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ByTamaraLush and Allen G. Breed TheAssociatedPress LUMBERTON, N.C. Adayaf- ter fleeing from the swollen Lumber River, the residents of this down-but-not-quite- out former mill town waded Wednesday into the swirl- ing, tea-colored waters and filled jugs for something most of us take for granted: flushing their toilets. "We still don't have wa- ter or power in our house," Caroline Kahn said as she sloshed through someone's flooded front yard in a pair of flower-print boots. "So we need water for the necessi- ties of life." The river gave this town its life. Now it has torn the community apart. About1,200residentshad to be evacuated by boat and plucked from their roofs by helicopters as the river crested. Two of the state's 19 fatalities occurred in Robe- son County, of which Lum- berton is the seat. Of all the towns affected by Hurricane Matthew, this city of 22,000 was among the hardest hit and the least able to absorb it. "It is just a heartbreak," said novelist Jill McCorkle, a Lumberton native. She and her husband, Tom Rankin, drove southeast from their home in Hills- borough, his pickup filled to the gunwales with diapers and drinking water. "It's a very poor area anyway." In her youth, McCorkle worked as a lifeguard on the Lumber. The river me- anders through her fictional landscape, where the mos- quitoes "are so big they roll up your pants legs to bite you." "When people are miss- ing in Marsh County, the river is one of the first places to go," the novelist wrote in "Carolina Moon," published in 1996. The po- lice "regularly drag nets up and down through that twisting brown river, one man in the boat designated to watch the branches of the live oaks for snakes that might sense the warmth of bodies below and drop onto them." "There's the constant trade-off of the river giving and taking away," McCorkle said. "It's a really beautiful, beautiful river — until it crests banks and goes out of control." Like so many early set- tlements, Lumberton de- pended on the river for sur- vival. By the late 18th cen- tury, the town had become a trading center for timber and related materials. "Rafts of pine logs on which were piled other pine products such as tar, pitch, turpentine and resin were floated down" the river to Georgetown, South Caro- lina, according to history produced by the Federal Writer's Project produced in the 1930s. But it wasn't timber that gave the river and town their names. To local Indians, it was not the Lumber, but the Lumbee. Poet John Charles McNeill, a native of neigh- boring Scotland County who grew up along the river, said the name was from a local Indian word meaning "black water." Early European survey- ors and settlers called it "Drowning Creek." In the 2011 book "Com- munities in Economic Cri- sis: Appalachia and the South," Lumbee Indian ac- tivist Richard Regan drew a primal connection between his people and the waters upon which they live. HURRICANE AFTERMATH River that gave life to North Carolina town now tears it apart By Gary Fineout The Associated Press TALLAHASSEE, FLA. A federal judge on Wednes- day extended voter regis- tration until Oct. 18 in the battleground state of Flor- ida, due to the disruption and damage from Hurri- cane Matthew. During a hearing Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker agreed to extend the deadline for six more days. He had al- ready extended the Oct. 11 deadline one day, after the Florida Democratic Party filed a lawsuit last week- end, following the hurri- cane's brush with Flori- da's east coast. Walker said in an or- der issued shortly after- ward that he acted swiftly because "no right is more precious than having a voice in our democracy." "Hopefully it is not lost on anyone that the right to have a voice is why this great country exists in the first place," wrote Walker, who set the deadline at 5 p.m. on Oct. 18. Powerful Hurricane Matthew didn't make land- fall in Florida but caused at least nine deaths there. Over a two-day period it knocked out power to more than 1 million people and caused flooding and beach erosion. Democrats late last week asked Republican Gov. Rick Scott to extend the deadline, but Scott turned down the request and said people have had enough time to register. Scott brushed aside ques- tions on whether his de- cision was related to his staunch support of GOP nominee Donald Trump. In court, however, attor- neys for both Scott and the state's chief top elections official offered no defense of the existing deadline and did not object to an ex- tension. Most of the hour- long hearing before Walker was spent discussing how long to extend voter regis- tration. Walker said he did not believe that Scott had au- thority to use his emer- gency powers to waive the deadline. But he also pointed out that Florida law already allows the gov- ernor to suspend or delay an election if there is an emergency. "There is a gap in Flor- ida law that renders (the deadline) constitutionally untenable," Walker said. Allison Tant, chair- woman of the Florida Dem- ocratic Party, hailed Walk- er's decision. "While we wish it had not taken a lawsuit to get the Scott administration to do the right thing, today's ruling is a major victory for all Floridians and for the democratic process in the Sunshine State," Tant said. Voting rights groups, including the League of Women Voters of Florida, joined the legal battle and pointed out that they had cancelled voter registra- tion drives because of the storm. Their legal brief cited statistics that showed nearly 160,000 voters had registered in the final nine days before the 2012 dead- line. 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