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Alberto begins to dissipate, leaving deaths, flooding behind

Published:Friday | June 1, 2018 | 9:57 AM
This photo provided by the Boone Police Department shows a home was destroyed by a gas leak following a landslide from the effects of Subtropical Storm Alberto on Wednesday, May 30, 2018 in Boone, N.C. Sgt. Shane Robbins said the landslide resulted in the “catastrophic destruction” of the home because of a gas leak. (Boone Police Department via AP)

Remnants of the first named storm of the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season are pushing into Canada, but Alberto’s heavy rains have drenched the Southern Appalachians, claiming lives in raging flash floods, triggering mudslides and washing away bridges.

Since its Memorial Day landfall in the Florida Panhandle, Alberto’s heavy rains have been widespread, with flooding reported from Alabama through Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, West Virginia and Illinois.

In Virginia, flash flooding blamed on Alberto turned a peaceful creek into a roaring death trap as witnesses reported a man and woman were swept away when their car was washed off a road Wednesday night.

Police say searchers found one of the victims Thursday and would resume searching Friday for the other still missing.

Rescue crews are to continue searching Friday in and around Ivy Creek in Virginia’s Albemarle County, where a day earlier they found the body of one of two occupants of a Toyota Prius engulfed by the floodwaters. Farther north in Virginia’s Madison County, sheriff’s officials said rescuers are seeking a female reported missing in high waters there.

The Carolinas also were dealing with problems of their own from Alberto, which took enormous amounts of moisture aloft from the Gulf of Mexico and dumped it on the region from rain bands stretching for hundreds of miles.

Two deaths had previously been reported in the U.S. during the storm’s passage. A television news anchor and a photojournalist were killed Monday in North Carolina while covering the weather, when a tree became uprooted from rain-soaked ground and toppled onto their SUV, authorities said.

WYFF-TV of Greenville, South Carolina, said news anchor Mike McCormick and photojournalist Aaron Smeltzer died.

Authorities in Cuba say Alberto left four people dead there as the storm drenched the island in heavy rain.

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