Toll from Hurricane Irene rises to 8: officials

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WASHINGTON: The toll as Hurricane Irene lashed the eastern United States has risen to at least eight, including an 11-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl, emergency officials said Saturday.

The boy died when a tree fell on his apartment in Newport News, a city on a coastal peninsula in Virginia, while the girl died in North Carolina as her family were heading home from a beach holiday and the traffic lights failed.

Five of the fatalities were in North Carolina, where Irene made landfall early Saturday morning with 85 mile (140 kilometer) per hour winds, before heading up the eastern seaboard on course for a rare direct hit on New York.

"A 15-year-old girl was killed in a car accident on her way back from the beach after vacationing in North Carolina," emergency official Patty McQuillan told AFP. "The traffic light at the intersection was not working, the power was out."

Virginia emergency officials said Hurricane Irene had claimed two lives in the state: one a man who died when a tree fell on his car in Brunswick County, the second the child in Newport News.

"There was an 11-year-old boy pinned under the tree and he was pronounced dead at the scene," Newport News city spokeswoman Anita Walters told AFP, adding that the boy's mother made it out of the apartment unharmed.

North Carolina emergency management spokesman Brad Deen said one of the five victims in his state was a man who had a heart attack on Friday while nailing plywood over his windows in preparation for the hurricane.

Two people were also killed in the state in separate driving accidents, while the fifth fatality there was a man struck by a falling tree limb while outside feeding his animals.

Coroners were still to confirm the cause of death of the eighth storm-related fatality, a surfer who took to his board in treacherously high waves off the Florida coast on Friday.

"We had sent out an advisory recommending everyone check beach reports and use an abundance of caution before entering the water," state emergency official William Booher told AFP.

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