And here, as well as in the other small communities that together make up the Outer Banks and serve as a hub for tourism, there was a deep sense of relief. Although the center of the hurricane made a surprising shift to the west as it neared North Carolina, reports of damage were limited. The hurricane was the first of this season and the first Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in the United States since 2012.

The authorities said there was flooding and infrastructure damage on Hatteras Island, which was under a mandatory evacuation order before the storm arrived. Dare County officials announced that the island would remain off limits indefinitely.

Gov. Pat McCrory said during a Friday morning news conference that the hurricane was not linked to any deaths or serious injuries in North Carolina, where people in the path of the storm had a new tool from the National Hurricane Center as they contemplated whether to stay or evacuate: an experimental map that predicted the storm surge.

Storm surge is a potentially deadly aspect of hurricanes that is sometimes played down; most discussions of storms deal with wind speed. And while predictions of surge have long been part of the discussion of storms provided by the center, those forecasts have been delivered in the telegraphic, official text that the meteorologists use.

This time, the forecasters released color-coded maps, taken from thousands of supercomputer runs of surge prediction modeling software, that showed how much extra water an area could expect.