Hurricane Milton is expected to make landfall in the early morning of Oct. 10, bringing catastrophic rainfall and winds, as well as causing life-threatening storm surge and flooding.
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00:00Joining me right now is AccuWeather flooding expert Alex Sosnowski, and you know Alex,
00:05with all of the impacts that we're going to see, the storm surge, the severe weather, the wind,
00:12we want to get into the flooding aspect now. A couple days ago we were concerned that we were
00:18going to be looking at a lot of heavy rain in the central part of the Florida peninsula,
00:22but over the last couple of days, Alex, the rain has been concentrated, let's say,
00:28more south of I-4, along the southern Florida peninsula.
00:32Yeah, we've seen, there's a separate system here that's been causing that rain,
00:37a weak tropical feature, if you will, and there's actually a low grade chance that that thing could
00:41go on and evolve into a tropical system east of the Bahamas, but that'll be moving away from
00:47Florida, but you can see there it has produced some fairly heavy rainfall. There's been some
00:51amounts down there locally up to six inches, most of that falling over the glades, but some of it
00:55getting into populated areas too, but you notice farther north, up in central and northern Florida,
01:01there's been less intense rain. That'll help a little bit. The problem is, if you can go to that
01:06next map that shows our projected rainfall, eight to twelve inches of rain, that's a general
01:13rainfall. Just about everybody in that dark green zone is going to get that kind of rainfall.
01:18Some places will get double that amount, unfortunately, and it looks like some of
01:22that rain may fall in a matter of a few hours. You know, four or five inches of rain potentially
01:27could fall in an hour or two's time, which even if you have a sandy soil, it's going to try to
01:33overwhelm that, and that's going to get into the creeks, rivers, and lakes, freshwater lakes.
01:38Yeah, let's talk about two kinds of flooding with this. We have the flash flooding, and then let's
01:43talk about the river flooding, Alex. Yeah, impermeable surfaces. Anytime you have a lot of
01:48development across a region there, pavement, concrete, there's a lot of new housing developments
01:54that have sprung up, that water is going to run off. You can have the best drainage system in the
01:58world. It's not going to handle three, four, five inch an hour rainfall, which can occur with this
02:03thing. Fortunately, it looks like this system is going to keep moving, not going to linger for
02:08several days, but still the damage will be done. You're going to get runoff. Don't park your car
02:12in an area where it's prone to flooding. Get it up a little bit. Don't park under trees, of course,
02:17because there's a lot of wind coming. We are expecting hurricane force winds along the I-4
02:21corridor throughout that, so multiple problems here with this, but then that water is going to
02:26work its way in fairly quickly into the smaller creeks and lakes, and then you have some of the
02:31slow-moving rivers around there, like the Peace River. We've been talking about the St. John's
02:36River. There's several others, the Hillsboro, the Myakka, the Black Creek, the Santa Fe,
02:44just to name a few. These are all going to be prone to significant rises here over the next
02:48few days, and it may take some time for those rivers to go back down because they don't flow
02:52very fast. We could be looking at a couple of weeks before they drop back below flood stage
02:56once they come up.