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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) —
It could take until the weekend for the threat of flooding to ease in storm-tattered South Carolina, where a senator warned of a potential billion-dollar cleanup bill, two more people died in the floodwaters and the flagship university sent a home football game 700 miles away.
Rivers rose and dams bulged as storm water from days of heavy rains made its way to the Atlantic Ocean, causing a second round of flooding downstream.
Gov. Nikki Haley paid a visit to the coast, which she said would still be in danger for another 24-48 hours.
"We're holding our breath and saying a prayer," she said.
U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham warned the disaster could "break the bank" of federal emergency funds, possibly topping more than $1 billion.
In another image of the storm's otherworldly toll, state officials said caskets have popped out of the ground in 11 instances in six counties.
At least 19 people in South Carolina and North Carolina have died in the storm, while many survivors returned home to discover they'd lost everything.
Wendy Dixon burst into sobs after realizing her wedding album and dozens of photos of her two sons and three grandchildren were destroyed.
Overcome with emotion and barely able to walk across her waterlogged carpet, Dixon grasped the arm of a niece inside the Columbia apartment.
"Everything is gone!" she wailed. "My clothes and all can be replaced. But my little things, my pictures, are all gone."
It was another anxious day of waiting for floodwaters to recede around the capital city. 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.
Haley said 62 dams across the state were being monitored, and 13 had already failed. However, she said South Carolina was fortunate that 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 in one testy response.
But Graham said the federal lifeline must be treated with care to avoid a "pork-laden monstrosity" like the federal government's aid package to the Northeast Hurricane Sandy in 2012. He warned state and county officials not to use the disaster as an opportunity to ask for money unrelated to flood damage.
He also said it would take weeks to get a reliable damage assessment.
"We're talking hundreds of millions (of dollars), maybe over a billion," he said while visiting a shelter in Columbia.
And in an extraordinary move for the football-crazy South, the University of South Carolina announced it was moving Saturday's football game against No. 7 LSU some 700 miles to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The university said more than 80,000 fans expected for the game in Columbia would have put too much stress on weakened infrastructure.
In two of the most recent storm-related deaths, deputies said the pickup's driver went around a barricade and plunged into the water at a 20-foot gap where pavement was washed out.
Sheriff's spokesman Lt. Curtis Wilson said three people in the pickup truck managed to get to safety around 3 a.m. Wednesday. Divers found two others dead inside the truck several hours later.
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said all nine deaths in the county have come from people trying to drive in flooded areas. Officers have located the cars belonging to several other missing people.
"I'm fearing the worst on that," Lott said.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) —
The Coast Guard plans to end its search at sunset for 33 missing crew members from a U.S. cargo ship that sank last week during Hurricane Joaquin, officials announced Wednesday afternoon.
Coast Guard officials made the announcement at a 3 p.m. news conference.
Robert Green, father of missing crew member LaShawn Rivera, said despite the decision, "I think we're still hopeful. Miracles do happen, and it's God's way only. I'm prayerful, hopeful and still optimistic."
The 790-foot cargo ship sank Thursday off the Bahamas during Hurricane Joaquin, a Category 4 storm with 140 mph winds that was producing 50-foot waves. Officials say the ship's captain had plans to go around the storm as he headed from Jacksonville, Florida, to Puerto Rico but the El Faro suffered unexplained engine failure that left it unable to avoid the storm.
Earlier, federal investigators said they still hope to recover a data recorder from the ship as search crews continue looking for any survivors.
The National Transportation Safety Board sent a team to Jacksonville on Tuesday to begin the agency's inquiry, which will help determine why the captain, crew and owners of El Faro decided to risk sailing in stormy waters.
"We will be looking at everything. So, we leave no stone unturned in our investigation and our analysis. We want to find every bit of information that we possibly can," Bella Dinh-Zarr, NTSB vice-chairman, said.
In addition to the voyage data recorder — which begins pinging when it gets wet and has a 30-day battery life — the board will focus on communications between the captain and the vessel's owner.
Another question is whether the five workers whose job was to prepare the engine room for a retrofitting had any role in the boat's loss of power, which set the vessel adrift in the stormy seas. Officials from Tote Inc., the vessel's owner, say they don't believe so. But the question — along with the captain's decision to plot a course near the storm — will help investigators figure out why the boat apparently sank near the Bahamas, possibly claiming the lives of all 33 aboard.
The ship is believed to have gone down in 15,000 feet of water after reporting its last known position last Thursday. One unidentified body has been found.
"It's just a tragic, tragic situation," Dinh-Zarr said.
The 41-year-old El Faro was scheduled to be retired from Caribbean duty and retrofitted in the coming months for service between the West Coast and Alaska, said Tote executive Phil Greene.
The El Faro and its equally aged sister vessel were being replaced on the Jacksonville-to-Puerto Rico run by two brand-new ships capable of carrying much more cargo and emitting less pollution.
When the El Faro left Jacksonville on Sept. 29, five workers from Poland came along with 28 U.S. crew members to do some preparatory work in the engine room, according to Greene. He gave no details on the nature of their work.
"I don't believe based on the work they were doing that they would have had anything to do with what affected the propulsion," said Greene, a retired Navy admiral.
The El Faro had no history of engine failure, Greene said, and the company said the vessel was modernized in 1992 and 2006. Company records show it underwent its last annual Coast Guard inspection in March.
"We don't have all the answers. I'm sorry for that. I wish we did," Anthony Chiarello, said Tote Inc.'s president and CEO. "But we will find out what happened."
The American Bureau of Shipping, a nonprofit organization that sets safety and other standards for ships, did full hull and machinery inspections in February with no red flags, the company said.
F. John Nicoll, a retired captain who spent years piloting the run to Puerto Rico, said he doubts the age of the El Faro was a factor, noting that there are many older ships plying U.S. waters without incident.
He predicted the NTSB will look into whether company pressure to deliver the cargo on time despite the menacing weather played a role in the tragedy — something Tote executives have denied.
"Time and money are an important thing" in the shipping industry, Nicoll said. He said there should be emails and other messages between the captain and the company to help answer the question.
Tote executives said the captain, Michael Davidson, planned a heading that would have enabled El Faro to bypass Joaquin if the ship hadn't lost power. The loss of power left it vulnerable to the storm's 140-mph winds and battering waves more than 50 feet high.
They said Davidson was in regular communication before the storm with the company, which can override a captain's decisions.
Davidson attended the Maine Maritime Academy and has a home in Windham, Maine.
"He was a very squared-away sailor, very meticulous with details, very prudent, which is important when you're working on the water. He took his job seriously," said Nick Mavadones, a friend since childhood and general manager of Casco Bay Lines, where he and Davidson worked together.
Still, seafarers who have long experience in the Caribbean say its weather can be treacherous.
"It can go from calm, in a matter of five or six hours, to hell," said Angel Ortiz, who retired as a merchant mariner after 39 years.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) —
The family of Miss South Carolina 1954 found her flood-soaked pageant scrapbook on a dining room floor littered with dead fish on Tuesday, as the first sunny day in nearly two weeks provided a chance to clean up from historic floods.
"I would hate for her to see it like this. She would be crushed," said Polly Sim, who moved her 80-year-old mother into a nursing home just before the rainstorm turned much of the state into a disaster area.
Owners of inundated homes were keeping close watch on swollen waterways as they pried open swollen doors and tore out soaked carpets. So far, at least 17 people have died in the floods in the Carolinas, some of them drowning after trying to drive through high water.
Sim's mother, known as Polly Rankin Suber when she competed in the Miss America contest, had lived since 1972 in the unit, where more than 3 feet of muddy water toppled her washing machine and turned the wallboard to mush.
"There's no way it will be what it was," said Sim. "My mom was so eccentric, had her own funky style of decorating, there's no way anyone could duplicate that. Never."
Tuesday was the first dry day since Sept. 24 in South Carolina's state capital, where a midnight-to-6 a.m. curfew was in effect. But officials warned that new evacuations could come as the huge mass of water flows toward the sea, threatening dams and displacing residents along the way.
Of particular concern was the Lowcountry, where the Santee, Edisto and other rivers make their way to the sea. Gov. Nikki Haley warned that several rivers were rising and had yet to reach their peaks.
"God smiled on South Carolina because the sun is out. That is a good sign, but ... we still have to be cautious," Haley said Tuesday after taking an aerial tour. "What I saw was disturbing."
"We are going to be extremely careful. We are watching this minute by minute," she said.
Georgetown, one of America's oldest cities, sits on the coast at the confluence of four rivers. The historic downtown flooded over the weekend, and its ordeal wasn't over yet.
"It was coming in through the kitchen wall, through the bathroom walls, through the bedroom walls, through the living room walls. It was up over the sandbags that we put over the door. And, it just kept rising," Tom Doran said, bracing himself for the next wave. "If I see a hoard of locusts then I'm taking off."
In Effingham, east of Columbia, the Lynches River was at nearly 20 feet on Tuesday — five feet above flood stage. Kip Jones paddled a kayak to check on a home he rents out there, and discovered that the family lost pretty much everything they had, with almost 8 feet of standing water in the bedrooms.
"Their stuff is floating all in the house," Jones said. "Once the water comes in the house you get bacteria and you get mold."
In downtown Columbia, about 200 workers rushed to fix a breach in a canal that is threatening the city's water supply to its 375,000 customers. The city's main intake valve is in the canal, and the water level was steadily dropping, Columbia Utilities Director Joey Jaco said.
Crews planned to work into Wednesday morning, sinking a barge and piling bags of rocks and sand on top to try and block the hole in the canal, Jaco said.
If the water gets below the intake valve, there is less than a day's supply in a reservoir.
"We need to make sure we get this dam constructed very soon to make sure we stay above a minimal level," Jaco said.
Haley said it was too soon to estimate the damage, which could be "any amount of dollars." The Republican governor quickly got a federal disaster declaration from President Barack Obama, freeing up money and resources. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican presidential candidate, promised not "to ask for a penny more than we need" and criticized other lawmakers for seeking financing for unrelated projects in disaster bills.
Water distribution was a challenge. In the region around Columbia, as many as 40,000 homes lacked drinking water, and Mayor Steve Benjamin said 375,000 water customers will likely have to boil their water before drinking or cooking for "quite some time."
The power grid was returning to normal after nearly 30,000 customers lost electricity. Roads and bridges were taking longer to restore: Some 200 engineers were inspecting about 470 spots that remained closed Tuesday, including a 75-mile stretch of Interstate 95. As of late Tuesday, that number had dropped to 436, the South Carolina Department of Transportation said in a news release.
Some drivers had a hard time accepting the long detours around standing water. In Turbeville, Police Lt. Philip Wilkes stood at a traffic stop, telling motorists where they could go to avoid flooded roads and dangerous bridges.
"Some people take it pretty good," Wilkes said. "Then you've got some of them, they just won't take no for an answer. We can't part the waters."
South Carolina was soaked by what experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called a "fire hose" of tropical moisture spun off by Hurricane Joaquin, which mostly missed the East Coast.
Authorities have made hundreds of water rescues since then, lifting people and animals to safety. About 800 people were in two-dozen shelters, but the governor expects that number to rise.
In Columbia, Ray Stilwell told a harrowing story of escaping his home along Gills Creek, where nearly 17 inches fell in as many hours Sunday.
He was upstairs when his backdoor failed and water rushed in, and was nearly swept away as he tried to make it outside to higher ground. He survived by hanging on to a neighbor's gate, and then climbing atop a patio table.
"I'm so grateful. If you hear me complain, remind me that I'm lucky to be here," the 59-year-old schoolteacher said. "God allowed me to be here; Now I've just got to figure out what to do with the extra time I've been given."
Stilwell took a long look at the nearby creek, which was still raging and foamy but didn't seem to be rising. A worried neighbor called out, asking what was going on. "Just keep watching the water level right now," Stilwell responded.
The Black River reached 10 feet above flood stage in Kingstree, breaking a 1973 record by more than 3 feet, according to Town Manager Dan Wells, who found himself involved in a porcine rescue mission Tuesday.
After a wild hog fell into the rushing river and slammed into the town bridge, Wells and a colleague used a stun gun and captured the exhausted hog, trussed its legs with duct tape and pulled it into a pickup truck to be released in a nearby forest.
"It wasn't on my list of things to do today, I can tell you that," said Wells.