AccuWeather's Melissa Constanzer takes a look at what storm surge is and the impacts it can have.
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00:00On a late September night, ocean water very aggressively taking over the landscape here.
00:05This was the landfall of Hurricane Helene last year in Florida.
00:09While the storm would go on to be known for its catastrophic flooding of North Carolina,
00:13it did its share of damage to Florida.
00:15Storm surge near landfall was estimated between 12 to 16 feet.
00:19Even before it made landfall, around 5 feet of storm surge in Naples, Florida, closed businesses.
00:24There were 14 people that lost their life in Helene's storm surge.
00:28So we already know it can have very deadly impacts, but what exactly is storm surge?
00:33It's that abnormal rise in seawater as a storm is coming ashore.
00:37Most of this comes from the wind pushing the ocean water right into the coastline.
00:42With it, nowhere else to go, so the water just overtakes the land.
00:46And that's part of the problem here, because with major storm surge,
00:49we do often see this pushing not only in creating beach erosion,
00:52but pushing into the coastline and overtaking buildings.
00:55The water can rise as high as 20 feet in spots,
00:59and there are several storms that have seen that to be the case.
01:02But what is the determining factors of storm surge?
01:05Well, there's a lot of things that go into it.
01:07First, how strong the hurricane is.
01:09The speed at which the hurricane is moving can also help to push extra water into the coastline.
01:14The size of the storm, is it 100 miles wide or 400 miles wide?
01:19That makes a difference, because it's pushing more water into the coast if it is wider.
01:22And the angle of the approach to the coast, plus the topography of the coast itself,
01:28can all factor into things.
01:29Like I said, storm surge can end up being upwards to 20 feet.
01:33One of the greatest storm surges in the coastal U.S. that we've seen in recent memory
01:38has been Hurricane Katrina, with 25 to 28 feet of storm surge estimated there on the Mississippi coast.
01:45It would quickly overtake homes and anyone that's in its path.