Hurricane Dorian made landfall on the Outer Banks of North Carolina today, hitting the beach resort area with powerful winds and battering waves days after reducing parts of the Bahamas to rubble.
The storm, packing 150km winds (90mph winds) made landfall at Cape Hatteras this afternoon, according to the National Hurricane Centre.
It has already dumped up to 10 inches (25cm) of rain along the coast between Charleston, South Carolina, to Wilmington, North Carolina, about 275km (170 miles) away, forecasters said.
Dorian is expected to push out to sea later today and bring tropical storm winds to Nantucket Island and Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, early tomorrow.
But it will likely spare much of the rest of the east coast the worst of its rain and wind, before likely making landfall in Canada's Nova Scotia that night, the NHC said.
The howling west flank of Dorian has soaked the Carolinas since yesterday, flooding coastal towns, whipping up more than a dozen tornadoes and cutting power to hundreds of thousands of people.
Floodwaters rose to a foot (30cm) or more in parts of the South Carolina port city of Charleston, where more than seven inches (18cm) of rain fell in some areas, officials said.
More than 330,000 homes and businesses were without power in North Carolina and South Carolina this morning.
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But as Dorian is expected to pick up speed from its 22km (14mph) crawl today, life-threatening storm surges and dangerous winds remain a threat for much of the area and Virginia, the National Hurricane Centre said.
Governors in the region declared states of emergency, shut schools, opened shelters, readied National Guard troops and urged residents to heed warnings, as news media circulated fresh images of the storm's devastation in the Bahamas.
At least 70,000 Bahamians needed immediate humanitarian relief after Dorian became the most damaging storm ever to hit the island nation.
In the Carolinas alone, more than 900,000 people had been ordered to evacuate their homes. It was unclear how many did so.
Of at least four storm-related deaths reported in the United States, three were in Orange County, Florida, during storm preparations or evacuation, the mayor's office said.
In North Carolina, an 85-year-old man fell off a ladder while barricading his home for Dorian, the governor said.
