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| From extreme drought to extreme flood. Here, a wildfire consumes houses in Balch Springs, Texas, a Dallas suburb, one month ago...... |
Every day it seems, there's news of a fresh, intense flash flood. Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, Sioux Falls, even Las Vegas. Some of these floods are hitting places that were deep in drought when the storms hit.
The latest victim is what was until this past weekend night bone dry Dallas, Texas.
Four to eight inches of rain deluged the city overnight Sunday into Monday. In just one hour, 3.01 inches of rain fell in at the officials weather station at Dallas-Fort Worth airport, its wettest hour dating back to at least 1953. That amount of rain in one hour is more than in any other month so far this year.
In all 9.19 inches of rain fell on the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, its second wettest day on record. A station in East Dallas reported 15.16 inches. The flooding was localized, but badly localized, concentrating on a heavily populated part of Texas. McKinney, just 25 miles north of Dallas, reported only a very manageable 0.86 inches of rain.
At least one person was reported dead in the flooding. There were many other close calls.
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| That same Dallas suburb of Balch Springs that was on fire a month ago was inundated by Monday. |
Other social media posts showed a couple feet of water inside some homes and apartments.
The flooding whiplashed the area from drought to flood. In the Dallas suburb of Balch Springs, a wildfire destroyed several homes one month ago. Parts of that same suburb was inundated Monday.
This is at least the third one in one thousand year flood in the United States this summer. St. Louis and Kentucky had their own thousand year floods this summer
Summer is the season for flash floods in the United States, especially mid and late summer. The jet stream is way north in Canada, so if you get a good thunderstorm complex, chances are it will move very slowly, dumping intense rains on one spot for a long time.
The Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean have had much of the summer to heat up, so now those huge bodies of water are finding it easy to send soupy, tropical air deep into the United States, just begging to trigger downpours.
Also, the monsoon season in the Desert Southwest and southern Rocky Mountains is in full swing, increasing the chances of flash flooding.
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| Interstate 30 in Dallas early Monday. |
This summer, however, has really been especially awful in the flash flood department. It's been in the news plenty, but aside from the human despair and deaths many of these floods have caused, the amount of rain has been way off the charts.
These aren't your grandparents' extreme rainfall events. They're worse. Climate change has taken what would have been pretty destructive, stressful events and supercharged them. Extreme rainfall is now, well, more extreme than it used to be.
We live in a new era in which our infrastructure isn't built for this type of thing. More on that further below, but first:
Let's go through some of the highlights:
ST. LOUIS
The July 26 flash flood dumped nine inches of rain on the city's official measuring site in just one day, besting the St. Louis' previous 24 hour record by two inches. Some areas near St. Louis reported a foot of rain. The city also reported 7.68 inches of rain in just six hours, which is roughly double the amount of rain St. Louis normally receives in the entire month of July.
Within just 12 hours, St Louis received a full 25 percent of its normal annual rainfall.
To add insult to injury, another destructive flash flood struck St. Louis on August 3, dumping another four to five inches of rain
KENTUCKY
The worst flood so far this summer was in eastern Kentucky, as previously mournfully noted in this blog thingy.
One fairly narrow swath of mountainous terrain was blasted by about 15 inches of rain in four days,with most of that falling in a 24 hour period. A much larger area received six to 10 inches of rain.
So much water fell that not only were these mountainous regions devastated. Larger communities downstream that did not receive much rain were also trashed. These communities are along main stem rivers which have some of their tributaries come from those mountains. These rivers reached record crests in places like Jackson, where the north fork of the Kentucky River reached a record crest.
This was the second one in 1,000 year flood the nation saw in less than a week.
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| The owner of the popular Isom IGA grocery store in Kentucky surveys the damage after the extreme flooding. The water in the store had been six feet deep. |
Note, this does not mean this kind of flood only comes once every thousand years. It means that every year, you have a one in one thousand chance of seeing an event like this. Big difference.
The Kentucky flooding has also created one of the worst humanitarian crises the United States has seen in decades. The remote mountainous area of Kentucky had winding roads that were iffy at the best of times. They're now washed out, making it hard to reach people who need help.
The area has one of the highest rates of poverty in the nation.
On top of that, new flash floods have kept cropping up in a wet weather pattern since the peak of this flood. These new floods have prevented a start on cleanup, and in some cases undid repairs. As I was working on this piece Sunday afternoon, new flood watches were in effect for eastern Kentucky, among other areas of Appalachia.
Not all that far to the northwest, in central and southern Illinois, another intense round of rain dumped four to eight inches of rain on August 4-5, causing some pretty intense floods there.
DESERT STORM
As noted, monsoons often cause summertime flash floods in the Desert Southwest, but this year has been particularly wild.
One day in July, Furnace Creek in Death Valley recorded 1.46 inches of rain, just 0.01 inches short of the record. The more impressive statistic is that Death Valley on average only gets about two inches of rain per year, so they received 75 percent the normal yearly allotment in just a few hours.
About 1,000 employees and visitors to the park were stranded there until roads could be cleared in a day or so. The park's emergency services building and some residences also flooded.
In Las Vegas, torrential rain overloaded streets and roof drains. Water gushed from the electronic odds board at Cirq. Water poured from the ceiling at Planet Hollywood and Caesar's Palace, but gamblers there kept at the slot machines even as water poured down on them. Sigh.
And it continues. Just on Saturday, Moab, Utah became the latest victim of the Southwest Monsoon. Most of that city's downtown endured a flash flood that dumped two to three feet of water inside businesses and homes. Mud, boulders, cars and trees were swept down the town's main streets.
ALASKA
Finally, we have Utquiagvik, Alaska, formerly known as Barrow, at the northern tip of the state, had its wettest day on record on July 23. A total of 1.42 inches fell. That doesn't sound like much, especially compared to the foot or more of rain that assaulted places like Virginia, Kentucky and Illinois.
But 1.42 inches is pretty incredible for Utqiagvik, which is basically arid tundra that just seems to get constant light snow, except of light, cold showers, sprinkles and wet snow flurries all summer. Total melted precipitation there for an entire year should amount to about 5.4 inches.
For context, 5.4 inches of rain is about what normally falls on Vermont within six weeks during the summer.
This is only the third time since at least 1920 that Utqiagvik had more than inch of rain in a single day.
In an upcoming post, I'll have more on how these big rain events are increasing due to climate change, and how our infrastructure is not ready for all this.
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