Mother, Baby Killed After Tree Falls Onto House As Hurricane Florence Continues To Batter Carolinas
Follow CBSPHILLY Facebook Twitter
WILMINGTON, N.C. (CBS/AP) — Hurricane Florence rolled ashore in North Carolina with howling 90 mph winds and terrifying storm surge early Friday, killing at least five people and trapping hundreds more in high water as it settled in for what could be a long and extraordinarily destructive drenching. North Carolina's governor is concerned Florence could wipe away "whole communities."
More than 60 people had to be pulled from a collapsing cinderblock motel at the height of the storm. Hundreds more had to be rescued elsewhere from rising waters. And others could only hope someone would come for them.
Hurricane Resource Guide
"WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU," the city of New Bern tweeted around 2 a.m. "You may need to move up to the second story, or to your attic, but WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU."
As the giant, 400-mile-wide hurricane pounded away, it unloaded heavy rain, flattened trees, chewed up roads and knocked out power to more than 600,000 homes and businesses. A mother and baby were killed when a tree fell on a house, according to a tweet from Wilmington police.
CBS News reports three others have also been killed in the storm. Roger Dail of Lenoir County Emergency services says two people were killed in Kinston. A 78-year-old man was electrocuted at a residence when he attempted to connect two extension cords in the rain, and a 77-year-old man was killed after being blown down by the wind as he checked on his hunting dogs.
A woman in Pender County died from a heart attack during the storm. Emergency crews were unable to reach here when a tree branch fell and shattered the windshield of their front-end loader.
By late afternoon, Florence had weakened to a tropical storm, well below the storm's terrifying Category 4 peak of 140 mph earlier in the week. But the hurricane had slowed to a crawl as it traced the North Carolina-South Carolina shoreline, drenching coastal communities for hours on end.
"I'm looking down the street and I'm amazed, I've never seen this kind of damage here," said New Bern resident Shawn Hublin.
Ominously, forecasters said the onslaught on the North Carolina-South Carolina coast would last for hours and hours because the hurricane had come almost to a dead stop at just 3 mph as of midday.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said the hurricane was "wreaking havoc" on the coast and could wipe out entire communities as it makes its "violent grind across our state for days." He called the rain an event that comes along only once every 1,000 years.
Latest On Hurricane Florence
"Hurricane Florence is powerful, slow and relentless," he said. "It's an uninvited brute who doesn't want to leave."
There were no immediate reports of any deaths.
Florence made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane at 7:15 a.m. at Wrightsville Beach, a few miles east of Wilmington, not far from the South Carolina line, coming ashore along a mostly boarded-up, emptied-out stretch of coastline.
Its storm surge and the prospect of 1 to 3½ feet of rain were considered a bigger threat than its winds. Forecasters said catastrophic freshwater flooding is expected well inland over the next few days as Florence crawls westward across the Carolinas all weekend.
The area is expected to get about as much rain in three days as Hurricanes Dennis and Floyd dropped in two weeks in 1999. Preparing for the worst, about 9,700 National Guard troops and civilians were deployed with high-water vehicles, helicopters and boats that could be used to pluck people from the floodwaters.
CBS News' David Begnaud Shares 'Concerned Mom' Text As He Covers Hurricane Florence
For people living inland in the Carolinas, the moment of maximum peril from flash flooding could arrive days later, because it takes time for rainwater to drain into rivers and for those streams to crest. Authorities warned, too, of the threat of mudslides and the risk of environmental havoc from floodwaters washing over industrial waste sites and hog farms.
"Some of the river levels are going to be forecast to exceed historic levels and some of those were during Hurricane Floyd," said Chris Wamsley of NOAA.
Florence was seen as a major test for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was heavily criticized as slow and unprepared last year for Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, where the storm was blamed for nearly 3,000 deaths in the desperate aftermath.
The National Hurricane Center said Florence will eventually make a right hook to the northeast over the southern Appalachians, moving into the mid-Atlantic states and New England as a tropical depression by the middle of next week.
Meteorologist Ryan Maue of weathermodels.com calculated that 34 million people in the U.S. could get at least 3 inches of rain from Florence, with more than 5.7 million people probably receiving at least a foot.
Florence is expected to dump about 18 trillion gallons of rain over a week along its entire path, enough water to fill more than 65,000 Empire State Buildings, Maue calculated.
On Friday, coastal streets in the Carolinas flowed with frothy ocean water, and pieces of torn-apart buildings flew through the air. The few cars out on a main street in Wilmington had to swerve to avoid fallen trees, metal debris and power lines. Traffic lights out of order because of power failures swayed in the gusty wind. Roof shingles were peeled off a hotel.
At 11 a.m., the center of Florence was about 20 miles southwest of Wilmington, its winds down to 80 mph, according to the hurricane center. Hurricane-force winds extended 80 miles from its center, and tropical-storm-force winds reached out 195 miles.
Florence has already dumped at least a foot of rain north of Wilmington.
The Wilmington airport had a wind gust clocked at 105 mph, the highest since Hurricane Helene in 1958, the weather service said.
In Jacksonville, North Carolina, next to Camp Lejeune, firefighters and police fought wind and rain as they went door-to-door to pull people out of the Triangle Motor Inn after the structure began to crumble and the roof started to collapse.
Farther up the coast, in New Bern, flooding on the Neuse River trapped people. Mayor Dana Outlaw told The Charlotte Observer about 200 had been rescued by 5 a.m.
Sheets of rain splattered against windows of a hotel before daybreak in Wilmington, where Sandie Orsa of Wilmington sat in a lobby lit by emergency lights after the electricity went out.
"Very eerie, the wind howling, the rain blowing sideways, debris flying," said Orsa, who lives nearby and feared splintering trees would pummel her house.
Forecasters said Florence's surge could cover all but a sliver of the Carolina coast under as much as 11 feet of sea water.
New Lease On Life: 21 Animals In Path Of Hurricane Florence Saved By New Jersey Shelter
The rising sea crept toward the two-story home of Tom Copeland, who lives on a spit of land surrounded by water in Swansboro.
The water "is as high as it's ever been, and waves are breaking on my point, which is normally grass," said Copeland, a freelance photographer for The Associated Press. "Trees are blowing down in the wind. Nothing's hit the house yet, but it's still blowing."
The worst of the storm's fury had yet to reach coastal South Carolina, where emergency managers said it was not too late for people to get out.
"There is still time, but not a lot of time," said Derrec Becker of the South Carolina Department of Emergency Management.
More than 12,000 people were in shelters in North Carolina and 400 in Virginia, where the forecast was less dire. Officials said some 1.7 million people in the Carolinas and Virginia were warned to evacuate, but it was unclear how many did. More than 3,000 inmates at North Carolina prisons and juvenile detention centers were moved out of the storm's path.
(© Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
