LUMBERTON, N.C. — A North Carolina state trooper shot and killed an armed man during a search and rescue operation, authorities said Tuesday, and thousands of people were told to get to higher ground as the flooding from Hurricane Matthew moved downstream.
In Greenville, officials warned that the Tar River would overwhelm every bridge in the county by sundown, splitting the county in half before the river crests late Wednesday. An angry Governor Pat McCrory asked his citizens to stop refusing evacuation orders and driving around barricades blocking flooded roads.
''As a governor, that is unacceptable. You are not only putting your life danger, you are putting emergency responders' lives in jeopardy,'' McCrory said Tuesday.
The US death toll rose to 30 — half of them in North Carolina. Authorities reported four more fatalities Tuesday — three motorists washed away by flood waters and a man whose car was struck by a tree. Florida also raised its death count to eight. In Haiti, officials said more than 500 were dead from the storm.
Rescue teams returned to work across eastern North Carolina as at least three rivers were forecast to reach record levels, some not cresting until Friday.
In hard-hit Lumberton, a trooper was riding with two Robeson County deputies on a Humvee through about 4 feet of flood waters around 8 p.m. Monday when they confronted an angry man who had a gun, Highway Patrol Lieutenant Jeff Gordon said in a statement.
Gordon didn't say why the man was angry and released few other details about the shooting.
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 harm's way.
In many areas, Matthew's aftermath was compared with Hurricane Floyd, which did $3 billion in damage and destroyed 7,000 homes as it skirted the coast in 1999.