(CBS/ AP) Tropical Storm Hanna buffeted predawn tourist beaches on the North-South Carolina border Saturday at the start of a run up the Eastern Seaboard forecast to dump heavy weekend rain from Virginia to New England.
Emergency officials were already looking past Hanna to powerful Hurricane Ike, several hundred miles out in the Atlantic. Ike, packing Category 3 hurricane winds of near 115 mph, could approach southern Florida by Monday as Hanna spins away from Canada over the North Atlantic.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Hanna's center came on land about 3:20 a.m. near the state line with top sustained winds dropping to about 60 mph from near 70 mph while the storm was over water.
"All I've heard is wind, wind and more wind," said Dylan Oslzewski, 19, working an overnight shift at a convenience store in Shallotte, N.C., about 15 miles north of the state line with South Carolina. Oslzewski said he had only seen four customers compared to 30 or 40 on a normal weekend night.
Scattered power outages (at one point up to ten thousand homes were without power; this morning it's only a few hundred homes) and fallen trees were reported across Horry and Georgetown counties, but there were no injuries.
More than three inches of rain fell across the area. A stretch of Highway 17 flooded near neighboring Georgetown and had to be closed due to heavy rain and storm surge.
Thrill-seekers came out around midnight to watch the waves as Hanna raced north at about 21 mph, with top winds of 70 mph.
Vacationing friends Ken Prive, 17, and Armin Berkley, 18, from Concord, N.C., were swimming in high waves in the ocean after employees at their hotel kicked them out of the pool.
"We're good swimmers and we want to have fun," Berkley said. "Yeah, this is crazy, but you have to live life as hard as you can."
Police in other parts of the 50-mile-beach called the Grand Strand chased people out of the surf.
Emergency officials urged evacuations in only a few spots in the Carolinas and about 400 people went to shelters in both states. Forecasters had said there was only a small chance of Hanna becoming a hurricane, and most people simply planned to stay off the roads until the storm passed.
Crews are out cleaning the beaches and forecasters expect a beautiful, but breezy Saturday.
The Carolinas appear to have escaped any major damage, but in Haiti, where Hanna hovered for four days earlier this week, the death toll has skyrocketed. Officials now estimate Hanna has killed 529 Haitians. The United Nations is rushing food and fresh drinking water to people devastated by the storm.
Hanna was expected to race up the Atlantic Coast, reaching New England by Sunday morning. Tropical storm watches or warnings ran from the Carolinas to Massachusetts, and included all of Chesapeake Bay, the Washington, D.C., area and Long Island. But a hurricane watch along the Carolinas' coasts was dropped.
As many as 6 inches of rain were expected in the Carolinas, as well as central Virginia, Maryland and southeastern Pennsylvania. Some spots could see up to 10 inches, and forecasters warned of the potential for flash flooding in the northern mid-Atlantic states and southern New England.
Utilities as far north as New Hampshire put electric and natural gas crews on notice they might have to work long hours to repair any damage. At the Ocean Edge Resort and Club on Cape Cod in Brewster, Mass., staff members braced for rain as they prepared for an outdoor wedding Saturday. "Hopefully it will blow out to sea and it won't even bother them," said Bryan Webb, director of sales and marketing.
In Washington, officials prepared for the possibility of flooding in low-lying neighborhoods by removing debris from catch basins, stockpiling sandbags and lining up portable pumps and generators. In New Jersey, 300 dump trucks hauled in sand to fortify a beach in the Strathmere section of Upper Township.
"These shipments of sand are a good thing, but if they don't work out, the people down here could lose their houses," said Tim Buckland, whose family has owned an oceanfront house in Strathmere for 50 years. He was at the beach Friday, playing in bigger-than-normal waves with his family.
Amtrak canceled some Saturday service in preparation for Hanna. Ten trains, including the Silver Meteor between New York and Miami, and the Auto Train between Lorton, Va., and Sanford, Fla., were halted.
Organizers of the U.S. Open in New York said they may have to reschedule some of the tennis matches after seeing forecasts calling for about 12 hours of rain and wind up to 35 mph.
For all the talk of Hanna, there was more about Ike, which could become the fiercest storm to strike South Florida since Andrew in 1992. That hurricane did more than $26 billion in damage and was blamed for 65 deaths from wind and flooding along with car crashes and other storm-related accidents.
FEMA officials said they were positioning supplies, search and rescue crews, communications equipment and medical teams in Florida and along the Gulf Coast - a task complicated by Ike's changing path. Tourists in the Keys were ordered to leave beginning Saturday morning.
Florida's governor Charlie Crist has declared a state of emergency in advance of Ike, and is preparing for possible mass evacuations.
"I got briefed yesterday about the potential for evacuations in south Florida, it might include as many as 1.3 million people."
Florida residents are preparing.
"We've got a lot of water, a lot of batteries, and we've got a lot of reading material," one man said.
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