Tornado Outbreak Ends; Transitions To Incredible, Extreme Flood

The big tornado outbreak that killed 35 people in the United States since Sunday is winding down, though there might be a few more twisters in the Southeast today.

Downtown Pensacola, Fla. flooding last night, via @pnj on Twitter.
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That's the good news.

The very bad news is the storm has transitioned into one that has caused extreme flooding along the Gulf Coast.

Incredibly, 23 inches of rain has fallen on Pensacola, Florida in just over 24 hours. (That amount of rain is what we'd normally expect over eight months here where I sit in Vermont.)

Water up to the doorknob inside
a Pensacola, Fla. home last night.  

At one point, 5.24 inches of rain came down in just 45 minutes. Large swaths of the Gulf Coast have gotten 10 to 25 inches of rain since yesterday. As you can imagine, the flooding is incredible.  

Downtown Pensacola and Mobile, Alabama are flooded, there were many, many water rescues. Traffic jams extended for 16 miles on flooded Interstate 10, the major east-west corridor in that neck of the woods.    

It was still pouring on the Gulf Coast as dawn broke this morning.  Lightning has been incredible, too. We don't have a full accounting of rainfall in Pensacola because lightning hit the National Weather Service station.

At one point in the southern Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, there were 9000 lightning strikes in 15 minutes last night.

The flooding is likely to extend up the East Coast today as the very wet feed of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico rides north.

The inside of a flooded home
in Pensacola, Fla. last night.  

While nobody in the Mid-Atlantic states to New England will get 20 inches of rain, several inches seems likely in several spots.

Flood watches extend from Georgia to New York and southern New England.

Funny, practically the only place that's getting off without much trouble in the eastern half of the nation from this storm is up where I live in Vermont.  At worst, we'll get minor field flooding from the rains over the next couple of days.

And the rain will extend the minor flooding that's going on now along the shores of Lake Champlain.

Somehow, I worry the other shoe will drop for us up here in northern New England at some point.