Rusty Jacobs

Highway officials outlined their Hurricane Florence response and recovery efforts for a house committee in Raleigh this week.

State Department of Transportation Secretary James Trogdon told lawmakers the catastrophic storm dumped an estimated 8 trillion gallons of rain on the state, equivalent to more than 1 trillion cubic feet of water.

"So Florence would have filled Jordan Lake 536 times," Trogdon told committee members.

Many roads have re-opened but not all of them, said Trogdon.

The approximately 20-year-old male alligator measured around 5-foot-7-inches but was missing a portion of its tail and probably had been closer to seven feet.

The gator was caught and killed on the second-to-last day of this inaugural season by a hunter in the Hyde County town of Swan Quarter.

Hurricane Florence lashed Wilmington with high winds when it made landfall more than two weeks ago, and then the trouble started. The storm inundated the coastal city with 30 to 40 inches of rain in three days.

North Carolina Democrats want to capitalize on anger over the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process and allegations he sexually assaulted Dr. Christine Blasey Ford when the two were high school students in the 1980s.

North Carolina farmers will suffer some heavy losses from the effects of Hurricane Florence. Preliminary reports from the state agriculture department show heavy hits to peanut, soybean, cotton and sweet potato crops.

Updated 5 p.m. | Sept. 13, 2018

Hurricane Florence's leading edge battered the Carolina coast Thursday, bending trees and shooting frothy sea water over streets on the Outer Banks, as the hulking storm closed in with 105 mph (165 kph) winds for a drenching siege that could last all weekend.

The state elections board is refusing to comply with federal subpoenas seeking confidential voter information.

Updated 8:30 a.m. | August 31, 2018

The torn-down Silent Sam monument was the site of dueling protests Thursday night. About 50 members of a neo-Confederate group were greeted by several hundred counterprotesters on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill. 

A federal court ruling could have a major impact on Congressional elections this fall.

A three-judge panel ruled Monday that North Carolina's Republican-controlled General Assembly gerrymandered 12 of the state's 13 districts with such extreme partisanship that the maps violate the equal protection and First Amendment rights of non-Republican voters.

The Chemours Company will stop providing bottled water to hundreds of residents whose well water has been tainted by the chemical GenX.

A North Carolina town will be the site of a new Amazon distribution center that officials say will lead to hundreds of millions in investment and the creation of more than a thousand jobs.

State regulators are getting ahead of federal policies in an effort to control a toxic pollutant used in preparing logs for export to China.

North Carolina's director of emergency management said the pace of distributing federal relief funds to Hurricane Matthew victims will pick up soon.

The new Bonner Bridge could be open to traffic by the end of the year. The state Department of Transportation says the project to replace the existing span that connects Hatteras Island to the northern Outer Banks is 88 percent complete.

North Carolina joined California, Arizona, Nevada and Texas in seeing the greatest total increases in solar energy generation from 2008 to 2017, according to a report released Tuesday by Environment North Carolina Policy and Research Center.

North Carolina came close but ultimately fell short in its effort to lure the U.S. Army's new Futures Command to the Triangle.

The Triangle's transit organization is looking at higher capacity buses to ease daily commutes for the area's growing population.

GoTriangle is trying out a higher capacity bus on its busiest routes this month, such as the I-40 stretch from Chapel Hill to Raleigh.

Chemours and state regulators may not see eye to eye on a long-term solution for residential wells tainted by GenX.

Independence Day celebrations raise concerns about fireworks-related injuries. Nationwide, emergency rooms treated almost 13,000 such injuries last year, according to the non-profit National Fire Protection Association.

Republicans in the General Assembly rode their majority to pass three more proposed constitutional amendments Tuesday. 

Deaths due to residential fires are up in North Carolina, in part a consequence of a new reporting system.

Lawmakers put in a busy day in Raleigh Wednesday, completing the override of two gubernatorial vetoes and advancing proposed constitutional amendments.

Another of Governor Roy Cooper's vetoes is headed for an override by the Republican super-majority in North Carolina's General Assembly.