Ernesto eases but forces evacuations

ERNESTO weakened to a tropical depression as it ploughed northward over land yesterday, but it still had the punch to lash Virginia with 6 inches of rain, flooding highways, forcing evacuations and knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of people.

The system was blamed for at least one traffic death in Virginia and one in North Carolina, where it had made landfall just before midnight on the heels of thunderstorms that already had drenched the region.

“It wasn’t any big deal,” said Dennis Rood of Carolina Beach, NC, northeast of the landfall point. “The house shuddered a little bit, but that’s about it.”