#Hurricane track dorian torrent#

Trump sent his tweet about Alabama on 1 September, by which time forecasts made clear it was not in danger. I accept the Fake News apologies!”īut the map is dated 28 August at 08.06 EDT. As you can see, almost all models predicted it to go through Florida also hitting Georgia and Alabama. The president wrote: “This was the originally projected path of the Hurricane in its early stages. The map has a “South Florida Water Management District” logo in the bottom corner. This one showed numerous, multicoloured lines projecting the path of Dorian. On Wednesday night, apparently stung by the criticism, Trump tweeted another hurricane map. Bill Kristol, the director of Defending Democracy Together and a conservative critic of Trump, posted sarcastically: “Who among us hasn’t altered a National Hurricane Center forecast with a Sharpie?” Some saw the episode as the latest in the Trump administration’s war on reality. The original NHC map, showing the probable path of the storm, can still be seen online. “But that was the original chart,” he said.

In his Oval Office remarks, the president argued that on the “original chart”, Dorian was going to hit Florida directly “and that would have affected a lot of other states”. The system will remain too far east.”īut Trump is not one to admit he was wrong, whether over crowd sizes or how much of his border wall has been built. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. Just 20 minutes later, the National Weather Service in Birmingham, Alabama, tweeted: “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. One mistakenly warned that Alabama would be impacted, potentially spreading panic.

#Hurricane track dorian torrent#

Over the weekend, as Dorian bore down on and then brutally struck the Bahamas, the president issued a torrent of tweets. According to the Washington Post, when he was asked about the doctored map later on Wednesday, Trump said his briefings had included a “95% chance probability” that Alabama would be hit.Īsked if the chart had been drawn on, he insisted: “I don’t know, I don’t know.”Ġ1:50 Aerial footage from Bahamas shows Hurricane Dorian destruction – video The hamfisted, homespun addition triggered uproar on social media and a frenzy of speculation over whether the president himself, or perhaps some lackey eager to impress, was responsible.Īltering official government weather forecasts is against the law. It was apparently a belated effort to justify Trump’s previous baseless claim that the latter state could be affected. At one point, the president held up a National Hurricane Center (NHC) map from 29 August, displaying the hurricane’s track and intensity.īizarrely, someone had apparently used a Sharpie, a kind of marker pen, to add a black loop falsely extending the hurricane’s path from Florida to Alabama. In the Oval Office at lunchtime on Wednesday, Donald Trump held a briefing on Hurricane Dorian.