US East Coast braces for Dorian chaos after Bahamas battered

Bloomberg

Hurricane Dorian is starting to move again, inching towards the northwest and potentially up the US East Coast after bashing the Bahamas for almost two days with high winds and driving rains that have inflicted huge damage, killing five on one island alone.
The storm is now crawling at 1 mile per hour with sustained winds of around 120 miles (190 kilometres) per hour, making it a Category 3 hurricane, the National Hurricane Center said in an 8 am New York time advisory. But the movement was expected to speed up on Tuesday and on Wednesday, with Dorian forecast to move “dangerously close” to the Florida coastline as it travels north toward Georgia and the Carolinas.
While its winds have weakened, Dorian is threatening to inundate coastal communities with rain, rising sea levels and a life-threatening storm surge even if the US mainland dodges a head-on blow.
Shoreline residents and businesses in Florida, George and the Carolinas have been ordered by their respective state governments to evacuate.
“We know that these evacuations are inconvenient, difficult and sometimes costly,” North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper said in a statement. “But we must realise the potential deadly cost of refusing to evacuate when told.” The Bahamas continue to be under attack.
“I don’t think there has been a populated area in the entire Atlantic basin in the climatological record that has experienced the severity and the intensity of impacts that Grand Bahama Island and Abaco have experienced in the past two days,” said Ryan Truchelut, president of Weather Tiger in Tallahassee, Florida.
Dorian is weakening in part because it has exhausted its supply of warm ocean water by sitting over the same spot for days, Truchelut said. He doesn’t see the storm — pulled along by a low pressure system — moving much farther west, with the core of the hurricane likely staying about 75 miles off of Florida. But he said the eastern North and South Carolina are still very much at risk.
“I think it is going to be a pretty significant and powerful low all the way up the East Coast,” Truchelut said.
Dare County, North Carolina, which includes much of the tourist-friendly Outer Banks, issued a mandatory evacuation for visitors starting from Tuesday and for residents beginning from Wednesday. Other parts of the state’s coastline were also bracing for the storm. Ocean-going commercial vessels and barges greater than 500 gross tons should make plans for departing North Carolina ports, the US Coast Guard said.
The National Hurricane Center has issued a tropical storm warning for north of Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida — near Jacksonville — to Altamaha Sound, Georgia, near the popular Golden Isles area in the state.
While the current forecast keeps Dorian’s centre offshore, forecasters are keeping a close eye for changes, according to Ken Graham, the hurricane center’s director. “It doesn’t take much, a little wobble, a little wiggle and you have hurricane-force winds on shore,” he said in a Facebook update.
Grand Bahama, one of the island nation’s northernmost centers, remains near the center of the storm, which has caused widespread flooding in many of the islands of the northwest
and central Bahamas, the National Emergency Management Agency has said.