09/18/18

This is the BBC News. Hello, I'm Jonathan Izard. The governor of the US state of North Carolina Roy Cooper has warned that residents can't consider themselves safe yet

as the risk to life from floods in the wake of this tropical storm Florence could be greater than when it first made landfall. Colleen Roberts is public information officer for the city of New Bern which suffered massive flooding. She echoed Mr. Cooper's fears.

We had a high tide here about three hours ago, so we saw that storm surge increase a little bit and that's exactly the sort of thing that the North Carolina governor is talking about.

Also additional flooded communities upstream, that water over the next week or so will flow down into the Neuse and we will likely see our river crest with additional possibly dangerous storm surge.

The government in the Philippines says some fourteen people have been killed in a massive storm which brought destruction to the north of the country. It's the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines this year.

Details of the destruction are still coming in. This report from Jonathan Head. The authorities are reporting extensive damage in a number of towns,

but the fate of those in the direct path of the storm is still not clear as communications have been cut and many roads are blocked. The storm was both powerful and very wide.

Heavy rain fell on much of the northern Philippines, causing some rivers to burst their banks and a number of landslides. We saw two hundred people who'd taken shelter in one school

being reevacuated because a dike holding back a swollen river was about to burst. Tens of thousands of Ethiopians have welcomed back another former rebel group,

the Oromo Liberation Front in the latest response to a wave of political reforms in the country. The OLF spent more than three decades fighting a separatist insurgency on behalf of the Oromo, the country's largest ethnic group.