Some students have been working to help others, such as Cory Alpert, who with friends organized a list of more than 1,700 volunteers for the city and charities like the United Way.
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The death toll from record floods that swamped swaths of the southeastern United States has climbed to 16, officials said Tuesday, as the focus shifted to damage assessment and securing dams.
A flooding disaster of this scale was unlikely to be sure, scientists say, but climate change has transformed once-in-a-lifetime events into periodic occurrences.
The governor said she could not yet estimate the cost of the devastation but noted “the damage is going to be heartbreaking for a lot of people”.
“We woke up and there was a sinkhole that took out half of the road”, Andy Spivey said.
She said Tuesday that the state has officials on the ground in different areas watching and reporting about the water and rivers “minute by minute”. “This could be any amount of dollars”.
The sun was shining in South Carolina Tuesday, but people are still trying to recover from heavy rains that caused 18 dams to breach or fail in the state. Some 800 people are living between two dozen shelters, and Haley expects this number to rise.
“Some people take it pretty good”, he said. Officers have located the cars belonging to several other missing people. At least nine South Carolina cities surveyed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) broke their one-day rainfall records for the month of October, and six of them broke one-day records for any month of the year. University officials said more than 80,000 fans expected for the game in Columbia would have put too much stress on infrastructure already compromised by the storm.
More than 60cm of rain have fallen since Friday (local time) in parts of South Carolina, which avoided a hit from Hurricane Joaquin but experienced historic rainfall and flooding due to a combination of weather conditions mostly unrelated to that storm.
Hours after calling for evacuations and saying the failure of Beaver Creek Dam in Columbia was imminent, authorities said they had managed to stabilize the dam and that evacuations were voluntary.
Department of Health and Environmental Control spokesman Jim Beasley says that the Upper Windsor Dam has not failed and that earlier reports were incorrect. But when a second portion of the canal collapsed Wednesday afternoon, they were forced to look at other options, Mayor Steve Benjamin said. Authorities said the driver of their vehicle had driven around a barricade placed there to prevent vehicles from falling into the water.
Richland County Sheriff’s Lt. Curtis Wilson says it’s not clear where the incorrect information originated.
Floodwaters rush over a diversion dam in Columbia, S.C., Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2015.
Electricity had returned to most homes and businesses and about 10,000 people were without water, down from a peak of 40,000. Workers were building a rock dam a few hundred feet north of the breach, which is near the city’s hydroelectric plant. Regional rivals become brothers and sisters in arms at such times, and the N.C. National Guard has been among those public and private groups helping South Carolinians deal with flooding that is simply astounding.
There were no further details of who the occupants of the vehicle were or why they had gone down the road in Lower Richland County.
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Today was the first completely dry day in Columbia since September 24, but officials warned that new evacuations could be ordered as the huge mass of water flows toward the sea, threatening dams and displacing residents along the way. She did not release names or the location of the barricade.
