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By JAY REEVES
PELHAM, Alabama – Terrified drivers exited flooded cars and muddy floodwaters swept through neighborhoods after a stalled weather front soaked Alabama for hours, leaving entire communities underwater on Thursday and killing at least four people, with more storms to come.
Dozens of people had to be rescued Wednesday night in central Alabama, where the National Weather Service said up to 13 inches of rain fell, and a southern Alabama town temporarily lost its grocery store main when a stream has passed through the gates of Piggly Wiggly. Near the coast, heavy rains forced sewage from underground pipes.
The Birmingham metropolitan area remained under flash flood watch, and meteorologists predicted another rainy day for most of Alabama and parts of Florida, Georgia and Tennessee. Up to an additional 5 inches of rain was possible until Thursday evening, the weather service said.
A 4-year-old girl and an 18-year-old woman have died in separate incidents when flooding swept away vehicles in northeast Alabama, Marshall County Coroner Cody Nugent said. Researchers found the bodies of a boyfriend and girlfriend, both 23, inside a car washed away by a fast-moving stream in the Birmingham suburb of Hoover, a Shelby County Coroner Lina Evans said.
“Normally it’s just a trickle. It was raging, “she said. She identified the victims as Latin Marie Hill and Myles Jared Butler, both of Hoover.
The rain has wreaked havoc in parts of northern Alabama, submerging cars in the Birmingham subway and parts of the Tennessee Valley. Rescue teams helped motorists escape as low visibility and standing water put their lives at risk in some areas.
Some of the worst flooding has occurred in Pelham, outside Birmingham, where 82 people were rescued from their homes and more than 15 were removed from vehicles after up to 13 inches of rain caused streams to overflow and streams, the Pelham Fire Department said early Thursday. More than 100 rescuers were involved in the effort, as well as 16 boats, according to the statement.
“The water was coming into the car so quickly that I had to jump out the window,” said Jill Caskey, who watched a tow truck on Thursday morning haul her sport utility vehicle from a low parking lot in Pelham. The car stalled as it attempted to navigate the flood waters during the flood on Wednesday night.
A police officer helped her up to the heights, and Caskey’s husband picked her up from the side of the road. But it then took them three hours to walk a few kilometers home because of the flooded roads.
Caskey heard the weather safety mantra ‘turn around, don’t drown’ but said ‘it really happened so fast I didn’t have time to think about it’.
The Alabama Flood comes about seven weeks after flooding killed more than a dozen people in Tennessee. These types of flooding could be more frequent in the future due to global warming, scientists say.
Federal research has found that human-caused climate change is doubling the chances of the types of heavy rain that flooded Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with 26 inches (66 centimeters) of rain in 2016, killing a dozen people and damaging 150,000 houses.
In southern Alabama, near the Florida Line, streets were covered with water in the flood-prone towns of Escambia County, Brewton and East Brewton, flooding a mall and sending up 3 feet of water in the Piggly Wiggly. Two schools have had to cancel classes, Escambia Sheriff Heath Jackson said.
“We’re hoping the rain will stop so we can get some of that water out… from here,” Jackson told WKRG-TV.
To the south, in Baldwin County, up to 250,000 gallons of sewage overflowed from sewage systems along Mobile Bay, officials said.
With precipitation totals already ranging from 2 inches to 6 inches across the state this week, forecasters said an additional 3 inches of rain was possible, with the heaviest rains in the north.
Severe storms and a few isolated tornadoes from a slow low pressure system were a threat, mainly in the afternoon, forecasters said. The National Weather Service issued a tornado watch for northeast Alabama, northwest Georgia and southern Tennessee.
Rains are expected to end in Alabama by Thursday evening as the storms move east. Flash flood warnings were in effect through Friday along the weather front, stretching from the Florida panhandle to northern Georgia and the mountainous areas of eastern Tennessee and western Carolinas.
Back in Pelham, Michael Halbert walked through his neighborhood to a row house filled with over 40 inches of water. He tried to remove objects from the ground, but still lost some of his things and his jeep filled with water outside.
“Flood insurance is going to be fun,” he said.
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Associated Press reporter Jeff Martin in Marietta, Georgia contributed to this report.
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