Aid supplies reach Wilmington
WILMINGTON, N.C. — 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.
The storm’s remnants took aim at the densely populated Northeast.
The death toll from Florence rose to at least 32, and crews
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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 Coast Guard helicopter crew who plucked him and his dog Lucky from atop a house encircled by water in Pollocksville.
A day earlier, Wilmington’s entire population of 120,000 people was cut off by flooding. By midday Monday, authorities reopened a single unidentified road into the city, which stands on a peninsula. But it wasn’t clear whether that 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 hardest-hit areas to stay away because of closed roads and catastrophic flooding that submerged entire communities.
“There’s too much going on,” he said at a news conference.
About two dozen truckloads of military MRES and bottled water were delivered overnight to Wilmington, the state’s eighth-largest city, officials said.
The chairman of New Hanover County’s commissioners, Woody White, said three centers would open by Tuesday morning to begin distributing essentials to residents.
“Things are getting better slowly, and we thank God for that,” White said.
Mayor Bill Saffo said he was working with the governor’s office to get more fuel into Wilmington.
“At this time, things are moving as well as can be in the city,” he said.
Crews have conducted about 700 rescues in New Hanover County, where more than 60 percent of homes and businesses were without power, authorities 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 neighborhoods.
At the White House, President Donald Trump said almost 20,000 military personnel and federal workers had been 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 that Florence had the fourth-highest rainfall total of any hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since 1950, with 35.94 inches at Elizabethtown, North Carolina.