Parts of East Coast brace for flooding

Associated Press

Millions along the East Coast breathed a little easier Friday after forecasters said Hurricane Joaquin would probably veer out to sea. But a freakishly powerful rainstorm fueled in part by the hurricane threatened to bring ruinous flooding to parts of the Atlantic Seaboard over the weekend.

With the soil already soggy and roads swamped in places from days of rain, East Coast states braced for what forecasters said could be deadly and unprecedented downpours.

New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and parts of Maryland and Delaware were under states of emergency. Meteorologists said the Carolinas will probably get the worst of it, with 15 inches of rain in places and landslides possible in the mountains.

“It’s going to be enormous,” meteorologist Ryan Maue of Weather Bell Analytics said. “It’s going to be a slow-motion disaster.”

For days, authorities had feared that Joaquin would link up with the rainstorm, multiplying the disastrous effects. Various computer models showed the hurricane hitting North Carolina’s Outer Banks, New Jersey, New York’s Long Island or Massachusetts’ Cape Cod.

But on Friday, as Joaquin raked the Bahamas with winds of 130 mph, forecasters said it appeared the hurricane would pass well off the U.S. coast.

“It looks like we dodged a bullet this time,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said at the Jersey shore, which nevertheless got hit with street flooding nearly three years after it was devastated by Superstorm Sandy. “Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”