Houses collapse in North Carolina from Imelda as Bermuda braces for hurricane's impacts

Five homes on North Carolina’s Outer Banks collapsed amid warnings of dangerous surf as a pair of hurricanes passed far off the U.S. East Coast, officials said Tuesday, and authorities in Bermuda said that the worst was yet to come.

Hurricane Humberto was already affecting Bermuda with winds of around 25 mph, Phil Rogers, director of the Bermuda Weather Service, said in a briefing early Tuesday afternoon.

But behind Humberto was Hurricane Imelda, which strengthened to a Category 1 storm Tuesday and was expected to bring hurricane conditions Wednesday night into Thursday, officials said.

Of the two, Imelda is “the storm of greatest concern to us,” said Michael Weeks, Bermuda’s minister of national security.

“Bermuda, I cannot overstate the seriousness of this threat,” he said.

The storm is to bring hurricane-force winds for four to six hours overnight Wednesday into Thursday, Weeks said.

Neither Humberto nor Imelda hit the U.S., and they stayed out to sea. Imelda was centered east of Florida and was forecast to keep moving northeast toward Bermuda, the National Hurricane Center said.

But the storms still created danger for the U.S. East Coast, bringing strong surf and rip currents, the hurricane center said.

In Buxton on the Outer Banks, five homes — all unoccupied — collapsed Tuesday afternoon, Cape Hatteras National Seashore said on Facebook. The homes collapsed between 2 p.m. and 2:45 p.m., it said. There were no injuries reported.

Two people died in Cuba due to Imelda, which earlier affected the eastern part of the island nation, Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero said late Monday. Marrero said on X that the two people died in Santiago de Cuba province, but he didn’t give any details.

Hurricane Humberto, churning in open waters, was thought to cause Imelda to abruptly turn to the east-northeast, away from the Southeastern U.S. coast.

“This is really what’s going to be saving the United States from really seeing catastrophic rainfall,” said Alex DaSilva, lead hurricane expert for AccuWeather, a private U.S. weather forecasting company.

Because the two storms were so close, they are subject to each other’s influence in a phenomenon called the Fujiwhara effect.

“It doesn’t happen that often to get two storms this close together — especially two strong ones,” Andy Hazelton, a hurricane modeler and associate scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies at the University of Miami, said earlier this week.

Officials in the Carolinas prepared for the effects of the storms on their shores.

North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein declared a state of emergency even before Imelda formed, which allows for state aid, and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said authorities were pre-positioning search-and-rescue crews.

Both hurricanes are expected to cause life-threatening swells on parts of the U.S. East Coast for the next few days, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said.

In Florida, crews found a couple of turtle hatchlings that rough surf had tossed ashore.

“We actually had two washbacks come in over the weekend,” said Justin Perrault, vice president of research at Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach. “We may get more as the day goes along.”

Imelda had maximum sustained winds of 85 mph and was around 665 miles west-southwest of Bermuda around 5 p.m. Tuesday, the hurricane center said in a bulletin. It was moving east-northeast at 12 mph.