The center of the Category 1 storm passed over Cape Hatteras at 8:35 a.m. Friday while moving rapidly northeast, according to the National Weather Service. Cape Hatteras is part of the Outer Banks, a 175-mile-long strip of narrow barrier islands that are accessible only by bridges, boats or planes.
The storm previously wreaked catastrophic devastation in the Bahamas, killing at least 30 people, with others feared missing or dead. So far in the southeastern United States, at least four people have died while preparing for the storm, according to The Associated Press.
“It’s raining buckets,” said Pam Anderson, who was hunkered down at a dog kennel she owns in the Outer Banks on Friday morning.
Anderson rides out each storm at her facility in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, renting a generator and hauling in an air mattress so that she could make sure the dogs were fed and cared for while their owners were out of town.
Overnight, she set her alarm for every two hours to check on the storm. As it made landfall Friday morning, she sat in her office at the kennel, watching the rain blow sideways and preparing for wind gusts of up to 100 mph.
“We’ll probably be getting the worst of everything in the next couple of hours,” she said.
Wilmington, North Carolina, had a message for the storm: ‘Not even your mom loves, you, Dorian!’
In Wilmington, North Carolina, the bands of rain that had pelted the city in sporadic bursts for much of Thursday turned into a sustained, breezy shower Friday. Water overflowed ditches and filled some cul-de-sacs, and several traffic lights had lost power. But most of the city’s roads were passable, and no injuries had been reported on Thursday.
“The conditions are improving fairly quickly here,” Dave Loewenthal, a forecaster for the National Weather Service in Wilmington, said Friday morning, adding that the storm was moving quickly offshore. “It’s more of a quick hitter.”
At the North Chase apartments in Wilmington, a neighborhood whose properties were damaged in Hurricane Florence, water skimmed across several roads, and many of the ditches were filled to the brim — or above — with water. A nearby electronic sign flashed intermittently between two messages: “Be safe!” and “Not even your mom loves you, Dorian!”
Next in Dorian’s sights: Tidewater Virginia, the Delmarva Peninsula and Southeast Massachusetts.
As Hurricane Dorian tracks ever faster northeastward, its powerful winds are gradually slowing and spreading out over a wider area. Though the center of the storm was headed offshore and unlikely to veer significantly left toward land, much of southeastern Virginia and the Delmarva Peninsula will be lashed Friday with tropical-storm-force winds, and the same is expected to hit the southeastern corner of Massachusetts, including Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and parts of Cape Cod, by Saturday, forecasters said.
Tropical storm warnings have been posted from North Carolina all the way to Fenwick Island, Delaware, as well as for Chesapeake Bay south of Drum Point, Maryland, and the tidal portions of the Potomac River. In Massachusetts, the warnings are up for the southern coast, from Woods Hole to Sagamore Beach, and for the islands.
A North Carolina church is translating emergency updates into Spanish.
In a dimly lit church in Wilmington late Thursday night, Fernando Lopez monitored Hurricane Dorian as coffee brewed and children played tic-tac-toe.
For several days this week, Lopez and other leaders of the First Brigade U.S. Christian Church had lived inside the church, watching updates from local governments, storm chasers and television stations and translating them into Spanish for the Hispanic ministry’s followers.
The church leaders have posted dozens of times each day on Facebook and fielded calls from nearby residents asking whether they should stay or leave. They also opened their doors to residents who fled their homes and were sleeping at the church Thursday night.
The updates — which include shelter locations to tornado warnings — could be vital for Spanish-speaking residents. Many of the notifications from the city of Wilmington and New Hanover County are only in English.
“It’s not a big city, but a lot of people don’t speak English,” Lopez said as children — including three of his — watched movies with their parents and giggled as they chased each other through the church.
For example, shortly after midnight, the church translated into Spanish a Facebook post from the county alerting residents that Duke Energy, an electric company, would not be responding to reports of downed power lines until the morning.
The ministry provided a similar service during Hurricane Florence, when it provided information in Spanish and opened its doors to mobile home residents and others who had evacuated.
Fewer people fled their homes this year than during Hurricane Florence, Lopez said, but people grew more and more worried as the day wore on and the rain continued to fall on the city.
On Thursday, a man called Lopez in the afternoon asking if he should evacuate or not. Wary of prescribing what callers should do, Lopez instead acted as a weatherman, explaining that dangerous winds could extend for 60 miles from the eye of the hurricane.
One of the pages most-watched updates — a Facebook live video — racked up more than 2,000 views.
Lopez said he planned to keep an eye on the storm. The children stomping through the house would help, he predicted.
In the Bahamas, a blind man carried his son on his shoulders to safety.
The roof had blown clean off. Outside, the ocean surged, swallowing the land. Brent Lowe knew he had to escape — and take his 24-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy and can’t walk, with him.
But Lowe had another problem. He’s blind.
So he put his grown son on his shoulders, then stepped off his porch, he said. The swirling current outside came up to his chin.
“It was scary, so scary,” said Lowe, 49.
Clutching neighbors, he said he felt his way to the closest home still standing. It was five minutes — an eternity — away.
Stories of unlikely survival have slowly emerged in the days since Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas, pummeling the islands of Grand Bahama and Abaco for days before moving toward the Atlantic Seaboard.
While the damage has been visible from above, the full human toll is still far from certain, with 30 deaths confirmed so far and the authorities warning that the real number may be much higher.
The death count “could be staggering,” said Dr. Duane Sands, the minister of health, who updated the toll late Thursday.
Some neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, almost entirely flattened by the storm. In others, 95% of homes have been damaged or destroyed.
As many as 23 relatives of the actor Sidney Poitier are feared missing in the Bahamas.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian, which left the Bahamas splintered and overcome with flooding, one prominent family with extensive connections in the islands has spent a week trying to account for missing relatives — and to maintain hope.
More than 500 Bahamians belong to the extended family of Sidney Poitier, the acclaimed actor who was born in Miami of Bahamian parents and was raised in the islands, according to Jeffrey Poitier, a nephew.
Jeffrey Poitier said that at least 23 relatives were still unaccounted for on Thursday, including his sister Barbara and her grown children in Freeport.
“We haven’t been able to find any of them, nor have we heard from any of them,” Poitier, 66, said in a phone interview from the Bahamas on Thursday. “We are still looking and hoping that they surface as soon as possible. It’s got us all worried.”
Poitier, who is also an actor and who splits his time between New Orleans and Cat Island in the Bahamas, said that he had tried calling his sister repeatedly without an answer. He hoped to fly to the Freeport area by helicopter later on Thursday to search for her himself.
“It’s been very discouraging, very disappointing and very stressful,” he said.
How The Times is covering Hurricane Dorian.
The New York Times has half a dozen correspondents on the ground covering Hurricane Dorian from locations including the Bahamas, the Carolinas and Florida. You can follow our correspondents on social media: Patricia Mazzei, Richard Fausset, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Frances Robles and Kirk Semple.
The Times has published live updates for the past 11 days, as Hurricane Dorian blew through the Virgin Islands but largely spared Puerto Rico, then built up strength and devastated the Bahamas, before moving toward the United States mainland. Here is the latest map tracker and tips on how to stay safe.
We are continuing to cover the destruction in the Bahamas and how members of the Bahamian diaspora in Miami are scrambling to send aid to those affected by the storm and to locate their loved ones in the islands. If you would like to help, we have an article about on how to do that.
As Florida braced for a direct hit that ultimately did not come, our correspondents looked into how the storm could test the state’s nursing homes, the difficult question of whether to stay or evacuate and lessons learned from past storms.
We have received more than 500 questions from readers, including what makes a hurricane change course and how the eye of the storm comes into play. Adam Sobel, an atmospheric scientist and director of the Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate at Columbia University, shared his answers. We also took a look at climate change and how it plays a role in the way hurricanes take shape.
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