Florence’s floods obscure damage inflicted on Carolinas

Bloomberg

Companies, regulators and environmental groups are waiting for record floods to recede so they can make a comprehensive assessment of damage from Hurricane Florence. Water levels, however, are headed in the wrong direction.
Rivers throughout North and South Carolina are days from cresting as the deadly storm moves northeast, according to the National Weather Service. North Carolina will be dealing with flooding for at least two weeks, said Wylie Quillian, a hydrologist at the agency’s Southeast River Forecast Center in Peachtree City, Georgia.
The Atlantic season’s first major hurricane has killed at least 17 people, according to the Associated Press. The coastal city of Wilmington was cut off by the disaster—officials are planning an airlift—and hundreds of search-and-rescue boats cruised inundated streets in the state’s sodden east on Sunday. About 708,000 customers were still without power in the Carolinas and Virginia, according to the US Department of Energy.
Officials don’t yet know how hard the storm hit the region’s farms or how long it will take to restore power. They don’t know the extent of any environmental damage from a Duke Energy Corp. coal-ash spill and a wastewater discharge in Wilmington.

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“There’s a lot of damage in the hardest hit areas,” David Fountain, Duke Energy Corp.’s North Carolina president, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “It’s really going to take a while for the floodwaters to recede so that we can get in and conduct our damage assessment.’’
North Carolina had more than 1,000 search-and-rescue personnel out with more than 2,000 boats and 36 helicopters that were either in the air or available to help stranded residents, Michael Sprayberry, the state’s director of emergency management, said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster said the death toll could rise alongside the “angry waters.”
The dead range in age from 7 months to 81 years. Five were killed when their vehicles lost control on flooded roads, a mother and her baby died when a tree fell on their Wilmington home and a couple perished from carbon-monoxide poisoning after using a generator inside their coastal South Carolina home as the storm lashed the region.
Florence’s remnants were about 125 miles (200 kilometres) west-southwest of Roanoke, Virginia, at 5 am local time on Monday, according to the National Weather Service. The storm, now a tropical depression, is expected to move towards the northeast before accelerating and moving eastward on Tuesday.
Parts of the Mid-Atlantic as far north as southern New York and New England are set to receive additional rainfall, and a few tornadoes are possible in the region stretching from northeastern South Carolina to southern Pennsylvania on Monday.
Rainfall totals for southeast North Carolina will probably be close to 40 inches (102 centimeters) and 20 inches elsewhere in the region. More than 30 rivers in North Carolina have flooded and at least 14 are at “major flooding” level, according to the Flood Inundation Mapping and Alert Network website.