Hurricane Belle

Eastern United States, August 8–10, 1976 

A relatively mild Category 1 hurricane whose 90-MPH (145-km/h) winds and torrential precipitation at landfall nonetheless claimed at least 12 lives and caused an estimated $23.5 million in property damage to communities in North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, and New England between August 9 and 10, 1976.

A midseason tropical cyclone that had developed off the northeast coast of the Bahamas during the afternoon of August 8, 1976, Belle briskly intensified as it first underwent recurvature and then sped up the United States’s eastern seaboard on August 9. Aerial reconnaissance flights conducted by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) indicated that Belle, with a central barometric pressure of 28.47 inches (964 mb), was packing sustained winds of 111 MPH (179 km/h) and gusts of 125 MPH (201 km/h) as it brushed past North Carolina’s Outer Banks shortly after dawn on August 9. The state was fortuitously spared a direct strike by Belle’s Category 3 winds and minimal four-foot (1.5-m) storm surge; however, five people were drowned when the van they were traveling in was washed into a shallow gorge by one of the hurricane’s rain-driven flash floods. Aside from a few isolated power outages and some minor beach erosion, material damage in North Carolina from Hurricane Belle’s glancing passage was on the whole considered fairly moderate.

Quickly progressing up the coast in a wavering north-northeasterly direction, Belle’s extensive spiral rain bands next grazed portions of New Jersey’s eastern shoreline. In Atlantic City, the hurricane’s showering winds and torrential rains brought with them a heavy surf, one that relentlessly pounded the resort community’s famed wooden Boardwalk, clientless hotels, and clifflike stone jetties. More than 150,000 homes in New Jersey, some as far inland as Trenton, were left without electrical power. Three people were reportedly killed in storm-related automobile accidents, and damage estimates in Atlantic City alone totaled some $4.5 million.

Shortly after midnight on August 10, 1976, Belle’s sprawling eye finally came ashore on the south coast of New York’s Long Island. Although the North Atlantic Ocean’s cooling waters had by this time reduced the hurricane to Category 1 status, its sustained 90-MPH (145-km/h) winds managed to uproot hundreds of trees, knock out traffic lights and road signs, smash windows, and demolish several beachside cottages on the heavily settled island. Downed power lines sapped more than 275,000 homes of electricity, while isolated flood action washed out a small bridge near the Fire Island Inlet. One fatality—a man who was struck by a falling tree—was reported on the island. Damage estimates ranged from $8–9 million, making it the most costly hurricane to strike Long Island since Hurricane Carol came ashore at Westhampton in August 1954.

With its wind and rain now sharply diminished, Belle spiraled inland, passing over southern and central New England during the evening hours of August 10. No casualties were reported in Connecticut, where the storm’s gale-force winds scattered nearly 20 percent of that year’s vital apple

harvest like grapeshot, causing upward of $4 million in agricultural losses to the state. In Vermont’s green hills, however, Belle’s lingering rains spawned serious flash floods: In one tragic instance, a mother and her seven-year-old son drowned when the footbridge they were traversing collapsed, pitching them into the raging torrent below. A further $2.5 million in property damage was tallied in Vermont, where the dissipating storm’s trampling effects on timber forests and dairy farms were judged to have been among the worst in living memory.