'Never More Dangerous': Florence Dumping Calamitous Amounts of Rain as It Crawls Through Carolinas
WILMINGTON, NC – As the remnants of Florence continues to dump inches of rain, still-rising floodwaters are prompting emergency situations across the Carolinas.
So far, the storm has claimed at least 17 lives.
"Not only are you going to see more impact across North Carolina ... but we're also anticipating you are about to see a lot of damage going through West Virginia, all the way up to Ohio as the system exits out," Brock Long of the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Fox News on Sunday.
In Wilmington, North Carolina, four straight days and nights of pounding rain have caused one local river to overflow its banks, eroding Highway 40.
Wilmington is now cut off from the rest of state by those floodwaters, so officials are planning to airlift food and drinking water to the city's 120,000 residents.
"Our roads are flooded," said Woody White, chairman of the board of commissioners of New Hanover County. "There is no access to Wilmington."
While the storm is gaining speed as it exits the Carolinas, it's still dumping rain – and lots of it.
Rescue teams are out in force, pulling about a thousand people from their flooded homes, and shelters are overflowing with evacuees.
"This storm has never been more dangerous than it is right now," warned North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper. "Wherever you live in North Carolina, be alert for sudden flooding."
Neighborhoods look like war zones, with storm debris making roadways impassable and many streets turned into a maze of fallen trees.
"The next half of the tree went, hit the roof and knocked the chimney down onto my first-floor den and that knocked a hole in the roof," Wilmington resident Alex Hall said.
However, the best in humanity has been on display during this disaster.
One group of good Samaritans traveled from Tennessee to help the storm-beleaguered city get back on its feet – small business owners who say they are just doing what God wants them to do.
"It just seems like the right thing to help people out," Linden, Tennessee resident Jeff Durham told CBN News. "They hope to be able to get back to their homes. They can't do that unless we clean it up."
Another Linden resident, Larry Gallagher, agreed, saying, "It's just a need to give back. The Lord has blessed us; we need to bless others."
Wilmington resident Denny Best is grateful for the work the businessmen are doing.
"I've driven around the town. I can see how badly we've been hit. It going to take a lot of people like this coming down to help us to allow us to recover. We ain't going to be able to do it by ourselves," he said.
Meanwhile, as the storm moves off to the west, inland residents are not out of the woods just yet. All that water is going to flow off the mountains into local rivers and we could see more scenes like the ones in Wilmington in the future.
