The declaration made state resources available and put the Virginia National Guard on standby for possible duty. No injuries were immediately reported, authorities said.

Gov. Mark R. Warner was scheduled Tuesday to tour Richmond, which was inundated with more than 11 inches of rain in 10 hours, turning streets into rivers and trapping people in buildings.

"It looks like rapids outside our building," said Nick Baughan, who was stranded with about 20 other people on the second floor of the Bottoms Up pizza restaurant. "All of our cars have floated away."

With Gaston in Maryland early Tuesday, emergency officials and meteorologists were looking toward the Caribbean, where Hurricane Frances was churning toward the southeastern U.S. coast, packing maximum winds of 125 mph.

Hurricane forecasters say the course of Frances remains too difficult to determine, since it's at least five days from reaching the U.S. mainland.

With rains from Hurricanes Alex and Charley and the remnants of Bonnie all during August portions of the Southeast have had rainfall totals that are several inches above normal for the month.

"If you throw another hurricane into the mix, there could be a lot of problems," said Mike Strickler, a National Weather Service forecaster in Raleigh, N.C.

At 5 a.m. EDT, Frances was centered about 125 miles north of the northern Leeward Islands and was moving west at about 15 mph. A hurricane watch was in effect for the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos islands.

For now, Virginians were struggling to recover from Gaston, which flooded the state's antiquated Emergency Operations Center with 4.5 inches of water and disrupted power briefly.

A stretch of Interstate 95 was closed and many streets were impassable, creating traffic jams that lasted from rush hour until well into the night. Many roads were still closed Tuesday morning.

Richmond police appealed to residents to call 911 only in a life-threatening situation after the system was swamped with hundreds of calls from residents. Some 92,000 electricity customers lost power.

The storm ensured that this would be the wettest summer on record in some localities. Keith Lynch, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service said that Richmond had received 30.34 inches of rain since June 1, breaking the June-through-August record of 27.57 inches recorded in 1969.

Associated Press Writer Justin Bergman in Richmond contributed to this report.

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photo credit and caption:

Hurricane Frances is seen over the Atlantic Ocean in this NOAA satellite image taken on Monday, Aug. 30, 2004, at 8:15 a.m. EDT. Frances was a Category 3 hurricane with sustained wind of 120 mph as it headed toward the Caribbean on Monday. The storm was expected to strengthen during the day Monday and into Tuesday. (AP Photo/NOAA)