Mother and infant among first victims of Hurricane Florence
HURRICANE Florence has killed a mother and her young child in North Carolina.
The Wilmington Police Department said they died when a tree fell on their house. The father was taken to hospital for treatment.
North Carolina’s governor’s office said a third person was killed plugging in a generator.
The hurricane came ashore early yesterday, pounding the state with torrential rain and high winds. Catastrophic flash flooding was predicted.
The National Hurricane Centre in Miami said over 16 inches of rain had fallen at locations in southeast North Carolina, with another 20 to 25 inches on the way.
The giant, 400-mile-wide hurricane unloaded heavy rain, flattened trees, chewed up roads and knocked out power to more than 600,000 homes and businesses.
More than 60 people had to be pulled from a collapsing motel and hundreds more were rescued elsewhere from rising water.
“WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU,” the city of New Bern tweeted around 2am local time. “You may need to move up to the second storey, or to your attic, but WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU.”
Forecasters say the biggest danger is water as the storm surge on the coast and the prospect of one to three-and-a-half feet of rain in coming days could see catastrophic flooding inland.
By early yesterday afternoon, Florence’s winds had weakened to 75mph, well below the storm’s terrifying Category 4 peak of 140 mph earlier in the week.
But the hurricane had slowed to a crawl as it traced the North Carolina-South Carolina shoreline, Civilian Crisis Response Team volunteers help rescue children from their flooded home yesterday in James City; Union Point Park is flooded in New Bern, North Carolina; parts of a boat dock and boardwalk are destroyed by the wind and waves as Hurricane Florence arrives at Atlantic Beach
drenching coastal communities for hours on end.
“Hurricane Florence is powerful, slow and relentless,” North Carolina governor Roy Cooper said. “It’s an uninvited brute who doesn’twanttoleave.”
Mr Cooper said the hurricane
was “wreaking havoc” on the coast and could wipe out entire communities in its “violent grind across our state for days”. He said parts of North Carolina had seen storm surges — the bulge of seawater pushed ashore by the hurricane — as high as 10 feet.
For people living inland, the moment of maximum peril from flash flooding could arrive days later, because it takes time for rainwater to drain into rivers and for those streams to crest.
Preparing for the worst, about 9,700 National Guard troops and
civilians were deployed with high-water vehicles, helicopters and boats that could pluck people from the floodwaters.
Authorities warned, too, of the risk of mudslides and environmental havoc from water washing over industrial waste sites.