Hurricane Erin will cause a high risk of rip currents along the Lowcountry coastline through the end of the week despite its turn away from the southeast U.S. coast. Live 5 First Alert Meteorologist Joey Sovine said the storm is going to create dangerous ocean conditions,

If a storm is a Category 3, 4 or 5, it is deemed a "major" hurricane due to the potential for "significant loss of life and damage," the National Hurricane Center says. Hurricanes that fall into categories 1 or 2 are still considered dangerous, the center says.

Erin a dangerous, large major hurricane. Erin will move east of us through this week leaving us no direct impacts however a DANGEROUS rip current risk this week. At 11 pm, the center of Hurricane Erin was locatednear latitude 27.

The longstanding hurricane rating system, the Saffir-Simpson Scale, only takes into account sustained wind speeds and not the full devastating impact of a hurricane.

Let's break it down. Big Picture -What It Measures: As the name implies, the current version is strictly a wind scale that rates a hurricane's sustained winds (not gusts) from Category 1 through 5.

Following a hurricane at a CATEGORY 4, most of an area will be “uninhabitable” for anywhere between weeks or months. CATEGORY 5: This is the highest category on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale.

In a study, Michael Wehner, PhD, and the Berkeley Lab found that the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale fails to tell the full story of higher wind speeds. "The strongest storms are getting stronger.

"The Saffir-Simpson scale is a measure of wind speed. But far more people die from hurricane flooding than from strong winds. Hurricane Florence made landfall near Wilmington as a Category 1 storm.

Hurricane Erin reached the maximum intensity on the Saffir-Simpson scale last Saturday (16), becoming a category 5 storm with winds of up to 260 km/h (161 mph).