CHARLOTTE ( QUEEN CITY NEWS ) — Record rainfall in the Carolinas from Debby had North and South Carolina neighbors shocked.
“I haven’t seen it get this bad in Rock Hill before.”
“The amount of water that has come up so quickly—it’s the most I’ve ever seen. And I’ve lived in this area of southern York County all my life.”
Heavily flooded roads and downed trees forced local and state emergency crews to block off areas for safety, preventing some from getting home.
Flooded bridge in Huntersville closed indefinitely Chief meteorologist Tara Lane says her team thought Chesterfield or Richmond counties would see higher rainfall.
“The highest amounts ended up being [in] places like York County and down through Chester County, 6 to 7 inches of rain there . . . We had so much so many areas of flooding in Charlotte. We had about four and a quarter inches of rain up through midnight last night,” she said.
It was the 14th wettest day on record for Charlotte. The previous record for August 8th was about 1.5 inches of rain.
“The climate is changing, the ocean is getting warmer, there’s more water vapor in the air, and that water vapor is available for raining,” said extension climatologist Pam Knox.
She says warmer waters are primed to provide the energy hurricanes use to get stronger.
“So that’s one of the reasons we expect to see a lot of hurricanes this year. Some forecasts are somewhere between 17 and 25 named storms, depending on exactly which source you use. So that’s almost the whole alphabet’s worth of storms. And we’ve only gotten through ‘D’ so far. There’s a lot of the year we could still be seeing tropical storms occur,” Knox said.
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It’s something all climate experts are warning neighbors about.
“People are going to have to respond to that because we live in areas where all that rain is going to fall. And not only does it fall, but when it hits the ground, then it will wash into rivers. It will cause problems for anybody in a low-lying area. It will cause problems for infrastructure like bridges and roads,” Knox said.
“We’ve seen a lot of that with Debby in the areas with the highest rainfall amounts, that roads are just getting washed away and bridges are getting washed away. There have been a number of dams that have collapsed because they just can’t handle that much rain. So the infrastructure is going to take a huge hit from this,” Knox continued.
She says it’s not that tropical storms have never had heavy rains, but we will see more weather systems bring heavy rains as the climate continues to change.
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