                             THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Saturday, November 19, 1994            TAG: 9411190459
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: BY STEVE STONE, STAFF WRITER 
                                             LENGTH: Long  :  163 lines

GORDON BACKS DOWN WIND, WAVES LASH OUTER BANKS BEFORE STORM STALLS UNPREDICTABLE STORM SYSTEM HEADS SOUTH, BAFFLES EXPERTS

The ever-erratic Hurricane Gordon cut a sharp left turn and stormed to the doorstep of the Outer Banks with pounding, house-eating surf and high winds Friday, only to suddenly turn tail and dip south.

``I've been doing this about 50 years, and this is the weirdest I've ever seen,'' said John Hope, veteran hurricane forecaster at The Weather Channel in Atlanta. ``I've never seen quite so many changes as rapidly as we've seen with this hurricane. It's been quite an odyssey.''

At 4 p.m. Friday, Gordon had been downgraded to a tropical storm with top winds of 70 mph. Its center was about 165 miles south of Cape Hatteras and moving south at nearly 6 mph, a weak course expected to continue through this morning.

The storm might even make a third visit to Florida, where it has already done considerable damage.

``It's been the most difficult, complex system we've had to deal with,'' said Bob Sheets, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. ``We expect the storm to continue drifting toward the south for 24 to 48 hours, but after that, we'll just have to follow it and see what happens.''

Even with the last-minute turn to the south Friday - and without having actually coming ashore - Gordon left its mark on the Outer Banks and along the Virginia coast.

At least four oceanfront homes in Kitty Hawk collapsed into the roiling surf and a dozen more were in danger. Residents could do little more than watch and cry.

Some people were defiant in the face of the storm, however.

Vince Mascitti surveyed the damage around his mostly intact home, where waves had stripped five or six feet of sand from around the pilings. But he dismissed any suggestion that people should feel bad for him.

``You go pity someone else, man, 'cause I'll be there forever,'' said Mascitti, 53. ``I'm not finished yet. . . . When I built this in 1975, I made up my mind that I would do my best to keep the house standing.''

At nightfall, a crowd of about 75 people gathered near another house in Kitty Hawk that appeared on the verge of collapse. As some of the spectators sipped beer and mixed drinks from plastic party cups, they marveled at the surf's strength and made bets on when the house would tumble.

The surf also swept over the sandbags around the historic Hatteras Light, which has grown increasingly vulnerable to coastal storms as protective beaches around it have vanished over the years. But Friday's damage did not appear to be serious.

Meantime Friday, a television crew covering the storm became a little too involved in the story.

A huge wave crashed over them when they ventured too far onto a beach. It tossed them about like rag dolls, sending camera gear flying. But no one was seriously hurt.

N.C. Route 12, the sole highway linking the Outer Banks to the mainland, was closed in places, covered with storm debris, floodwater and up to 4 feet of mud.

Storm tides carved a 3-foot-wide strip under the highway on Hatteras Island, four miles north of Rodanthe, closing the road there.

Despite travel problems, Denise Burrus Barnett, whose family owns Burrus Red and White grocery store in Hatteras Village, said business was brisk Friday.

``We ran out of milk,'' Barnett said. ``We're in pretty good shape with everything else. This storm is so bewildering because it's behaved so erratically. It's taken us by surprise.''

She wasn't alone. Many North Carolina residents went to bed thinking they were safe, only to wake to word that they were under a hurricane warning.

The National Hurricane Center had not anticipated Gordon's 90-degree turn to the west. And even as it was happening, forecasters said they thought Gordon would turn back to a more traditional route.

At midnight, however, that hope faded and the warning went up.

On Portsmouth Island, 61 anglers staying in summer rental cabins were taken off by boat Friday morning as the hurricane threatened.

In Virginia Beach, a once controversial effort to save homes in Sandbridge met an inauspicious demise. An extensive system of costly bulkheads was breached Thursday, and by Friday morning the relentless surf had ripped some of the barrier apart.

That left several homes in imminent danger of collapse and homeowners wondering if all the expense and fighting to build the bulkhead had been worth it. Among them was Ed Jones, 53, of Farmville, who could only watch helplessly as his Sandbridge abode teetered on the brink of destruction.

``Yesterday, we had sand all the way out to there,'' Jones said, pointing 30 yards offshore where waves broke over the shattered remnants of his wooden seawall. ``And now we got nothing.''

Roads in the area were littered with debris, mud and sometimes torrents of ocean overwash.

At the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, 20-foot waves sliced away a 75- to 100-foot section of the 14th Street fishing pier. Much of the tangled debris washed up near 35th Street. None of the businesses on the pier was damaged.

The heavy surf broke on the Boardwalk in sometimes spectacular explosions of foam that left portions of the walkway caked in inches of sandy mud.

As the wind eased and rains relented Friday afternoon, hundreds of people came to the beaches to see what had - and had not - happened. Police tried to keep them out of Sandbridge, which was closed to all but residents while crews cleared the streets.

``We are having a problem with sightseers, people with four-wheel-drive vehicles and the like, going to see what the storm is like,'' said Lou Thurston, a police spokesman.

And surfers flocked to favored wave-riding locations all along the coast. At Buckroe Beach in Hampton, they continued climbing the swells well past dusk.

Meanwhile, forecasters did their best to warn simply: It ain't necessarily over yet.

The storm lost some of its punch Friday as its winds diminished to just below hurricane force. But Gordon's southerly course will bring it back into the storm-sustaining, warmer waters of the Gulf Stream, where it could regenerate.

At the hurricane center in Miami, forecaster Miles Lawrence made no bones about it - meteorologists have had little success tracking this storm.

The slow-moving storm developed off Nicaragua on Nov. 8 and ran a zigzag course over eastern Cuba and neighboring Haiti, where officials put the death toll at 531.

The storm crossed the Florida Keys, churned into the Gulf of Mexico, then turned back toward Florida and cut across the middle of the state, causing extensive floods, killing six people and causing half a billion dollars in damage.

Gordon became a hurricane Thursday when it turned into the Atlantic and made its feint at the Outer Banks before stalling and then turning south.

``I don't think we really know where it's going to go,'' Lawrence said, warning that coastal residents should not presume Gordon is history. ``Our track has it going to Florida and that puts it over the Gulf Stream. It will be very interesting to see what happens then.''

It's not the first time a storm has gone south, although such an occurrence is rare.

In 1935, before storms were named, another November hurricane formed north of Bermuda and then steered south until it hit Miami.

In 1972, Hurricane Dawn hit southeast Florida, moved through the upper Keys, exited at Broward County and went northeast into the open Atlantic.

Dawn then steered north before turning west toward the Outer Banks. Like Gordon, it got close but never made landfall.

Dawn then went south, turned west and then northwest, barely missing Jacksonville.

Whatever Gordon's future holds, it has etched out its own chapter in hurricane lore.

``This will become the latest in a series of examples that we use to train meteorologists,'' Lawrence said. ``This track will demonstrate the limits of our abilities to forecast the track as well as the intensity of hurricanes . . MEMO: Staff writers Perry Parks, Lane DeGregory, Mike Mather and Paul South

contributed to this report.