Florence could dump enough rain to fill Chesapeake Bay,
It’s about the water, not the wind, with Hurricane Florence making an extended stay along the North Carolina coast. Forecasters say “it cannot be emphasized enough that the most serious hazard associated with slow-moving Florence is extremely heavy rainfall, which will cause disastrous flooding that will be spreading inland.” Top sustained winds made it just a Category 1 hurricane but some communities were already submerged in more than 6 feet of water as the storm drenched the coast.
Meteorologist Ryan Maue of weathermodels.com calculates that Hurricane Florence is forecast to dump about 18 trillion gallons of rain over a week over North Carolina, South Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Maryland. It doesn’t include rain after it dissipates and its remnants circle back to the northeast.
That much rain is 2.4 trillion cubic feet. It’s enough to cover Manhattan with nearly 3,800 feet of water, more than twice as high as the island’s tallest building, One World Trade Center.
Florence’s 18 trillion gallons is as much water as there is in the entire Chesapeake Bay. It’s also enough to cover the entire state of Texas with nearly 4 inches of water.
North Carolina alone is forecast to get 9.6 trillion gallons of rain, enough to cover the Tar Heel state in about 10 inches of rain.
Those rainfall predictions still don’t quite measure up to the 25 trillion gallons from last year’s Harvey in Texas and Louisiana because the 2017 storm stalled longer and stayed closer to the Gulf of Mexico for more moisture. Florence still should swamp the 5.2 trillion gallons that fell 19 years ago when Floyd was the last scary storm to hit the Carolinas.
Maue calculates that 34 million people in the U.S. are forecast to get at least 3 inches of rain from Florence, with more than 5.7 million probably getting at least a foot, and about 1.5 million getting 20 inches or more.
Escaping to Florida
With Hurricane Florence barreling toward their home near Wilmington, North Carolina, Allison Hales Jordan and her husband boarded up their house, packed up their car and headed to Walt Disney World in Florida with their two teenage children.
“When we decided where to go, everybody was going west, but we decided we should go as far south as possible, which is weird since Florida gets hurricanes,” said Jordan who works as a preschool director in Burgaw, North Carolina.
Long accustomed to its residents evacuating north or to other parts of the state when hurricanes threaten, Florida was in the unusual position this week of accommodating diverted cruise ships and hotel-room seekers hoping to escape the wrath of Hurricane Florence, which made landfall Friday morning in North Carolina.
State emergency officials said Thursday they had no way of tracking how many residents from the Carolinas had escaped to Florida this week.
But Florida hotels were offering special discounts for hurricane evacuees and Florida ports were opening their terminals to cruise ships making unexpected ports of call.
FEMA rumors
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has set up a “rumor control” website to quash false information in Florence’s wake. The page says service animals aren’t barred from evacuation shelters, beaches shouldn’t be used for sand bags, and evacuation orders aren’t enforced by FEMA. It also responds to criticism about money diverted from FEMA to federal immigration authorities.
Hurricane wedding
The mayor of Hurricane, West Virginia, stepped in to rescue a wedding on North Carolina’s Outer Banks from an uninvited guest: Florence. As the storm threatened to wash away months of planning , Mayor Scott Edwards offered a unique opportunity to use his city hall for the ceremony. Marsha Bradbury and Jon Gillenwater plan to be wed “in Hurricane during the hurricane” on Sunday.
At the zoo
About 1,600 animals at the North Carolina Zoo are hunkered down. Zoo workers moved elephants, giraffes, chimpanzees and hundreds of other species indoors for safety. Some animals, including bison and elk, stayed in fenced-in yards instead of barns because they don’t like being in fully enclosed spaces.