Dorian rocks Outer Banks with powerful winds

Hurricane Dorian made landfall on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on Friday, hitting the beach resort area with powerful winds and battering waves days after reducing parts of the Bahamas to rubble.

The storm, packing 150kph made landfall at Cape Hatteras at about 9am EDT (1300 GMT), according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).

It lashed the Outer Banks with hurricane-force winds as far as 72km from the centre of the hurricane and sent tropical storm winds farther than 320km from its centre, the NHC said.

It has already dumped up to 25cm of rain along the coast between Charleston, South Carolina, to Wilmington, North Carolina, about 275km away, forecasters said.

“The rain is moving up north,” said National Weather Service forecaster Alex Lamers early on Friday.

“Even the Raleigh-Durham area inland will get 3 inches today.”

“It’s bad,” Ann Warner, who owns Howard’s Pub on Ocracoke Island, said by telephone.

“The water came up to the inside of our bottom floor, which has never had water.” She said a skylight blew out and whitecaps coursed through her front yard and underneath her elevated house.

“We’re safe,” Warner added. “But it’s certainly a mess.”

Another Ocracoke Island resident, bookshop owner Leslie Lanier, said via text message that the first floors of some homes had flooded and people had been forced to retreat to their attics, but that the water had already begun to drop.

“We are flooding like crazy,” she said, adding: “I have been here 32 years and not seen this.”

“Do not let your guard down,” Dare County emergency managers warned people who insisted on riding out the storm.

Dorian is expected to push out to sea later on Friday and bring tropical storm winds to Nantucket Island and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, early on Saturday.

But it will likely spare much of the rest of the East Coast the worst of its rain and wind, before likely making landfall in Canada’s Nova Scotia that night, the NHC said.

“It’s in the process of moving out, going north,” Lamers said.

The howling west flank of Dorian has soaked the Carolinas since early Thursday, flooding coastal towns, whipping up more than a dozen tornadoes and cutting power to hundreds of thousands of people.

Floodwaters rose to a 30cm or more in parts of the historic South Carolina port city of Charleston, where more than 18cm of rain fell in some areas, officials said.

Another half-inch or more was expected overnight on Friday.

More than 330,000 homes and businesses were without power in North Carolina and South Carolina on Friday morning. Power had mostly been restored to thousands of people in Georgia, tracking site poweroutage.us showed.

“We prepared for the worst and that didn’t happen. That’s OK. I was a little worried back when it was a Category 3. We got lucky,” said Ross Page, who walked his dogs in Wilmington on Friday morning.

Joseph Pawlick went out to rake leaves, twigs and other debris blown from the sidewalk outside his Wilmington home. “I slept like a baby last night. This, thankfully, was not bad,” he said.

But as Dorian is expected to pick up speed from its 22kph crawl on Friday, life-threatening storm surges and dangerous winds remain a threat for much of the area and Virginia, the NHC said.

Governors in the region declared states of emergency, shut schools, opened shelters, readied National Guard troops and urged residents to heed warnings, as news media circulated fresh images of the storm’s devastation in the Bahamas.

At least 70,000 Bahamians needed immediate humanitarian relief after Dorian became the most damaging storm ever to hit the island nation.

In the Carolinas alone, more than 900,000 people had been ordered to evacuate their homes. It was unclear how many did so.

In Kill Devil Hills in the Outer Banks, Mark Jennings decided to ignore the order, lining his garage door with sandbags and boarding up his home with plywood.

The retired firefighter planned to stay put with his wife and two dogs, saying: “We are ready to go. If something happens, we can still get out of here.”

Agencies