tagged w/ extreme rainfall
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Texas, Alabama and Missouri topped the list of states hardest hit by the unrelenting assault of extreme weather in 2011.
Severe weather across much of the nation has raised the question of whether global warming has already begun to influence shorter-term weather patterns, and the specter of even more extreme years to come as global temperatures continue to rise.
STATES OF DISASTER: TOP 10 STATES
#1- Texas
#2- Alabama
#3- Missouri
#4- North Carolina
#5- Oklahoma
#6- Tennessee
#7- Kansas
#8- Connecticut
#9- Vermont
#10- New Jersey
According to climate studies, the short answer is- yes: the new climate environment created by global warming is more conducive to some extreme events, particularly heat waves and heavy precipitation events: these are now more likely to occur and be more intense when they do take place. Climate models have more difficulty predicting how climate change may be influencing other types of extremes, such as severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, but a warming climate provides more fuel to these events in the form of increased water vapor and heat in the atmosphere.
And those extreme events -- searing heat waves, parching drought, deadly tornadoes, blizzards and floods -- cost billions of dollars in damage, affected millions of lives and tragically, killed more than a thousand people across the U.S.
By some measures, 2011 was the most extreme year for the U.S. since reliable record-keeping began in the 19thcentury -- and the costs have been enormous: according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2011 set a record for the most billion dollar disasters in a single year. There were 12, breaking the old record of nine set in 2009. The aggregate damage from these 12 events totals at least $52 billion, NOAA found.
More at the link-click on the picture here to see more.Texas, Alabama and Missouri topped the list of states hardest hit by the unrelenting... more
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More than 90 people were counted dead Tuesday from heavy rains pounding Central America after Guatemala reported more people swept away by raging floodwaters and Costa Rica found four drowned.
An estimated 700,000 people were displaced by floods and landslides following as much as 120 centimeters (47 inches) of rain in the past week in some areas -- three times the monthly average this season -- officials said.
In Guatemala, five more deaths were reported, including four swept away, bringing the death toll to 34 over the past week in a nation that has been hit particularly hard in 2011 by flooding and heavy rains, officials said.
The mayor of the northern Guatemala community of Mixco, Amilcar Rivera, reported the four new deaths and warned the toll may rise further.
US Ambassador Arnold Chacon said the diplomatic mission would offer the use of six helicopters used in anti-narcotics efforts for search and rescue operations in Guatemala. The envoy said $50,000 in humanitarian aid would also be offered.
In Costa Rica, Red Cross officials reported four people had drowned across the country, with the victims attempting to cross swollen rivers.
Authorities have gone on high alert across the mountainous region, home to 42 million people, as the rains have shown no sign of abating.
The unusually heavy rainfall came as the region was pounded from one weather system from the Pacific and another from the Caribbean.
El Salvador's President Mauricio Funes warned late Monday that his country was facing a "major emergency," with 32 dead, three missing and some 32,000 people evacuated, saying the rainfall exceeded that caused by past hurricanes.
"The intensity of the rainfall, the duration of the phenomenon and the extent of the affected territory presents us with a major emergency," he said.
Another 13 deaths were reported in Honduras and eight in Nicaragua, according to local officials, with the overall toll expected to rise as reports from isolated villages begin to trickle in.
Officials also fear further casualties from fresh mudslides, shortages of basic goods in isolated towns and disease spawned by the stagnant water.
Hard-hit El Salvador has launched a worldwide appeal for humanitarian assistance due to the intense rain.
More at the linkMore than 90 people were counted dead Tuesday from heavy rains pounding Central... more
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Seven people have died and three others are missing as strong storms and torrential rain over the past three days hit the coastal provinces of Turkey, including an inner province, triggering flash floods, officials announced on Tuesday.
Three bridges enabling access to Antalya’s Serik district collapsed due to flooding and six people in the village of Haskızılören reportedly went missing. Antalya Governor Ahmet Altıparmak said on Monday that six people were missing in Antalya, and officials later announced that three of the six had been found dead. Altıparmak stated that 25 villagers who were trapped amidst rising waters were rescued on Sunday night when the torrential rain began to seriously affect the village they lived in.
Torrential rains also wreaked havoc in the Aegean provinces of İzmir, Muğla, Manisa, Denizli and Çanakkale as many homes and workplaces were flooded. The Anatolia news agency reported that two people died and three more were injured in the Gördes district of Manisa on Monday. Gördes District Governor Davut Gül told Anatolia that the two people who died in the flood were a 70-year-old man and his 1-year-old grandson. Anatolia said a 60-year-old woman also died in the flood that occurred due to heavy rain in Denizli.
More at the linkSeven people have died and three others are missing as strong storms and torrential... more
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Massive floods have left 500 people dead across Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, officials said Monday, as authorities stepped up efforts to reach victims of the unusually heavy monsoon rains.
In Thailand, where the death toll from the country's worst floods in decades rose to 269, thousands of soldiers fanned out across affected areas as part of a huge aid operation.
Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who has described the situation as a "serious crisis," said the kingdom had two days before the arrival of the next tropical depression, but insisted the situation was under control.
"It is not necessary to announce disaster zones because we still can handle it," she told reporters, a day after postponing official visits to Singapore and Malaysia to stay and monitor the authorities' response.
She said new flood defences would be built in several locations in the north and east of the capital.
In neighbouring Cambodia, the toll from the country's worst floods in over a decade reached 207, including 83 children, a disaster official there said. Vietnam has reported 24 deaths from flooding in the Mekong Delta.
Vast swathes of rice paddy have been damaged or destroyed in Southeast Asia as a result of the floods.
In Thailand the floods have damaged the homes or livelihoods of millions of people, particularly farmers, across about three quarters of the country's provinces.
Huge efforts are now under way to stop the waters from reaching low-lying Bangkok, home to 12 million people, with prevention measures including sandbags along the Chao Phraya river.
More at the linkMassive floods have left 500 people dead across Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam,... more
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Hurricane Jova eased on Tuesday as it was about to reach Mexico's Pacific coast, threatening one of the country's busiest cargo ports and tourist resorts with high waves, heavy rainfall and flooding.
Downgraded to a Category 2 storm, with top winds reaching 100 miles per hour, Jova was about 85 miles southwest of the port city of Manzanillo at 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
The Miami-based hurricane center said Jova would reach the Mexican coast on Tuesday night, to the northwest of Manzanillo on a stretch of coast dotted with beaches south of Puerto Vallarta. Mexico has no major oil installations in the Pacific.
In the popular resort town of Puerto Vallarta, people were preparing for the biggest storm in nine years by boarding up shops and staying at home.
"People think it's not going to do anything, but it's moving slowly and it's going to be dangerous," said Jose Avila, who was boarding up the windows of the shorefront bank branch where he works. "They thought that last time and it destroyed everything."
At step two on the five-step Saffir-Simpson intensity scale, Jova is considered likely to cause extensive damage and a dangerous storm surge could produce bad flooding along the coast when Jova makes landfall, the center said.
Avila, 55, who has lived in the tourist destination for 30 years, said the waves were unusually high. The city is bracing for waves up to 13 feet high.
Puerto Vallarta's last big hurricane was Kenna in 2002, which hit with top winds of 144 mph and flooded streets close to the shore, causing damage that took authorities days to clear.
Authorities in Jalisco state have prepared 70 shelters for 11 municipalities. There were no evacuations yet in Puerto Vallarta but south of the beach resort, people were evacuating from the towns of Zihuatlan and Melaque near Barra de Navidad, where businesses were closed and windows shuttered.
Local officials and state social workers arranged for several migrant worker families to stay the night in a brick warehouse in Pino Suarez near Tomatlan, south of Puerto Vallarta, passing out foam mattresses and blankets for toddlers and a newborn baby.
"They said (the storm) would be strong, and we were sleeping under nylon," said Angel Martinez, 22, who came to the state to harvest papayas and took shelter with his four children.
FEARS OF LANDSLIDES, RAIN
Even as the storm weakened slightly, locals were worried the hurricane would cause heavy rains and landslides.
"I offered to let some families that live up there in the mountains come down and stay with me because of the risk of landslides, but at the moment they're staying in their homes," said a woman in the small town of Boca de Tomatlan. Her brick home near the coast is surrounded by steep lush mountains where houses are perched precariously.
Jova could produce up to 12 inches of rainfall over four states, with isolated rainfall of up to 20 inches, the hurricane center said. "These rains could cause life-threatening flash floods and mud slides over mountainous terrain," it added.
More at the linkHurricane Jova eased on Tuesday as it was about to reach Mexico's Pacific coast,... more
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"The year 2010 was one the worst years in world history for high-impact floods. But just three weeks into the new year, 2011 has already had an entire year's worth of mega-floods. “ -- Meteorologist Jeff Masters
I spend hours a day researching what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls “global weirding”: the destabilization of our weather system fueled by the three million tonnes of fossil fuel pollution we inject into it each hour. So it is a rare day when something shocks me as much as a recent U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) report on last year’s extreme rainfall.
As most locals know from soggy personal experience, our corner of planet Earth since last spring has been a bit wetter and greyer than normal. And next door, our Washington neighbours donned their gum boots and slogged through their fourth wettest year since 1895.
Still, we got off lucky. Very lucky it turns out.
According to this jaw-dropping NASA report, worldwide rainfall and snowfall were so extreme, in so many places last year, that sea levels fell dramatically.
Sea levels have been rising steadily for over a century as the ever warmer ocean water expands and the world’s remaining glaciers and ice sheets melt. In fact sea levels are rising twice as fast now as they were a few decades ago. As the NASA chart above shows there have been some ups and downs but nothing in the modern satellite record comes close to the 6 mm drop worldwide last year.
While 6 mm might not sound like a lot, when collected from the surface of all our planet’s oceans it adds up to 26,000 gallons of water per human.
So just where did all this missing water go?
The ringleader of the great water heist was one of the strongest La Nina cycles of recent times. La Nina shifted and altered weather patterns causing extreme precipitation to funnel into places like India, Pakistan, Australia, and northern tiers of both South and North America.
In the map below, produced from NASA’s GRACE satellite data, blue indicates areas that gained water last year. The darkest blue areas gained as much as 50 mm in one year.
These dark blue spots are also the sources of the world’s epic floods of the last couple years which not only left tens of millions homeless and destroyed agriculture and infrastructure, but also left behind so much water that global oceans were depleted by 6 mm.
A YEAR OF RECORD FLOODING
Last year 182 floods affected 180 million people, almost double the annual average for the last decade. Here are a few:
snip
NOW WHAT?
Well in the short term the seas will start rising again. As the NASA report states:
“water flows downhill, and the extra rain will eventually find its way back to the sea. When it does, global sea level will rise again. ‘We're heating up the planet, and in the end that means more sea level rise’".
What happens in the medium and long term depends on us. We humans really have only one question to answer: To burn or not to burn?
OPTION A: Leave most fossil fuels in the ground -- forever.
OPTION B: Keep doing what we are doing and dig up every last crumb of carbon and burn it.
The climate science is clear that we cannot burn most of the fossil fuels we already know about and also have a stable enough weather system that we can continue to prosper.
As local Nobel laureate and world famous climate scientist, Andrew Weaver, explained in a talk at UBC the other night, just reducing the rate at which we burn fossil fuels won’t prevent dangerous levels of climate change beyond 2C warming. Instead we must totally eliminate fossil fuel emissions.
Weaver showed that even if humanity cut 90% of our fossil fuel use by 2050 but kept burning that last 10% into the future, then we would still heat the climate by more than 2C. That sends us into the realm of dangerous and dramatic climate changes that Canada, USA and every major nation has stated clearly we must avoid.
As Weaver summed it up:
"At some point we just have to say stop.”
More at the link"The year 2010 was one the worst years in world history for high-impact floods.... more
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JR: The disinformers like to say the extreme weather we are seeing today is nothing unusual. They don’t live in Texas, where “No One on the Face of This Earth has Ever Fought Fires in These Extreme Conditions.” Or my hometown area around the Catskill Mountains, where Hurricane Irene was “the most devastating weather event ever to hit the region.” Or around Binghamton, NY, where “An Extreme Rainfall Event Unprecedented in Recorded History Has Hit.”
Rainfall rates observed in southern Fairfax county around 6:00 p.m. on September 8. Some places saw rates between 3 and 4” per hour.
Capital Weather Gang Chief Meteorologist Jason Samenow has the details on one more record-exploding extreme event in this repost.
On Thursday, September 8, Ft. Belvoir received an astounding 7.03” of rain in three hours. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), that amount of rain in that amount of time was an “off the charts above a 1000-year rainfall (based on precip frequency from Quantico).”
Chris Strong, warning coordination meteorologist for the NWS in Sterling, emailed media a note on the frequency of rain return from last week’s event, for locations in Maryland and Virginia. It’s extraordinarily impressive and reproduced in full below…
National Weather Service note:
For our DC and Baltimore media colleagues…Some interesting stats that our hydrologist Jason Elliott passed on to us that you may find useful in your broadcasts/bloggings. Based on precipitation frequency computations, for last week’s rainfall:
Maryland (Wednesday)
* The Bowie IFLOWS gauge recorded 4.57 inches in 3 hours, which is about a 200-year rainfall (based on precip frequency from Glenn Dale).
* For Upper Marlboro and near Ellicott City, Wednesday’s rains were a roughly one in 50-100 year event.
* For Westview (near I-70 and the Baltimore Beltway), Wednesday’s rains were a roughly one in 10-25 year event.
Virginia (Thursday)
* The Kingstowne IFLOWS gauge (near Franconia) in Fairfax County recorded 5.47 inches in 3 hours, which is approximately a 500-year rainfall for that timeframe (based on precip frequency from Vienna & Clarendon).
* The Reston IFLOWS gauge in Fairfax County recorded 6.57 inches in 6 hours, which is also approximately a 500-year rainfall (based on precip frequency from Dulles).
* The Fort Belvoir AWOS (KDAA) reported 7.03 inches in 3 hours, which is off the charts above a 1000-year rainfall (based on precip frequency from Quantico).
For a wide swath in the heavy rain axis thru the DC and Baltimore metro areas, rainfall was at least a one in 10-25 year event.
Of course return period doesn’t mean that we won’t see that kind of rain in those locations for several decades (or centuries). A 1 in 100 year rain means that there is a 1% chance of seeing that amount of rain in any given year. A 0.1% chance is true for a 1 in 1000 year event.
Chris Strong
NWS Baltimore/Washington
More at the linkJR: The disinformers like to say the extreme weather we are seeing today is nothing... more
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Heat waves, droughts, blizzards and the the rest of the year's U.S. record-breaking extreme weather, likely enjoyed a boost from global warming, suggests a climate report.
Hurricane Irene this year pushed the U.S. yearly record for billion-dollar natural disasters to 10, smashing the 2008 record of nine. In the "Current Extreme Weather and Climate Change" report, released today by the Climate Communication scientific group, leading climate scientists outlined how increasing global atmospheric temperatures and other climate change effects -- triggered by industrial emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane -- are loading the dice for the sort of extreme weather seen this year.
"Greenhouse gases are the steroids of weather," says climate projection expert Jerry Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, at a briefing held by the report's expert reviewers. "Small increases in temperature set the stage for record breaking extreme temperature events." Overall, says the report, higher temperatures tied to global warming, about a one-degree global average temperature rise in the last century, have widely contributed to recent runs of horrible weather:
•In 1950, U.S. record breaking hot weather days were as likely as cold ones. By 2000, they were twice as likely, and in 2011 they are three times more likely, so far. By the end of the century they will be 50 times more likely, Meehl says.
•With global warming's higher temperatures packing about 4% more water into the atmosphere, total average U.S. snow and rainfall has increased by about 7% in the past century, says the study. The amount of rain falling in the heaviest 1% of cloudbursts has increased 20%, leading to more flooding.
•Early snow melt, and more rain rather than snow, has led to water cycle changes in the western U.S. in river flow, winter air temperature, and snow pack from 1950 to 1999. The effects are up to 60% attributable to human influence.
Rather than totally triggering any extreme event, global warming just makes it worse, says meteorologist Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, a report reviewer. "A warmer atmosphere has more energy," he says, contributing to heat waves, tornadoes and other extremes. Even heavy blizzards come from an atmosphere packed with extra moisture by global warming he adds. "Years like 2011 may be the new normal."
The report notes scientific disagreement exists over the role of global warming in some severe weather events, such as hurricanes, or the frequency of El Nino weather patterns.
"There's really no such thing as natural weather anymore," says climate scientist Donald Wuebbles of the University of Illinois, who was not involved with the report, but said he largely agreed with its conclusions. "Anything that takes place today in the weather system has been affected by the changes we've made to the climate system. That's just the background situation and it's good for people to know that," Wuebbles says. Although scientists cannot immediately tie what percentage of an extreme weather event relies on global warming to make it more severe, he says. "It's always a factor in today's world."
More at the link.Heat waves, droughts, blizzards and the the rest of the year's U.S.... more
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Dr. Jeff Masters: An extreme rainfall event unprecedented in recorded history has hit the Binghamton, New York area, where 7.49″ fell yesterday. This is the second year in a row Binghamton has recorded a 1-in-100 year rain event; their previous all-time record was set last September, when 4.68″ fell on Sep 30 – Oct. 1, 2010. Records go back to 1890 in the city….
You don’t often see a major city break its all-time 24-hour precipitation record by a 60% margin, according to wunderground’s weather historian, Christopher C. Burt, and he can’t recall ever seeing it happen before.
Before seeing that amazing story, I was all set to lead with the “unprecedented” rains soaking the Washington, DC area:
“I can’t recall flooding like this. This is unprecedented,” [Virginia Department of Transportation spokesman] Morris said.
The unrelenting rains, sometimes falling at four inches an hour….
Capital Weather Gang’s Jason Samenow points me to this post, which has more details on our deluge:
Fort Belvoir, Va., recorded at least (last ob with rain total was 7:55 p.m.) an incredible 8.82” with as much as 7.03” coming during a three-hour stretch during the evening. It has received a stunning 13.52” since Monday.
And let’s not forget Irene’s recent devastating 1-in-100 year deluge, which was “the most devastating weather event ever to hit the region” where I grew up near the Catskill Mountains of New York state. It also set “the greatest single-day rainfall in Vermont’s history” by over an inch.
What’s going on?
Well, a very basic prediction of climate science is that as you warm the planet you get more water vapor in the atmosphere and more rain comes down in extreme deluges. Observations reveal that is already happening, and the recent scientific literature has said that is extremely likely that human emissions are the cause of this increase in precipitation intensity. Climate Progress ran through the recent literature in this February post, “Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment.”
In a new report by by the scientific group Climate Communication, “Current Extreme Weather and Climate Change” report, top climatologists scientists spell out how human-caused global warming is loading the dice for the extreme weather seen in the past year. You can listen to a press conference held Wednesday by Jeff Masters and Jerry Meehl and Kevin Trenberth and Richard Somerville here.
Trenberth, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, explained the deluge-warming connection in an interview with Climate Progress last year:
I find it systematically tends to get underplayed and it often gets underplayed by my fellow scientists. Because one of the opening statements, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard is “Well you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.” But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.
More at the linkDr. Jeff Masters: An extreme rainfall event unprecedented in recorded history has hit... more
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Rescue teams carried out a painstaking search Monday for the missing after a typhoon pounded western Japan leaving at least 31 people dead and more than 50 unaccounted for, local authorities said.
Torrential rain brought by powerful Typhoon Talas, which made landfall Saturday and was one of the deadliest in years, caused rivers to swell and triggered floods and landslides that swept away buildings, homes and roads.
Police and firefighters resumed a search for the missing early Monday, warning that the number of victims was set to rise as the continued threat of landslides and damaged access routes hampered relief efforts.
In the deadliest typhoon since an October 2004 storm killed nearly 100 people, floods triggered by Typhoon Talas gave rise to scenes eerily reminiscent of the aftermath of the March 11 tsunami that hit northeast Japan.
In Nachikatsuura town, a railway bridge was swept into a river, while TV footage showed splintered trees, crushed houses and cars tossed onto walls and buildings by the raging floodwaters that inundated entire neighbourhoods.
By Sunday, Talas had been downgraded to a tropical storm after it moved over Japan and into the Sea of Japan (East Sea), the Meteorological Agency said, but risks of further landslides posed a threat to rescue and recovery efforts.
The storm came after new Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda was sworn in on Friday, replacing Naoto Kan, who was heavily criticised for the government's response in the aftermath of the March 11 disasters.
"We will do our best in saving lives and finding the missing," Noda told reporters Monday.
The Talas weather system, moving as slow as 10 kilometres (six miles) per hour, dumped 1.8 metres (six feet) of rain on a village in Nara prefecture for five days through Sunday, more than Tokyo's annual average rainfall, said the Yomiuri daily.
Wakayama prefecture was the hardest hit region, where 21 people were killed and 35 were missing. More than 200 rescue workers continued the search on the ground on Monday.
"We are struggling to get a hold on the current situation... electricity is out and destroyed roads are preventing our vehicles from going into affected areas," said an official at the fire department in Tanabe, Wakayama prefecture.
More at the linkRescue teams carried out a painstaking search Monday for the missing after a typhoon... more
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US rescuers battled Tuesday to reach thousands cut off by flooding in towns across Vermont, New Jersey and upstate New York as the death toll from Hurricane Irene climbed towards 50.
Emergency provisions had to be airlifted in to dozens of communities stranded by floodwaters as unprecedented weekend rains dumped by the massive storm system washed away roads and sent rivers cascading over their banks.
President Barack Obama dispatched senior officials to survey some of the worst of the damage as rescuers in boats ferried thousands of people -- including the elderly, small children and babies -- to safety.
Although the much-hyped direct-hit on New York failed to translate into major damage to America's most populous city, heavy rain in places like the Catskill Mountains proved a ticking disaster time-bomb.
Two days after its passage, thousands of marooned families were still waiting anxiously for the national guard and firefighters to bring food and water after their towns were swamped by the floodwaters.
The main highway to Wilmington, Vermont was clogged with mud and Irene had turned other roads into deathtrap chasms after dumping two months worth of rain (8.3 inches, 21 centimeters) in less than a day.
"The problem is inaccessibility," emergency operations supervisor Dave Miller told AFP as teams struggled to pull trucks out of the sludge and remove fallen trees that had perilously dragged down power lines.
The drastic situation was mirrored in parts of New Jersey and upstate New York, where schools and community centers turned into makeshift Red Cross emergency shelters were nearing full capacity.
In Paterson, New Jersey, teams in rubber motorboats rescued and evacuated people non-stop after the Passaic River crested 13 feet (four meters) above flood stage, its highest level since 1903.
"It's over 500 (people rescued) and the amount is climbing," police sergeant Alex Popov told CNN. "We are dealing with elderly people, families, small children, and pets."
Millions of Americans remained without electricity, many farther south in states like Virginia and North Carolina, where Irene's winds were strongest as the storm barreled up the eastern seaboard on Saturday and Sunday.
Vermont, a mountainous state criss-crossed by numerous streams and rivers, saw several towns completely cut off by the floods and other smaller communities reportedly wiped off the map.
"There are currently 13 communities that are unreachable by vehicle due to road damage," said a statement from Vermont Emergency Management.
"There are more than 200 roads that are still impassable statewide and all 500 road workers from the Agency of Transportation are on the street today working on repairs. Much of that staff is working with local road crews to make isolated towns accessible."
Dramatic television pictures from New Jersey, New York and Vermont showed flash floods sweeping through towns and vast oceans of water out in the country where rivers had burst their banks.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack visited Virginia and North Carolina on Tuesday, while top disaster official Craig Fugate went to Burlington, Vermont.
Officials reported at least 43 deaths across 11 states, including eight in New York, seven in New Jersey and six in North Carolina, where Irene made landfall Saturday with winds upwards of 85 miles (140 kilometers) an hour.
The hurricane was already responsible for at least five deaths in the Caribbean before it struck the United States and is being blamed for a 49th fatality in Canada, where the storm finally petered out on Tuesday.
More trouble was on the way though as Tropical Storm Katia formed in the Atlantic, forecast to become a category 3 hurricane by Saturday or Sunday as it nears the Caribbean with winds topping 120 miles per hour.
Also See:
http://www.12newsnow.com/story/15365917/flood-waters-surge-as-states-come-to-grips-with-irenes-damageUS rescuers battled Tuesday to reach thousands cut off by flooding in towns across... more
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New York broke an all-time record for a one-day rainfall Sunday as up to 8 inches of water soaked the city, snarling trains and flooding roadways.
By 9 p.m., 7.7 inches of rain had fallen at Kennedy Airport.
It was the most recorded there in a single day since the National Weather Service began keeping records 116 years ago.
The heavy tropical rain is expected to continue Monday, and a flash flood warning is in effect until 9 p.m.
The normal rainfall for all of August in New York is 4 inches - which means the city was socked with two months worth of rain in a single day.
"This is what you would expect in a major hurricane," said Steve Wistar, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.
Kennedy Airport's old one-day rainfall record, 6.3 inches, set on June 30, 1984, fell by noon.
Central Park, where the city's official rainfall total is recorded, saw 5.8 inches by 10:45 p.m., making it the fifth-wettest day of all time there.
The heavy rain caused scattered power outages and transit disruptions. Cars got caught in flash floods, and the Long Island Rail Road reported localized flooding and trees on the tracks, delaying several dozen trains and closing the Far Rockaway and Long Beach branches.
In the subways, water flooded into tunnels, knocking out parts of seven lines in the morning. By evening, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said, things were under control.
On Staten Island, firefighters rescued two construction workers who got trapped in a stalled elevator rapidly filling with water.
"We thought we were dead," said one of the rescued men, Ed Tyler, 26, of Milltown, N.J. "I literally thought I was going to die."
More at the linkNew York broke an all-time record for a one-day rainfall Sunday as up to 8 inches of... more
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