Florence remains deadly in wake of ‘historic and unprecedented’ flooding
Hundreds of people in the Carolinas were trapped by Florence’s catastrophic flooding Sunday, as the devastating storm’s death toll rose to 16.
Roads, including parts of Highway 74 and Interstate 40, leading in and out of Wilmington, NC, were underwater — making the city essentially inaccessible from the rest of the state.
“Our roads are flooded,” Woody White, chairman of the county Board of Commissioners, said Sunday at a news conference. “There is no access to Wilmington.”
Authorities were planning on how to get food and water there by plane and boat. Still, debris-filled streets inside the city of nearly 120,000 were busy — though most of the businesses were closed.
Victor Merlos was overjoyed to find an open store so he could pick up groceries for the 20 relatives staying in his apartment. He spent more than $500 on cereal, eggs, sodas and other necessities — plus beer.
Police guarded the doors of another store, only allowing 10 people inside at once. Dallas Perdue said he waited about two hours to get inside to buy a few groceries.
Even the Waffle House eatery limited its menu options, allowing one biscuit and one drink per customer at $2 bucks an item.
Meanwhile, the water utility, Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, said Sunday it had only a 48-hour supply of fuel left to provide water. Later in a news release, it said it’d found an alternative fuel source and that there was no immediate threat to service.
City officials asked North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper for additional law enforcement, including the National Guard.
Record-breaking amounts of rain were projected to fall on the Carolinas Monday — even as Florence was downgraded to a tropical depression. Some type of National Weather Service alert either for weather or flash floods was in effect in all of North Carolina’s counties.
Nearly 34 inches of rain had fallen by Sunday afternoon in Swansboro and 20 other places in North Carolina had at least 20 inches, according to the NWS. Another 30 areas in North and South Carolina had at least 10 inches.
The storm has “never been more dangerous than it is right now,” Cooper said at a news conference.
“The risk to life is rising with the angry waters,” he added — as the storm’s death toll climbed to 16 when 30-year-old Rhoda Hartley lost control of her pickup and hit a tree in Gilbert, SC, on Sunday morning.
Also on Sunday, a 23-year-old man drowned when his pickup flipped into a drainage ditch along a flooded South Carolina road and a couple in their 60s died in the state of carbon-monoxide poisoning from a generator being operated in their home.
With the torrential downpour, authorities feared rivers would burst their banks and tens of thousands of people were ordered to leave their homes along the Cape Fear, Little River, Lumber, Waccamaw and Pee Dee rivers.
Mitch Colvin, the mayor of Fayetteville, warned residents to get out, saying, “The worst is yet to come.”
Authorities called the amount of flooding “historic and unprecedented.” Michael Sprayberry, the director of the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management, told ABC’s “This Week” that Florence was “one for the record books.”
President Trump tweeted that “FEMA, first responders and law enforcement are working really hard on hurricane Florence.”
About 740,000 homes across the Carolinas are without power as the storm heads west over the mid-Atlantic and southern New England this week. Rain is projected to keep battering the Carolinas and Virginia at least until Tuesday.
With Post Wires