Hundreds rescued from N.C. flooding
Swift-water rescue teams are assisting residents as Florence floods city of New Bern
NEW BERN, N.C. — Tropical Storm Florence continued to thrash the Carolinas late Friday with fierce winds, driving rain and catastrophic flooding. Downgraded from hurricane strength after making landfall, the storm had killed at least five people, authorities said, and trapped hundreds of others whose rescues continued as night fell.
Among the dead were a mother and her infant child, who were killed after a tree fell on their house, the police said. The rains are expected to continue for days, and flooding is likely to worsen as more rivers spill over their banks.
The center of the storm moved into South Carolina early Friday evening with top sustained winds at 70 mph as it crawled west at just 3 mph.
At 8 p.m. Friday, Florence was centered about 15 miles northnortheast of Myrtle Beach, S.C., and about 55 miles east-southeast of Florence, S.C.
About 500 people had to be rescued in flooding in New Bern, which is about 30 miles north of Morehead City.
The National Weather Service said on Twitter on Friday night that Morehead City had received 23.04 inches of rain, with more heavy rain coming.
Forecasters issued what they called a flash flood emergency, saying areas of surrounding Carteret County are flooding that have never flooded before.
An ominous tweet appeared on New Bern’s Twitter feed about 2 a.m. Friday.
It came as rivers swelled, tides crested and the rain wouldn’t stop. And that’s when people found themselves trapped in their homes as the water rose.
“WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU,” the tweet said. “You may need to move up to the second story, or to your attic, but WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU.”
Crews from the city and the Federal Emergency Management Agency were working with citizen volunteers to get people to dry ground, Roberts said. There had been no reports of injuries or fatalities, though most of the city was without power and thousands of buildings had been damaged, she said.
Sixty-seven-year-old Sadie Marie Holt was among those rescued Friday.
Ms. Holt, who has diabetes and clogged arteries, said she stayed for doctor’s appointments that were canceled at the last minute. She tried to row out of her neighborhood Thursday night with a boat that was in her yard after her home began to flood, but had to retreat because of the conditions.
“The wind was so hard, the waters were so hard that, trying to get out, we got thrown into trailers. We got thrown into mailboxes. Houses. Trees,” Ms. Holt said.
The city of about 29,000, which was founded in the early 1700s and was briefly the state capital, is near the North Carolina coast and is bordered on the east and south, respectively, by two rivers. When Hurricane Florence started battering eastern North Carolina with record rainfall, the Neuse and Trent rivers began to swell — and combined with high tide, made for dangerous flooding.
Residents reached out for help through the night by phone and on social media.
Dawn Baldwin Gibson, 47, a minister and private school founder who lives on a farm closer to the coast in nearby Pamlico County and runs a Facebook page about weather in eastern North Carolina, had evacuated to New Bern to stay with family, thinking it would be a safer spot.
Ms. Gibson said Friday that while she and her family were safe, she and her husband had gotten around 75 calls and texts from others asking for help.
“And from that point, we started hearing where people were saying on phone calls, ‘I love you,’ to their family members because they were not sure they were going to get out of it alive,” she said Friday.
Ms. Gibson said some people couldn’t afford to evacuate New Bern and others didn’t heed evacuation warnings after Florence dropped from a Category 4 to a Category 1. But once New Bern TV news station WCTI evacuated its newsroom Thursday night because of flooding and people began to lose power, the seriousness of the situation began dawning on folks, she said.
Tom Ballance said his wife went to Atlanta and he stayed behind in their New Bern home with their three dogs and a cat. Around 3:30 p.m. Thursday, the electricity went out. By midnight, his rain gauge showed that he’d gotten 9 inches of rain since mid-afternoon. He drifted off to sleep. About 40 minutes later, he woke and went to a sun room, where he’d boarded up all the windows except for a small hole. He shone a flashlight through the glass.
“I about jumped out of my skin,” he said in a phone interview Friday morning. “These were waves crashing down.”