ORLANDO, Fla. -- Tropical Storm Dorian was packing 60 mph winds Monday and had parts of Florida in its projected track, according to the National Hurricane Center.
In its afternoon advisory Monday, the center projected that Dorian will be a Category 1 hurricane with 80 mph winds by Wednesday as it passes over or near Puerto Rico. Then the storm is forecast to pass over or near the island of Hispaniola before heading toward the Bahamas and possibly to Florida.
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley closed schools and government offices across the 166-square-mile island nation as she warned people to remain indoors.
"When you're dead, you're dead," she said in a televised address late Sunday. "Stay inside and get some rest."
Winds at tropical-storm levels are expected in south Florida as early as Friday and in central Florida by Saturday, based on the forecast.
Weather experts, however, note that a lot can change in the next several days.
"I've been doing this 21 years, and I can tell you this track will change many, many times," said meteorologist Jayme King with Orlando's Fox affiliate. "It'll scare us, we'll be relieved, then we'll be scared again. It's important just to be ready to go should this come a little bit closer to the region as proposed right now."
The National Hurricane Center echoed King's sentiments.
"While uncertainty is high, wind and rain impacts are possible in the Bahamas and Florida later this week and this weekend. Residents in these areas should monitor the progress of Dorian and ensure that they have their hurricane plan in place," the hurricane center said.
As of 4 p.m. Monday, Dorian's center was about 60 miles east-southeast of Barbados and 165 miles east-southeast of St. Lucia. The storm was moving west-northwest at 14 mph with maximum sustained winds near 60 mph with higher gusts and tropical-storm-force winds extending 45 miles from its center.
A hurricane watch is in effect for St. Lucia, where Prime Minister Allen Chastanet shut down everything on the island of nearly 179,000 people Monday night. The storm was expected to hit St. Lucia early this morning.
"We are expecting the worst," he said.
Barbados, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines are under a tropical storm warning, while Puerto Rico, Dominica, Saba, St. Eustatius, Grenada and its dependencies are under a tropical storm watch.
In Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, hundreds of people have been crowding into grocery stores and gas stations to prepare for Dorian, buying food, water and generators, among other things. Many are worried about power failures and heavy rains on an island still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm that hit nearly two years ago.
The storm has developed slowly, but conditions favor it to reach hurricane strength by Wednesday, forecasters said.
"Anticipating when an eye will form is challenging, but Dorian could be a hurricane by the time it reaches the Windward Islands," hurricane center forecasters said.
While several models are used for the hurricane center's consensus cone of uncertainty, King said he's been paying close attention to the European model.
"It has very good resolution and has been in the vicinity of this track that [the hurricane center] is proposing now for the last two or three days," King said. "I've noticed that it kind of brings it in closer range to Florida during that time."
The exact path will determine how much the storm interacts with the islands in the Caribbean, and whether it will affect the storm's intensity before potentially restrengthening in the warm waters near the Bahamas.
In Dorian's immediate path, though, forecasters said the storm is likely to bring 3 to 8 inches of rain from Martinique to St. Vincent, including Barbados, with isolated totals as high as 10 inches in portions of the northern Windward Islands.
Information for this article was contributed by Roger Simmons , Lisa Maria Garza and Richard Tribou of the Orlando Sentinel; and by Danica Coto of The Associated Press.
A Section on 08/27/2019