Heavy rain pounds the Carolinas

Gills Creek flows past the Columbia Ballet School, and, a few miles downstream, a shop where people can pawn car titles to pay monthly bills. It fills lakes ringed with stately, white-columned homes worth nearly $1 million and snakes by a working-class apartment complex where locals say it's best to leave before dark.

Over the past week, as the water rose after days of unrelenting rain in the heart of South Carolina, the creek spilled misery and pain on rich and poor alike, robbing both of the things most precious to them.

The once-a-millennium storm and mammoth flood that rolled in on a Sunday have further tested a state that has endured a year filled with more than its fair share of trauma: Back in April, a day before Easter, a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black man in the back in North Charleston. In June, police said, a white man gunned down nine black church members in Charleston. The state was roiled for 23 more days before lawmakers removed the Confederate flag that had flown for 50 years outside the Statehouse. (AP)

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