Hurricane Dorian: Crews rescuing residents stranded in North Carolina’s Outer Banks floods

ABC News(NEW YORK) — Hurricane Dorian made landfall over Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, Friday, battering the state’s barrier islands — the Outer Banks — with torrential rain, ferocious winds and dangerous rising floodwaters.

That led to roughly 800 people being stranded on the Outer Banks’ hard-hit Ocracoke Island, where residents described the flooding as “catastrophic,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said.

Leslie Lanier, who lives on Ocracoke Island, said some residents had to climb into their attics to escape the water, ABC Raleigh station WTVD-TV reported.

 Crews flew to Ocracoke Island via helicopter Friday afternoon to begin evacuations.

Among those rescued was a 79-year-old man who needed immediate attention for a medical issue, Cooper said.

The helicopter crews will rescue anyone else who is hurt or who wants to be evacuated, the governor said. No deaths or serious injuries were reported on Friday in North Carolina.

“Please continue to send prayers to the people of Ocracoke as they have a long road ahead,” the Hyde County Sheriff’s Office said.

Meanwhile, Hatteras Island, about 35 miles away from Ocracoke Island, “is literally drowning … the flooding is insane,” said Outer Banks resident Sarah Ashley.

Ashley evacuated inland but said her husband stayed behind.

“We’re praying that these winds die down before high tide [Friday afternoon],” she told ABC News via email.

At least 250,000 homes and businesses were without power across the Carolinas and Virginia on Friday as a result of the storm, now a Category 1 hurricane.

 Dorian is expected to dump up to 8 inches of rain in northeast North Carolina through Friday night, with as much as 15 inches of total rainfall in some spots.

The combination of downpours and storm surge as high as 7 feet could cause life-threatening flash floods.

South Carolina has already seen more than 10 inches of rain since the storm barreled up the coast on Thursday.

At least 20 tornadoes were reported in the Carolinas on Thursday. One tornado ripped through Emerald Isle, North Carolina, upending mobile homes and strewing debris across the roads.

Another tornado was reported in Little River, South Carolina, where one resident told ABC Florence affiliate WPDE-TV that they heard what sounded “like a large airplane or a large train coming through.”

By Friday afternoon and evening Dorian will move out to sea, but the storm is still set to bring heavy rain to southern Virginia.

Even the Northeast will see impacts from Dorian when the storm grazes the coast with heavy rain Friday night into Saturday morning.

A coastal flood advisory was issued for parts of New Jersey, New York and coastal Connecticut, while a tropical storm warning was issued for Cape Cod and eastern Maine.

Before approaching the United States, Dorian slammed into the Bahamas on Sunday afternoon as a Category 5 hurricane, making the strongest Atlantic hurricane landfall on record.

At least 30 people have died in the Bahamas due to Dorian, but the country’s health minister told a local radio station on Thursday that the final death count will be “staggering.”

The storm hovered over the archipelago’s northern islands for nearly two days, flattening homes, submerging roads and flooding an international airport.

“Everybody’s, like, in a state of shock right now. We lost everything,” one woman said. “So right now we’re in survival mode.”

Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said Dorian left “generational devastation” across the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama, which are both in the archipelago’s northern region, east of southern Florida.

At Treasure Cay International Airport in the Abaco Islands, hundreds of desperate people waited in the intense heat Friday to leave the island on a commercial flight.

One man said he’d been waiting with his children for over four hours.

“For the first in my life I saw a dead body,” he told ABC News, as his children were shielded from the heat under an umbrella next to him. “There is no civilization no more.”

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