PLEASANT HILL, S.C. — A number of South Carolina residents near the coast are evacuating and others are piling up sandbags anew outside homes and businesses, bracing for more possible flooding even as the nation's Homeland Security chief is set to tour areas hit hard by recent heavy rains.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson planned to travel to Columbia and Charleston today to meet with federal, state and local officials and see the recovery efforts firsthand from what South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has described as a 1,000-year rainstorm. While skies are clear again after past days of rain, residents along or near the coast are readying as rain-swollen rivers reach the sea.

Members of the South Carolina National Guard, stationed at a fire station in Pleasant Hill, were busy Thursday helping people get to shelters from areas still cut off by road flooding. In some areas, flooding is expected to worsen in coming days and Georgetown, which fronts a coastal bay fed by a series of rivers, is especially watchful.

LONG BEACH, Calif. — The California Coastal Commission approved a $100 million expansion of the tanks SeaWorld uses to hold killer whales in San Diego — but it banned breeding of the captive orcas that would live in them.Animal rights activists praised Thursday's decision as a death blow to the use of killer whales at the California ocean park.The vote “ensures that no more orcas will be condemned to a nonlife of loneliness, deprivation and misery,” said a statement from People from the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “These 11 orcas would be the last 11 orcas there,” PETA lawyer Jared Goodman said after the meeting, referring to the whales at the California marine park.The last-minute amendment would ban breeding of captive orcas, including through artificial insemination, at the California park but not at SeaWorld facilities in other states.In a statement, SeaWorld said it was disappointed by the conditions attached to the approval of its “Blue World” expansion, set to open in 2018, which would triple the size of existing killer whale enclosures.

JUNEAU, Alaska — Parts of the nation's northernmost state are bracing for heavy rains and strong winds from the remnants of Hurricane Oho.Tropical storm conditions are expected to combine with a low-pressure system to bring potentially 2 to 6 inches of rain to southeast Alaska.The expected tropical system will be the latest unusual weather event to hit Alaska in 2015: sparse snowfall pushed the start of the Iditarod sled-dog race 400 miles to the north; dry conditions fueled one of Alaska's worst fire seasons; but soggy weather in Juneau made for an especially wet summer.Last year, Juneau, which is in a rainforest, had its wettest summer on record, with more than 24 inches of rain. This summer was a close second. Oho was among a record number of tropical cyclones in the central Pacific this hurricane season.