S.C. residents told to stay home as rain continues to pound region

In scores of swift-water rescues Sunday, emergency agencies scrambled in steady rain to reach residents trapped by life-threatening floodwaters here as state officials urged residents not to travel.

Forecasters projected possible heavy storms through Sunday, and also warned that other sections of the Eastern Seaboard – including parts of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina and Virginia – could be subject to flooding through the day, as a pernicious storm system lingered over the region, partly fed by moisture from Hurricane Joaquin offshore.

At one point Sunday, the Columbia Police Department said it had about 200 pending rescue calls. Local officials across South Carolina said Sunday that they had opened shelters and imposed overnight curfews.

“We’ve had astronomical flooding,” said Mayor R. Keith Summey of North Charleston, where a curfew was ordered. “If you have to go out, go out, but make sure it’s an emergency. We don’t need anybody else stranded.”

Brian Hinton, 32, the deputy chief of the volunteer Charleston County Rescue Squad, was outside a fire station Sunday morning, planning his strategy. To the north, along the coast, floodwater had reached rooftops in neighborhoods in and around the small fishing hamlets of Awendaw and McClellanville.

Hinton and his colleagues were trying to determine how he might safely get there with his truck and his boat – and how he might get back. Two to three feet of water covered one stretch of the road, and high tide was coming.

“I'll put it this way – for us, this is a biblical event,” said Hinton, a big man wearing an orange wet suit. “This is a historical-type deal.”

The flooding in South Carolina forced the closing of dozens of streets in Charleston, a city of 130,000, and prompted the city on Saturday to seal off the peninsula in the heart of town to incoming traffic. Officials loosened the rule Saturday night to allow residents and business owners to come into the peninsula. By Sunday morning, all traffic was being allowed on the peninsula, said Charles Francis, a public information officer for the Charleston Police Department. But some access points were still blocked.

Charleston is a low-lying coastal city with an intimate relationship with the water, and many residents here were calmly riding out the steady Sunday rain in homes that did not flood.

But others were suffering through the slow-rolling disaster that this storm had become.

In Midtown Charleston, a low-income neighborhood, the Gadsden Green housing complex felt cut off from the world Sunday afternoon, with some of the main roads in blocked by broad pools of water – some of them knee-deep. There were almost no cars out, but there were people holed up in some of the tiny apartments on Norman Street.

Demetrius Scott, 26, a restaurant worker, was sweeping – and sweeping – the tile floor of his home with a bright red broom. The water, he said, as much as 3 inches of it, had been seeping in since 10 p.m. the night before. “It got in through the cracks in the walls,” he said.

A few doors down, Nikita Heyward, a stay-at-home mother, was using a portable fan to dry out the moisture. Her big sofa, soaked through at the base, was propped up against a back wall. A football game playing on a small television.

Heyward was hoping to stay with family members who had a dry place across the Ashley River. But she said she was not sure if she was even allowed to leave.

Television news footage showed neighborhoods elsewhere in the state with water near the roofs of cars. Thom Berry, a spokesman for the state emergency management division, said that evacuations were being carried out in “spot areas.”

In some areas, waters were rising over dams, a particular problem in the city of Forest Acres, a suburb of Columbia, he said. “There are a number of interconnected lakes, and you’re seeing some of the dams in those lakes overtopping,” he said.

Officials implored residents not to venture out unless it was necessary. “This event in our state is unprecedented,” Maj. Gen. Robert E. Livingston Jr., the South Carolina adjutant general, wrote on Facebook Sunday morning. “If you are not involved in response efforts, I remind everyone to stay home.”

Evacuations were reported in Richland County, home to Columbia, the state capital about 115 miles northwest of Charleston, as well as in Lexington County, a populous suburban area outside the capital. More than 90 state roads and bridges were closed, and swift-water rescues were reported in both the Lowcountry and Midlands regions. As of midmorning Sunday, the state government said the authorities had made more than 200 such rescues since Saturday night.

The extended flood threat drew some of its vigor from Hurricane Joaquin, a storm that meteorologists concluded would not make landfall in the United States but would still loom as a source of trouble for the mainland. Moisture from the hurricane joined with a sprawling low-pressure system to wreak havoc from Georgia well into the mid-Atlantic.

By late Sunday morning, Joaquin’s eye was about 150 miles southwest of Bermuda, where a hurricane warning was in effect. The hurricane’s winds had fallen to 110 miles per hour, making it a Category 2 hurricane. The National Hurricane Center said Joaquin was expected to weaken, but that Sunday afternoon would bring hurricane-force winds to Bermuda.

In the Bahamas, the U.S. Coast Guard was searching for a fourth day for El Faro, a 790-foot container ship that sent out a distress call Thursday morning. The crew of the ship, which the authorities said was carrying 33 passengers, said that the ship had taken on water, but officials have been unable to make contact since Thursday morning.

Late Saturday, the Coast Guard said one of its crews had located a life preserver from the ship about 75 miles from El Faro’s last known position.

“While this reflects that the ship was caught in rough seas and extreme weather, it is in no way indicative of the ship’s fate,” El Faro’s owner, TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico, said it told family members of the ship’s crew on Saturday evening.

The discovery, the company said, “helps confirm the El Faro’s possible location” and aided the Coast Guard in confirming its search area.

The Coast Guard said weather conditions had impeded the search, which has covered more than 30,000 square miles, as pilots flew in winds that were in excess of 100 knots and near waves that were more than 40 feet tall.

In a video released by the agency, a Coast Guard lieutenant who flew one of the search planes said that Saturday had produced “the most challenging weather conditions anyone on our crew had ever flown in.”

This story was originally published October 4, 2015 at 4:07 PM with the headline "S.C. residents told to stay home as rain continues to pound region."