Over 1,000 still need rescue in North Carolina after floods

Rescuers from the nearby town of Rayham spent about 10 hours on Monday ferrying residents to safety in inflated dinghies or bass boats.

"We've got it nowhere near this bad," said Jimmy Hunt Jr, son of the chief of the volunteer fire department in Rayham.

Hurricane Matthew killed more than 500 people in Haiti and at least 26 in the US - more than half of them in North Carolina. At least three people were missing.

In addition to the 14 storm-related deaths in North Carolina, there were five in Florida and three each in Georgia and South Carolina. One death was reported in Virginia.

Also in Lumberton, authorities said a man was shot dead by a police officer in a confrontation amid flood waters. Few details about the shooting were released. Governor Pat McCrory would only say it happened under "very difficult circumstances".

The full extent of the disaster in North Carolina was still unclear, but it appeared that thousands of homes were damaged and more were in danger of flooding.

Officials said a dam in danger of a breach after the storm was holding, so far. Crews worked until about 2am on Tuesday to add sandbags to reduce the threat at Woodlake Dam in Moore County near Vass, deputy public safety director Scott Brooks said.

He said crews were returning later to finish. The work would need to be inspected before residents could return home.

In many areas, Matthew's aftermath was compared to Hurricane Floyd, which did 3 billion US dollars in damage and destroyed 7,000 homes as it skirted the coast in 1999.

Mr McCrory said thousands of animals drowned - mostly chickens on poultry farms - and he was deciding on rules for disposing of the carcasses. Floyd left behind its own environmental crisis from livestock farming, when waste from hog lagoons mixed with flood waters in a toxic mess.

But on Monday, for the first time, the governor began talking about recovery, saying he would form a task force and get private businesses to help.

Most state officials were still concentrating on the crisis. They were concerned that other cities could suffer a fate similar to Lumberton, a community of 22,000 people about 80 miles from the ocean. With electricity cut off in the storm's wake, there was virtually no gasoline, water or food for sale.

The Reverend Volley Hanson worried that stress from the lack of running water and electricity might push people over the edge. Robeson County, which includes Lumberton, had North Carolina's highest violent crime rate in 2014.

"The cash is going to be running out. We've already got street vendors hawking water, Cokes and cigarettes. Cigarettes are at seven bucks a pack," Reverend Hanson said. "It's nuts here, and it's going to get worse."

The Lumber River crested 4 feet above its record level on Sunday in Lumberton and was forecast to remain above the record until next Sunday.

Coming up on @MSNBC #HurricaneMatthew unleashed disaster in #NorthCarolina we'll tell you all about from Lumberton pic.twitter.com/PN5cnKM2Ab

— Mariana Atencio (@marianaatencio) October 11, 2016

In the tiny town of Nichols, South Carolina, downstream from Lumberton, at least 100 people spent the night on the third floor of the town hall waiting to be rescued.

Interstate 95 - a major artery for the East Coast - was closed in Lumberton and engineers could not predict when it would reopen. Driving was difficult, if not impossible because hundreds of roads were closed, in some cases isolating entire towns. Dozens of school districts and East Carolina University cancelled classes for the entire week.

Authorities in coastal Georgia and South Carolina warned residents it may take days or even weeks to restore electricity and clean up the debris. People grew increasingly frustrated when they were blocked from returning home by authorities who said the damage was still too severe.

Matthew's flooding in North Carolina was worsened by September's heavy rainfall. Many areas got at least twice their normal amount of rain in September, in part because the remnants of Tropical Storm Julia parked off the coast for several days.