Tropical Storm Debby brought unrelenting rain to the US Southeast as it drifted off the Carolinas on Wednesday morning, threatening the region with dangerous flooding before picking up speed in the coming days and racing towards the Northeast.
At least six people have died in Florida and Georgia in the wake of the storm, which barged into Florida’s Gulf Coast on Monday as a Category 1 storm and raced north. It is expected to menace the southeastern and mid-Atlantic coasts for days.
Governors in the Carolinas, Florida and Georgia have declared a state of emergency. The storm has already left neighbourhoods and communities under water with widespread flooding washing out streets and inundating homes across the region.
“This is certainly an extreme rainfall event … so in that respect the flooding has been something that we haven’t seen in many years,” said Neil Dixon, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Charleston, South Carolina, noting that daily rainfall records have been broken in the area.
The storm could deliver another 3 to 9 inches of rainfall to the Carolina coast, the National Weather Service said. That would bring rain totals to 25 inches in South Carolina and 15 inches in southeast North Carolina near Wilmington and coastal Georgia.
The system was packing sustained winds as high as 75kmph early Wednesday morning, the service said, warning coastal residents from the South Santee River in South Carolina to Cape Fear, North Carolina, to be prepared for a dangerous storm surge. But Debby’s greatest threat was the sheer volume of rain it could dump on the Eastern Seaboard and the potential for flooding that would follow into next week.
“Rivers won’t crest for another few days,” Dixon said. “We’re still a couple of days away from pretty noteworthy river flooding.”
The storm, which was creeping at 5mph on Wednesday morning, should pick up speed on Thursday, bringing 3 to 7 inches of rain to eastern Virginia through Friday. A heavy soaking is expected in the north from Maryland to upstate New York by the weekend.