Fran slammed into the North Carolina coast east of Cape Fear around 8 p.m., Sept. 5, with howling wind gusts up to 120 mph, smashing trees, power lines and coastal homes from the South Carolina border to Surf City, N.C. Its 12-foot storm surge carried away a temporary North Topsail Beach police station and town hall, housed in a double-wide trailer since Hurricane Bertha's rampage across the same area in July. Extensive flooding struck the coast around Wrightsville Beach just up the coast from Cape fear.
Fran's top winds quickly dropped to 100 mph after it slammed into Cape Fear, N.C., but the storm still caused damage on its way north to Wilmington and Raleigh. After submerging beach towns, ripping steeples off churches and snapping trees like sticks in its terrorizing path through the Carolinas, a weakened Hurricane Fran turned into a tropical storm when it winds dropped below 74 mph early Sept. 6, while swirling into Virginia.
Gale force winds between 39 and 73 mph lashed the Chesapeake Bay and heaped water into the Potomac River around the nation's Capitol where it backed up into Georgetown and Old Town, Virginia. Tree limbs crashed to the ground as far north as Maryland and tornadoes briefly spun up in parts of Virginia.
As Tropical Depression Fran chugged into north Virginia, the danger shifted from winds and coastal flooding to torrential rain. Tropical rain bands spiraling into the Appalachian Mountains were lifted by the sloping terrain, enhancing rainfall from North Carolina to Pennsylvania.
Thundering rain of up to 15 inches deluged interior North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, bringing dangerous river flooding to much of the mid-Atlantic.
At least 34 people were killed by Fran and damage estimates topped $3.2 billion dollars.
Looking back, Fran became a tropical depression on Aug. 24, then briefly weakened before regenerating into a minimal category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson damage potential scale with 75 mph winds. Fran threatened the Lesser Antilles on Aug. 29-30, as a weak hurricane. After the storm's center was relocated by a hurricane hunter plane farther north than thought, Fran missed the islands, weakened to a tropical storm with winds of 65 mph, then regained hurricane strength while traveling toward the Bahamas.
Before landfall, Hurricane Fran was about as large as Hurricane Hugo, with sustained hurricane force winds over 75 mph extending out as much as 140 miles from its center. But its winds weren't nearly as strong, a relief to North Carolina residents. Fran struck as a "major" category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale .
With winds reaching 115 mph, Hurricane Fran has become the third "major" hurricane of the 1996 Atlantic hurricane season. Hurricane Bertha was the first and Edouard was the second. A "major" hurricane has winds exceeding 110 mph.
Hurricane Fran's thrashing of North Carolina only aggravated the state's problems caused by numerous weather disasters in 1996.
We had friends and family in Wilmington tell us that Bertha ended up being a huge blessing to SE NC. She was a much weaker storm but took out a lot of the weakened trees, etc. People had time to clean up before Fran came along. Without Bertha's preliminary sweep through the area, the damage from Fran would have much worse because so many more trees would have all come down at once.
We had only been gone from eastern NC three years when Fran came through. We talked to the people who had been our next door neighbors in a small town north of Wilmington. Our old neighborhood didn't get power back for a week. "Our" lot, which had been full of pine trees, ended up with not a single one left standing. Three fell on the house.
..... Some of them actually survived the hurricane itself but were leaning. The ground was so soggy that throughout the week, they continued to fall until they were all down. I went through there a month later and you could still smell all the pine sap from the number of trees that had come down or snapped off during Fran.
And then when Floyd came through, a friend, whose home was not flooded, told us that they were fine ...... they only had 3 trees down on their house but thankfully they weren't flooded out so they considered themselves lucky!