AccuWeather's Flooding Expert Alex Sosnowski shares the latest updates on the flood threat left behind by Helene that continues to plague the southeastern region of the United States.
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00:00Alex, let's start with the timeline you and I put together for Friday and how things have moved on
00:05through the weekend and now into this week. You know, what we saw, of course, was the flash
00:10flooding of the streams and rivers in the higher elevations. Elevation makes a big difference.
00:15You get rapid runoff there in the southern Appalachians, and that's exactly what occurred.
00:20On a tremendous scale, though, with this, when you get one to two feet of rain,
00:23there's not an infrastructure really that can handle that kind of rain in the few hours that
00:28they had. But then as that water works downstream, whether you get rain downstream or not, you still
00:34have to deal with the surge coming downstream. So we saw the mid-state flooding going on
00:39pretty much later this week and into the start of this week. Now we're looking farther out,
00:44farther down into the lowlands, closer to sea level. That's where we're seeing the surge coming
00:49here. And some places we're going to be looking at significant flooding, but certainly not on the
00:54scale that we had back in the southern Appalachians. It's a slower moving flood situation near the
01:00coast, not a rapid flood situation like we had back up in the southern Appalachians.
01:06So we're right on track here with that flooding that has moved further downstream. You take a
01:11look here at some of the river gauges, and you can see the different colors representing that
01:16there are some in major flood stage. Yeah, and the yellow ones on there are action stage, where
01:22we're getting up not quite to minor flood stage, but we're getting close. This will not have the
01:28scope or the magnitude of the flooding that occurred, the disastrous and deadly flooding
01:32that occurred up in the southern Appalachians. This is slower moving, and because you didn't
01:37have the big rain and a good chunk of this area here hitting at the same time, you're just dealing
01:42with what happened upstream pretty much. And those red and purples, you're looking at moderate and
01:47major flood states. Not too many in the major states, fortunately.
01:51Your expertise told you that it would take a few days to see that flooding
01:55further towards the coast, and it shows that well in the Santee River.
01:58Yeah, the Santee River is just a bit above sea level there, and this is at Jamestown,
02:04and you can see that we're not going to get a crest there until this weekend coming up.
02:10So that's how long it takes some of these rivers to cycle through. You can get the flooding
02:14upstream within hours, and then downstream near the coast, it can take days if not a week or more.
02:19That's a really helpful perspective. All right, we look at kind of positives from,
02:23of course, what has been an absolutely devastating catastrophe. When you look at the 30-day rainfall,
02:27you can see all of the green that filled in, and that's going to be beneficial rain along the
02:32Mississippi. Yeah, we're already seeing a response on the Ohio and the Mississippi.
02:37That'll help with the barge operation. So if there is one positive out of this, they got
02:42rain out there, but they didn't have the scope of the flooding, of course, that we had in the
02:46southern Appalachian. So very beneficial there. You can see the drought that was in place.
02:50That'll be kind of taken away a little bit there in part of the Ohio, Tennessee, and lower
02:56Mississippi Basin. So some good news there. Water levels will be up. They'll be out of the brown
03:01and into the green. That'll help with the barge operations for a little bit, especially if this
03:05port situation goes on. We might be relying a little bit more, perhaps, on the Mississippi
03:09here for transport. And Alex, you know as well as I do here at AccuWeather, we like to give advance
03:14notice. So we are tracking the next thing in the tropics, and that could impact areas that
03:19were hard hit from Helene. Yeah, one thing, one point we want to make, we're not getting any
03:26information here that's suggesting that we're going to get big rains in the southern Appalachians
03:29out of this. There's a minor system coming on Friday, like basically a front. That can produce
03:34some downpours, and with the damaged infrastructure, you can have some flash flooding problems there.
03:39But we're not going to get like a Helene-type repeat going on in the southern Appalachians.
03:43But it is Florida. As Bernie's saying, Florida, Florida, Florida. You got to watch this thing. We
03:47could, from a freshwater standpoint, there certainly can be river flooding going on for the middle and
03:52latter part of next week. AccuWeather flooding expert Alex Anowski, thank you so much for
03:57helping break that down this morning. My pleasure.