With helicopters overseeing the rescue operation from above, volunteer firefighters turned their military-surplus truck with 4-foot tires into the dark flood waters, cruising past a mortuary, grocery and homes in part of this city that flooded when a river swollen by Hurricane Matthew overflowed.
They joined US Marshals and water rescue teams from as far away as New York and New Jersey focused Monday on retrieving about 1,500 residents who were trapped when the Lumber River unexpectedly rushed out of its banks, up their stairways and into buildings.
The half-dozen men from the nearby town of Rayham spent about 10 hours yesterday at the rescue work aboard their truck usually used for fighting brush fires in this swampy, rural southeast corner of North Carolina.
They primarily located and ferried to safety rescued residents in inflated dinghies or bass boats to meet the truck on the neighborhood's main street.
"We've got it nowhere near this bad," said Jimmy Hunt Jr, son of the chief of the volunteer fire department in Rayham.
The rescue teams were expected to be back at work across eastern North Carolina today as the deluge rolled downstream toward the Atlantic Ocean. At least three rivers were forecast to reach record levels, some not cresting until Friday.
Hurricane Matthew killed more than 500 people in Haiti and at least 23 in the US nearly half of them in North Carolina. At least three people were missing.
The full extent of the disaster in North Carolina was still unclear, but it appeared that thousands of homes were damaged, and more were in danger of flooding.
Robert Barnhill, 83, and his wife Katie, 81, left everything inside their Lumberton home but their medications, a couple of blankets and a pillow.
"The water's up to the porch now, so it's got one more step to go" before entering their home of 35 years, Robert Barnhill said after being rescued Monday afternoon. "I've never seen a flood like this before."
Rescuers still had not made it to all the submerged cars or figured out exactly how many people are missing or dead, county Emergency Management Director Stephanie Chavis said. "I've been here right at 28 years," Chavis said. "This seems to be the worst one we've had in my career."
Elsewhere in North Carolina, officials said a dam has been in danger of a breech after the storm was holding, so far.
Crews worked until about 2 am today to get sandbags in place to reduce the threat at Woodlake Dam in Moore County near Vass, Deputy Public Safety Director Scott Brooks said.
Brooks said crews would be out again later today to finish. The work would need to be inspected before residents could return home.
In many areas, Matthew's aftermath was compared to Hurricane Floyd, which caused USD 3 billion in damage and destroyed 7,000 homes as it skirted the coast in 1999.
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