Idella T. Dingle gingerly opened the front door to her modest three-bedroom apartment and held up her cellphone to illuminate a pile of damp debris - clothes, magazines, overturned televisions - strewn across the muddy carpet."I lost everything -- there's nothing to salvage," Dingle, 34, a care provider for people with special needs, said Tuesday as she stepped slowly from room to room snapping photographs to document the water damage. "All I have now is the clothes on my back."
It has stopped raining in South Carolina but it will likely take weeks for the state to return to normal after a record-setting deluge washed away roads, flooded neighborhoods, battered earthen dams and cut off fresh water to about 40,000 people. At least 12 people have died.
Of the 18 dams state officials are closely monitoring, nine have been breached or failed completely and one was intentionally broken to relieve pressure on it, the South Carolina Emergency Management Division announced Tuesday morning.
Officials warned of the likelihood of new evacuations - such as one ordered Monday afternoon in one of two towns east of downtown Columbia where two dams were breached.
Days of fierce rain, described as a one-in-1,000-years rain and flooding event, has inundated the state's capital city and other towns. Gov. Nikki Haley warned downstream communities that the churning flood was working through the state's waterways toward the low-lying coastal regions.
"This is not over. Just because the rain stops does not mean that we are out of the woods," Haley said Monday.
Water distribution remained a key problem for Columbia, with as many as 40,000 homes lacking service. The rest of the city's approximately 375,000 water customers have been told that as a safety measure they should boil water for at least one minute before using it for drinking or cooking.
Mayor Steve Benjamin told reporters on Tuesday that the water order is likely to be in effect for "quite some time." The city was planning to open more water distribution centers.
Officials brought bottled water and portable restrooms for 31,000 students at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Firefighters used trucks and pumps to ferry hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to Palmetto Health Baptist Hospital.
At least 11 weather-related deaths in South Carolina and two in North Carolina were blamed on the vast rainstorm, including six people who drowned in their cars just in Columbia. About 1,000 people have sought refuge in shelters.
The 16.6 inches of rain that fell at Gills Creek near downtown Columbia on Sunday made for one of the rainiest days recorded at a U.S. weather station in more than 16 years.
The state Department of Transportation said nearly 500 roads and bridges were closed Tuesday morning including a 90-mile stretch of a key highway, Interstate 95. Many of the road closures were in the Columbia area.
Power had been restored to most of the nearly 30,000 customers who were without electricity at the storm's peak.
The parking lot outside Dingle's home was filled with thick brown sludge that covered the cars, including her gray Honda Accord.
The tiny creek that winds through the Willow Creek Apartments at St. Andrews, in the northwest suburbs of greater Columbia, flooded nearly all the ground-floor homes of the complex early Monday, filling the apartment Dingle shared with her daughter and mother to chest level with muddy water. Dingle woke to the screams of her daughter, Mikayla.
The family climbed a flight of steps outside the apartment and eventually had to scale a Ford Crown Victoria to climb aboard a rescue boat.
On Tuesday, the apartment complex's grounds were strewn with lamps, golf balls, and page after page of a Little Miss Muffet picture book. Outside the administrative office, a neat row of wet paperwork and purchase orders was lined up on a plastic table to dry in the sun as workers unloaded heavy-duty garbage bags and cleaning supplies from a pickup truck.
"We've got the muscle power," the apartment complex manager said cheerily to a resident.
Dingle had little hope of returning, though.
After staying Sunday and Monday nights in a nearby Sleep Inn, she planned to apply for FEMA assistance and look for a new apartment - a challenge, she noted, given that she had paid all her bills at the first of the month and had only $600 in her bank account.
"We can't go back," she said. "I have to find a new place to stay."