(RALEIGH) -- A hurricane watch has been issued for North Carolina's Outer Banks as Hurricane Irene moves through the Caribbean and toward North Carolina. North Carolina News Network Meteorologist Elizabeth Gardner said Irene could make landfall around Cape Hatteras sometime Saturday afternoon.

Irene is expect to strengthen to a category 4 hurricane. "But it is likely to weaken back to category 3 before it hits North Carolina. Still, a category 3 storm is going to do a lot of damage, especially to our fragile Outer Banks.  Even if the eye of the storm passes just to the east of the Outer Banks we're still talking about a very large, devastating storm for North Carolina," added Gardner.

While there's no doubt there could be major damage on the Outer Banks, Gardner said what is known as the Inner Banks could get hit hard too. "We're talking about all the land that borders Albemarle Sound and the Pamlico Sound.  A lot of trees will be down.  We'll have a lot of power outages and we may have flooding there as well," said Gardner.

While the Outer Banks could take a direct hit from Hurricane Irene, Gardner said people along the southern coast should be ready for power outages too. "Tropical storm force winds there likely and we'll probably have some flooding and some coastal erosion, that sort of thing, even around the Wilmington area."

One the other hand, much of the state may not even be able to tell such a deadly storm is impacting North Carolina.  "We'll have rain probably as far west as the Triangle.  The rest of the state should really skate by without a lot of impact."