Hurricane Joaquin Upgraded to a Category 4

Hurricane Warnings are out for the central and northern Bahamas.

“We are closely monitoring Nassau now to see where the storm is at first light… since that is where the majority of the population is located”, said Basil Dean of the Bahamas Department of Meteorology.

Even if the storm doesn’t maintain its intensity through the weekend, New Yorkers are likely to experience heavy rains and flooding into early next week, according to Forbes.

But fortunately for the Garden State, Joaquin’s center would be a few hundred miles off the Shore by that point, potentially far enough out to sea to spare the state most effects from the storm.

The final path of the hurricane will change over the next several days, but meteorologists warned anyone living along the Eastern Seaboard to prepare now.

“Joaquin is a large hurricane”, the Miami-based hurricane center pointed out.

The current track of Joaquin puts it hauntingly close where Sandy made landfall in 2015.

“At this point, it’s a powerful storm, a Category 4 storm with winds 130 miles per hour”.

“Confidence in the details of the forecast after 72 hours remains low”, the hurricane center said in an online forecast. Forecasters at the NHC are concerned that the northerly shift may allow Joaquin to graze the east coast.

Hurricane Joaquin, which is expected to pass the area far out in the Atlantic Ocean early Sunday, isn’t expected to affect much on land in the county, Carpenter said. “Right now they’re looking at a Tuesday time frame where maybe, if we have it, the hurricane force winds could hit the area”.

The National Weather Service has issued a flash flood watch for Western North Carolina, upstate South Carolina and northeast Georgia.

In Virginia, Governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency Wednesday for the state because of the predicted heavy rain event Thursday and Friday and the potential weekend hurricane. It also the strongest storm since Gonzalo previous year.

Update: September 30, 8:00 a.m.: Marty Bass reports that Joaquin could make landfall somewhere between the Carolinas and the Mid-Atlantic later in the week. “In the past, we did not take the worst-case scenario into full consideration”. US models and others have disagreed.

Joaquin was about 80 miles (125 kilometers) south-southeast of San Salvador.