The Florida coast was spared severe damage on Sunday, but much of the Eastern Seaboard is threatened with flooding rains.
Tropical Storm Isaias buffeted Florida’s eastern edge on Sunday with more heavy rainfall and powerful winds as it skirted the Atlantic Coast, leaving many people bracing for the threat of flash floods, storm surges and even tornadoes as the storm made its way north.
The storm failed to deliver the punch in Florida that state officials had feared. But that has not been enough to allay the concerns of officials and residents in its path.
“It’s a wait-and-see game,” said Jay Slevin, the manager of a pizzeria about a mile from the shore in Myrtle Beach, S. C., where the center of the storm appeared to be heading.
Isaias, the ninth named storm in what has become a busy hurricane season, has come at a time when many people in the Southeast are already beleaguered by the coronavirus outbreak. Officials in the region are juggling the response to a storm with a pandemic, and business owners are wary of being dealt yet another crippling blow.
Isaias, which is written as Isaías in Spanish and pronounced ees-ah-EE-ahs, clobbered the Bahamas with hurricane conditions over the weekend after hitting parts of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
It was downgraded to a tropical storm on Saturday evening when its sustained winds slipped below 74 m.p.h.; they were about 65 m.p.h. most of Sunday but picked up again to 70 m.p.h. late in the afternoon. Forecasters said some minor fluctuations in the strength of the storm were possible over the next few days, and they posted hurricane watches for areas in its immediate path and tropical storm watches all the way to Rhode Island.
The storm, which has largely run parallel to the Florida coast since leaving the Bahamas, is expected to give the Georgia coast only a glancing blow but to strike the Carolinas more directly.
After pummeling the Bahamas for the better part of the weekend, the storm blew away on Sunday morning, leaving parts of low-lying Grand Bahama soaked with more than a foot of rain and other islands in the archipelago with minor flooding, downed trees and power outages.
