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NY Times With a fearsome Hurricane Ike not far in its wake, Tropical Storm Hanna cruised ashore here overnight Saturday, bringing soaking rains and near-hurricane force winds to the Carolina coast but doing little immediate damage before pivoting quickly up the Eastern Seaboard. Officials in South Carolina and North Carolina said they had received no reports of deaths or injuries as of 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Both states experienced isolated flooding, downed trees, and beach erosion, but there were no tornadoes.
Some 53,000 customers suffered power outages in North Carolina, many of them in inland areas where rain was heaviest, and another 1,300 lost electricity in South Carolina. About 2,000 people spent the night in shelters in the two states.
"It's been an awning here, a satellite dish there," said Kelly L. Brosky, a spokeswoman for the Horry County government here, in assessing the damage. "Given that inland areas got five to six inches of rain, the flooding really hasn't been anything major."
Though not a debilitating storm, Hanna extended a two-week assault by tropical weather systems on the coastal South that began with Tropical Storm Fay's soggy trek through Florida and continued with Hurricane Gustav's landfall in Louisiana. The region had seen a relative respite since 2005, the year of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Next comes Hurricane Ike, a Category 3 storm that could still strengthen as it moves gradually through the Atlantic toward south Florida and possibly into the Gulf of Mexico. FEMA is positioning supplies, rescue crews, communications equipment and medical teams in the state, and a mandatory evacuation of the Florida Keys began on Saturday morning, when tourists were ordered to leave. Residents were to follow on Sunday.
At a Saturday morning news conference, Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida urged residents to listen for possible evacuation orders and to switch to the weather during commercials on the weekend's football games. The state has made plans to turn highways into one-way evacuation routes, he said, and is loading trucks with water and ready-to-eat meals.
The National Hurricane Center's most recent forecast has Ike blowing through the Turks and Caicos Islands on Sunday morning, skirting Cuba's northern shore on Monday, and ricocheting towards South Florida and the Keys on Tuesday. The storm had calmed from its Category 4 strength of 145 miles per hour on Thursday to 115 miles per hour Saturday morning, but could reinvigorate over warm open water.
Tropical Storm Hanna, which caused more than 100 deaths in Haiti earlier in the week, fell just short of hurricane strength when it made landfall along the North Carolina-South Carolina border at 3:20 a.m. The hurricane center measured its sustained winds at 70 miles per hour, just short of the 74 m.p.h. needed to qualify as a hurricane.
After sunrise Saturday, winds had dropped to 50 miles per hour. Tropical storm warnings and watches stretched from North Carolina to Massachusetts and Hanna's effects promised to dampen the weekend throughout much of the seaboard.
Unlike Fay and Gustav, Hanna moved quickly, at 20 miles per hour, not lingering long enough to drop the kind of rain typically required for heavy flooding. North Carolina officials expected up to eight inches in some areas before the storm passed into Virginia, but said flooding had been minor. Indeed, much of the region has been suffering from drought, making the three to six inches that fell in some areas welcome.
Officials in North Carolina and South Carolina had encouraged evacuations of low-lying coastal areas, but not mandated them, and most residents and business owners regarded the storm casually.
Bars and restaurants remained open in the tourist strand stretching south of here, though hotel owners reported heavy cancellations. Most homeowners in the "shabby-chic" beach towns to the north did not bother to board their windows. Couples kept their plans for Saturday night weddings in the sand.
Lane E. Larsen, 62, a retiree who lives in nearby Little River, said he and his family woke up about 3 a.m. and decided to watch the storm from the comfort of their back-deck hot tub. "We were having a good old time," he said. "I was thinking about boarding up, but it's a lot of work and I tend to be lazy."
On Saturday morning, with the wind still whipping and the surf roiling, beachcombers strolled the flattened sand in search of shark's teeth and shells washed up by the storm.
John F. Arthur, a 53-year-old printer from North Myrtle Beach, came armed with a shovel and metal detector to search for buried treasure. He said he had visited the beach at midnight to feel the salt spray and wind-whipped sand.
"It just didn't come in with what I call a right hook," he said. "This one was more like a tourist attraction."
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