AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live on Sept. 17, as homeowners in southern North Carolina took stock of the damage left behind by a tropical rainstorm.
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00:00Folks in North Carolina are cleaning up after yesterday's rain.
00:03Meteorologist Tony Laubach joins us now to talk about some of the issues people are facing today. Tony?
00:12Yeah, Jeff. We're talking about all sorts of issues.
00:15And unfortunately for many of these folks that were dealing with the flooding yesterday,
00:18one of the biggest things, they have to really just wait until the water clears out
00:22so they can actually get a visual, take stock of what it is they need to tackle in the days, weeks, and even months ahead.
00:30We know many businesses yesterday had water run into them thanks to the flooding that we saw all along the coast,
00:36particularly there in Carolina Beach and Cure Beach.
00:39Those areas certainly going to be cleaning up.
00:41But a lot of rural areas still dealing with that.
00:44And for a couple of folks, it really was pretty obvious early on what it is they need to tackle.
00:49I want to show you some video here that we talked to the homeowners earlier today that, well, they have an issue to deal with.
00:57And that is their driveway has collapsed.
00:59And that is a very deep collapse.
01:01They actually had a bridge on their property that ran across from the access road to their place.
01:06That was completely washed out.
01:08Some of the good news that they have, though, is they have a back way they can take to get to and from their house.
01:13So they are not completely cut off.
01:15But you see some of this damage.
01:16Not only did it take out the driveway.
01:18It took out their utilities.
01:19They lost water.
01:20They lost Internet.
01:21They lost power.
01:22And they said they lost that all at the same time when that bridge ended up collapsing.
01:27But it wasn't until earlier this morning when they realized what had actually happened.
01:31But they said they were pretty clued in early on.
01:33Now, unfortunately, I was not able to actually get real sound from them because, as you can see, the distance between us was very, very great.
01:42So we were kind of communicating via the cans-on-a-string method across that chasm that he had.
01:47Fortunately, no injuries.
01:48He did not lose any of his vehicles in that.
01:50But, unfortunately, it is a bill that he is going to have to fit himself because that is not city property.
01:55If that had happened a little closer to the road, it might have been something he was able to work with.
01:59So this morning as I was talking to him, he was talking about some of the issues that he's going to have to be dealing with,
02:04not only in terms of the paying for it but the logistics of having to now put up a new bridge and a new gate
02:10where the old one once stood, and this all coming from the water that ran under the creek.
02:14He was telling me about Hurricane Florence.
02:16We've been talking a lot about Florence.
02:18It happened over six years ago.
02:20That left a lot of destruction in the wake.
02:22But he was talking about how even with Florence and the rain that they saw spread out over several days, Jeff,
02:27that he did not have the issues that he had from this one-day unnamed storm.
02:33Tony, you and I were talking about the contrast between a Florence, a 20 to 40-inch rain event over four days
02:38versus a 15 to 20-inch event over maybe 18 hours.
02:42And, again, it was way too much for about two or three counties here,
02:46areas around especially the area of Brunswick County there in far southern North Carolina,
02:53right over the Wilmington area as well.