Flooding Strikes Vermont As Epic Storm Trashes East

I haven't been out yet to document the flooding today
 but the tiny brook by my house in St. Albans that
we call the Woof River was raging
pretty good this morning after two inches of rain.  

We Vermonters woke up to quite a bit of flooding this morning as the enormous storm that caused all those tornadoes the past couple of days dumped record amounts of February rain on the Green Mountain State.

This wasn't just routine lowland flooding.  It was worse than that. And it was statewide.

Buildings were flooded in Springfield. Several homes were evacuated in Hardwick as high water threatened there.

Water also came close to damaging downtown Montpelier, Vermont again. Lower State Street and Route 2 there were closed due to ice jam flooding.

Other major roads that were or are closed by flooding, and this isn't an exhaustive list, are Route 2 in Middlesex, Route 125 in Cornwall, Route 30i in Whiting, Route 105 in Enosburg and Route 122 in Lyndonville.

Several areas of Vermont got two inches of rain, which is extremely odd for February. Within 24 hours, Burlington received 1.86 inches of precipitation, more than normally falls in the entire month of February.

The nearly statewide flood warning issued by the National Weather Service in Burlington was set to expire at 8:45 p.m., but I'm sure the warnings will be extended for specific areas and specific rivers through the day.

As of 8:30 a.m., there was still a line of moderate intensity showers across central Vermont, from near  Rutland northeastward into the Northeast Kingdom.  More rain was working in from New York State.

Though this rain will not be nearly as heavy as what we already received, it'll slow the rate at which all the high water around Vermont will recede.  The lighter rain will change to snow tonight, and deposit and dusting to three inches of snow on most of us. The higher totals will be in the mountains.

As bad as it is in Vermont, at least we didn't get the severe thunderstorms and tornadoes further south, though several Vermont towns saw lightning and heard thunder overnight.

Winds in severe thunderstorms gusted to 83 mph in Milton, Mass, 75 mph near Glastonbury, Connecticut and  68 mph in  Hartford, Connecticut.

Overall, there were 19 reports of tornadoes and a whopping 380 reports of wind damage along the East Coast, says NOAA's Storm Prediction Center. 

The weather pattern is going to remain active for sure. Several small storms, disturbances and weather fronts will affect Vermont over the next several days. Those won't drop too much precipitation, but the weather will be inclement pretty frequently.

There are signs that another strong storm could go by to our west late next week. These are the kinds of storms that have given Vermont all kinds of trouble this winter. One of January 10 caused rare thunderstorms and damaging downslope winds on the western sides of the Green Mountains.

Another on February 16 dumped rain and freezing rain on Vermont and caused some high winds. And then we had this one, that caused all the flooding.

It's too soon to say whether that next storm late in the week will actually get going, and if so, how bad it might be. But it's worth watching. At least once the water recedes from today's Vermont flooding.