A tropical rainstorm that struck North Carolina on Sept. 16 dropped immense amounts of rain in a very short time, causing breathtaking flooding, as AccuWeather's Tony Laubach explains.
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00:00Right now, meteorologist Tony Laubach joins us now from Wilmington, North Carolina and he's got a closer look at the flooding from this storm.
00:07Tony, we recently had a rotating storm that sure looked like it produced a water spout earlier in the past 45 minutes or so just south of Emerald Isle.
00:16Rotation has weakened with that storm, but really what's going to be remembered by most will be the severe and significant flooding from this storm.
00:24So tell us about your experience with this one, Tony.
00:28Well, you know, it's interesting you mention the tornadoes because when I got up this morning, if you guys remember, if you got up with us at 6 o'clock in the morning, I was the first one on TV to tell you it was raining.
00:39And I shifted gears to go down south, actually, to Southport where we were actually watching for the potential for water spots down there.
00:47That was kind of my focus for the day, although I said multiple times the flooding is going to be an issue.
00:53I certainly did not realize how big an issue that was going to be.
00:57And it certainly was the case for a narrow area.
01:00You mentioned just a few counties and we're going to take you down right now to one of those areas.
01:05This was Carolina Beach, about 15 miles as the crow flies south of where I'm at right now.
01:10And it was just an unbelievable scene with the amount of water that infiltrated that entire city due to the fact that it has been raining 18 plus inches there over the last 24 hours.
01:22That is insane amounts of rain.
01:24We talk about that in terms of snow more often than not.
01:27So for me to actually experience something like that of this scale was something that I certainly have never done, at least in terms of measuring rain like I would typically measure snow back in Colorado.
01:38For many folks down there, though, this was certainly something they had never seen either, even for many of them that had been around here for years.
01:45And that counts if you go back a handful of years to Hurricane Florence, which doesn't really hold a candle to what we saw down today.
01:52This is crazy. We've never seen anything like this.
01:55It's unbelievable, really. I think it's worse than Florence.
01:58It's crazy, man. I've never seen like this.
02:01I mean, for Florence, it wasn't this bad at all.
02:04So I don't know. For Florence, there's minnows swimming in this parking lot over here.
02:08And they were about knee deep in water.
02:10It wasn't this deep at all.
02:16And you want to talk about how deep that was, Jeff?
02:19It was about up to my chest in some places, how deep it was.
02:23Now, no, I did not get into up to my chest, but there were folks of equivalent height that were walking around out there that were getting water up to their chest at points.
02:32A lot of those cars, we saw that from video that I shot, that Aaron Jajak shot, that Allie shot.
02:36Again, we all ended up kind of converging in that same area because, again, that was really where this storm really took aim.
02:43And, again, it was just a narrow band, only about 25 miles wide.
02:46And, again, 15 miles south of here, it was a huge difference.
02:50And I had to loop all the way around to get up on the other side of the Sound to get down into that.
02:54I just narrowly missed out on the closure down in Southport that had Jajak stranded earlier.
02:59And then, of course, I ended up getting stuck down there for several hours waiting for those roads to clear out.
03:04So, Jeff, I can safely say that I have been to the coast with a storm with no name, and I am happy to be out of the rain.
03:12All right. That's very well said, my friend.
03:15I'm trying to remember the name of that song, but that's some good work.
03:19He's a linguist and also a musician of sorts.
03:23Good stuff there, Tony.