The storm is likely to keep drubbing the island of roughly 51,000 people through Monday night, forecasters said, before moving on to the Atlantic coast.
“Tonight and tomorrow morning, we’ll start to see the pull to the north that we’ve all been anxiously awaiting, because we really need to get this thing off of the Bahamas and moving northward,” Ken Graham, the director of the National Hurricane Center, said in a Facebook video.
Geoffrey Greene, the chief meteorological officer at the Bahamas Department of Meteorology, said emergency management officials were not expecting to get verified firsthand accounts from the affected islands until late Tuesday or early Wednesday because the hurricane was still thrashing islands there.
“The storm is still over Grand Bahamas and slowly moving over the rest of the Bahamas,” he said. “This is going to continue to batter Grand Bahama and Abaco for the next 24 to 36 hours.”
But getting to the islands after the storm passes may be difficult because runways may be underwater, Greene warned.
He also cautioned against relying on videos circulating on WhatsApp, a messaging app. “Some people, they are showing stuff that is not the Bahamas,” he said.
Louby Georges, the director of international affairs for Human Rights Bahamas, said at least one friend had run out of drinking water and others had left tearful voice messages for loved ones.
Dozens of worried families posted pleas for information about their loved ones on social media after losing contact for hours at the height of the storm. The weather center advised people on the island to remain in their shelters until conditions improved, warning that it could take several hours.
Videos on social media showed water rising around houses and devastating scenes of decimated homes, with roofs sheared from buildings and insulation strewed about the floor.
The storm could still run ashore over Florida.
In Florida, forecasters continued to warn that hurricane conditions were expected across the state and the southeastern coast of the United States. A hurricane warning was extended to about 180 miles of the Florida coast Monday, and tropical-storm-force winds blew on a South Florida beach.
The much-monitored cone of uncertainty overlapped with nearly all of the state’s central and northern coast, meaning the eye could move over the eastern edge of the state during the next two days. Forecasters emphasized that even a minor diversion from the storm’s predicted route could bring the storm onto the coast.
“It cannot be stressed enough that only a small deviation to the left of the NHC forecast could bring the core of the extremely dangerous hurricane onshore of the Florida east coast within the hurricane warning area,” a forecaster wrote in a briefing Monday morning, using the abbreviation for the National Hurricane Center.
At 2 p.m., forecasters said the hurricane would move “dangerously close” to the Florida coast, beginning late at night and continuing through Wednesday evening. Then, it is expected to continue “dangerously close” to the Georgia and South Carolina coasts.
Even if the hurricane’s center does not reach the Florida coast, strong winds and rain are all but certain to disrupt life in that region. Much of Florida’s eastern coast is also susceptible to dangerous storm surges, and tropical gusts up to 57 mph were expected to reach parts of South Florida overnight.
“It’s like being stalked by a turtle,” said Ben Foster, the general manager of Brother Jimmy’s BBQ in downtown West Palm Beach, in describing the long wait for Hurricane Dorian to brush the state.
Brother Jimmy’s BBQ was the only restaurant open in the area at lunchtime on Monday, and it was bustling with about two dozen people watching the U.S. Open and “SportsCenter.” A group of men played a golf video game, a respite from boarded-up homes.
Mayor Jerry Demings of Orange County, which includes Orlando, said 150 residents were staying in shelters in the county. He said the region would be hit with winds from the storm around midday Tuesday and its effects would last through Wednesday afternoon.
Rain from the storm reached the southern coast on Monday, and the National Weather Service’s office in Miami said on Twitter that the first tropical-storm-level wind was recorded at 40 mph at Juno Beach Pier just before 1 p.m.
South Carolina and Georgia governors ordered evacuations.
Officials in South Carolina and Georgia are growing increasingly anxious about the storm’s path toward their coastlines and have ordered many costal residents to evacuate. Dorian is now projected to approach those two states as a major hurricane, and strong winds could reach Georgia by Tuesday.
“We know that we cannot make everybody happy, but we believe that we can keep everyone alive,” Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina said at a news conference, announcing that residents in portions of eight counties must begin evacuating by noon Monday.
North Carolina’s governor also declared a state of emergency. State officials warned that heavy rain could cause life-threatening flooding between Wednesday night and Friday and that there was a possibility for tornadoes.
Norma Lemon, the owner of a Caribbean-themed restaurant on South Carolina’s coast, has evacuated three times in the past few years because of several hurricanes. She said Sunday that she was near tears at the thought of leaving her restaurant in Mosquito Beach again.
“It just feels like here we go again with this one, like it’s not going to be good, you know?” she said.
South Carolina could receive between 5 and 10 inches of rain, with isolated areas inundated with up to 15 inches.
In Palm Beach County, surfers ‘ride it out’ while others take shelter
As Hurricane Dorian’s outer rain bands moved over South Florida, the barrier island of Palm Beach, which is in a mandatory evacuation zone, felt eerily calm Monday morning. Roads were empty. Businesses were closed and shuttered.
Still, a small crowd gathered along the beach, staring in awe at the wild gray waves crashing onto the shore.
“I just wanted to take a look at this — it’s crazy,” said Brandon Atkinson, 40, a West Palm Beach resident. “You admire it for the beauty but know its devastation.”
A handful of young surfers braved the water, despite warnings from authorities.
“We’re not worried about the storm,” said one of them, adding that he had driven south from Vero Beach, Florida, and planned to continue driving south once the waves in Palm Beach got too big. “We’re probably going to surf all day.”
He encouraged his friends to join him, and they hopped onto the sand. “Come on — let’s surf,” he said.
Inside the West Boynton Park and Recreation Center in Lake Worth, Florida, PeggyAnn Cromartie sat with a pile of knitting as Dorian’s rains pelted the shelter outside.
“I wanted to be safe, because you never know what may happen,” said Cromartie, 72, of Pahokee, Florida. “It’s not really scary, but I thought about the flooding or the lights going out.”
She arrived on Sunday afternoon with her dog, Garfield, a 5-year-old Maltese, and shared half of a queen size air mattress with another evacuee. Dinner was a hot meal of chicken, rice, carrots and a bread roll, Cromartie said, and breakfast an assortment of cereal, bagels and coffee.
By Monday morning, the pet-friendly shelter was housing 75 people and 114 animals, including 75 dogs, 28 cats and several birds and rabbits. A sign posted outside warned that no livestock, reptiles or vicious dogs would be accepted. During Hurricane Irma in 2017, someone tried to come in with a chicken, said Yleana Arias, one of the shelter’s managers.
Randye Carol Pollack, 68, of Boynton Beach, Florida, brought her parakeet, Sweet Pea, and spent the night in a hard plastic chair by his cage, “to keep him company.”
“I didn’t sleep at all,” she said. She covered the cage with two blankets to keep him warm and said she was grateful for a place that would take them both.
Pollack planned to pass the time with a transistor radio and a magazine. Cromartie brought her knitting, crochet and her Bible.
Cromartie said she would pray for the Bahamas.
“God is very good,” she said. “He’ll see us through.”
A Florida utility company has assembled its largest response team ever.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has said for days that coastal residents should expect to lose power.
Florida Power and Light Co., which serves about 10 million residents, announced that it had assembled 16,000 employees and contractors and asked them to be ready to respond to outages around the state.
“We’ve assembled the largest prestorm restoration workforce in company history,” Eric Silagy, the company’s chief executive and president, said in a statement.
He added that the team would “work around the clock to restore power safely and as quickly as possible.”
As of Monday morning, there were no substantial power failures in the state.
This article originally appeared in
.