The severe storms that caused more than 20 deaths across the central U.S. are gone, but many rivers are going to remain at flood stages for quite a while to come.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00At least 23 people across seven states have lost their lives in connection to the severe storms and flooding that began last week.
00:07The days of drenching rain through the central U.S. are over, but the flood dangers still remain.
00:12For some communities, the danger is actually increasing as rivers continue to rise.
00:16It's going to take a closer look at what we're going to be tracking here, and you can see just widespread flooding here across these areas.
00:22As you look at the actual individual markers here for the river levels along these different rivers, you can see that we have multiple areas here in red, which is moderate flooding, and then purple, which is major flooding.
00:35Some of these areas are going to be in major flooding for the foreseeable future here.
00:39It's going to take a while, especially for some of these slower-moving river systems, for that water to subside and come back down because these are in major.
00:47Because once again, you go for major, then you go to moderate, then you go to minor, and then it's going to take a while there to get back to normal here going forward.
00:54And unfortunately for some of these areas, we're tracking more rainfall here as we head into the weekend.
00:59So we're going to continue to watch this here as we head into at least Saturday and Sunday.
01:03So overall here, you can see the watershed for the Mississippi River.
01:05Now for the eastern Mississippi watershed rivers that we are tracking, especially the Ohio, that's the river that I really want to highlight.
01:13Because as you look at this map, this map is showing the rainfall received compared to the 30-day average.
01:20Now on this map, you want to be in the light shade of green.
01:22That means you've got a little bit more rainfall than you would normally historically see in that same 30-day period.
01:27But whenever you get into that darker shade of green, that means that you have seen an excess amount of rain.
01:32And by excess, I mean two, three, even 400%, four times as much rainfall as you would normally see in that same 30-day time period.
01:40And unfortunately for some of those areas there across the Ohio River Valley, they received all that rainfall, a month's worth of rainfall, four, five months' worth of rainfall in as many days.
01:50So that's why it's been so devastating there.
01:52And you see those images there on the right-hand side of your screen.
01:55But this river flooding will continue as this water slowly starts to make its way downstream to the south.
02:01So we're going to see widespread areas with moderate to major flooding.
02:04This is going to cause some road and bridge closures here going forward.
02:08And for the low-lying areas, they could be inundated for weeks with flooding rainfall here as we go into at least a foreseeable future.
02:16Now as we head into at least tomorrow, it's going to remain relatively dry here from the I-35 corridor across the Mid-South and into Kentucky.
02:23But we will see some shower chances here on Wednesday up to the north.
02:27And that's going to kick off another threat of severe weather with heavy rainfall possible.
02:31For unfortunately, some of these same areas, including Memphis, all the way down through northern parts of Mississippi, northern parts of Alabama, even eastern portions of Tennessee will be included on this as well.
02:43So this is going to be a level one of four on our severe weather threat index.
02:47But yes, any storms that move into or form in this highlighted region will be capable of producing severe weather.
02:52So this is going to be one of the things that we're definitely going to be tracking here as we head throughout Thursday.
02:56Because this is going to add to the already inundated areas here for flash flooding.
03:01Yeah, definitely not what we want to see after all of that severe weather and the flooding.