Severe flood threat as Debby drenches the Northeast

AccuWeather

AccuWeather Flooding Expert Alex Sosnowski details the major risk of flooding as Debby continues to barrel across the northeastern U.S. Several parts of the region are receiving months worth of rain.

Transcript

00:00We're going to talk about these bands of rain that we're going to be dealing with here this

00:04afternoon in just a minute, Alex. But boy, what a week we've had when you take a look at the

00:09rainfall across the mid-Atlantic and northeast. And not Debbie withstanding, we've had pockets

00:17of heavy rain earlier this week around New York City just with some of the thunderstorms.

00:22Yeah, and with Debbie coming in, it's the icing on the cake, of course. But if you look at this

00:27map here, what you're seeing, the dark reds, well, you're well over a month's worth of rain

00:31there. In some cases, you're looking at two, even three months worth of rain. And all of that came

00:36in a few days time. Now, Alex, even with this, what has happened here, what is occurring here

00:42right now across parts of Pennsylvania and northern Maryland, you know, this is an area

00:47that was somewhat dry. How concerned are you in those areas in northern Maryland and in central

00:54Pennsylvania that this is going to lead to at least some kind of river and stream flooding?

00:59Well, it certainly will. Things can turn around in a hurry when you get a month's worth of rain

01:03coming, say, in several hours, which is what the system is capable of doing and will do.

01:08We may actually get two months worth of rain from Debbie here in some cases.

01:12It'll wipe out that drought. It'll take a while to soak deep down into the into the earth. But

01:18at the topsoil level, a lot of this is just going to overwhelm the drought conditions,

01:22is just simply going to run off. Let's talk about these thunderstorms also, Alex.

01:27You know, they're very skinny across parts of eastern Pennsylvania. So the I-95 corridor,

01:34you don't have the same coverage as you have, let's say, back across central Pennsylvania.

01:39But these bands can certainly produce some very heavy rain and flash flooding.

01:45Yeah, what you're seeing on that radar shot there, that big solid blob, if you will,

01:50that's the old center of Debbie. That's the center of Tropical Rainstorm Debbie.

01:54But these skinny bands here, these are kind of the leftover spiral bands,

01:59and they're behaving like tropical feeder bands into this thing. And if you get underneath one

02:02of those things, you can get torrential rainfall. You can pick up two inches of rain in several

02:07minutes. That's how intense they are. You can also get some strong wind gusts. And as you've

02:12been saying, we're getting some tornado reports, some tornado warnings coming out of those bands

02:18here, which is also a concern for areas farther to the east. So it may seem like most of the time

02:23here during the midday and afternoon hours, the weather's fine along I-95. But when you get into

02:28one of these bands, as the thing progresses along, the situation could be horrendous for a while if

02:34you're on the road and you're caught into a flash flooding situation, which is going to occur with

02:38this. Heaviest rainfall, the steadiest with Tropical Rainstorm. You can see that dark

02:42yellow shading here. You mentioned the I-95 corridor. Of course, another area that has been

02:47inundated over the last month has been northern New England, especially northern Vermont, Alex.

02:53Yeah, they're going to be on the edge of the thick of the rain here, but it's close enough,

02:59too close enough for comfort, as they say. So if this thing were to, say, shift a little bit,

03:04or one of these spiral bands were to kind of persist in that area later today into the night,

03:10they could get right back in that same situation. But you see the darker shading there,

03:13that's where the heaviest rain is going. And this will be enough. We've been, over the past several

03:19days, we've been shouting about the likelihood of flash flooding of urban and small streams,

03:25and we continue to honk the horn about river flooding with this. Now, I think in most cases,

03:30the river flooding here is going to be minor to moderate, but there will be some exceptions.

03:35That webcam you showed earlier in the Harrisburg area, in the background, that was the Susquehanna.

03:41That's one of the rivers that are on our radar here for the potential for minor to moderate

03:46flooding. The levee systems that they have around these major rivers will handle this,

03:50but the areas that don't have that are probably going to take on water.

03:54All right, Accuweather flooding expert, Alex Zdowski. Alex, thanks for joining us.

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