The Cyclone Erin has strengthened again, reaching category 4 yesterday Sunday, with the National Hurricane Early Warning Center (NHC) warning that damaging winds, waves and currents are threatened along the east coast of the US later this week.

The so-called eye of the cyclone was still 1,555 kilometers south-southwest of Cape Hatteras, in North Carolina, with winds of 215 kilometers per hour, according to an emergency warning issued by the center, part of the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) system.

He predicted it might “strengthen further” over the next 12 hours and then “gradually weaken.”

The extreme event will approach the Bahamas, in the Caribbean, a vast area of the North Atlantic already hit by strong winds and heavy rains in the next 24 hours, and there are risks of flooding and landslides.

In Puerto Rico, a US territory and hit hard by Cyclone Maria in 2017, more than 150,000 residents were already without power yesterday because of Erin.

The day before yesterday, Saturday, the phenomenon, the first of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, even reached as high as Category 5 – “catastrophic”, in NHC terminology – before fading to Category 3.

The Bahamas is not far from the state of Florida in the southeastern United States. The phenomenon is expected to pass south-southeast through this island nation.