River flooding just beginning in the inland Carolinas
AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from Columbia, South Carolina, on Aug. 8 as the slow-motion disaster of river folding began unfolding in Debby's wake.
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00:00The Accuweather meteorologist Tony Lovac joins us now from Columbia, South Carolina to talk about
00:05what many areas are facing in the days to come. Tony, I know that you're far inland there. We've
00:10had a lot of inland flooding concerns. Are you seeing much of that there in Columbia?
00:18Well, not specifically here in Columbia, but many surrounding areas, particularly the further north
00:23and east you get, despite them being much, much further from where Debbie made landfall
00:28there along the Carolina coast, we are seeing the river flooding, all of that rain that has
00:34fallen over the last couple of days. Unfortunately, all that has to go somewhere, and one of the
00:40places it's going is here in Bentonsville, this in South Carolina, just outside of Florence,
00:46and you see some of the flooding that we're dealing with here. This is looking pretty,
00:50you know, you see river flooding all the time. You're thinking this doesn't look all that bad.
00:54The bad news is this is just the start. A lot of these area rivers, this is the Crooked Creek
00:59that runs through town, is going to be dealing with this flooding into the weekend as the water
01:04levels are likely to rise. The gauge level there, they're expecting to rise another three to five
01:10feet by the time Saturday rolls around. So what you're seeing now is likely going to progressively
01:15get worse as we go through the next couple of days. In fact, just in the hour or so we were
01:19there in town, we noticed just several places where the water was noticeably higher. We're not
01:25talking feet higher, but we're certainly talking about noticeable differences about how far the
01:30water was coming up into the roads, into some of the yards. We talked to some of the emergency
01:34personnel there that were trying to get some people out of some of the homes that were more
01:38at risk. They said a lot of those people, unfortunately, are quite stubborn, want to stay
01:42in their homes despite the dangers that are lurking for sure. In addition to that, another
01:47thing we kind of came across, especially as we were in some of the more back road areas, are the
01:52number of critters that are kind of being moved around by these waters. We're talking about snakes,
01:56we're talking about some insects, all sorts of things like that, turtles, really a lot of the
02:01wildlife. Obviously some of that more dangerous than others, aka the snakes and stuff, so that's
02:05certainly another little hazard there. We tell people don't get into the floodwaters, period.
02:11You certainly don't want to be waiting around in this kind of stuff. It is not exactly the
02:16cleanest of water that's coming up into these areas, but this is going to be a prolonged thing,
02:20Jeff. We're talking probably over the next several days. While Debbie works its way to the northeast,
02:25the storm itself clearing on out, but unfortunately, like I mentioned, all that rain is going to go to
02:31somewhere and you're going to see a lot of those tributaries, like the Crooked Creek, for instance,
02:34that pours into the PD River. That's all going to start to really fill in and when you start
02:40taking all those small little creeks, you funnel them into the bigger rivers, then we're going to
02:44start to see the bigger rivers go up and that's going to continue to create hazards. So the coastal
02:49flooding, the storm surge flooding, moving on out, the flash flooding, easing, unfortunately now we're
02:55in the slow motion disaster. That is river flooding and that is going to be an issue for us here,
03:00not only in South Carolina, but up the way North Carolina, Virginia, as well as Debbie continues
03:07to work its way north. And we'll be watching that evolve into the northeast too. The rain has yet to
03:11begin in the northeast, but we're going to be seeing four to eight inches in some areas and
03:15we're going to have some high water under a blue sky behind the storm into the weekend. Thanks for
03:18that report there, Tony Laubach, meteorologist Tony Laubach in Columbia, South Carolina. And
03:23that's just a little bit south of the center of the storm. You can see the swirl here again,
03:27not far from Charlotte and he is in Columbia.