Thousands ordered to get out after Alberto threatens dam
N.C. residents endure one of wettest months
Thousands of people were evacuated in North Carolina amid mudslides and flooding as Alberto, a tropical depression, continued its sodden march Wednesday.
The storm drove pounding rains across a swath of the nation stretching from Alabama to the Great Lakes. Much of the region was already soggy from one of the wettest Mays on record.
In North Carolina, 2,000 people were evacuated for several hours after McDowell County emergency management officials announced that the Lake Tahoma Dam faced “imminent failure.” The evacuations, which followed localized mudslides triggered by the drenching rains, were ordered pending inspections.
An all-clear was announced about 10 hours later. “The emergency at Lake Tahoma has been canceled,” the county said in a statement. “The engineer has performed a safety inspection and determined that the evacuation order is no longer needed.”
Asheville has received 13.26 inches of rain this month, making it the city’s wettest May on record by more than 4 inches, AccuWeather reported. “A normal May would be 3.66 inches, so you are talking about almost 10 inches more than normal,” senior meteorologist Paul Walker said. “And it continues to rain.”
Two people were rescued after a mudslide pushed a state Department of Transportation truck into the Catawba River in McDowell County.
“To illustrate the power of water, about 10 feet of rushing water pushed the 33,000-pound truck more than 1,000 feet downriver,” the department warned.
Western portions of the Carolinas have seen more than 20 inches in the past two weeks, the National Weather Service said. Two television station employees of WYFF in Greenville, S.C., were killed Monday when a tree fell on their vehicle as they covered the storm in Polk County, N.C.