S.C. coast alerted as flooding rolls seaward

Firefighters help Eliza Linen leave her home Friday in the Dunbar community of Georgetown, S.C.
Firefighters help Eliza Linen leave her home Friday in the Dunbar community of Georgetown, S.C.

PLEASANT HILL, S.C. -- Many South Carolina residents near the coast are evacuating and others are piling up sandbags anew outside homes and businesses, bracing for more possible flooding, as the nation's homeland security chief was to tour areas hit hard by recent heavy rains.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson planned to travel to Columbia and Charleston on Friday to meet with federal, state and local officials and see firsthand efforts to recover from what South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has described as a 1,000-year rainstorm. While skies are clear again after past days of rain, residents along or near the coast are readying as rain-swollen rivers reach the sea.

And there may be more misery on the way. A storm system will stall near the coast this weekend, bringing as much as an inch of rain to some areas, according to the National Weather Service.

Members of the South Carolina National Guard, stationed at a fire station in the rural hamlet of Pleasant Hill about 30 minutes from Georgetown, were busy Thursday helping people get to shelters from areas still cut off by road flooding. In some areas, flooding is expected to worsen in coming days and Georgetown, which fronts a coastal bay fed by a series of rivers, is especially watchful.

Parts of nearly 260 roads in South Carolina are still closed because of flooding, according to the state Department of Transportation.

South Carolina Transportation Secretary Christy Hall said Friday that the foundations under some bridges on Interstate 95 have washed out, and they can't say when a 13-mile stretch of the highway will reopen.

Hall said the problems are on 18 separate small bridges that go over the Black and Pocotaligo rivers and surrounding swampland in Clarendon County.

Other bridges in the area are also damaged, so travelers on I-95 that would normally drive 74 miles from Interstate 26 to Interstate 20 are having to take a 168-mile detour through Columbia.

Guardsmen Michael Sanders, 21, and Michael Dunmore, 19, manned a Light Medium Tactical Vehicle, a truck with high clearance and a sealed engine that can easily move through 4 feet of water. The back was covered with canvas and outfitted with seats for those being evacuated out of the areas still threatened by floodwaters. The two are among some 2,800 Guard members called up to help.

"This is the most water I have ever seen," Sanders said. "There is water running across the roads and there is water in yards, some worse than the others."

Sanders was in Columbia, the state capital, when he was called to the coast for disaster response work. He said it took seven hours to drive from Columbia to Georgetown because of the flooding along the way. Normally, the stretch is a 2.5-hour drive.

Some motorists honked in greeting and people standing by the road waved as the heavy truck wound down the back roads not far from the Black River.

There was no water immediately threatening the homes of the people evacuated Thursday. But several homes were isolated because of road flooding in other areas -- flooding that Haley warned could get worse.

The governor on Thursday urged those in low-lying areas near the coast to "strongly consider evacuating."

"We have thousands of people that won't move. And we need to get them to move," she said. "They don't need to be sitting in flooded areas for 12 days."

Officials said there were no mandatory evacuations but people need to be alert.

"We want people to be hypervigilant," said South Carolina National Guard commander Maj. Gen. Robert Livingston.

In Georgetown, where floodwaters ran a foot or more deep over the weekend, merchants were again placing sandbags by doors and on sidewalks next to businesses.

In Columbia, work is still underway to repair the city's water system, which serves 375,000 customers, after that city was hit hard by the rains. A canal that serves as the main source of drinking water for about half those customers collapsed in two places after historic rainfall. Contractors built a rock dam to plug the holes while National Guard helicopters dropped giant sandbags into the rushing water.

Water from the canal feeds the reservoir at the city's water treatment plant. With the levels in the canal falling, pumps are helping get water from the canal into the reservoir.

Information for this article was contributed by Adam Beam, Susanne M. Schafer and Meg Kinnard of The Associated Press.

A Section on 10/10/2015

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