Saturday, December 15, 2018

North Carolina Can't Catch A Break From Flooding

It rained wicked hard in North Carolina Friday and Friday night

This just days after it snowed really hard in interior North Carolina and poured rain along the coast, one to three inches of rain came down on the state's saturated soil.  Coastal Wilmington got 1.84 inches of rain while snow was burying communities further west and north last weekend.

Flooding in Lumberton, North Carolina from Hurricane Florence
this past September.
Rivers are flooding again in North Carolina this morning. At least the flooding isn't as bed as the epic, record flooding from Hurricane Florence earlier this year.

I mentioned the other day that many places in the eastern half of the nation are experiencing their rainiest or close to rainiest year on record this year. Ground zero is North Carolina.

By the time you read this, Wilmington, North Carolina will have had 100 inches of rain for the year. By midnight last night, Wilmington was up to 99.72 inches. Another 0.08 fell in the five hours ending at 5 a.m. and a slug of moderate to heavy rain was on the city's doorstep.

The city will beat its previous record for wettest year by at least 16 inches of precipitation. In the rare cases when a city beats its annual rainfall record, it's usually by an inch or two at the most.

Each of the past five years in North Carolina have been wet. They could use a break.

According to some of the flood warnings up this morning in North Carolina, some houses that were devastated by flooding from Florence are going to hit again. That is if any of those houses still exist after Florence.

Flooding is pretty widespread this month in the Southeast. Last weekend, up to 11 inches of rain fell on southern Georgia and northern Florida, flooding homes in Waycross, Georgia and other cities.

High water was also reported around Charleston, South Carolina.

Up here in Vermont, the worst of the storms continue to miss us in December, much as they have for a lot of 2018. The southeastern storm will clip us a bit Sunday night, dropping a very modest amount of rain and snow. A little more snow will come with a cold front Monday and Monday night, but again, it won't be a huge deal.

We'll finish the year a little wetter than normal, but nothing record breaking, nothing spectacular.






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