21 dead as Florence swings northeast
WILMINGTON, North Carolina — Throwing a lifeline to a city surrounded by floodwaters, emergency crews delivered food and water to Wilmington on Monday as rescuers picked up more people stranded by Hurricane Florence and the storm’s remnants took aim at the densely populated Northeast.
The death toll from Florence rose to at least 21, and crews elsewhere used helicopters and boats to rescue people trapped by still rising rivers.
“Thank you,” a frazzled, shirtless Willie Schubert mouthed to members of a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter crew who plucked him and his dog Lucky from atop a house encircled by water in Pollocksville. It was not clear how long he had been stranded.
A day earlier, Wilmington’s entire population of 120,000 was cut off by flooding. By midday Monday, authorities reopened a single unidentified road into the town, which stands on a peninsula. But it wasn’t clear if that the route would remain open as the Cape Fear River kept swelling. And officials did not say when other roads might be clear.
In some places, the rain finally stopped, and the sun peeked through, but North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper warned that dangerously high water would persist for days. He urged residents who were evacuated from the hardesthit areas to stay away because of closed roads and catastrophic flooding that submerged entire communities.
“There’s too much going on,” he told a news conference.
About two dozen truckloads of military MREs and bottled water were delivered overnight to Wilmington, the state’s eighthlargest city, officials said.
Compounding problems, downed power lines and broken trees crisscrossed many roads in Wilmington three days after Florence made landfall. The smell of broken pine trees wafted through damaged neighbourhoods.
At the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump said almost 20,000 military personnel and federal workers were deployed to help with the aftermath.
“We will do whatever it takes to keep the American people safe,” Trump said.
Preliminary statistics from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed Florence had the fourth-highest rainfall total of any hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since 1950, with 91.2 centimetres at Elizabethtown, North Carolina. Harvey’s total of 60.5 cm last year in Texas is No. 1.
Downgraded from a tropical depression, the deadly storm still had abundant rain and top winds around 35 km/h. Forecasters said it was expected to continue toward the U.S. Northeast, which is in for as much as 10 cm of rain, before the system moves offshore again.
Flooding worries increased in Virginia, where roads were closed and power outages were on the rise. In all, about 420,000 homes and businesses in three states were in the dark. Most of the outages were in North Carolina.
The death toll climbed by three as authorities found the body of a one-year-old boy who was swept away after his mother drove into floodwaters and lost her grip on him while trying to get back to dry land. Elsewhere in North Carolina, an 88-year-old man died after his car was swept away. Authorities in Virginia said one person was dead after an apparent tornado.