Update Aug. 31: Hurricane Dorian May Veer Away From Direct Hit on Florida

Hurricane Dorian strengthened as it churned toward Florida, where forecasters are trying to determine if it will stall near the coast or even fail to make landfall in the state at all.

The hurricane’s center was about 445 miles (716 kilometers) east of West Palm Beach, Florida, as of 8 a.m. New York time. Its maximum sustained winds reached near 145 miles per hour, up from 140 mph earlier, making it a Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale and “extremely dangerous,” according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.

Most forecast models now have Dorian veering away from Florida at the last minute and running up the coast, a shift from Friday’s outlook, but some are still calling for a landfall. The hurricane center has shifted the center of its track offshore, but adds that the path Dorian takes becomes “more problematic” 48 hours in the future.

At a morning press conference, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the latest forecasts appeared positive, but he encouraged Floridians not to let their guards down. He said a “bump in one direction or the other” could yet change the likelihood of impact.

“You’re still looking at significant impacts even if the storm remains hugging the coast,” he said Saturday. He said storm surge and flooding remained a serious risk, in part because the storm coincides with a periodic high tide event known as the king tides, which frequently cause sunny-day flooding in South Florida.

Looking like our great South Carolina could get hit MUCH harder than first thought. Georgia and North Carolina also. It’s moving around and very hard to predict, except that it is one of the biggest and strongest (and really wide) that we have seen in decades. Be safe!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2019

Florida’s Brevard and Martin Counties on Friday ordered mandatory evacuations for residents of their barrier island communities on the state’s east coast.

There’s an 80% chance Dorian will miss Florida and a 50% chance it spares the U.S. a direct hit completely, said Todd Crawford, chief meteorologist with the Weather Co. in Andover, Massachusetts.

Ryan Truchelut, president of Weather Tiger LLC in Tallahassee, Florida, said the latest forecasts marked “an encouraging trend, but I don’t want to call the game yet, certainly given the errors the models have had and the model whiplash over the last three or four days.”

Before menacing the East Coast, Dorian will tear through the northwestern Bahamas as a powerful Category 4 hurricane that will probably send sea levels 10 to 15 feet above normal tides and bring as much as 15 inches of rain across the islands, along with thrashing winds.

Once the storm approaches the mainland, “even if the center doesn’t make landfall, Atlantic coastal regions of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas are still expected to feel the impacts of Dorian, with multiple hours of tropical storm force and potentially hurricane-force winds, excessive rainfall, and damaging storm surge north of the storm center,” Crawford said in an email.

In 2016, Hurricane Matthew veered away from Florida without a landfall but still left massive destruction in Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina from torrential rains. Even a glancing blow could cost upwards to $7 billion in damage, Chuck Watson, a modeler with Enki Research, said on his blog.

Dorian could also make landfall in the eastern Carolinas some time Wednesday or Thursday, and rake eastern New England with rain by the end of the week, said Brett Rathbun, a meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc. in State College, Pennsylvania.

If it does come ashore in Florida, the storm may hit just north of Palm Beach County, home of the fourth-richest zip code in the U.S., based on Bloomberg data. Dorian could be about a $40 billion or $50 billion storm, according to Watson said earlier.

‘Cone of Uncertainty’

The storm could get close to President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, even if it doesn’t make landfall. Trump canceled a planned trip to Poland this weekend because of the storm.

Trump said Friday they are “thinking about Florida evacuation, but it’s a little bit too soon.” That decision will probably be made on Sunday, he told reporters as he prepared to leave for the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland.

The storm may sit over the same area “for a couple of days,” bringing prolonged flooding, and it will produce a dangerous storm surge possibly in excess of 8 feet near its landfall and to the northeast of that point, said Steve Goldstein, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s liaison to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Governor DeSantis activated 2,500 Florida National Guard troops and 1,500 more have been told to be prepared, according to a press release on Friday. More than a dozen school districts and colleges have announced they’ll close for the duration of the storm.

The governor’s office also said that tolls would be lifted in relevant areas to speed traffic along, if and when evacuations are ordered. Meanwhile, Florida Highway Patrol is escorting fuel trucks to get supplies where they are needed.

“This is a major event,” DeSantis said at a press conference Friday, noting that the track still remained highly uncertain. “We’ve just got to be prepared for all those circumstances.”

By the end of the week a second storm could develop off Africa, but it would probably spin out into the open Atlantic, Truchelut said. The hurricane center is also watching a third potential storm in the western Caribbean that could drift toward Mexico.

Florida’s electric utility companies lined up personnel and equipment in anticipation of “significant” power failures. NextEra Energy Inc. subsidiary Florida Power & Light has 13,000 workers ready to respond and said it was reaching out to utilities in other states to secure additional crews and equipment.

Some gasoline stations were starting to run empty as residents prepared for the storm and the city of Miami said it was removing dockless scooters from its streets to avoid them becoming projectiles in high winds. A few oil companies began to evacuate non-essential workers from platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, which shouldn’t affect production.

–With assistance from Sharon Cho, Mark Chediak, David Baker, Will Wade, Todd Shields, Josh Wingrove and Alyza Sebenius.