Category 1 Hurricane Matthew made landfall late Saturday morning over South Carolina’s central coast, and the storm’s sea surges and rainfall appeared poised to threaten life-threatening inland flooding for that state and North Carolina as the storm crawled to the northeast.

Matthew’s center crossed near McClellanville, South Carolina, between Charleston and Myrtle Beach before 11 a.m. ET. Three hours later, the center was over Myrtle Beach, with maximum winds just above hurricane threshold at 75 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.

The storm has killed hundreds in the Caribbean and at least four people in Florida, and left swaths of damage and hundreds of thousands of power outages along parts of the US southeast from Florida to the Carolinas.

Though the storm has weakened, serious threats remain: Up to 15 inches of rain are possible near and east of Interstate 95, the hurricane center said.
That’s in addition to possible storm surges of 5 to 7 feet from Charleston to Cape Fear, North Carolina, the National Weather Service says.
“This has the potential for the worst flooding since Hurricane Floyd,” North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory said during a Saturday morning news conference. Floyd, a Category 2 storm, hit North Carolina hard in 1999.
A forecast track for Hurricane Matthew, with the storm's eye predicted to be somewhere within the shaded cone on the days indicated.
A forecast track for Hurricane Matthew, with the storm’s eye predicted to be somewhere within the shaded cone on the days indicated.
“It’s not just about the beaches. It’s (also) inland where we can have loss of life,” he said as Matthew approached.
Even though Matthew made its first technical US landfall Saturday morning, part of the storm’s eyewall — the hurricane’s strongest section — passed over parts of coastal Florida, Georgia and South Carolina from Friday into Saturday, helping to flood low-lying areas, down trees and make some roads impassable.