鈥楾he time to get out is now鈥 says US mayor after deadly storm
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AUTHORITIES made fresh appeals yesterday for people in eastern North Carolina to leave low-lying areas as rivers swollen with rainwater caused flooding days after Hurricane Matthew passed.
Evacuations were ordered for about a tenth of Greenville’s 90,000 people. The Tar River continued to rise as forecasters expected it to crest above 7.5 meters by early tomorrow, a slight upward revision from previous estimates.
Authorities have closed one bridge across the swollen Tar and warned that other bridges could close, isolating people on opposite sides. The city’s airport was expected to remain closed for another week due to flooding.
Elsewhere, flood conditions in Fayetteville were expected to last until tomorrow, while the Neuse River in Kinston was also still rising and expected to peak on Saturday.
“We want you to evacuate these low-lying areas absolutely and immediately,” said Kinston mayor BJ Murphy. “The time to get out is now.”
In a possible sign of storm-driven tensions, authorities said a state trooper shot and killed an armed man in Lumberton who became angry with officers carrying out search and rescue missions. They released little other information about the shooting.
In Greenville, military trucks patrolled leafy neighborhoods where orange traffic cones and police tape discouraged people from entering. Police were stationed at the edge of the evacuation zone to monitor who came and went.
David Baker, whose family owns the River Bank Apartments, said all but one of their tenants had heeded the evacuation order by Tuesday, and he was spending the afternoon putting boards and sealant across the doorways of ground-floor units. A half-inch of water had already pooled in the parking lot, not far from where he stood.
Matthew’s death toll in the United States climbed to 34, more than half of them in North Carolina, in addition to the more than 500 feared dead in Haiti.
In North Carolina, tens of thousands of people, some of them as much as 200 kilometers inland, have been warned to move to higher ground since the hurricane drenched the state.
Governor Pat McCrory urged people to heed evacuation orders. In the hard-hit town of Lumberton, along the bloated Lumber River, Ada Page spent two nights sleeping in a hard plastic folding chair at a shelter put together so hastily there were no cots. People had to use portable toilets outside.
“I left at home all my clothes, everything. The only thing I have is this child and what I was driving,” said Page, who was with an 8-year-old granddaughter.
The full extent of the disaster in North Carolina was still unclear, but it appeared that thousands of homes were damaged.
Many likened Matthew to Hurricane Floyd, which caused US$3 billion in damage and destroyed 7,000 homes in North Carolina as it skirted the state’s coast in 1999.
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