Life-threatening storm surge and flooding coming to Florida

AccuWeather

Hurricane Milton is expected to make landfall in the early morning of Oct. 10, bringing catastrophic rainfall and winds, as well as causing life-threatening storm surge and flooding.

Transcript

00:00Joining me right now is AccuWeather flooding expert Alex Sosnowski, and you know Alex,

00:05with all of the impacts that we're going to see, the storm surge, the severe weather, the wind,

00:12we want to get into the flooding aspect now. A couple days ago we were concerned that we were

00:18going to be looking at a lot of heavy rain in the central part of the Florida peninsula,

00:22but over the last couple of days, Alex, the rain has been concentrated, let's say,

00:28more south of I-4, along the southern Florida peninsula.

00:32Yeah, we've seen, there's a separate system here that's been causing that rain,

00:37a weak tropical feature, if you will, and there's actually a low grade chance that that thing could

00:41go on and evolve into a tropical system east of the Bahamas, but that'll be moving away from

00:47Florida, but you can see there it has produced some fairly heavy rainfall. There's been some

00:51amounts down there locally up to six inches, most of that falling over the glades, but some of it

00:55getting into populated areas too, but you notice farther north, up in central and northern Florida,

01:01there's been less intense rain. That'll help a little bit. The problem is, if you can go to that

01:06next map that shows our projected rainfall, eight to twelve inches of rain, that's a general

01:13rainfall. Just about everybody in that dark green zone is going to get that kind of rainfall.

01:18Some places will get double that amount, unfortunately, and it looks like some of

01:22that rain may fall in a matter of a few hours. You know, four or five inches of rain potentially

01:27could fall in an hour or two's time, which even if you have a sandy soil, it's going to try to

01:33overwhelm that, and that's going to get into the creeks, rivers, and lakes, freshwater lakes.

01:38Yeah, let's talk about two kinds of flooding with this. We have the flash flooding, and then let's

01:43talk about the river flooding, Alex. Yeah, impermeable surfaces. Anytime you have a lot of

01:48development across a region there, pavement, concrete, there's a lot of new housing developments

01:54that have sprung up, that water is going to run off. You can have the best drainage system in the

01:58world. It's not going to handle three, four, five inch an hour rainfall, which can occur with this

02:03thing. Fortunately, it looks like this system is going to keep moving, not going to linger for

02:08several days, but still the damage will be done. You're going to get runoff. Don't park your car

02:12in an area where it's prone to flooding. Get it up a little bit. Don't park under trees, of course,

02:17because there's a lot of wind coming. We are expecting hurricane force winds along the I-4

02:21corridor throughout that, so multiple problems here with this, but then that water is going to

02:26work its way in fairly quickly into the smaller creeks and lakes, and then you have some of the

02:31slow-moving rivers around there, like the Peace River. We've been talking about the St. John's

02:36River. There's several others, the Hillsboro, the Myakka, the Black Creek, the Santa Fe,

02:44just to name a few. These are all going to be prone to significant rises here over the next

02:48few days, and it may take some time for those rivers to go back down because they don't flow

02:52very fast. We could be looking at a couple of weeks before they drop back below flood stage

02:56once they come up.

Category

Transcript

Recommended