Slow-moving Hurricane Sandy, a late season Atlantic storm unlike anything seen in more than two decades, slogged toward the US East Coast yesterday after killing at least 31 people on a trail of destruction across the Caribbean.
Forecasters said the storm, with an expanding wind field already 890 kilometres wide, had begun merging with a polar air mass over the eastern US, potentially spawning a “hybrid” super storm that could wreak havoc along the US East Coast.
“Its structure is evolving as we speak because it’s interacting with this weather feature at higher levels of the atmosphere,” said Todd Kimberlain, a forecaster at the US National Hurricane Centre in Miami.
“The models are suggesting that the storm could actually become better organised or intensify a little bit, not due to the normal processes than we would expect for a tropical cyclone but more related this weather feature,” Kimberlain said.
Most of Florida was under a tropical storm warning, and watches extended up the US coast through North Carolina.
Winds and rains generated by Sandy were being felt in south Florida.
Late Thursday, Sandy weakened to a Category 1 storm as it tore through sparsely populated low-lying south-eastern islands in the Bahamas, knocking out power and blowing rooftops off some homes.
One storm-related death was reported in the Bahamas. Police said it was under investigation, but it occurred in Lyford Cay, a wealthy enclave of New Providence island that is home to the likes of actor Sean Connery, hedge fund billionaire Louis Bacon and Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard.
Sandy’s driving rains and heavy winds were blamed for a number of deaths elsewhere in the Caribbean.
The Cuban Government said Sandy killed 11 people when it barrelled across the island on Thursday.
At least 16 other lives were lost in deeply impoverished Haiti and three people were killed in the neighbouring Dominican Republic and Jamaica.
The Haitian dead included a family of five in Grand-Goave, west of the capital Port-au-Prince, killed in a landslide that destroyed their home, authorities said.
The Cuban fatalities were unusual for the communist ruled country that has long prided itself on protecting its people from storms by ordering mass evacuations.
The National Hurricane Centre said Sandy was about 770 kilometres south-southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, yesterday morning and packing maximum sustained winds of 130 kilometres per hour by the afternoon.