After Hurricane Florence, North & South Carolina grapple with floods, outages and endless water. At Least 33 Deaths.
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| A drone captures the widespread flooding from tropical storm Florence in New Bern, N.C., on Saturday. (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post) |
WASHINGTON POST
WILMINGTON, N.C. — The water is everywhere — flooding interstates, swamping homes and swelling rivers that keep climbing. The rain stopped falling, but the water remains, endless water clogging up the highway, overwhelming gauges meant to measure rivers, stretching out in every direction.
“Even though there’s no substantial rain now in the forecast and the sun may be shining, rivers continue to rise, and we will see more flooding,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) said at a briefing Tuesday.
The storm has pummeled North Carolina, leaving people here stranded at home, blocked from traveling, sweltering as they wait for the power to come on and the water to recede.
Florence, the storm that brought the misery, has gone from a hurricane to a tropical depression to a meandering system that dropped rain over the Mid-Atlantic and southern New England on Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service. It left behind deaths in at least three states and carved an arc of destruction that had not fully become clear, though one preliminary analysis said could cost up to $20 billion in property losses.
Florence was another 1,000-year rain event. Is this the new normal as the planet warms?
Four states have set tropical storm rainfall records in the past year.
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Over a massive region of southeast North Carolina and northeast South Carolina, Florence produced an extraordinary rainstorm that statistically has a 1-in-100 chance of occurring each year. Over substantial areas, the deluge had a 0.1 percent chance of happening, what is known as a 1,000-year event.
These exceptional rainfall events keep happening and appear to be part of a trend toward more extreme tropical rainmakers, probably connected to climate change.