Matthew’s winds waning but flooding to continue

The hurricane was moving to the northeast at 13 miles per hour with maximum sustained winds of 75 miles per hour, just 1mph above tropical storm level.

“Flash floods are the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States”, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said.

Chavis said it’s hard to get help to everyone quickly because of flooded roads.

At least 500,000 customers are now without electricity service, he noted.

In North Carolina, Gov. It said the motorists were near Wilson.

The death toll in the US climbed to at least 16 – half of them in North Carolina.

“Today they say everybody’s got to go”, Sharon Taylor said.

Roberto and his little girl, Roseberlande, are among the 470 people who died in just one district in southwest Haiti devastated by Matthew as the country braces for a rise in cholera cases and grapples with what could become the worst crisis since a catastrophic 2010 quake.

A hurricane warning has now been extended, and now includes the entire SC coast and into southern North Carolina, ending at Surf City, NC.

In many areas, Matthew’s aftermath was compared to Hurricane Floyd, which did $3 billion in damage and destroyed 7,000 homes as it skirted the coast in 1999. It has since weakened to a Category 1.

In North Carolina, rescue teams continued to search for five people missing after record flooding hit the state.

The storm has also been blamed for more than a dozen deaths in the coastal states it hit.

Gov. Pat McCrory is to given an update on the state’s efforts to recover from the storm at 9 a.m. Monday. People grew increasingly frustrated when they were blocked from returning home by authorities who said the damage was still too severe. One of the casualties was a 68-year-old man who was home alone when two trees fell on his home. Florida reported six storm-related deaths.

In the tiny town of Nichols, South Carolina, downstream from Lumberton, at least 100 people spent the night on the third floor of the town hall waiting to be rescued. Weeks of heavy rain preceded the storm.

A property data firm projected that insured losses on home and commercial properties would amount to $4 billion to $6 billion, well below Hurricane Katrina’s $40 billion and Superstorm Sandy’s $20 billion.

The firm also projects that the hurricane will end up damaging roughly 1.5 million residential and commercial properties in Florida, Georgia and SC.

Hurricane Matthew’s torrential rain. He said Charleston has shown its resilience time and time again throughout its history and in the face of disaster and struggle, the city is at its best. With rivers rising, the governor said he expected the number of dead to increase.

Obama spoke separately Saturday to Govs. But in the end, the hurricane skirted Florida’s heavily populated Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area and sideswiped cities farther north, including Daytona Beach, Vero Beach, Cape Canaveral and Jacksonville, without its center ever actually coming ashore in Florida. Despite the state losing four people to the storm, all three major theme parks in Orlando, Florida, including Walt Disney World, were up and running on Sunday.

Residents of McClellanville, where Hurricane Hugo made landfall in 1989, counted their blessings Sunday, the day after Matthew made landfall.

Its storm center, or eye, finally blew ashore just north of Charleston on Saturday, but only briefly. Fugate says the Carolinas will continue facing life-threatening conditions for days because of the flooding.

The center of the cyclone will pass just south of the coast of North Carolina Sunday morning before moving well east of the coast by Sunday afternoon, according to the National Hurricane Center. She says those from unknown senders should be deleted.

They planned to head home Saturday but they saw the governor announce the evacuations on TV so they packed up and left Friday.

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The Rev. Volley Hanson anxious that stress from the lack of running water and electricity might push people over the edge. A homeless woman was seen staggering through waters up to her neck. Evacuations had started in some towns and were being considered in others, he said. Storm surge flowed across the road and drenched her belongings in waist-deep salt water, washing away the stores of rice and sugar she regularly sold at the market to support her family. The city was left awash in rain and gray seawater, though the floodwaters had mostly receded by Saturday morning.

“It wiped out our tent, our tarp and washed away all our blankets and clothes”, she said. A bystander handed her a sheet, which she wrapped around her neck.

Four islands in SC remain closed, with Hilton Head Island set to reopen this afternoon. But several communities nearby received extensive damage with water surging down some streets, and massive trees toppled over.

They heard someone “hollering” and tried to rescue her with a rope but couldn’t. I can’t go back and take the expense. “That’s what I’m afraid of”. The hurricane downed some trees and caused power outages on the Army post, about 30 miles inland near Savannah, but by Tuesday normal operations had resumed for servicemembers and civilian employees. In the Outer Banks of North Carolina, tropical storm warnings have been issued. A deteriorating Matthew was stripped of hurricane status Sunday.

By the early evening, the storm will be turning away from SC.

The storm was stripped of hurricane status just before daybreak, but the crisis – set off by more than a foot of rain – was far from over.

Matthew also brought some of the highest tides on record along the SC coast. His was the second weather-related death in SC. It is moving north about 12 miles per hour (19 kph).