Hurricane Milton drenched the state of Florida with torrential rainfall and flooding. Multiple rivers in the state swelled up to major flood stages, which could linger due to the state's flat terrain.
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00:00We spoke, I believe, last week here. You and Bertie had a conversation about what the heavy
00:04rain from Milton could bring, and we saw it brought plenty of flooding across Florida.
00:10Yeah, it certainly did, Ariella. If you go to that rainfall graphic, you can see where the
00:17heaviest rains were with this thing, and that's where the worst of the stream and river flooding
00:22is going to be. Florida's relatively flat if you've never been there. We don't have the big
00:27hills in there. We don't have the mountains like we do in the mainland, so these creeks and rivers
00:31are very slow-moving. It takes a long time for them to cycle, but the rain is getting in there.
00:36Despite the sandy soil, you can have the sandiest soil in the world. That kind of rainfall, when you
00:42get four to eight times your monthly rainfall for October in a matter of 24 to 36 hours,
00:48you're going to have significant flooding, and that's exactly what we're seeing with this thing
00:52here. You can see St. Petersburg, almost 19 inches of rain. There were probably some remote spots
00:57there that picked up over 20 inches of rain from this thing. Yeah, and Alex, we were talking about
01:02the river flooding here, and we'll take you out to one example of that with the Hillsborough River,
01:08and you can see how that white line really peaks. The previous record here was over 15 feet, and I
01:14believe we saw close to 17. Yeah, the river levels here, and there's another spot there too, multiple
01:20points along the Hillsborough River, which is just north of Tampa. We're already at record stage. In
01:26some cases here, the river level is still rising. These levels were set during Irma in 2017,
01:33and it's going to take a long time for these things to cycle through. Now, if you step along
01:37there, we can swing over toward the St. Johns River. We've got the same problem going on there,
01:43and a lot of the flooding there is still on people's mind from
01:502022, I think it was. Correct me on that if I'm wrong there. That was from Ian.
01:59That produced record flooding. We're already at that stage now in a lot of cases there, and
02:04we're probably going to swing above, and the problem with these rivers here in Florida,
02:09they're slow moving. It can take days, weeks, and in some cases along the St. Johns, it can take
02:14months. These levels here right now, these levels are into homes along the St. Johns, and these
02:19people may be isolated for some time there, so there's significant damage going on as we speak
02:26right now, and that'll be going on here over the next several weeks. That's a good perspective. As
02:31for the future here, you will see a little bit of green returning into some of the areas that
02:35saw the heaviest rain, but most of the heaviest rain here with our forecast is going to stay
02:40across parts of South Florida. Yeah, I don't want to say they can handle the rain down there better
02:45than they can up north. They just didn't have the type of problems with the rivers that we have up
02:50across the central and northern parts of the state, so these downpours down there are fairly
02:55typical, the tropical downpours that they're going to see, but up across the central and northern
02:58part of the state, that type of rainfall that you see there that's coming in spotty showers,
03:03that's insignificant. It's not going to contribute to the flooding. It's going to
03:06be an annoyance for cleanup mostly. Exactly. All right, well, AccuAir flooding expert Alex
03:10Zazowski, thanks again for joining us and for bringing us your expertise on this topic this
03:14morning.