Tropical Storm Oscar is expected to avoid the biggest population centers in the Bahamas and keep going through the Atlantic, bringing heavy rain to Bermuda later this week.
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00:00Oscar is still spinning. This is a pretty disembodied storm. It's really
00:03been ravaged by the mountains of eastern Cuba that have weakened the storm, but
00:08we're still dealing with max sustained winds of 40 MPH. Barometric pressure
00:11has been rising a bit as the storm weakens, but we're still facing a lot
00:14of impacts here, and it's a dangerous storm in the area around eastern Cuba
00:19because of rain. There will be a storm surge for some of the southeastern
00:23Bahamas with an area seeing 1 to 3 ft storm surge here. Keep in mind, most of
00:28the population of the Bahamas, about 285,000 people are in the area near
00:32Nassau and then another another 30,000 up your Grand Bahama Island and
00:36Freeport. So that leaves very little population in the southeastern Bahamas
00:41where this storm is going to be tracking. Still, there are some
00:43settlements there, but still overall limited impacts to human life in the
00:48path of this storm here for the southeastern Bahamas, with gusts of wind
00:52generally 40, maybe a little stronger than 40 MPH. This storm has been
00:55weakened because it's interacted with the mountains here over Cuba. But with
00:59that said, we've seen tremendous amounts of rain in Cuba, and that's the real
01:02danger here. 8 to 12 inches of rain in these mountainous areas, and we could
01:06conceivably see four inches in some of the Bahamas there, southeastern
01:09Bahamas, largely missing Nassau and Freeport, thankfully. So this storm,
01:15Oscar, does have an accurate, a real impact scale rating of two for the
01:18Caribbean, mainly with the eastern end of Cuba in mind. And we picked the
01:22storyline up here as the storm is going to be pulling north, and as Oscar
01:26drifts north, it's going to pass very close to Bermuda, and we're forecasting
01:302 to 4 inches of rain into Bermuda. So that will be a concern over the
01:35islands there. Now, Bermuda is an area where we can handle storms like this
01:39pretty well. In fact, they actually capture the rain on the rooftops, and
01:44that is something that they leverage there to their own use after the rain
01:48falls. So 2 to 4 inches in Bermuda, something to keep an eye on. The center
01:51of the storm will probably pass barely west of or near the islands, as we
01:55watch this overall steering flow. Again, some impacts coming to Bermuda, but
01:59it will be limited in overall impact. The wind's 40 to 60 miles per hour
02:04there as the storm races past the islands. But we do have some big
02:08concerns still in the southeastern part of the nation here, as we've been
02:12dealing with a lot of impacts associated with, again, pretty, not
02:16just significant hurricanes, but major hurricanes that led to devastation and
02:20a lot of damage. So, Damien, we're very concerned about the recovery that
02:23continues here. The weather is cooperating, but we know it's going to
02:27get invariably chillier as we get into winter, and some are not going to be
02:30under a sturdy roof by that point. That's right. The other issue that
02:34we're gonna be watching is, yes, even though we're seeing high pressure that's
02:37going to dominate the forecast, which is gonna mean lots of sunshine to help
02:40out with those recovery efforts, it also means that we're gonna see dry
02:43conditions. And some of these areas across the East Coast and the Northeast
02:46have been seeing the driest October of all time. So we definitely need to get
02:51some moisture out here. We definitely need to get some rainfall. But in the
02:53meantime, at least here for the East Coast, not a whole lot of rainfall to
02:56speak of here as we head throughout the next 24 to 48 hours.