GEORGETOWN, S.C. -- Rivers rose and dams bulged Wednesday as South Carolina faced another anxious day of waiting for floodwaters to recede, and search teams found the bodies of two people who had driven around a barricade and into rushing water.
At least 19 people in South Carolina and North Carolina have died in the storm.
Along the coast, residents prepared for a second round of flooding as water from rivers swollen after days of rainfall make its way toward the Atlantic. In the Columbia area, where some residents returned home to assess damage and start cleaning up, the threat of more flooding still hadn't lifted Wednesday.
About 1,000 residents near the compromised Beaver Dam were told to evacuate Wednesday morning, though the order was lifted several hours later when crews shored up the dam.
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned that the disaster could "break the bank" of federal emergency funds, possibly topping $1 billion.
In coastal Georgetown, one of the United States' oldest cities, Scott Youngblood added sandbags to the pile near the door of the Augustus & Carolina furniture store on Front Street, a popular tourist area that runs along the Sampit River.
Every day since the weekend storm -- which sent more than a foot of water washing down the street -- water at high tide has lapped against those sandbags. Residents worried that there will be more flooding on the Black and Waccamaw rivers. Both drain into Georgetown County.
The Waccamaw River was expected to crest today at 5 feet above flood stage at Conway in Horry County. The Black River crested Tuesday upstream at Kingstree at a record 10 feet above flood stage, town officials said.
Youngblood said he hopes things won't get as bad as earlier in the week.
"We're hanging our hat on that we're not going to have that combination of tide and rain and such," he said. "We had so much rain, but the primary thing we were experiencing was the water table coming up through the bottom bubbling up from beneath the flooring. We had quite a bit of damage."
After an aerial tour of damaged areas Tuesday, Gov. Nikki Haley on Wednesday paid a visit to the coast, which she said would be in danger for another 24-48 hours.
"We're holding our breath and saying a prayer," she said.
At a shelter in Columbia, Graham said it would take weeks to get an accurate damage assessment.
"We're talking hundreds of millions [of dollars], maybe over a billion," he said.
Graham warned state and county officials not to use the disaster as an opportunity to ask for money unrelated to flood damage. He criticized the federal government's aid package to the Northeast after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, calling it a "pork-laden monstrosity."
In two of the most recent storm-related deaths, sheriff's deputies said a pickup driver went around a barricade where a road had been closed, and the pickup plunged into the water at a 20-foot gap where the pavement had washed out.
Sheriff's spokesman Lt. Curtis Wilson said three people in the pickup managed to get to safety about 3 a.m. Wednesday, but several hours later, divers found the bodies of two others inside the truck. The names of the victims were not released Wednesday.
Crews in Columbia were still working Wednesday to repair a breach in a canal that was threatening the main water supply for 375,000 people, utilities director Joey Jaco said. Workers were building a rock dam a few hundred feet north of the breach, which is near the city's hydroelectric plant.
Jaco said the only danger now is if the canal -- built in the early 1800s and supplying 35 million gallons to the city's water plant each day -- breaches in a second spot, but he added that the levee shows no sign of buckling.
In a neighborhood in northeast Columbia, officials worked to shore up the Beaver Dam and said they believed that the worst was over.
Col. Brad Owens said Wednesday that crews had worked through the night piling sandbags and dropping large rocks to stop the escaping water. Part of the roadway there has eroded and has been closed for days, Owens said.
Haley said 62 dams across the state were being monitored, and 13 had already failed. However, she said those represented only a small fraction of 2,000 or so dams regulated by the state.
At a news conference, Haley and other officials were asked repeatedly about whether the state had spent enough in previous years to maintain dams and other infrastructure.
"I think the analysis of this can be done after" the danger from the floods passes, she said.
Information for this article was contributed by Jeffery Collins, Susanne M. Schafer, Adam Beam, Emery P. Dalesio and Meg Kinnard of The Associated Press.
A Section on 10/08/2015