The car stalled as she was trying to navigate floodwaters, it said.īirmingham Fire and Rescue Service made 16 water rescues, local news media reported. “Water was coming in the car so fast I had to bail out the window,” said Jill Caskey, who watched as a tow truck hauled away her vehicle from a parking lot in Pelham, The Associated Press reported. In Pelham, about 20 miles south of Birmingham, firefighters rescued 82 people from their homes and up to 20 from vehicles, the Fire Department said on Thursday. Another woman escaped her vehicle after she had apparently tried to drive through a flooded street, he said. Brocato said that in Hoover, a woman had been rescued from the roof of her car, which had been pinned by water against a dam, teetering over a 30-foot embankment. Rescuers waded through chest-deep water to reach people stranded in their cars. But the rains are forecast to taper off by Thursday night.
Up to four inches of rain was expected on Thursday to drench areas already saturated, adding to the risk of flash flooding, the Weather Service in Birmingham said. The cities most affected were Pelham, Helena and Hoover, in Shelby County, south of Birmingham, where as much as 10 inches of rain had accumulated within 24 hours. The storm system drifted in from the west early in the week and spawned sluggish thunderstorms, some of which eventually migrated into the state’s north and central regions, where they lingered for several hours, doing the most damage, said Chris Darden, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Birmingham.Īlthough bands of heavy rain had fallen across the state since Saturday, the height of the flooding was Wednesday night from about 7 to 10 p.m. The coroner’s office also said that the body of an 18-year-old woman was recovered on Friendship Road in the Union Grove area on Thursday.Īs of Thursday morning, the office had not publicly identified either flooding victim. The Arab Fire Department said the woman and boy who were rescued had been clinging to a tree from atop a submerged minivan, but “due to extreme conditions of the water, there was no way to reach the female child.” But a child still in a car seat inside the vehicle died, he said.Īccording to the Marshall County Coroner’s Office, the child who died was a 4-year-old girl.
In Marshall County, in the state’s northeast, Chief Shane Washburn of the City of Arab police said an adult and a child were rescued by firefighters from the top of their vehicle, which had been washed off a roadway into an overflowing creek. Brocato, a former firefighter of 42 years. “It parked itself right over Hoover, and for five hours, it was unrelenting,” said Mr. Nine to 10 inches of rainfall over 24 hours pooled in basements or swamped high-elevation areas in Hoover, which has about 92,000 people, intensifying on Wednesday night.