The next morning, my husband and our host set out by car to survey the damage. I barely slept during what was left of the night as a huge oak tree in the backyard creaked constantly under the wind's fury. 9, the executive editor, city editor, women's editor and I had to lock arms to keep from being blown over by the strong winds as we crossed Pearl Street toward a parking garage.Īs he drove down Riverside Avenue, with his three passengers as ballast, the executive editor had to avoid traffic signals that were swinging wildly from cables that stretched across intersections. ![]() I remember as we left the paper late on Wednesday, Sept. I called my husband and told him to pack up the baby, diapers, formula and the playpen for a makeshift crib and go to the Avondale home of a bachelor reporter, who was kind enough to take us evacuees in to the shelter of his home. I remember several of us reporters standing in the executive editor's corner office and watching the huge neon sign atop the George Washington topple onto its roof. The Times-Union was at the southwest corner of Pearl and Adams streets, just down the block and across the street from the Hotel George Washington. I lived with my husband and year-old son in an apartment in a home in Neptune Beach that had been built in 1937 just one block from the ocean. Volunteers at the Beaches filled sandbags to pile at street ends in an attempt to keep the ocean from coming inland. And Wonderwood wasn't even a wrinkle in a transportation engineer's brain. It was so low that the roadway often flooded in a heavy thunderstorm. The bridge on Atlantic Boulevard, which was replaced by the one that was recently replaced, was also a drawbridge. The McCormick Bridge on Beach Boulevard, just recently replaced, was a drawbridge. At the time, there was no Butler Boulevard with its Arthur Sollee Bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway. No hurricane parties for him.Īnd Weatherford's urging was not unreasonable. I remember Duval County's Civil Defense director, Jack Weatherford, a white-mustachioed smaller version of Walter Cronkite, appearing on TV-4 with Winterling and saying that if he lived at the Beaches, he would evacuate. The storm left almost $2 billion, in today's dollars, in damage but only five fatalities, thanks to advanced warnings. It would be the first hurricane since 1898 to make landfall along the First Coast. He was the only forecaster in the area to predict that the harsh effects would be felt in Jacksonville. Caption by Michon Scott.Dora made Winterling famous. ![]() NASA image courtesy MODIS Rapid Response, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The storm was expected to continue weakening over the next 48 hours as it remained on a track roughly parallel to Mexico’s southwestern coast. Located roughly 255 miles (415 kilometers) south of Cabo San Lucas, the storm had maximum sustained winds of 90 miles (150 kilometers) per hour. PDT on July 22, the NHC reported, Dora had weakened to a Category 1 hurricane. Dora’s eye is southwest of Cabo Corrientes, and storm clouds graze the coast.īy 5:00 a.m. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image around 1:00 p.m. At that time, the NHC stated, Dora was located about 240 miles (390 kilometers) south-southwest of Cabo Corrientes. National Hurricane Center (NHC) reported that Dora had maximum sustained winds of 155 miles (250 kilometers) per hour with higher gusts. Pacific Daylight Time on July 21, 2011, Dora was nearly a Category 5 hurricane. ![]()
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