By Edward Walsh and Stephen Barr
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 7 1996; Page A01

Hurricane Fran was gone from the North Carolina coast today, but she left behind a path of twisted destruction, toppled beach houses and flooded island communities. The storm was blamed for at least 17 deaths.

Uprooted and broken trees littered the landscape throughout the Wilmington area, and residents told of the popping sound of tree limbs breaking and tree trunks shattering from the force of the storm's winds as it turned off its ocean path Thursday evening and bore down on this city near the coast.

"At its peak about 9 last night, we could hear those popping sounds all around," said Simon Blackburn, 34, who rode out the storm in his house near the approach road to Carolina Beach, which like other low-lying coastal areas had been under water during the height of the storm and remained closed to all but emergency traffic today.

Forced to evacuate his home on Wrightsville Beach, Danny Hall, 54, moved his family to a motel in a heavily wooded section of Wilmington, a decision he questioned as the storm roared through the city.

"They must have lost 100 trees around that motel," he said. "They were cracking like toothpicks. It was unbelievable."

Uprooted and broken trees, downed power lines, damaged houses and flooding in coastal areas were Fran's legacy. Virtually all of New Hanover County was without electrical power today, but there were no deaths or serious injuries here as a result of the storm, local officials said.

Statewide in North Carolina, however, 11 deaths were attributed to the storm, four involving traffic accidents and three from trees falling on homes, according to Tom Ditt, a spokesman for the state emergency management agency. And overall, at least 17 people were killed as Fran bore down on the Carolinas, making landfall at Cape Fear, N.C., near Wilmington, and then moving inland into Virginia, officials said.

By early this morning, the hurricane had lost much of its windy punch -- though it still was dumping torrents of rain on communities from North Carolina to West Virginia and Maryland, spawning floods and widespread power outages. A quarter of North Carolina's residents were without power today, and there and in South Carolina many people were still camping out in shelters.

The destruction in North Carolina, which Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. said could cost up to $1 billion, prompted President Clinton during a Florida campaign swing to declare the state a major disaster area. "We are going to do everything we can to help the people of North Carolina," he said in a speech in Orlando. Later, he declared Virginia a disaster area as well.

This was the second hurricane in less than two months to slam into the North Carolina coast. In July, it had been Hurricane Bertha, a storm that was less frightening and less destructive than Fran, several local residents said. Bertha seriously damaged about 3 percent of the houses in Wilmington; Fran caused major damage to 25 percent of them, officials said.

Near Wrightsville Beach, Fran lifted boats from their moorings and dumped them in the street, ripped apart piers along an inland waterway, shattered utility poles and tore billboards from their mountings.

Residents of the area dealt with the storm's fury in a variety of ways. Kymberlie Barton, 30, decided to have a party.

She left her home in Wilmington on Thursday afternoon, but instead of fleeing inland took refuge at the Waterway Lodge, a sturdy, concrete motel at the entrance to the bridge to Wrightsville Beach in the storm's path. There she joined her sister-in-law, Alison Coward, 24, and several other relatives who had been ordered to evacuate their homes on the island.

Equipped with a portable generator and plenty to eat and drink, Barton said, "we had a party."

But it was not all fun. "The anticipation of it was scary," Barton said. "When you start seeing water coming up, it's scary. You don't know how bad it's going to be. But I was not leaving. It's exciting and I don't want to miss the action."

"We felt safe here," said Coward. "There really are not trees around here."

Falling trees, in fact, appeared to pose the greatest danger during the storm. In the Scotts Hill area north of Wilmington, a huge white oak, uprooted by Fran's winds, lay across the roof of the home of Eddie and Ellen Gurganious, graphic evidence of the hurricane's power and the danger to those in its path.

It came down, crashing into the house, about 9 p.m. Thursday. "It's a bang and the house starts shaking and you try to figure out where it's coming in," Ellen Gurganious, 36, recalled. She was in an interior hallway with her two sons, she said, and "you could hear the rain coming in the house. The sound of it was so scary because it was dark and you couldn't see."

Eddie Gurganious, 38, said it "sounded like a bomb going off. There was just popping all around and dust everywhere."

"It was more than popping; it was a big old cracking," added his mother-in-law, Ruth Jones, 69.

Wilmington was without electric power today, but water, telephone and other services were generally operating. This was not the case in Wrightsville Beach, Carolina Beach and other coastal areas, where electrical, water and sewer lines were destroyed by the wind and floods. Estimates of when residents could return to their homes ranged from four to seven days.

These barrier island communities remained sealed off today, and rescuers were trying to contact people who had stayed there -- against orders by state officials to evacuate. Local officials declared a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew in Wilmington and surrounding areas. Wilmington Mayor Don Betz said Fran had caused four times the damage of Bertha in terms of debris scattered around the city. He said 237 businesses were damaged, compared with 13 by Bertha, and that the city will spend at least $5 million fixing signs and traffic signals and repairing public buildings.

"It was a major storm event," said Dan Summers, New Hanover Country emergency management director.

Fran was described as a slow-moving storm, but it did not seem so by today. By mid-morning, the rain had stopped and clouds over the coast began to clear. Parts of southbound Interstate 40 were flooded between Raleigh and Wilmington, but in nearby pastures, cows grazed peacefully, like on any other late summer day.

Meanwhile, as a warm sun brightened in the Carolina blue of the sky, Wilmington slowly began to come back to life. Throughout the day, a long line of people stood patiently in the wilting, steamy heat outside the Rose Ice & Coal Co. to purchase ice to preserve food until power is restored.

In a nearby neighborhood of large, frame homes, the streets were covered with debris. Amid the sound of a chain saw signaling the start of the cleanup effort, a young woman, delivering a pizza, searched for an address.

In the Scotts Hill area, Gurganious unloaded a generator from his van, the first step in getting though the second night after the storm. "You hope it doesn't start raining. You pray for sun," his wife said of what they would do now.

And near the bridge to Wrightsville Beach, Hall wondered aloud about the rapidly changing ways of nature along the coast. "Last night, destruction, today beautiful," he said. "In a 10-hour period of time we go from disaster to beauty."

Staff writer Peter Baker, in Florida, contributed to this report.