Almost a week after landing a devastating hurricane “Florence” on the coast of North Carolina and SC the effects of the disaster become even more risky.
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The hurricane swept through the U.S. east coast, causing more than 40 deaths and more than US$22bn worth of damage to the region. And it’s really become more of a flooding story than it is a wind story.
President Trump’s pre-emptive slam on Democratic criticism comes after the controversy over the elevated death totals from Puerto Rico’s aftermath of two hurricanes that struck the island late in 2017.
Although the storm is long gone, river flooding still poses a danger to the area. At least 37 people have died in storm-related incidents, including 27 in North Carolina, 8 in SC and 2 in Virginia.
That news comes as authorities from Horry County Sheriff’s Department in SC say two detainees drowned when a van was swept away in rising flood waters.
Trump then visited a church in heavily hit New Bern, North Carolina, where he helped hand out meals to victims of the flooding. While Florence caused substantial damage to structures and resulted in the loss of power to thousands of people when it first made landfall, the storm’s after-effects are even worse. There are roughly 10,000 people still in shelters.
Officers were going door-to-door along the river in Brunswick County, North Carolina encouraging residents to evacuate.
While Twitter had a field day with Trump’s “water is wet” comment, he did get some parts of his speech 100 per cent correct.
McMaster told the delegation that rainfall and flooding in North Carolina is sending “unheard of” water into SC.
Trump spent the run-up to the storm focused on criticism of the federal response to a hurricane that battered Puerto Rico previous year, rejecting the official death toll of almost 3,000 and claiming Democrats manufactured the number to make him “look bad”.
North Carolina’s farmers, meanwhile, are beginning to count up their losses.
The chairman of the New Hanover County commissioners says the nonprofit organization came to Wilmington four days before the storm.
The flooding has killed an estimated 3.4 million chickens and 5,500 hogs, authorities said.
In South Carolina, workers with electricity provider Santee Cooper erected a temporary dike in hopes of preventing flooding of an old coal ash dump at the demolished Grainger Generating Station near Conway.
Environmental concerns continued to mount after massive industrial-scale hog and poultry farms in North Carolina were inundated by flood waters, causing toxic animal waste to pour out. Sixty of its 880 broiler houses in North Carolina flooded and another six broiler houses experienced damage.
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More than 121,000 customers were without power across North Carolina, and more than 2.1 million customers across the southeast United States were affected by the storm, according to utilities.
