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Hurricane Dorian Updates: Category 2Storm Slams CarolinasThe Carolinas were being hit by heavy rain, strong winds and even sometornadoes. Forecasters warned of storm surge of up to eight feet in places.More than 200,000 customers were without power.

By Richard Fausset and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

RIGHT NOW Hurricane Dorian, a Category 2 storm, is about 55 miles east ofCharleston, S.C., with winds of up to 110 m.p.h.

Here s̓ what you need to know:

Dorian lashes the Carolinas, heading toward the Outer Banks.

The wind howls through Charleston, as it watches for rising water.

Tornadoes were spinning off the storm in North Myrtle Beach and Wilmington.

The death toll in the Bahamas has risen to 23.

Four hurricanes later, the ocean s̓ allure stays strong.

Dorian lashes the Carolinas, heading toward the Outer Banks.Hurricane Dorian was pounding much of the Carolina coast with heavy rain and strong winds on Thursday, spawning small tornadoesand causing widespread power losses and flooding.

By early Thursday afternoon, the Category 2 storm was about 55 miles from Charleston, S.C., as it continues its creep up the East Coast,according to the National Hurricane Center. And while the eye of the storm has so far remained offshore, the center’s models show it couldpossibly make landfall on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on Friday.

The center of a storm does not have to make landfall to cause serious damage, and hurricane-strength winds began to pummel parts of theSouth Carolina coast on Thursday. Forecasters said storm surge waters could flood up to eight feet in some areas.

Dorian’s rain bands were whipping cities from Savannah, Ga., to Wilmington, N.C., and places along the coast could receive as much as 15inches of rain before the storm departs. Approximately 360,000 South Carolinians have been evacuated from their homes. The storm hasalready knocked out power for about 200,000 customers in South Carolina, as well as 9,000 in North Carolina and 7,000 in Georgia

The wind howls through Charleston, as it watches for rising water.The wind began howling and groaning in Charleston around 2 a.m., bending trees to its will, downing power lines and toppling trees.

By daybreak, it felt as though the storm had fully arrived. Streets were flooding, and local TV forecasters, urging people to remain in theirhomes, warned that the worst of the storm would be felt in Charleston through at least noon. Charleston County government officialsordered residents to stay off high-span bridges, given sustained winds of more than 30 miles per hour. City government posted a runningonline tally of flooded and impassible streets.

“Remember, TURN AROUND, DON’T DROWN,” the Charleston Police tweeted.

HurricaneDorian Live updates Map tracker Crisis in Bahamas Q. and A. Photos How to help

Charleston has accrued deep hurricane experience in recent years, as well as deep scars — particularly from Hurricane Hugo, which hitthe city hard in September 1989. At the time, computer storm tracking was not as sophisticated as it is today, and social media did notexist. Many residents were caught unprepared as the storm toppled buildings or blew them away.

Hurricane Hugo killed 35 people in South Carolina, and damaged or destroyed more than 21,000 homes statewide. According to the authorBrian Hicks, it also marked a turning point in Charleston history. With many older, less steady buildings damaged beyond repair, JoeRiley, the mayor at the time, saw an opportunity with so many patches of blank canvas to fill in and helped revitalize the city.

Tornadoes were spinning off the storm in North Myrtle Beach and Wilmington.At least two tornadoes had touched down in North Myrtle Beach, S.C., Pat Dowling, the city’s public information officer, said.

One of the tornadoes was “pretty sizable,” he said, and though it damaged a couple of condominium buildings and a mobile park near theIntracoastal Waterway, there were no injuries and everybody was safe.

The outer bands of Hurricane Dorian were also reaching north to Wilmington, N.C., slamming the area with heavy rain and winds — andcausing at least one tornado.

Streets began to flood in Charleston. Johnny Milano for The New York Times

NWS Wilmington NC@NWSWilmingtonNC

Video of a tornado passing near Pender County Fire Station 18 along Highway 17 near Sidbury Rd. Video courtesty of Station 18. Time was around 6:55-7:00 AM EDT Thursday Sept 5, 2019

Dorian’s center was far away, but its tropical-storm-force winds extended nearly 200 miles from its center, and its effects could be felt inWilmington, a port city of about 122,000 on North Carolina’s southeastern coast. The National Weather Service’s local office warned thateven if the eye avoids landfall, the city would experience winds equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane.

Thursday would be a day of “high risk for flash flooding in southeastern North Carolina, and we know too well that floodwaters can bedeadly,” Gov. Roy Cooper said Wednesday.

On Wednesday Mr. Cooper announced that an 85-year-old man in Columbus County had died after falling off a ladder while preparing forthe storm.

Wilmington is under a storm surge warning through Sunday morning, and forecasters said water could rise between four and seven feet insome areas. Many of the neighborhoods along Cape Fear River, which flows through the city toward Fayetteville, were expected to flood.

Officials in New Hanover County, which includes Wilmington, said a shelter at an elementary school had filled up but that two others stillhad room.

Wilmington is no stranger to hurricanes. Hurricane Florence dumped rain on the city and swelled its rivers in 2018, essentially cutting itoff from the rest of the state. Residents lost electricity for several days.

And residents still recall the devastation from Hurricane Matthew in 2016, which turned streets into rivers and took many residents bysurprise.

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The death toll in the Bahamas has risen to 23.Days after Hurricane Dorian, one of the strongest Atlantic storms on record, bore down on the Bahamas, a fuller picture from the groundhas emerged, and with it, harrowing stories of survival.

Even as officials were taking stock of the storm’s toll Thursday — at least 23 people were dead — relatives of some residents of the AbacoIslands, in the north of the archipelago, were beginning to slowly reunite with their loved ones.

Sandra Cooke, a resident of Nassau, said that during the storm, a roof on an Abaco Islands building had collapsed on her sister-in-law. Herbrother couldn’t find his wife at first, but the family dog eventually detected her in the rubble. When there was a break in the storm,neighbors helped free her.

Ms. Cooke was reunited with her sister-in-law on Tuesday.

“She was trapped under the roof for 17 hours,” said Ms. Cooke, a resident of Nassau, on Wednesday, adding that she had hired a privatehelicopter service to take the rescued woman to Nassau.

[Read more about the stories of survival, and of loss, in the Bahamas.]

Four hurricanes later, the oceans̓ allure stays strong.A first-person account from Chris Dixon, an author and journalist.

I engaged in a grim ritual with my neighbors on Wednesday, sweating and cursing under a broiling Charleston sun while draping sheets ofplywood across the windows on my house. For the fourth time since 2016, I was preparing for a hurricane: Matthew, Irma, Florence andnow Dorian.

Depending on your point of view, I am lucky or unlucky enough to live on a tidal creek near Folly Beach, S.C. When hurricanes and tropicalstorms strafe our coast, their winds roar across the several miles of harbor and normally placid marsh that separate our neighborhoodfrom the Sullivan’s Island Lighthouse. As the tides rise, these winds pile seawater into wave-driven surge and batter the homes in my

A tree was downed by a tornado on Thursday in Wilmington, N.C. Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

neighborhood.

Yanking a splinter from my thumb, I asked myself, Why do I live here?

I should know better. When I was young, my great-aunt Ethel told frightful tales of Hurricane Hazel’s 1954 destruction of the Carolinacoast. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo upended my life by destroying my home in Surfside Beach, north of Charleston. Two years ago, I gasped asthe tides from Hurricane Irma casually carried a foot of marsh into my house while sweeping tons of my yard out to sea. And last year,while covering Hurricane Florence for The New York Times, I spent many tense hours among people who were in the process of losingeverything.

So why do I choose to live in this slowly drowning port city? Why endure the annual stress of possibly losing everything? Why constantlycheck computer models before frantically hauling everything inside, boarding up, driving for safety and then waiting for interminablehours while glued to The Weather Channel?

Because the ocean is my family’s life and my livelihood. My wife grew up in Dana Point, Calif., with the Pacific in her backyard andsaltwater in her veins. I grew up in Atlanta but had the great fortune of spending my summers along this Carolina coast — sailing, fishingand, eventually, having my life taken over by surfing.

It sounds cliché, but when your entire life comes to revolve around the ocean, it becomes almost impossible to imagine living any otherway. You come to define life not by the hours on the clock, but by the ebb and flow of the tides and the rhythm of the winds and swells. Youbecome deeply enmeshed in a culture of shrimpers, crabbers, divers and surfers. You watch your kids come to revere the ocean andrespect its moods and its power. You manage to make a living writing about the ocean. You catch a perfect wave from a hurricane-spawned groundswell at your local break.

After a close call, Florida stands down and offers to help its neighbors.“I want to thank all Floridians for hanging in there during what was a frustrating process,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Thursday. “This wasa storm where we had a cone of uncertainty last week covering almost the entire state of Florida.”

He said the state’s emergency operations based in Tallahassee, the capital, would shut down but his administration would be ready toassist Georgia or the Carolinas as needed.

Mr. DeSantis also said he would be willing to send National Guard troops to the Bahamas if the federal government deems that helpful.Florida will also send bottles of water to the islands. The water will expire in the coming months, and if another storm threatened Florida,the state would have no problem backfilling its supply stocks, the governor said.

“I don’t want that to go to waste if we have the ability to use that to help some folks,” he said.

And he urged Floridians to keep any vacation plans they might have to the many Bahamian islands that were not hit by Dorian.

“Canceling those plans doesn’t help them in their recovery,” he said.

Bahamians in Miami are also lending a hand.The ties could not be stronger between Miami and the Bahamas, an archipelago less than 200 miles east. Bahamians settled in SouthFlorida decades before Miami was born, building bridges and railroads and raising children who would become some of the region’s mostprominent leaders. This week, their descendants, many veterans of devastating hurricanes, gathered across South Florida to lend a hand.

“When we were desperate, people came to our rescue,” said Charles Bethel, 68, a retired state juvenile justice administrator who lost hishome in south Miami-Dade County to Hurricane Andrew, another Category 5 storm, in 1992. “The community pulled together. There wasno sense of division. Now, we are doing the same.”

[Bahamian descendants in Miami are helping the battered nation.]

Miami owes its very beginnings to residents from there. Bahamian laborers worked in construction and agriculture, creating the city’sinfrastructure and teaching white settlers unfamiliar with the tropics how to build with coral rock, till the soil and plant tropical fruit, saidMarvin Dunn, a retired college professor who chronicled local history in his book “Black Miami in the Twentieth Century.”

Bahamians started to arrive in the 1880s, following an economic downturn on the islands, Dr. Dunn said. Many went to work in pineapplefields in Key West and then migrated north to Coconut Grove, which they called Kebo. Bahamians also settled in the Miami neighborhoodof Overtown and in Carver Ranches, which is now part of the city of West Park, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale.

On Wednesday in Miami, volunteers gathered in houses of worship, dripping with sweat as they sorted through heavy boxes and bags.Stacks of water bottles. Heaps of diapers. Baby formula. A chain saw. So many donations came in that Christ Episcopal ran out of pallets.

Reporting was contributed by Patricia Mazzei, Nick Madigan, Adeel Hassan, Sarah Mervosh, Kirk Semple, Frances Robles, Rachel Knowles and Elisabeth Malkin.

Richard Fausset is a correspondent based in Atlanta. He mainly writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice. Hepreviously worked at the Los Angeles Times, including as a foreign correspondent in Mexico City. @RichardFausset

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on national news. He is from upstate New York and previously reported in Baltimore, Albany, and Isla Vista, Calif. @nickatnews

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Volunteers in Miami organized donations for storm victims in the Bahamas. Saul Martinez for The New York Times