After a week of steady rain, the showers tapered off Monday and an inundated South Carolina turned to surveying a road system shredded by historic flooding, and in a cruel twist, thousands of residents faced the prospect of going days without running water.

The governor warned communities downstream, near the low-lying coast, that they may still see rising water and to be prepared for more evacuations. More than 900 people were already staying in shelters and nearly 40,000 people were without water. At least 11 weather-related deaths in two states were blamed on the vast rainstorm, with one of the latest coming when a sedan drove around a barricade and stalled in rushing waters.

The driver drowned, but a woman who was riding in the car managed to climb on top of it and was rescued by a firefighter who waded into the water.

"She came out the window. How she got on top of the car and stayed there like she did with that water- there's a good Lord," Kershaw County Coroner David West said.

On Monday, the rains moved north into North Carolina and the mid-Atlantic states. The rainstorm is part of an unprecedented system that dumped more than a foot of rain across South Carolina and drenched several other states. Sunday was the wettest day in the history of South Carolina's capital city Columbia, according to the National Weather Service.

The 16.6 inches of rain that fell on Gills Creek near downtown Columbia on Sunday was the rainiest day in one single spot in the U.S. in more than 16 years, among weather stations with more than 50 years of record-keeping. There was so much rain there, a gauge was swept off a bridge and had to be replaced by members of the U.S. Geological Survey.