By Dan Eggen, Josh White and Fern Shen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 16, 1999; 5:33 p.m. EDT

Storm Watch For continual updates on school, college and office closings, high water and flood warnings, and power and transportation problems, check our list.

Hurricane Floyd's fast trip along the coastline of Virginia and Maryland ended this afternoon as the storm's heavy rains and winds moved off toward the Northeast.

By 5 p.m., with its center 10 miles south of Atlantic City, N.J., Floyd was downgraded to a tropical storm.

As the rain stopped, and the sun began to shine in many parts of the region, authorities were still assessing the storm's damage, but many of the early reports left officials hopeful that Floyd hadn't been as destructive a visitor as once predicted.

The worst damage in Virginia was in the southeastern corner of the state. There were no tornadoes reported, no serious injuries and only one death, from a highway accident Wednesday night.

But Gov. James S. Gilmore said the damage was bad enough, with 280,000 homes without power, as much as 20 inches of rain and more than 100 roads in central and eastern Virginia closed because of high water. Sections of both Interstates 95 and 64 were closed, as were evacuation routes out of Hampton Roads.

Four communities had forced evacuations authorized by Gilmore.

"It could have been worse . . . we had a category four or five storm hit Virginia first, I hate to think what would have happened," said Gilmore, clad in a plaid shirt, khakis and boots covering his ankles.

Officials in Virginia Beach, where the storm struck this morning, said damage appeared to be far less than they anticipated. Waves as high as seven feet continued to barrage the coastline throughout the afternoon, but much of the flooding was further inland, such as in Norfolk, where roads were deluged and whitecaps were reported in downtown streets.

Nearby Portsmouth residents, however, were without water after a pumping station was flooded and put out of service, and many roads in Suffolk were impassible because of standing water. Sections of Interstate 64 through the Hampton Roads area were closed due to enormous pools of water and portions of routes 58 and 460 were also shut down to wait for torrents of water to dissipate.

Residents were asked not to drive on local roads and to avoid driving through standing water at all costs; a spattering of cars across the region were abandoned after drivers tried to negotiate through pools that were sometimes three or four feet deep.

D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams and interim city administrator Norman S. Dong said the city appeared to have gotten through the storm without major property damage.

There was limited street flooding in certain areas of the District, including the Georgetown waterfront. Tree limbs cracked and fell to the street in a few locations across the city. Some city residents were without power. But there was apparently no severe damage to buildings or serious injuries, city officials said.

Up the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, Floyd's storm surge turned many of the homes in the Kent Island community of Cloverfield into little islands, as water reached up to the homes' doorsteps, to car door handles, to the tops of mailboxes, and almost to the tops of backyard swing sets. Scores of trees in the neighborhood of modest, single-family homes had been blown down in the wind, many of them pulling down power lines.

Though local traffic flowed fairly smoothly across much of the Washington region's road network, the hurricane did disrupt long-distance travel along the East Coast, creating delays for both trucks and buses using Interstate 95.

Staff writers Alan Sipress and Craig Timberg contributed to this report.