Tropical Storm Danny makes landfall in South Carolina
Tropical Storm Danny made landfall in South Carolina on Monday night, bringing heavy rains to parts of the southeast, forecasters said.
Danny came ashore just north of Hilton Head, on the state's southern coast, the National Hurricane Center said in an 8 p.m. advisory.
It later weakened to a tropical depression and was producing heavy rains in parts of South Carolina and Georgia, the hurricane center said. At 11 p.m. it was in eastern Georgia and it will continue west before likely dissipating by late Tuesday, forecasters said. It had maximum sustained winds of 35 mph.
Danny became the fourth named storm of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, marking the fourth time on record that so many powerful storms have formed before July, experts said.
Around 3 inches of rain fell in parts of South Carolina by Monday by night, the National Weather Service in Charleston said. The storm could produce an additional 1 to 2 inches of rain, forecasters said.
The storm comes one week after Tropical Storm Claudette battered the Gulf Coast, dumping more than a foot of rain in some places and causing a car crash in Alabama that killed 10 people. Nine of the victims were children.
Last year saw 30 named tropical cyclones form in the Atlantic Ocean, a record in the nearly four decades that scientists have been tracking the storms via satellites. Atlantic storms are named when winds reach speeds of 39 mph.
Although researchers believe climate change is driving the intensity of these storms, debate remains over why the number of storms has risen steadily since 1972.
