Hurricane Dorian Updates: Category 3 Storm Rakes the Carolinas

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida declared a state of emergency last Wednesday afternoon, and advised residents to have seven days’ worth of supplies on hand. There was a run on gasoline and bottled water, and the attorney general’s office was investigating hundreds of complaints of price gouging.

[With an altered map, President Trump insisted he was right on Dorian heading toward Alabama.]

By Friday, Hurricane Dorian had become a Category 4 storm over the Atlantic Ocean with winds of 130 m.p.h., and Mr. Trump approved an emergency declaration for Florida.

In the end Florida was largely spared its wrath.

But one Florida resident had died while preparing for the storm, The Associated Press reported. A 56-year-old man who was knocked to the ground from a tree Monday evening as he trimmed limbs with a chain saw in an Orlando suburb.

Bahamians in Miami are lending a hand.

The ties could not be stronger between Miami and the Bahamas, an archipelago less than 200 miles east. Bahamians settled in South Florida decades before Miami was born, building bridges and railroads and raising children who would become some of the region’s most prominent 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 his home in south Miami-Dade County to Hurricane Andrew, another Category 5 storm, in 1992. “The community pulled together. There was no 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’s infrastructure and teaching white settlers unfamiliar with the tropics how to build with coral rock, till the soil and plant tropical fruit, said Marvin 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 pineapple fields in Key West and then migrated north to Coconut Grove, which they called Kebo. Bahamians also settled in the Miami neighborhood of Overtown and in Carver Ranches, which is now part of the city of West Park, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale.