AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from heavy rain in Georgia on Aug. 5 as the impacts of Debby spread northward.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00We're going to go to Richmond Hill, Georgia this morning, this afternoon, as we check
00:06in with AccuWeather meteorologist and storm chaser Tony Laubach.
00:09Tony, you've been on the move for the past couple of hours.
00:12Tell us how your day started and how it's progressed throughout time.
00:16Well, it is, we're constant regardless of where we've been, it's been a wet one.
00:23You can see here, raining really, really heavy here, we're about 15 miles south of Savannah
00:29here along coastal Georgia, and this is something you folks are probably going to have to get
00:34used to here over the next couple of days, is this heavy, heavy rain that is falling
00:38right now.
00:39A little bit of a breeze here, but this is actually some of the lighter winds that we've
00:42seen so far today.
00:43We started the day off really right along the coast there, you mentioned where landfall
00:47was, we were just to the east of that, south of Perry where we ended up in the eye of Debbie
00:53right there, right before 7 o'clock, and that certainly left a mess.
00:57You're looking at a lot of what is going to be a lingering issue here, power outages and
01:01the fights you are seeing here are primarily why.
01:04We see trees that have come down on power lines all over the place, and these are very
01:10interesting power lines, you know, I come out from the Great Plains a lot of times where
01:14these lines just get snapped, they bring down the poles, these are some pretty sturdy
01:18lines, a lot of these really holding up trees, but we've seen several of those poles that
01:23did get snapped, some of those due to wind directly, others due to trees coming down.
01:27We saw power crews pretty much all over the place, in fact at one point as we were coming
01:31up 95, we saw a caravan of maybe a dozen or more utility trucks, those powers, those line
01:37workers running down to the south toward the Jacksonville area, likely going to work their
01:41way over into that region here, so a lot of power outages due to debris, despite only
01:46being a lowing Category 1, you mentioned that when landfall occurred, so fortunately we
01:52didn't see much in the way of the wind, but we have had the flooding, we've had the storm
01:55surge, and that flooding, that heavy rain that you're seeing right now, you're hearing
02:00on the mic, that is what is working its way here into Georgia, and again here, folks,
02:04this is Monday afternoon, we could be looking at rains like this through the day on Wednesday,
02:09maybe even beyond that, for folks, Savannah up to Charleston, you've heard us talk about
02:14it on several occasions today, the mayor there in Savannah has instituted a curfew starting
02:19tonight at 6 o'clock, sorry, starting tonight at 10 o'clock, going until 6 o'clock the following
02:24morning, so we're advising people not to be out overnight tonight, again, flood water
02:29is very, very dangerous, particularly at night, because you can't really identify the flooding
02:33very easily, certainly can't tell the depth of it there at night, so we, like everybody
02:37else, will be off the road coming this evening once we get in and get settled there in Savannah,
02:42so we are going to continue to work our way up there, that is where we're going to hold
02:45up here for the next couple of days, and again, this is the rain that we're going to be dealing
02:50with, heavy rains, extreme rains, maybe historic flooding with that as well.
02:56But the sounds there coming in from Tony as he tries to protect that microphone from some
03:00of the rain, which as he mentioned, he'll be doing for days to come here with Debbie.