FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory says that the death toll in his state from Hurricane Matthew now stands at 10.
McCrory also said during a televised press conference Monday that 1,500 people remained stranded in the city of Lumberton, which is about 70 miles inland. Boats and helicopters have been deployed to rescue them.
McCrory said that the Federal Aviation Administration has placed temporary flight restrictions over the city.
He asked operators of drones to keep them out of the airspace over flooded areas so they do not endanger helicopter teams. He also said that “inland flooding” remains the greatest threat to the state.
The additional fatalities in North Carolina bring to 20 the number of U.S. deaths from the hurricane, and more than 500 in Haiti.
Power is slowly being restored to the hundreds of thousands of South Carolinians left without power when Hurricane Matthew hit the state over the weekend.
As of early Monday, utility outage maps show that just under a half million electric customers across the state were still in the dark.
That’s down from 625,000 on Sunday and about 825,000 at the height of the storm.
Power companies say it may be several days before power can be restored to all electric customers across South Carolina.
Similar numbers were without power in North Carolina. North Carolina Emergency Management says about 491,000 residents were without service Monday morning. The state’s largest utility, Duke Energy, had the biggest problems, with about 310,000 customers without service.
Matthew is long gone from the Atlantic coast early Monday, but the devastation lingers, most notably in North Carolina, where flooded cities are trying to dry out and those downstream are keeping a close eye on rising rivers.
The flooding disaster is forecast to slowly unfold over the next several days as all that rain — more than a foot in places — flows into rivers and downstream, likely causing more inundation in many of the same places devastated by a similar deluge from Hurricane Floyd in 1999.
Thousands of people found themselves suddenly trapped in homes and cars during the torrential rains. Rescuers in Coast Guard helicopters plucked some of them from rooftops and used military vehicles to reach others.
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