The tropical storm Bertha surprised the coast of South Carolina, forming and landing in two hours, bringing a bad day of rain and gusts of wind, but without major problems
COLOMBIA, SC – Tropical storm Bertha surprised the South Carolina coast on Wednesday, forming, hitting land in two hours and being lowered before sunset, bringing a bad beach day, rain and strong winds , but without major problems.
Meteorologists expected bad weather, but did not expect it to organize so quickly and become the second named storm before the official start of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season.
Bertha was appointed around 8 am on Wednesday and was on land east of Charleston at around 9:30 am. The state’s Department of Natural Resources called it “a surprise at dawn”. Six hours after the formation of the tropical storm, the National Hurricane Center demoted it to a depression deep inside. They said that Bertha was no longer a tropical depression at 5 pm and stopped issuing warnings.
Like almost all storms with heavy rain, several streets flooded Charleston, leaving calf-brown water mixed with trash from cans dropped on Wednesday. The elevation of the sea and an old-fashioned drainage system mean that the city floods on average more than once a week. Heavy rains from an unnamed storm last week caused further problems.
Less than 1,000 power cuts and scattered fallen trees were reported when Bertha and her maximum sustained winds of 80 km / h moved to the coast and east of South Carolina.
Bertha moved quickly inland, spreading up to 10 centimeters of rain in parts of North Carolina and Virginia. Flood warnings were issued as the region saw heavy rains in May.
At the final warning at 5 pm, the storm was centered about 95 miles (150 kilometers) west-northwest of Myrtle Beach and was moving north-northwest at 15 mph (24 km / h).
Evan Woodbury made videos of the storm before starting what he hoped would be a slow day at the beachfront restaurant he works in in Garden City, south of Myrtle Beach.
A strong wind blew rain from the side. Closed umbrellas swayed with the roar of the wind on an empty beach.
“I’ve seen a lot worse than that. It’s just the surprise element of the storm. “Woodbury said.” It will definitely keep tourists inside. “
Bertha was the last – and on the calendar the first – in a series of storms that have affected South Carolina in the past four years. Hurricanes Matthew (2016), Irma (2017), Florence (2018) and Dorian (2019) crossed the coast, causing major flooding in the much more active late summer and early fall.
Earlier this month, tropical storm Arthur brought rain to North Carolina before moving into the sea. It was the sixth consecutive year that a named storm developed before June 1, the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season.
The last time there were two named storms before June was in 2016, according to Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist in the atmospheric sciences department at Colorado State University. It also happened in 1887, 1908, 1951 and 2012, he said.
“Most of these storms at the beginning of the season originate, at least in part, from non-tropical or subtropical processes and do not necessarily imply anything about the rest of the season,” Klotzbach said in an email to the Associated Press.
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AP Science writer Seth Borenstein in Kensington, Maryland contributed to this report.
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Follow Jeffrey Collins on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JSCollinsAP.