Muddy floodwaters from last week's torrential rains in Alabama and Georgia coursed through the Florida Panhandle Tuesday, damaging homes and businesses and threatening supports for an interstate highway bridge over a raging river.
Flood damage was expected to worsen in Florida, where at least 1,200 people fled their homes. Some rivers in the northern part of the state won't crest until Wednesday.In Alabama and Georgia, authorities began assessing damage from storms that dumped up to 16 inches of rain Thursday and Friday. Flood-related accidents killed 17 people and about 4,000 fled their homes in those two states.
Cold air followed receding floodwaters in Alabama and Georgia Tuesday, the first day of spring. Temperatures dipped to 30 degrees this morning in Birmingham, Ala., and hovered just above freezing in Atlanta. Freezing temperatures also were recorded in Tennessee and Kentucky.
A mixture of rain and snow was falling Tuesday in the nation's capital. The band of snow showers stretched from central Pennsylvania, through Maryland, central Virginia and into central North Carolina.
In Virginia, 6 inches of snow fell in Lynchburg, 2 inches in Roanoke, Va., and 4 inches near Charlottesville.
Alabama Gov. Guy Hunt asked President Bush for federal aid Monday for Coffee County, where the swollen Pea River burst a levee and inundated Elba, a town of 4,400 people.
Hunt also requested federal aid for 25 other flooded counties in central and south Alabama but said he would ask Bush to help Coffee County first.
Some of Elba's evacuees returned Monday for their first look at the destruction.
"It didn't really hurt until I got here. Then it tore me up," said Mike Simmons, who returned home to find a waterline on his ceiling, overturned furniture and smaller items still floating in several inches of water.
National Guardsmen and state troopers patrolled the streets enforcing a 7 p.m. curfew after some reports of looting in downtown Elba, which remained under several feet of water. Telephone, gas and electric service was out.
There was another problem in Elba and elsewhere in the region: the high waters flushed out snakes, which could be seen swimming through inundated neighborhoods.
The Pea River empties into the Choctawhatchee River in Florida, and its muddy water was already a foot deep in Billy Wayne Bailey's four-bedroom house in Caryville on Monday and was expected to rise another three feet before cresting Tuesday.
"Well, it's already done the damage so it doesn't matter how far it goes," Bailey said as he looked down on his home from nearby U.S. 90.
A 20-mile stretch of I-10 west, from Bonifay to DeFuniak Springs, was closed by state transportation officials Monday afternoon because of concern about erosion around the supports of the highway's bridge over the Choctawhatchee.