MORE BARK THAN BITE, FLOYD HITS N. CAROLINA.

Byline: Francis X. Clines The New York Times

The heart of Hurricane Floyd raked across the mainland here at Cape Fear on Thursday morning, uprooting beach houses and leaving widespread floods as it set a rapid but steadily weakening course up the Atlantic coast.

The vast storm, whose advent alarmed much of the Eastern seaboard and widely disrupted air, rail and highway travel, was clearly losing its power with the dawn Thursday as the hurricane's eye danced across the coastline following a two-week buildup of the forces of nature and the precautions of government.

By Thursday evening, as Floyd reached northeastward along the New Jersey coast to New York City, its strength had further waned. It was downgraded to a tropical storm that still delivered lashing rain but that officials said presented no major threat to New York or other population centers.

At least 10 deaths were attributed to Floyd. Seven people died in traffic in the Carolinas and Virginia and two girls in Delaware drowned after a storm-swollen creek swept them into a sewage pipe. One man was presumed drowned in the Bahamas.

In the howling predawn of this coastal city, Floyd's power was measured to be dropping from a Category 4 to a Category 2 hurricane before dropping further to a tropical storm. While storm-drenched hurricane veterans were delighted after all the ominous evacuation warnings that it delivered far less physical injury and property destruction than originally feared, Floyd nevertheless proved relentlessly drenching, dropping as much as 19 inches of rain in some areas.

``We were blessed this time,'' Fire Chief Keith Studt said as he roamed flooded streets and hacked away at fallen trees cluttering the streets of nearby Winter Park. ``We were lucky this thing suddenly ratcheted down before it hit town.''

Even so, the flooding and house damage out on Oak Island and other coastal barrier islands was considerable as the storm headed unpredictably northward, causing further disruption across a wide swath of the seaboard. Residents emerged uncertainly from emergency centers to blink at piles of suddenly sun-dappled debris. By then Floyd was speeding up along the coast by Virginia, Chesapeake Bay and the New Jersey shore.

It lost further power but still caused fresh damage along its western flank as the storm was described as fading into a rough course aimed toward eastern Long Island. But travel turmoil was widespread during the day and quickly became bumper to bumper around Washington, as a truck overturned on the storm-lashed Chesapeake Bay Bridge and blocked one of the major regional arteries.

On St. Michael's, a resort and retirement village on an elbowlike peninsula reaching into Chesapeake Bay, the day's rain and winds started turning savage in midafternoon as the eye of the storm approached.

Lawrence Murphy is a netter, who fishes with nets attached to poles. He left two, $10,000 pole nets standing in the bay, where he assumed they would be safe from a northeaster.

``But it's coming from the northwest,'' Murphy said. He said his nets had withstood 40 mph winds. ``But this was 60 or 70,'' he said, figuring his rigs were lost. ``The netters are caught real bad.''

The storm's eye loomed out of the Atlantic's 30-foot seas as a somewhat tentative invader, avoiding a deep inland attack and cutting across Cape Fear at 3:20 a.m. to begin a rapid ride up the coastline. Open relief at the turning was the reaction from this storm-hardened city, which has had to batten down for five hurricanes in the past three years.

``It was merciful that it didn't come through at the 155 mph they were first talking about,'' said James Blanton, hitching his pickup truck's chain to a tree fallen across the road to his granddaughter's house. ``That's what saved us, even with all this flooding.''

For a while, the storm registered sustained winds of 98 mph that gusted up to 130, tearing up the roof of the Brunswick County Hospital to the south. There was some roof damage as well to Wilmington's historic Cotton Exchange building, which is now a shopping mall centerpiece.

One unnerving accident was the draining of 2 million gallons from a hog waste lagoon into the Northeast Cape Fear River, about 40 miles to the north.

But otherwise the storm caused minimal structural damage here, as in South Carolina.

The old buildings of downtown Charleston shrugged off lashing wind and rain, as many have there for two centuries. ``These old houses have seen a lot worse,'' said Park Smith, wielding a saw to create fresh firewood from a fallen tree near South Battery Street.

Charleston suffered little more than $10 million in damage, according to the county director of building services, Carl Simmons. ``Very, very minor,'' he declared. Other residents said Floyd would be remembered for the convoys of rain-slickered television anchormen who hit the beaches more than for the actual glancing blow the storm delivered.

Down the coast in Myrtle Beach, S.C., wind damage was minimal but flooding was severe along the coastal Grand Strand. Safety workers had to deal with snakes fleeing to dry ground and drivers determined to ford passages left obviously risky with coursing flood water.

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Photo: Jean Sonthelmer attempts to shield herself from blowing rain Thursday evening in downtown Boston.

Jared Leeds/Associated Press