Flooding from Chantal's remnants forces dozens to flee homes in North Carolina

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — Floodwaters from the remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal swept a woman in her car from a rural road and forced dozens of people to flee their homes, officials in North Carolina said Monday.

Parts of central North Carolina experienced hazardous conditions overnight including 3 to 8 inches (8 to 20 centimeters) of rain, according to North Carolina Emergency Management. Multiple water rescues were conducted in Alamance, Orange, Chatham and Durham counties overnight, and several areas have declared local states of emergency, officials said.

About 120 roads were closed Monday across the state, but several major roads had reopened, including parts of Interstate 40 and 85 in Alamance County, according to Gov. Josh Stein’s office.

An 83-year-old woman from Pittsboro was killed when her car was swept off a rural Chatham County road by floodwaters Sunday night, according to the North Carolina State Highway Patrol. Responding troopers found the submerged vehicle about 100 feet (31 meters) from the road, and the woman was found dead inside, officials said.

The Chapel Hill Fire Department and neighboring agencies completed more than 50 water rescues, many of them in areas where floodwaters entered or threatened to enter apartments, officials said. More than 60 people were displaced. After helping with rescues in Chapel Hill, the Durham Fire Department said in a social media post that its crews performed more than 80 more rescues in the Old Farm area.

Alesia Ray, 65, stood on a second-floor staircase at her apartment building in Chapel Hill for five hours, clicking a flashlight, until rescuers in a rubber boat got her out. Below her, floodwaters wrecked her home.

“It was really scary,” she said Monday as she and fiance Thomas Hux worked to salvage some of their belongings. “I’ve never experienced anything like that. I don’t want to go through that again.”

Floodwaters inundated Chapel Hill's Eastgate Crossings shopping center, where the red-framed glass doors of a Talbots store were blown in and debris-specked white mannequins littered the floor. Next door, at the Great Outdoor Provision Co., manager Chad Pickens said kayaks ended up 30 feet (9 meters) from where they had been on display, and shelves in the shoe room were toppled like dominoes.

What happened there pales in comparison to the floods in Texas, he said.

“The bottom line is these are just things, and while it hurts to lose things, it’s a lot different to losing people,” Pickens said.

A large brown dumpster had smashed into the outdoor dining area of a Shake Shack in the shopping center. The windows were blown out and chairs and cups were strewed everywhere.

Hua Jiang said he put in an order at the Shake Shack around 8:45 p.m. Sunday. and about 10 minutes later, water started flowing through the doors. After about five minutes, employees said they should make a run for it, he said. Jiang’s Toyota RAV4 was already flooded in the parking lot, so he went to a Chipotle on higher ground.

“It’s unfortunate, but that’s life,” Jiang said, wiping sweat from his brow Monday morning.

After seeing photos of flooding on Lake Hyco in Person County, Kevin Nickerson traveled from Durham to check on the boathouse he and his wife own.

Whole boathouses were floating in the lake when he arrived. The lake rose about 6 feet (2 meters) from the week prior, he said. At the Nickersons' boathouse, water had pushed the retired couple's boat up to the ceiling and their fridge was drifting inside. They have to wait for the water to subside to fully assess the damage.

“This isn't something that we had really thought about, so we will find out, you know, how good our insurance is,” Sandy Nickerson said.

Several solid-waste trucks and police cars were also totaled from rushing floodwaters at a facility used to service local government vehicles in Carrboro, a town near Chapel Hill, the town's public works director, Kevin Belanger, said at a news conference Monday.

In Chatham County, authorities were searching for two canoers who went missing during the storm on Jordan Lake, according to a county sheriff’s office statement.

The Eno River crested early Monday at Durham at 25.6 feet (7.8 meters), surpassing the previous record of 23.6 feet (7.2 meters), according to the National Water Prediction Service’s website.

The Haw River crested early Monday at 32.5 feet (9.9 meters), the second highest river stage ever recorded at the Town of Haw River. That level was only eclipsed by Hurricane Fran in 1996 when the stage reached 32.8 feet (10 meters), according to a post from the National Weather Service’s Raleigh office.

Tropical Storm Chantal was downgraded to a depression Sunday after making landfall near Litchfield Beach, South Carolina, early Sunday, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

By late Monday afternoon, the storm was off Delaware's coast, with maximum sustained winds of 25 mph (40 kph). It was moving northeast at about 21 mph (34 kph). Forecasters warned of dangerous surf and rip currents at beaches from northeastern Florida to the mid-Atlantic states for the next couple of days.