Tag Archives: Evacuation

Operation to end last IS Syria pocket hits evacuation snag

A fighter from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) gives bread to children near the village of Baghouz, Deir Al Zor province, Syria February 20, 2019. REUTERS/Rodi Said

By Rodi Said

NEAR BAGHOUZ, Syria (Reuters) – The operation to destroy Islamic State’s final vestige of rule in Iraq and Syria hit a temporary snag on Thursday, as an expected evacuation of the remaining civilians from its last enclave in eastern Syria did not go ahead.

The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which has steadily driven the jihadists down the Euphrates, has surrounded them at Baghouz near the Iraqi border but does not want to mount a final attack until all civilians are out.

Iraqi sources said the SDF handed over more than 150 Iraqi and other foreign jihadists to Iraq on Thursday, under a deal involving a total of 502.

The SDF had expected to pull the last civilians from Baghouz on Thursday, but trucks it sent in left empty. “We can’t get into details, but today no civilians came out,” SDF official Mustafa Bali told Reuters.

Baghouz is all that remains for Islamic State in the Euphrates valley region that became its final populated stronghold in Iraq and Syria after it lost its major cities of Mosul and Raqqa in 2017.

In Paris, a French source said the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State was verifying whether an air strike killed French jihadist Fabien Clain, who voiced the recording claiming the November 2015 attacks on Paris.

A second French source close to the matter said Clain had been killed and his brother Jean-Michel seriously wounded after a coalition strike on Wednesday in Baghouz.

In the 2015 attacks, gunmen and suicide bombers killed 129 people in the French capital. France’s military, foreign ministry and president’s office declined to comment. The coalition said it could not confirm the information at this time.

The capture of Baghouz will nudge the eight-year-old Syrian war towards a new phase, with U.S. President Donald Trump’s pledge to withdraw troops leaving a security vacuum that other powers are seeking to fill.

Though the fall of Baghouz marks a milestone in the campaign against IS and the wider conflict in Syria, Islamic State is still seen as a major security threat.

The group has steadily turned to guerrilla warfare and still holds territory in a remote, sparsely populated area west of the Euphrates River – a part of Syria otherwise controlled by the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian allies.

Bali told Reuters the SDF would attack Baghouz once the civilian evacuation was complete. He did not say how much more time was needed to finish off the remaining Islamic State militants or give a new estimate of how many fighters remained.

The SDF has previously estimated several hundred fighters – believed mostly to be foreign jihadists – are still inside.

A Reuters witness saw warplanes in the sky over Baghouz on Thursday though there was no sound of fighting or shelling.

The U.S.-led coalition said on Wednesday “the most hardened” jihadists remain in Baghouz.

More than 2,000 civilians left the enclave on Wednesday, the SDF said. It has said more than 20,000 civilians left Baghouz in the days leading up to the start of the SDF’s final push to capture the enclave this month.

The SDF has not ruled out the possibility that some Islamic State fighters had left Baghouz with the civilians.

SDF and coalition forces are recording the names and questioning everyone who has left in the civilian convoys.

Many of the people who left the enclave in civilian convoys have been Iraqis, some of whom said they had crossed from Iraq into Syria as Iraqi government forces made gains against Islamic State on the other side of the frontier.

FACING THE CONSEQUENCES

Two Iraqi military sources told Reuters the handover of Islamic State fighters on Thursday was the first of several.

“The majority of the fighters are Iraqi,” said a military colonel whose unit is stationed at the Syrian border. “But we have a few foreigners.”

Islamic State, whose leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself “caliph”, or leader of all Muslims, in 2014, attracted members from all over the world, including many Western states.

A Turkish official said Turkey was doubling down its own security measures to make it harder for foreign fighters still in Syria or Iraq to pass through Turkey, noting that the threat was much greater than the 800 that the SDF says it is holding.

Western countries refusing to repatriate jihadists were not living up to their responsibilities and leaving countries like Turkey to face the consequences, the official added.

Britain has stripped the citizenship of a teenager who went to Syria aged 15 to join Islamic State. But interior minister Sajid Javid said he would not take a decision that would leave anyone stateless, after Bangladesh said it would not accept her.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said a woman born in the United States who joined Islamic State did not qualify for U.S. citizenship and had no legal basis to return to the country.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad, Raya Jalabi in Erbil, Tom Perry in Beirut and Tulay Karadeniz, Writing by Tom Perry, Editing by Angus MacSwan, Angus McDowall, William Maclean)

Indonesian rescuers struggle against heavy rain to reach tsunami-hit villages

A man holding an umbrella watches as personnel search through the debris of his damaged house after a tsunami, in Sumur, Banten province, Indonesia December 26, 2018. REUTERS/Jorge Silva

By Fergus Jensen

SUMUR, Indonesia (Reuters) – Indonesian rescue teams on Wednesday struggled to reach remote areas on the western coast of Java amid an “extreme weather” rain warning after a tsunami killed more than 400 people last week.

Heavy rain lashed fishing villages along the coast, muddying roads and holding up convoys delivering heavy machinery and aid to isolated areas while authorities urged residents to stay away from the shore in case of further waves.

Clouds of ash spewed from the nearby Anak Krakatau, or child of Krakatau, almost obscuring the volcanic island where a crater collapse at high tide on Saturday sent waves up to 5 meters (16 feet) high smashing into the coast on the Sunda Strait, between Java and Sumatra islands.

Evacuees walk to a shelter with supplies they collected, after a tsunami, near Sumur, Banten province, Indonesia December 26, 2018. REUTERS/Jorge Silva

Evacuees walk to a shelter with supplies they collected, after a tsunami, near Sumur, Banten province, Indonesia December 26, 2018. REUTERS/Jorge Silva

Indonesia’s meteorology agency (BMKG) said the rough weather could make the volcano’s crater more fragile.

“We have developed a monitoring system focused specifically on the volcanic tremors at Anak Krakatau so that we can issue early warnings,” said BMKG head Dwikorita Karnawati, adding that a two-kilometer exclusion zone had been imposed.

The confirmed death toll is 430, with at least 159 people missing. Nearly 1,500 people were injured and over 21,000 people have evacuated to higher ground.

A state of emergency has been declared until Jan. 4, which authorities hope will make it easier to deploy assistance, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for the national disaster mitigation agency.

Search and rescue teams were focused on the town of Sumur near the southwest tip of Java, but “the roads are damaged and clogged” and helicopters had to be deployed to carry out assessments and evacuations, he added.

Volunteers were having to piece together makeshift bridges out of concrete blocks after the waves washed away infrastructure along the coast.

Debris is seen along a beach after a tsunami, near Sumur, Banten province, Indonesia December 26, 2018. REUTERS/Jorge Silva

Debris is seen along a beach after a tsunami, near Sumur, Banten province, Indonesia December 26, 2018. REUTERS/Jorge Silva

Indonesia is a vast archipelago that sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”. This year, the country has suffered its worst annual death toll from disasters in more than a decade.

The latest disaster, coming during the Christmas season, evoked memories of the Indian Ocean tsunami triggered by an earthquake on Dec. 26, 2004, which killed 226,000 people in 14 countries, including more than 120,000 in Indonesia.

The Saturday evening tsunami followed the collapse of an area of the volcano island of about 64 hectares (222 acres), or about 90 soccer fields.

The waves engulfed fishing villages and holiday resorts, leaving a coast littered with the matchwood of homes, crushed vehicles and fallen trees. Children’s toys and rides at a seaside carnival in Sumur were left scattered along a swampy beach.

The surge of seawater also left dozens of turtles, weighing several kilograms, stranded on land, and some volunteer rescuers worked to carry them back to the sea.

On Sebesi Island in the middle of the Sunda Strait, helicopters had been dispatched to evacuate residents.

Along the coast, thousands of people are staying in tents and temporary shelters like mosques or schools, with dozens sleeping on the floor or in crowded public facilities. Rice and instant noodles have been delivered to many shelters, but clean water, wet weather gear, fresh clothes, and blankets are in short supply, some evacuees said.

Ade Hasanah, 45, staying in an emergency center with her children, said people were being told not to return to their homes.

“It’s safe here,” she said. “We hope if the children are safe and the situation is stable, we can go home quickly. We’re restless.”

In 1883, the volcano then known as Krakatoa erupted in one of the biggest blasts in recorded history, killing more than 36,000 people in a series of tsunamis and lowering the global surface temperature by one degree Celsius with its ash.

Anak Krakatau is the island that emerged from the area in 1927 and has been growing ever since.

(Additional reporting by Bernadette Christina Munthe, Tabita Diela, Fanny Potkin, Nilufar Rizki, Wilda Asmarini in JAKARTA; Writing by Kanupriya Kapoor,; Editing by Robert Birsel and Nick Macfie)

Connecticut school evacuated for bomb threat on sixth anniversary of massacre

FILE PHOTO: The sign for the new Sandy Hook Elementary School at the end of the drive leading to the school is pictured in Newtown, Connecticut, U.S. July 29, 2016. REUTERS/Michelle McLoughlin/File Photo

By Gabriella Borter

(Reuters) – A bomb threat prompted the evacuation of a Connecticut elementary school on the site of the deadliest public-school shooting in U.S. history on Friday, the sixth anniversary of the massacre, police said.

Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, where 26 children and educators were killed in 2012, received a threatening phone call around 9 a.m. EST, said police Lieutenant Aaron Bahamonde.

“It was a bomb threat over the phone,” Bahamonde said. About 400 people were evacuated, he said. No bomb was found.

Bahamonde said the threat was unrelated to a Thursday incident in which hundreds of schools, businesses and buildings across the United States and Canada receive email bomb threats demanding payment in cryptocurrency. Authorities dismissed those threats as a hoax.

On Dec. 14, 2012, a 21-year-old gunman killed 20 young children and six educators at Sandy Hook before taking his own life. The building where the massacre took place was torn down, and Sandy Hook students now attend classes in a new facility.

The mass shooting inflamed the long-running U.S. debate on gun rights, which are protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The United States has experienced a string of deadly mass shootings since that attack, including one at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in February that left 17 people dead.

(Reporting by Gabriella Borter in New York; Editing by Scott Malone and Jonathan Oatis)

Cyclone ‘Gaja’ makes landfall in south India, kills 11 people

The aftermath of cyclone Gaja is seen in Tamil Nadu, India November 16, 2018 in this picture obtained from social media. SHABBIR AHMED/via REUTERS

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – A cyclone made landfall in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu on Friday, killing at least 11 people, uprooting trees and knocking down electricity poles after more than 80,000 people were moved out of its path to safety, officials said.

The aftermath of cyclone Gaja is seen in Tamil Nadu, India November 16, 2018 in this picture obtained from social media. SHABBIR AHMED/via REUTERS

The aftermath of cyclone Gaja is seen in Tamil Nadu, India November 16, 2018 in this picture obtained from social media. SHABBIR AHMED/via REUTERS

Cyclone “Gaja” made landfall in the early hours of Friday but then weakened as it moved inland, K. J. Ramesh, director general of the state-run India Meteorological Department, told Reuters.

Eleven people were known to have been killed, said an official from the Tamil Nadu State Disaster Management Authority.

The state government has set up more than 470 relief camps and had evacuated more than 80,000 people from their homes in vulnerable areas, said the official who declined to be identified as he is not authorized to speak to media.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami announced compensation of 1 million rupees ($14,000) for the families of those killed.

(Reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Three fast-moving California blazes cause thousands to flee

Wind-driven ambers are seen during the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, U.S. November 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

By Stephen Lam

PARADISE, Calif. (Reuters) – Three fast-moving wildfires burned in California on Friday morning, including one that spurred the evacuation of 75,000 homes near a city that was still reeling from a mass shooting.

An inmate firefighter crew work to create a defensible space while battling the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, U.S. November 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

An inmate firefighter crew work to create a defensible space while battling the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, U.S. November 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

Voluntary evacuations of 75,000 homes were called for because of the Woolsey Fire that included parts of Thousand Oaks in Ventura County northwest of Los Angeles, the site of a mass shooting incident this week in which 12 people were killed.

The Woolsey blaze was also burning in parts of Los Angeles County.

Also burning in Ventura County was the Hill Fire, which had torched 10,000 acres (4047 hectares) by Thursday night, fire officials said.

In Northern California, the Camp Fire advanced rapidly to the outskirts of the city of Chico early on Friday, forcing thousands to flee after it left the nearby town of Paradise in ruins, California fire officials said.

Evacuation notices were set for homes on the east side of Chico, a city of about 93,000 people situated about 90 miles (145 km) north of Sacramento.

The Chico Fire Department said: “Firefighters continue to actively engage the fire in order to protect life and property.”

Firefighters battle to save structures while battling the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, U.S. November 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

Firefighters battle to save structures while battling the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, U.S. November 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

Flames from the unchecked, 20,000-acre (8,100-hectare) Camp Fire were being driven westward by 35-mile-per hour (56 km-per-hour) winds, fire officials said.

The blaze earlier ripped through Paradise, about 20 miles east of Chico.

“The town is devastated, everything is destroyed. There’s nothing much left standing,” said California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) spokesman Scott Maclean.

“This fire moved so fast and grew so fast a lot of people got caught by it.”

Maclean said an as-yet unspecified number of civilians and firefighters had been injured, and it could be days before authorities would know whether anyone had died.

Paradise, located on a ridge, has limited escape routes. Traffic accidents turned roads into gridlock and residents abandoned vehicles and ran from the flames, carrying children and pets, officials said. One woman who was stuck in traffic went into labor, the Enterprise-Record newspaper reported.

A Cal Fire firefighter hoses a smoldering home while battling the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, U.S. November 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

A Cal Fire firefighter hoses a smoldering home while battling the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, U.S. November 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

“It’s very chaotic,” said Officer Ryan Lambert of the California Highway Patrol.

Rescuers used a bulldozer to push abandoned cars out the way to reach Feather River Hospital and evacuate patients as flames engulfed the building, Butte County Supervisor Doug Teeter told reporters.

The hospital was totally destroyed, Mike Mangas, a spokesman for operator Dignity Health, told Action News Now.

The fire, which began early on Thursday, was the fiercest of several wind-driven blazes across California, during what has been one of the worst years for wildfires in the state.

In Ventura County, “Strong Santa Ana winds (are) expected to continue through this morning,” the National Weather Service in Los Angeles said on Twitter on Friday. That helped double the size of the Woolsey Fire to 8,000 acres (3238 hectares), fire officials said.

Wind gusts of 50 to 70 mph (80 to 113 kph) were expected in the mountains of Ventura County and up to 50 mph in the valleys and coastal areas of the county, the NWS said.

Travel was limited on U.S. Highway 101 in Ventura County, state highway patrol troopers said.

A former U.S. Marine combat veteran opened fire in a bar packed with college students in Thousand Oaks on Wednesday, killing 12 people in an incident that stunned a bucolic community with a reputation for safety.

(Additional reporting by Bernie Woodall and Brendan O’Brien; editing by John Stonestreet and Bernadette Baum)

Time Warner building in N.Y. evacuated due to suspicious package: police

Members of the public and media are pictured outside the Time Warner Center in the Manahattan borough of New York City after a suspicious package was found inside the CNN Headquarters in New York, U.S., October 24, 2018. REUTERS/Kevin Coombs

By Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Time Warner Building in New York City was evacuated on Wednesday morning after a suspicious package that had been mailed was found in the CNN mail room, New York police and CNN said.

The New York Police Department’s bomb squad “believes they have this under control” and that the package appears to be an explosive device, CNN reported.

A member of the New York Police Department with a dog is pictured outside the Time Warner Center in the Manahattan borough of New York City after a suspicious package was found inside the CNN Headquarters in New York, U.S., October 24, 2018. REUTERS/Kevin Coombs

A member of the New York Police Department with a dog is pictured outside the Time Warner Center in the Manahattan borough of New York City after a suspicious package was found inside the CNN Headquarters in New York, U.S., October 24, 2018. REUTERS/Kevin Coombs

The package contained a device that looked like a pipe, similar to those found at other locations, including the homes of former President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

There were wires in the package found at the CNN mail room, the network reported.

Two new anchors were on air shortly after 10 a.m. when a fire alarm was audible to viewers, and the network went on a commercial break. After the commercials, reporters from the CNN bureau in New York were seen on air outside on the street.

The NYPD said the package to CNN was reported to police at 9:53 a.m. local time on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

Jordan says nearly 300 Syrian ‘White Helmets’ leave for West

FILE PHOTO: Members of the Civil Defence, also known as the 'White Helmets', are seen inspecting the damage at a Roman ruin site in Daraa, Syria December 23, 2017. REUTERS/Alaa al-Faqir/File Photo

AMMAN (Reuters) – Nearly 300 Syrian “White Helmet” rescue workers and their families who fled Syria for Jordan three months ago have left for resettlement in Western countries under an U.N. sponsored agreement, Jordan said on Wednesday.

In July the rescue workers who had been operating in rebel-held areas fled advancing Russian-backed Syrian government troops and slipped over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights frontier and into Jordan, with the help of Israeli soldiers and Western powers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the time he had helped the evacuation at the request of U.S. President Donald Trump and other leaders and that there had been fears that the rescue workers’ lives were at risk.

Jordan had accepted them on humanitarian grounds after getting written guarantees they would be given asylum in Canada, Germany and Britain, Jordanian officials said.

The “White Helmets”, known officially as Syria Civil Defence, have been credited with saving thousands of people in rebel-held areas during years of bombing by Syrian government and Russian forces in the country’s civil war.

Its members say they are neutral. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his backers describe them as tools of Western propaganda and Islamist-led insurgents.

Jordan’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al-Qatarneh said 279 of the 422 people who took sanctuary in the kingdom had left, with 93 others due to leave by Oct. 25, near the end of a three-month period the authorities had given them to stay.

Another group’s departure would be delayed for two weeks until mid-November as there were new-born babies and people receiving medical treatment among them, al-Qatarneh told Reuters.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Andrew Roche and Alison Williams)

Quake strikes off Indonesia, bringing down ‘many buildings’

A paramedic gives treatment to an earthquake survivor outside a hospital in Donggala, Indonesia Sulawesi Island, September 28, 2018. Antara Foto/HO/BNPB-Sutopo Purwo N via REUTERS

By Gayatri Suroyo

JAKARTA (Reuters) – A major 7.5 quake struck off the Indonesian island of Sulawesi on Friday, briefly prompting a tsunami alert after a milder tremor brought down houses, and initial reports from the area said “many buildings” had collapsed.

The tsunami warning was lifted within the hour, but officials asked people to remain on the alert amid a series of moderate aftershocks.

“We advise people to remain in safe areas, stay away from damaged buildings,” Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for the National Disaster Mitigation Agency, said in a televised interview.

The agency was having difficulties reaching some authorities in the fishing town of Donggala and Palu city, the capital of central Sulawesi province, closest to the epicenter of the quake 80 km (50 miles) away at a shallow 10 km underground.

Palu airport was closed.

Some people took to Twitter saying they could not contact loved ones.

“My family in Palu is unreachable,” Twitter user @noyvionella said.

The U.S. Geological Survey put the magnitude of the second quake at a strong 7.5, after first saying it was 7.7.

The earlier quake destroyed some houses, killing one person and injuring at least 10 in Donggala, authorities said.

More than 600,000 people live in Donggala and Palu.

“The (second) quake was felt very strongly, we expect more damage and more victims,” Nugroho said, adding that evacuation process is still ongoing.

Based on initial reports, “many buildings” collapsed due to the 7.7 magnitude quake, he said.

A series of earthquakes in July and August killed nearly 500 people on the holiday island of Lombok, hundreds of kilometers southwest of Sulawesi.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire and is regularly hit by earthquakes.

In 2004, an earthquake off the northern Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a tsunami across the Indian Ocean, killing 226,000 people in 13 countries, including more than 120,000 in Indonesia.

(Reporting by Jakarta newsroom; Editing by Nick Macfie and Simon Cameron-Moore)

South Carolina city hopeful as flooding remains a threat

Santee Cooper worker Carl McCrea checks the water levels around a 6000 foot long Aqua Dam built to keep sediment from a coal ash retention pond from going into the flooded Waccamaw River in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Conway, South Carolina, U.S. September 26, 2018. REUTERS/Randall Hill

By Harriet McLeod and Gene Cherry

CHARLESTON, S.C./RALEIGH, N.C. (Reuters) – Emergency management officials in Georgetown, South Carolina, were optimistic on Thursday that their port community would see less flooding than previously expected in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence.

Florence, which crashed ashore two weeks ago as a Category 1 hurricane and killed 46 people in three states, has since dissipated, but the storm’s torrential rainfall threatens to swamp Georgetown as it drains toward the ocean.

Forecasts now show floodwaters rising two to four feet (0.6 to 1.2 meters) in Georgetown, which sits at the confluence of the Waccamaw, Great Pee Dee and Sampit rivers about 30 miles (50 km) south of Myrtle Beach, considerably lower than initially feared.

“While we’re optimistic that things are looking better to some degree … there will be increased levels of water in some areas,” Georgetown County Administrator Sel Hemingway said on Wednesday. “The awareness level needs to be elevated.”

Officials were still urging 6,000 to 8,000 residents to leave their homes, with rivers expected to crest in Georgetown on Friday and remain above flood stage for four or five days.

The North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies said preliminary research suggests that Florence was among the rainiest storms in the United States in some 70 years.

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster said the river flooding caused by Florence, which dropped nearly 20 inches (50 cm) of rain in some places in the state, is something his state has not had to cope with before.

‘FULL BATTLE MODE’

“This is unprecedented and we are still in full battle mode,” McMaster said at a press briefing on Wednesday at Emergency Management Division headquarters in Columbia, the state capital.

Flooding has destroyed 46 homes in the state, significantly damaged more than 1,000 and forced 11,000 people to flee their homes, including 3,000 in Georgetown, EMD Director Kim Stenson said Wednesday.

In Conway County, where the Waccamaw was already well above flood stage, Santee Cooper, South Carolina’s state-owned electric and water utility, said floodwaters stopped rising before inundating a pond that holds more than 200,000 tons of toxic coal ash.

“The river’s rise has slowed and we think it’s cresting today,” utility spokeswoman Mollie Gore said from the site, where 115 workers had shored up the dam around the pond. “We still have a foot between the top of the river and the top of the dam.”

Santee Cooper said it has removed more than 1 million tons of coal ash, which can contaminate water and harm fish and wildlife, from the site in the past few years.

Some one to two inches of rain moving into the central and western parts of the state in a next day or two will prolong the flooding, said meteorologist Rich Otto of the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

Crews worked to erect temporary dams on either side of U.S. Highway 17, the main coastal route through the area, and National Guard engineers were installing a floating bridge at Georgetown in case the highway is washed out at the river.

(Reporting by Harriet McLeod and Gene Cherry; additional reporting by Peter Szekely in New York, Makini Brice in Washington, Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; writing by Peter Szekely and Dan Whitcomb; editing by Cynthia Osterman, Lisa Shumaker, Larry King)

Thousands urged to flee ahead of post-Florence flooding in South Carolina

Flooding is seen in and around Wilmington, North Carolina, U.S., September 19, 2018 in this picture obtained from social media on September 21, 2018. ALAN CRADICK, CAPE FEAR RIVER WATCH/via REUTERS

By Harriet McLeod and Gene Cherry

(Reuters) – As many as 8,000 people in and around the city of Georgetown, South Carolina, have been urged to evacuate ahead severe flooding expected this week from two rain-gorged rivers in what may be the final destructive chapter of Hurricane Florence.

Floodwaters of 5 to 10 feet (1.5 to 3 m) are expected to inundate Georgetown and surrounding communities by late this week as the Pee Dee and Waccamaw rivers overurn their banks along the low-lying tidal flats where they converge at Winyah Bay, which flows into the Atlantic.

Emergency management officials began sending pre-recorded telephone messages to residents in harm’s way over the weekend, and will probably start going door-to-door in the next few days, Georgetown County spokeswoman Jackie Broach-Akers said.

The potential flood zone encompasses some 3,500 homes in Georgetown, which lies at the confluence of the two rivers at the top of the bay, and the coastal resort community of Pawleys Island, she told Reuters.

She said the estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people who live in that area are being “strongly urged”, to leave on their own, although no mandatory evacuation has been ordered.

The county plans to open emergency shelters at 7 a.m. on Monday, and hotels outside the flood zone in nearby Myrtle Beach are offering discounts for evacuees. Public schools will be closed until further notice, Broach-Akers said.

State transportation crews were working to erect temporary dams on either side of U.S. Highway 17, the main coastal route through the area, and National Guard engineers were installing a floating bridge at Georgetown in case the highway is washed out at the river.

“The water is still rising there,” said Bob Oravec, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center. “It’s a matter of time before it subsides,” he said early on Monday.

Flooding, in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, is seen in and around Wilmington, North Carolina, U.S., September 19, 2018 in this picture obtained from social media on September 21, 2018. ALAN CRADICK, CAPE FEAR RIVER WATCH/via REUTERS

Flooding, in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, is seen in and around Wilmington, North Carolina, U.S., September 19, 2018 in this picture obtained from social media on September 21, 2018. ALAN CRADICK, CAPE FEAR RIVER WATCH/via REUTERS

HIGH WATER

About 100 miles (160 km) up the coast, a commercial section of downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, by the Cape Fear River was under a foot of water, with flooding expected to rise by a further 2 feet with high tide on Sunday evening, city spokesman Dylan Lee said.

Flooding in Wilmington was expected to peak on Monday along the city’s Water Street riverfront, where many businesses had stacked sandbags in advance, Lee said. But the city said its offices would reopen on Monday after having been closed for a week.

Nine days after Florence came ashore, the National Weather Service said flooding would likely persist in coastal parts of the Carolinas for days as the high-water crest of numerous rivers keeps moving downstream toward the ocean.

“This isn’t over,” said Oravec. “All that water is going to take a good while to recede,” he said. “Damage can still be done. It’ll be a slow drop.”

The storm dumped 30 to 40 inches (75 to 100 cm) of rain on the Wilmington area alone after making landfall nearby on Sept. 14.

Floodwaters have begun to recede farther inland.

That left hundreds of dead fish stranded on a highway near Wallace, about 35 miles from the nearest beach, according to the Penderlea Fire Department, which posted video of firefighters hosing the fish off Interstate 40.

“Well, we can add ‘washing fish off of the interstate’ to the long list of interesting things firefighters get to experience!” the department said on Facebook.

Flooding is seen in and around Wilmington, North Carolina, U.S., September 19, 2018 in this picture obtained from social media on September 21, 2018. ALAN CRADICK, CAPE FEAR RIVER WATCH/via REUTERS

Flooding is seen in and around Wilmington, North Carolina, U.S., September 19, 2018 in this picture obtained from social media on September 21, 2018. ALAN CRADICK, CAPE FEAR RIVER WATCH/via REUTERS

Remnants of the once-mighty storm brought heavy rains across a swath of the country, prompting flood watches and warnings from Texas to Virginia and Maryland, at least through Monday, the weather service said.

About 5,000 people across North Carolina have been rescued by boat or helicopter since the storm made landfall, twice as many as in Hurricane Matthew two years ago, according to state officials. Thousands of people remained in shelters.

(Reporting by Harriet McLeod in Charleston, S.C. and Gene Cherry in Raleigh, N.C.; Additional reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta, Daniel Trotta in New York and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Alison Williams)