The widow of a man who drowned in South Carolina's historic 2015 flooding is suing the federal government over a dam that failed on an Army base near Columbia, according to the Associated Press.
The lawsuit, filed in late December by Lois McCarty, seeks unspecified damages related to the death of her husband early on the morning of Oct. 4, 2015.
According to the suit, Bob McCarty was in his car at 6:30 a.m. that morning when he was swept away in floodwaters rushing from Semmes Lake, a 29-acre, man-made lake at Fort Jackson, the Army's largest basic training installation. The lake feeds into a system of creeks and other bodies of water throughout Columbia. McCarty alleges her husband was in an area below the dam when his car was swept away.
The Semmes Lake dam failed at around 3 a.m. that day, not long after rain started to fall at about a rate of 2 inches per hour. The area received 2 feet of rain in about 12 hours.
The 76-year-old dam was inspected just two years earlier. According to the lawsuit, however, the government "utterly failed to remedy or even address the dam's serious risk of failure" following the 2013 inspection. Lawyers wrote that the government knew the dangers of maintaining the dam "in its seriously hazardous condition but chose not to correct the deficiencies" or repair the dam, adding that officials at Fort Jackson also didn't warn people including McCarty of the dam failure.
Other lawsuits related to the failure of Semmes Lake's dam are pending, reports AP. Property owners in King's Grant, an upscale subdivision just outside the fort's gate, are suing the government over millions in property damage, and the subdivision homeowners' association filed a suit over damage to some of the neighborhood's common areas.
At least 19 people were killed in the Carolinas in October 2015 during days of historic rain and flooding.
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