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Tropical Storm Elsa moves into Carolinas, expected to move up East Coast later in week

Tropical Storm Elsa
Posted at 7:50 AM, Jul 08, 2021
and last updated 2021-07-08 10:55:44-04

Nearly a full day after making landfall in Florida, Tropical Storm Elsa is still dumping heavy rainfall and bringing dangerous winds to the Southeast U.S.

As of Thursday morning at 5 a.m. ET, Elsa was located near the Georgia-South Carolina border with sustained winds of 40 mph. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecasts that the storm will continue to move northeast through the weekend, hugging the Eastern Seaboard up into Canada.

The NHC says Elsa poses a threat for "limited flash and urban flooding" across the Carolinas on Thursday. Tropical storm conditions are expected on the coasts of North Carolina throughout the day, and the Mid-Atlantic will see similar conditions in the region by Thursday night.

Later in the week, the system will dump heavy rainfall from the Mid-Atlantic into New England, which could lead to additional flooding.

Elsa made landfall in the "Big Bend" region of western Florida on Wednesday morning. Since then, officials have blamed the system for at least one death in Jacksonville. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis described that fatality as a "freak accident" on Thursday, saying that a tree fell on a moving car.

He added that Elsa had "as minimal impact as could have been anticipated" on the rest of the state.

In addition to the one fatality, a tornado spawned by Elsa injured another 10 people at an RV park on a Navy base in southern Georgia.

The system killed three people in the Caribbean earlier this week.

According to the Associated Press, one person died in St. Lucia. In the Dominican Republic, a 15-year-old boy and a 75-year-old woman died Saturday in separate events after walls collapsed on them.