Florence's catastrophic flooding could result in as much as $20 billion in damage.
As much as 2 feet of rain has fallen across portions of southeastern North Carolina, submerging coastal cities, ravaging tobacco crops in the fields and threatening the state's large and environmentally precarious hog industry.
"This is a massive storm that has put a lot of water on our coast and inland," Jeff Byard, FEMA's associate administrator for the Office of Response and Recovery, said Saturday. "There is a lot of rain to come, and there is a lot of rain that has fallen."
More than 1 million customers were without power in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia as of 7 a.m. local time, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Three North Carolina rivers have hit "major flood stage" and an additional 13 threaten to follow suit, according to state emergency officials. About 19,000 people were in North Carolina's emergency shelters and hundreds had to be rescued in New Bern alone, according to the office of Gov. Roy Cooper.
Portions of the region not yet inundated made preparations. Light rain fell on Fayetteville early Saturday as power-line repair crews camped out at an Embassy Suites hotel waiting for the go-signal. More than 40,000 utility workers from at least 19 states are ready to restore power, according to a news release from the federal Energy Department.
South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster said that unlike Hurricane Hugo, which shot through like "a rocket" in 1989, Florence's leisurely pace means the state will bear the brunt of rain for days. "This is something that we have not seen before, this much rain, a hurricane staying on top of us for this long,'' McMaster said at a briefing Friday.
The total bill for damage from Florence may reach $20 billion, said Chuck Watson, a disaster researcher at Enki Research in Savannah, Ga.
North Carolina is forecast to harvest 158,800 acres of tobacco this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the state is the nation's top producer. Half the eastern North Carolina crop was in the field and "will be basically destroyed, blown away," Larry Wooten, president of the North Carolina Farm Bureau, said Saturday. Many farmers are running tobacco-curing barns on generators because power is out, and leaves will spoil if fans can't circulate air, Wooten said.
More than 60 industrial swine operations house more than 235,000 hogs that generate almost 202 million gallons of waste a year in the floodplain of North Carolina's coast, according to Waterkeepers, an environmental watchdog group. Wooten said he hadn't heard about problems with hog lagoons, where bacteria break down the waste, or the safety of the animals, although some hogs were being moved to higher ground.
Environmental groups are preparing to inspect waterways for toxic spills from coal-ash ponds and hog lagoons once the storm subsides. Waterkeepers said it plans to take airplane and boat trips near flooded industrial sites and gather water samples.
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(Brian K. Sullivan, Natasha Rausch, Justin Sink, Ryan Collins, Anna Edney, David Wethe, Olivia Carville and Justina Vasquez contributed to this report.)
