Hurricane Dorian creeps up US coast; near-record storm surge feared

CHARLESTON, S.C.  – Weakened but still deadly, Hurricane Dorian crept up the Southeastern coast of the United States on Wednesday and millions were ordered to evacuate as forecasters said near-record levels of seawater and rain could inundate Georgia and the Carolinas.

The storm, which ravaged the Bahamas with more than a full day of devastating wind and rain, had weakened substantially — from a Category 5 storm to a Category 2 — but still had dangerously high winds and threatened to swamp low-lying regions from Georgia to southeastern Virginia as it moved northward.

“We will experience hurricane-force winds, in at least gusts,” South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said at a news conference Wednesday. Even if the hurricane doesn’t end up hitting the state directly, he said, “there’s still going to be wind and water and if you’re in the coastal area, that water can be treacherous.”

Dorian appeared likely to get dangerously near Charleston, which is particularly vulnerable since it is located on a peninsula. A flood chart posted by the National Weather Service projected a combined high tide and storm surge around Charleston Harbor of 10.3 feet (3.1 meters); the record, 12.5 feet (4 meters), was set by Hugo in 1989.

Stores and restaurants were boarded up with wood and corrugated metal in the city’s historic downtown, and about 830,000 people were under mandatory evacuation orders on the South Carolina coast. More than 400 people were in state-operated shelters statewide, and more were expected.

Mark Russell, a homeless U.S. Army veteran, said he had been in a shelter since Monday awaiting slow-moving Dorian.

“Once the rain comes and the wind hits, it’s going to blow left, right, in and out, and there’s not really a place that you can find” to avoid it, said Russell, 63.

In North Carolina, where authorities said an 85-year-old man died after falling from a ladder while getting ready for the storm, Gov. Roy Cooper warned about the threat of storm surge and flash flooding from heavy rains. The Outer Banks were particularly vulnerable.

Georgia’s coastal islands were also at risk, Gov. Brian Kemp said Wednesday.

“We are very worried, especially about the barrier islands getting cut off if we have these storm surges at the same time as … the high tides,” Kemp said.

Duke Energy said Dorian could cause more than 700,000 power outages in eastern regions of North Carolina and South Carolina, and Georgia Power said about 2,800 homes and businesses were already without electricity.


The Navy ordered ships at its huge base in Norfolk, Virginia, to head out to sea for safety, and warplanes at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia, were being moved inland to Ohio.

Weaker but bigger since it slammed the Bahamas with 185 mph (295 kph) winds earlier this week, Dorian was moving along Florida’s northeastern coast at 8 mph (13 kph) late Wednesday afternoon. Forecasters said it had maximum sustained winds of 110 mph (177 kph) and was centered about 150 miles (241 kilometers) south of Charleston.

A hurricane warning covered about 500 miles (805 kilometers) of coastline, and authorities warned about 3 million residents to get away before the water and wind rose with Dorian’s approach.

The acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Peter Gaynor, said 4,000 federal responders; 6,000 National Guard members; and 40,000 utility workers were on standby for the hurricane.

“We are ready to go,” Gaynor said. “We’ll follow Dorian up the coast until it is not a threat to the U.S.”

In Florida, initially projected to take a direct hit from Dorian, there was widespread relief and gratitude on Wednesday after the storm passed the state from a relatively safe distance offshore.

“We’re lucky today,” said Ryan Haggett, kitchen manager at the Oceanside Beach Bar and Grill, at Flagler Beach on the state’s central coast. Haggett and others were removing storm shutters they had placed over the restaurant’s windows and planned to serve dinner Wednesday night.

“This storm was much less than what happened two years ago, three years ago with Irma and Matthew,” Haggett said, referring to the deadly storms that hit in 2017 and 2016. “They were the worst.”

With the threat to Florida easing and the danger shifting northward, Orlando, Florida’s international airport reopened, as did Walt Disney World and Universal. Dorian forced Disney Cruise Line to cancel one trip and delay the return of another ship to Port Canaveral, Florida.

One resident in the state died while preparing for the storm Monday evening, when Dorian’s path was still projected to include central Florida. Joseph Walden, 56, was sitting on a tree limb and using a chainsaw to trim other limbs in the Orlando suburb of Ocoee when one of the cut limbs broke free and struck him, pushing him to the ground, Ocoee police said in a news release. He was pronounced dead at a hospital. /gsg

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Anxiety and impatience in long wait for Hurricane Dorian in coastal US

VERO BEACH, Fla.  – Two days after storm shutters started going up and people waited in long lines for gas and food in anticipation of Hurricane Dorian, the parking lot of a Home Depot a short drive from the beach in central Florida was nearly empty as the sun peeked out behind scattered clouds.

Mike Lafferty boarded up his house near Vero Beach days ago and was at the store to pick up a few more things. The waiting can be bothersome, but it beats being caught unprepared.

The National Hurricane Center has a 60% chance of the area getting hurricane force winds before early Wednesday.

“It’s not overkill. It’s necessity. You don’t know what is going to happen,” Lafferty said. “Electricity is going to go out sometime. You have to be ready for it.”

From Florida to North Carolina, residents and government officials have been preparing for possible impacts of Dorian for days, even as the official forecast has the center of the storm staying offshore.

They started taking action Sunday. South Carolina ordered about 830,000 people to evacuate the state’s coast beginning at noon EDT Monday.

The Category 5 hurricane’s nearly unprecedented strength — the 185 mph (295 kph) winds made it the second strongest storm in the Atlantic Ocean since 1950 — has people aware that even a tiny error in the forecast could be catastrophic.

“We have to be ready for it,” said Neil Baxley, commander of emergency services in coastal South Carolina’s Beaufort County. “We are deep in the error cone.”

The gas lines and people queued up with carts outside grocery stores weren’t seen Sunday along the southeast U.S. coast.

Instead, people were watching and waiting to see the destruction from the northern Bahamas, where Dorian made landfall on the Abaco Islands.

“I’m thanking God now that it has turned a little more to the east. But that’s a forecast. We never know,” said Kevin Browning, who was at the Vero Beach Home Depot looking for supplies after putting up his hurricane shutters Friday. “I feel for the Bahamas and I’m praying for them.”


Florida’s governor suspended tolls on roads to help those seeking to leave.

Farther up the coast, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said state troopers would start reversing lanes on major coastal roads so they all head inland Monday afternoon.

Many of South Carolina’s coastal residents are now evacuating for the fourth time in four years. Just one storm hit the state directly during that time — Matthew in 2016. McMaster addressed the storm weariness on Sunday evening as he announced the upcoming evacuations.

“We can’t make everybody happy. But we believe we can keep everyone alive,” the governor said.

Earlier in the day, McMaster said he understood the frustration with the waiting and uncertainty of Dorian’s path.

“We don’t have a solid prediction as to where it might turn, where it might not turn when it will get here. But we assure you we have the best minds and the most experienced and talented people working around the clock,” McMaster said.

In Florida, it was still the Labor Day holiday weekend, so folks headed to the beach. It wasn’t as crowded as usual at Jacksonville Beach, and members of the American Red Cross Volunteer Life Saving Corps were warning people not to go into the water.

“It looks like business as usual, which is a little strange, but a lot of people are here from out of town they don’t want the storm to ruin their Labor Day weekend,” said volunteer lifeguard Mikey Atkins.

Gerry Heister has lived in Florida for 35 years and seen a lot of storms come through Vero Beach. “Frances, Jeanne, Matthew and whatever the heck the others were,” she said Sunday, trying to recall them all.

She said she has learned it is better to be prepared and the worst not happen then to be surprised and not ready.


“You just prepare and then once it’s gone, you get on with the rest of your life,” Heister said. /gsg

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Millions in US prepare for potentially catastrophic Florence

RALEIGH, N.C. — Millions of Americans are preparing for what could become one of the most catastrophic hurricanes to hit the Eastern Seaboard in decades.

Hurricane Florence is carrying winds of up to 140 mph as a Category 4 storm. It is expected to strengthen and possibly become a Category 5 storm Tuesday before closing in on North or South Carolina on Thursday.


Mandatory evacuations have been issued for parts of South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia, including the entire coast of South Carolina.

Since reliable record-keeping began more than 150 years ago, North Carolina has been hit by only one Category 4 hurricane: Hazel, with 130 mph winds, in 1954.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

So far, cellphone networks have weathered Harvey

NEW YORK —Roads, refineries and other infrastructure have taken a beating in the Texas and Louisiana regions hit by Harvey — but cellphone networks so far remain largely functional.

One reason: Big carriers brought in supplemental equipment and backup power and turned to drones to diagnose problems.

Four Gulf Coast counties northeast of Corpus Christi, Texas, had more than half of their cell towers knocked out earlier in the week, but crews have been able to restore many of them. As of Thursday, one of the most heavily hit areas, Aransas County, reported 32 percent of its 28 towers out.

That’s down from 95 percent right after the weekend’s storm, according to data from the Federal Communications Commission.

Throughout the affected region, slightly less than 4 percent of cell towers were out.

While cellphone services fared well, hundreds of thousands of people lost landline or other wired phone services, according to the FCC. Some 911 centers had to transfer calls to neighboring centers, while some television stations lost broadcast capabilities.

Here’s a look at communications in the affected regions.

Cellphone Services

All told, the devastating storm knocked out fewer than 400 of the 7,804 cell towers in the affected counties; just 296 were down as of Thursday. By contrast, Hurricane Katrina disabled more than 1,000 cell towers in 2005.

Cell towers typically have backup batteries and generators so they can keep operating in a power outage. The problem comes when generators run out of fuel. Verizon spokeswoman Karen Schulz said crews prepared by topping off all generators ahead of the storm. The company also bought spare fuel and had refueling trucks on standby at key locations.

In a few cases, there’s been damage to the fiber lines that connect cell towers to communications centers. In such cases, it might be possible to get a signal, but the data isn’t going anywhere. Schulz said Verizon has microwave technology to temporarily bridge those gaps.

Verizon and AT&T have both sent out drones to assess damage at cell towers. Crews are still necessary for repairs, but the drone inspections allow companies to determine whether a tower simply needs refueling or requires extensive repair. Cellphone companies also sent truck-based mobile cell towers to areas needing greater capacity.

Emergency Services

As of Thursday, only 7 of the region’s 911 centers were out of service, all in Texas, although all were able to reroute calls to neighboring call centers. That’s down from 11 on Wednesday.

Four of those centers still aren’t able to get callers’ location information automatically, which can be a problem if the caller is unable to speak. Earlier in the week, two centers were down completely, but both have since been restored.

The bigger problem is call volume. Many callers in the Houston area were placed on hold until a dispatcher was free, said Trey Forgety of the nonprofit National Emergency Number Association. In a few cases, callers got busy signals.

“We’re part of the telephone era, so if you want to move calls around (to neighboring centers), you have to go physically rewire things,” he said.

Wired Services

The FCC said that at the peak of the outage, at least 283,000 households lost wired phone services — both traditional landlines and internet phones such as cable. That was down to about 270,000 by Thursday, a slight uptick from Wednesday. In comparison, Katrina knocked out more than 3 million phone lines.

People are far less dependent on wired phone services these days. U.S. households with only cellphone service hit a majority for the first time in the second half of 2016, according to a government survey.

Broadcast Services

The FCC said two Texas television stations — KFDM and KBTV in Beaumont — were out of service as of Thursday, one less than the day before. The outages appeared to affect only over-the-air broadcasts, as the stations streamed their channels online.
Several radio stations also lost service — nine as of Thursday, all in Texas. Five stations were down on Wednesday.

source: technology.inquirer.net

In Hurricane Patricia’s wake, torrential rains move into Louisiana

HOUSTON - Torrential rainstorms battered Louisiana on Sunday, leaving thousands without power, after pounding southeastern Texas as the remnants of Hurricane Patricia converged with a second storm.

The heaviest band of rain moved over the Gulf of Mexico, triggering coastal flood warnings and flash flood watches in southwest Louisiana and soaking New Orleans, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

About 22,000 people were left without power in the greater New Orleans area. Some streets were flooded, while a high tide surge brought some coastal flooding as well.

Rainfall has totaled as much as 7 inches (18 cm) since late Saturday night, and forecasters predicted another 5 inches (13 cm) could fall. The NWS said waterspouts over lakes and tornados over land were both possible into the early morning hours.

"Most of the heavier rain to the west of New Orleans will taper off in the evening ... and for far eastern Louisiana it will probably end closer to midnight," said NWS forecaster Gavin Phillips.

The NWS issued a tornado watch for southeastern Louisiana and coastal Mississippi into early Monday, and warned that severe thunderstorms could develop in the region.

A tornado touched down near the community of Larose, about 45 minutes south of New Orleans, though no serious damage was reported.

Tides along the southern coast of Louisiana were expected to be a few feet above normal at high tide due to sustained winds, likely flooding roads in lower-lying areas, Phillips said.

More than 9 inches (23 cm) of rain swelled rivers and flooded roads around Houston, but no injuries or deaths were reported as flash flood warnings ended.

Petroleum refineries along the US Gulf Coast, which make up more than 40 percent of U.S. capacity, also appeared to be largely undamaged.

In the Eagle Ford and Permian Basin oil fields of south and west Texas, no major production cuts were reported. While the rains were heavy in Houston, they came after a month-long dry spell so flooding was relatively limited.

Texas withstands pummeling

The storms over the past two days drenched a large swath from south of Dallas to the southeast coast, triggering flash flooding in Navarro County, about 50 miles (80 km) south of Dallas, on Saturday.

A Union Pacific freight train carrying cement derailed in Navarro County after a creek overflowed, washing out the tracks. Locomotives and rail cars were pushed on their sides, and a two-person crew was forced to swim to safety.

Repair teams cleared the derailed cars by Sunday morning, but they were not expected to be righted for several hours and the rail line was not due to reopen until Monday at the earliest, Union Pacific spokesman Jeff DeGraff said.

Navarro County was one of the hardest-hit areas. The tiny town of Powell got 20 inches (50 cm) of rain over 30 hours, said meteorologist Brett Rathbun of Accuweather.

Navarro County Sheriff Elmer Tanner reported dozens of rescues from vehicles, homes and businesses since Friday.

In San Antonio, a woman reported her boyfriend was swept into a drainage ditch as he walked his dog early Saturday.

The force of the water washed him out of the underground ditch and he passed out, the San Antonio Fire Department said on Twitter. He later came to and called authorities.

The rain was strengthened by the remnants of Patricia, which was downgraded to a tropical depression after crashing into Mexico's west coast on Friday as a powerful hurricane. —Reuters