Hurricane Dorian has made landfall on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, hitting the beach resort area with powerful winds and battering waves days after reducing parts of the Bahamas to rubble.
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The storm, packing 150km/h winds, made landfall at Cape Hatteras at about 9am local time on Friday, according to the National Hurricane Center.
It lashed the Outer Banks with hurricane-force winds as far as 72km from the centre of the hurricane and sent tropical storm winds farther than 320km from its centre, the NHC said.
It has already dumped up to 25cm of rain along the coast between Charleston, South Carolina, to Wilmington, North Carolina, about 275 km away, forecasters said.
"The rain is moving up north," National Weather Service forecaster Alex Lamers said early on Friday.
"Even the Raleigh-Durham area inland will get 3 inches today."
Dorian is expected to push out to sea later on Friday and bring tropical storm winds to Nantucket Island and Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, early on Saturday.
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.
"It's in the process of moving out, going north," Lamers said.
The howling west flank of Dorian has soaked the Carolinas since early Thursday, flooding coastal towns, whipping up more than a dozen tornadoes and cutting power to hundreds of thousands of people.
Floodwaters rose to 30cm or more in parts of the historic South Carolina port city of Charleston, where more than 18cm of rain fell in some areas, officials said.
More rain was expected overnight Friday.
More than 330,000 homes and businesses were without power in North Carolina and South Carolina on Friday morning.
Power had mostly been restored to thousands of people in Georgia, tracking site poweroutage.us showed.
But as Dorian is expected to pick up speed from its 22km/h crawl on Friday, life-threatening storm surges and dangerous winds remain a threat for much of the area and Virginia, the National Hurricane Center 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.
Australian Associated Press
