(DETROIT) — Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is urging his state’s residents to stay off the roads, especially around the city of Detroit, where a storm dropped six inches of rain, caused flooding on a number of major highways and interstates and left two people dead.
“Don’t go around barriers, don’t drive into flooded areas because you don’t know how deep it is,” Snyder said. “We want people to be safe.”
Jim Fouts, mayor of Warren, Michigan, a city north of Detroit, said his city was left swamped from the floodwater. “Last night resulted in two deaths related to the storm; hundreds of people left like refugees in their own city.”
“We need help from FEMA today,” Fouts said. “We need it now, not tomorrow, or the next day, we need it right now.” He called the flooding “an absolute calamity” and “the worst disaster that I have seen…for 30 years.”
Fouts said that one of the victims of the flooding was a 31-year-old woman who was overcome — believed to have had a heart attack — while running into five feet of water on a highway. The second victim was a 100-year-old woman who was found drowned in her basement.
NEWS FROM: ABC News Radio