The center of the Category 1 storm passed over Cape Hatteras in the Outer Banks at 8:35 a.m. Friday, according to the National Weather Service.
The storm was moving quickly northeast and heading away from land, but it left whipping winds and surging floodwaters in its wake in the Outer Banks, where local businesses barricaded their doors and residents holed up, watching water creep toward their doors.
The position of the Outer Banks, a chain of narrow barrier islands off the main coast, meant that those who did not evacuate were in some cases unable to escape once the storm began. On Ocracoke Island, which is accessible only by boat or by air even in normal weather, people climbed into their attics to flee from high rushing water.
Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina said that he had “significant concern about hundreds of people trapped on Ocracoke Island.” Officials, working with the National Guard, arranged helicopter flights to evacuate people who wanted to leave and to bring food and water to the island and neighboring Hatteras Island. The storm surge on Ocracoke rose 5 to 7 feet in an hour and a half, according to Katie Webster, a meteorologist with the state.
A local bookstore owner, Leslie Lanier, was sheltering inside her boarded-up home on Ocracoke Island, where she was “sick with worry.”
“The water is higher than I have ever seen it,” said Lanier, who owns independent bookstore Books to Be Red.
The storm previously wreaked catastrophic and deadly devastation in the Bahamas, where the full scope of the damage is still becoming clearer.
In the southeastern United States, at least four people died while preparing for the storm, according to The Associated Press.
The toll on the Bahamas is devastating.
With the death toll from Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas totaling at least 30, and with many more people unaccounted for and thousands made homeless, staggering estimates of the damage and destruction are starting to emerge.
Karen Clark and Co., a catastrophe consulting firm in Boston, said Friday that the initial loss from Dorian in the Bahamas was at least $7 billion, including the damage to residential and business buildings and lost business. The number could rise once the damage to infrastructure is included.
On Great Abaco Island, the estimate is based on the near total loss of property in its largest town, Marsh Harbour, and the surrounding communities because of wind and flooding. On Grand Bahama, the other island most afflicted by Dorian, the damage was caused largely by flooding over the northern area, including the airport and downtown Freeport.
Rupert Hayward, executive director of the Grand Bahama Port Authority, a private company that acts as the municipal authority and developer for Freeport, said the lives of many of the island’s 50,000 people were upended by the storm.
“The flooding over the north shore through the central part of the island took with it a lot of people’s homes and sadly a lot of people’s lives,” Hayward said by telephone from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as he awaited a plane to fly him back to Grand Bahama.
“A large proportion of the population have lost everything, not just family and friends but their homes and all their possessions,” Hayward said. “There is an immediate need to provide water and food. A lot of supplies were washed away.”
“It’s a difficult time; it’s a desperate time,” he said. “We are in need of help.”
Despite the devastation on the north side of the island, much of the infrastructure on the south side survived the storm, including the power infrastructure. Water is running but not yet potable, he said. Fuel is also available, so people are able to drive, but many cars were destroyed in the storm.
“Our focus is to get the city up and running again,” he said.
Tidewater Virginia, the Delmarva Peninsula and Southeast Massachusetts could also feel some effects.
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 west toward land, much of southeastern Virginia and the Delmarva Peninsula will be lashed Friday with tropical-storm-force winds, which by Saturday are also expected to hit the southeastern corner of Massachusetts, including Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and parts of Cape Cod, forecasters said.
The storm was expected to weaken by Saturday night.
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 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.
Almost 2 million homes in the U.S. were at risk from Dorian. Most lacked flood insurance.
Most of the homes threatened by Hurricane Dorian do not have flood insurance, which means the damage from the storm may be long-lasting.
Only 13% of the 1.9 million single-family homes in the United States at risk of flooding from Dorian have federal flood insurance, according to estimates from Milliman, an actuary and consulting firm. In North Carolina, where the hurricane made landfall Friday, fewer than 10% of homes at risk are estimated to have coverage.
“Many more people should have flood insurance,” said John Rollins, an actuary at Milliman who supervised the estimates using a combination of federal and proprietary data. “The takeup rate is minuscule. And yet the flood risk is there.”
The new data point to two persistent challenges for U.S. disaster policy. The first is a continued reluctance by homeowners to buy flood insurance as climate change gets worse, even when they live in areas designated as having high risk. The second is that increasingly, the flood threats are outside the government-designated risk zone.
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.
This article originally appeared in
.