Homes are still flooded 11 days after Florence
GEORGETOWN, S.C. — For many living near South Carolina’s coast, Florence is the visitor they never wanted who now refuses to leave.
Eleven days after the once-fierce hurricane arrived on the coast, and more than a week after it blew north and dissipated, rivers swollen by its relentless rains are still f looding homes and businesses in their paths as they make their way to the sea.
Some residents have no idea when they will return home. One of them is Vivian Chestnut, who evacuated her home in inundated Conway, S.C., six days ago.
The Waccamaw River, which flows through the city of 23,000, had already reached more than 21 feet — far surpassing the previous record high of 17.9 feet set by Hurricane Matthew two years ago — and it was still rising Tuesday afternoon.
The waterway was expected to crest on Wednesday, but not to drop below 18 feet or so until sometime next week. The river floods at 11 feet.
“You find yourself sitting around a lot and thinking, ‘What if?’ or, ‘I wonder what things are like right now,’ ” said Chestnut, who is staying with family in the area. “And wondering what you are going to find when you finally get back.”
It’s a scene repeating itself across eastern South Carolina, where rivers swollen from what one meteorologist calculated is the nation’s second-rainiest storm in 70 years slowly make their way down the state’s gentle sloping coastal plain.
If that weren’t bad enough, more weather was forming off the coast in a hurricane season that still has two months to go. National Hurricane Center forecasters watching a lowpressure area about 260 miles south of Cape Hatteras, N.C., said it could become a tropical depression as it approaches the coast before moving quickly to the north.
Although it will probably dump some rain on the Florence-battered city of Wilmington, it wasn’t expected to be significant enough to worsen the flooding.
“It shouldn’t put much of a dent in the rivers,” said Reid Hawkins, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Wilmington.
Florence was also having an enduring effect on the environment. A power outage at a wastewater station combined with heavy rain caused about 128,000 gallons of wastewater to spill into a river at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, the Marine Corps said Tuesday. The military said the spill wouldn’t threaten residential water supplies.
Officials at South Carolina’s state-owned utility were still warily monitoring two coal-ash ponds near Conway. They said floodwater from the Waccamaw River had made it into one pond, but that most of the ash had been removed during an earlier cleanup.
The river is likely to flood the second pond soon, but the utility promised it had taken steps to lessen the environmental impact, such as installing silt fencing.
Not far from the ash ponds, engineers are keeping an eye on U.S. Highway 501, the main link to Myrtle Beach. Water is touching a temporary barrier of sand and plastic that has been erected to keep water off the bridge. It will remain effective if the water doesn’t rise more than an additional 5 feet from its current level, according to the state Department of Transportation.
A preliminary analysis of Hurricane Florence has determined that the slow-moving storm dumped more than 17.5 inches of water on a region from Fayetteville, N.C., to Florence, S.C. Hurricane Harvey last year delivered 25.6 inches, said Ken Kunkel, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and North Carolina State University.