Hurricane Dorian Hits North Carolina Coast as Storm Reaches US

Hurricane Dorian made landfall in North Carolina on Friday morning, hitting the beach resort area with powerful winds and battering waves. It is advancing slowly northward like a "Category 1" storm, although it still has 90-miles-per-hour winds.

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The National Hurricane Center (NHC) announced that Dorian traveled at 14 miles per hour as it was moving to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, a state whose coastline will suffer from its effects during the next few hours.

More than 330,000 homes and businesses were without power in the Carolinas on Friday  morning. A few hours later, however, power had mostly been restored to thousands of people in Georgia.

The trajectory pattern indicates that Dorian's eye will pass over North Carolina in a northwest direction and move over the southern tip of New England on Friday night.

It will arrive in Nova Scotia (Canada) on Saturday afternoon or evening. By that time, Dorian is expected to become a "post-tropical cyclone."

Currently, its "hurricane winds" extend 45 miles from its center; its "tropical storm force winds", however, have a radius of 220 miles.

While Dorian continues its journey along the east coast of the United States, the tropical storm Gabrielle became a tropical post-cyclone in the eastern Atlantic. Nevertheless, there is a 70 percent chance that Gabrielle, while advancing at 17 miles per hour in a west-northwest direction, regains her previous condition over this weekend.

On Friday morning, this tropical post-cycle was more than 1,000 miles southwest of the Azores islands and had maximum sustained winds of 40 miles per hour.

According to U.S. statistics, although the number of hurricanes in the North Atlantic has remained stable in recent decades, the intensity of these climatic processes has increased.

Dorian is the first "category 5 hurricane" since 2016. Before, between 2003 and 2007, there were eight category-5 hurricanes, one of them was Katrina which devastated New Orleans in 2005.