Isaias grows as it crawls toward Carolinas

While Florida may have been spared the worst of Tropical Storm Isaias, that won’t be the case for the Mid-Atlantic and northeastern U.S.

Isaias was forecast to make landfall as a hurricane in the Carolinas on Monday night and will bring dangerous storm surge and flash flooding to most of the Eastern Seaboard over the next few days, the National Weather Service said.

The National Hurricane Center issued a hurricane warning from South Santee River, South Carolina, to Surf City, North Carolina, meaning winds of at least 74 mph are expected there.

“It’s forecast to produce a dangerous storm surge of 3 to 5 feet in portions of North and South Carolina,” senior hurricane specialist Daniel Brown said Monday.

Calling the surge “life threatening,” the hurricane center warned that “the combination of a dangerous storm surge and the tide will cause normally dry areas near the coast to be flooded by rising waters moving inland from the shoreline.”

Isaias – pronounced ees-ah-EE-ahs – could bring heavy rains, too – up to 8 inches in spots as it moves up the coast, Brown said, and “all those rains could produce flash flooding across portions of eastern Carolinas and mid-Atlantic, and even in the Northeast U.S.”

A tropical storm warning was in effect for a huge portion of the eastern U.S., all the way from Georgia to Massachusetts. In all, about 112 million

Americans live where a tropical storm warning is in effect, according to the Weather Service.

As of late Monday afternoon, the center of Isaias was located about 60 miles south-southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, and was moving north-northeast at 16 mph, the hurricane center said. The storm’s winds clocked in at 70 mph, which is just 4 mph below hurricane level.