COLUMBIA, S.C. — A former West Virginia football player tells MetroNews the epic flooding in South Carolina is a tragic sight to behold.
“Everything has really been shut down,” said former WVU linebacker Matt Taffoni, now a radiologist in Columbia, S.C. “Roads have been flooded, bridges washed out, the downtown area is nearly completely flood. One of the hospitals where I work is out of water and they’re having to bring tanker trucks in.”
A band of rain set in over the Palmetto state and drenched the entire state. The hardest hit areas were Myrtle Beach, Charleston, and Columbia, all within a 50-mile band of intense rainfall. College football fans watching the Notre Dame vs. Clemson game Saturday night saw the torrential rain, but Taffoni said it was a lot worse elsewhere.
“Oh yeah, worse than that because that was up in Clemson, which is about an hour and a half from here,” he said. “We’ve had worse rain than they’ve had there. I think Columbia has had 12 or 13 inches in the last week.”
Some parts of South Carolina have recorded more than 20 inches of rainfall. The streets of Charleston and Columbia had water up to the tops of street lamps and still rising by Monday. The water was so high segments of three of the major interstates surrounding the South Carolina capital city have been forced to shutdown.
Taffoni home sits on a hill and was not impacted, but several of his co-workers weren’t so lucky.
“Four of my partners’ homes were flooded and one had to be rescued from a second-floor window,” he said. “Schools are out and there’s a curfew. Nobody is allowed out between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.”
The state’s emergency officials were braced for an impact from Hurricane Joaquin. However, that storm stayed out to sea and never made landfall. The rainfall which struck the state was produced by a different system and the impact was far different than a hurricane. The intensity caught everybody off guard.
“Nobody was prepared for this,” said Taffoni. “The rivers have risen at a record level and caused flooding downtown. It definitely caught everybody by surprise.”