Some Imelda Flood Video

https://weather.com/news/news/2019-09-20-texas-interstate-closed-barges-hit-bridge


Good morning all,

Above has some Imelda flood scenes.

Note the reporter wearing waders. Infection control is a must.

 

This was a WILDLY rare occurrence. The town where my wife grew up got 43.2 inches of rain. The land there is flat as a tabletop and that kind of rain just can't run off as fast as it is falling. then in the cities, you have the problem of all the huge parking lots where water can't soak in at all and so runs off into the streets. It doesn't matter where you are when rain is dumping 8" and hour on you the water is going to flood everything. Imelda was the second wettest tropical storm in history and the Fifth wettest storm including hurricanes in History. Part of the problem was that the bitch came ashore and then just STOPPED and sat there. I live 70 miles north of Houston and 30 miles north of Conroe they both flooded and we sat in the sunshine. We got something like 3/10" from it. It was strange. Most cyclonic storms move norhtto northeast when they make landfall. Imelda sat there until she broke up and just scattered. In some areas, the flooding was worse than Harvey. Compared to this the terrible bad Hurricane Sandy that hit the Northeast a few years ago was a sprinkle cat 1 dry storm.

 

More about Imelda... A lot of the pictures are from Beaumont. I was raised there and never saw that kind of flooding. What happened is when Imelda came in and parked over Houston, as bad as it was in Houston and Conroe, what Beaumont got was the worst part of the storm. Hurricanes rotate in a counter-clockwise direction. When they make landfall on the Gulf Coast the East side of the storm has the highest winds and the heaviest rain. That is because the wind coming off the water is carrying a lot of water and starts to dump it as the wind is slowed by the friction over the lands. The rotation slows but keeps going and the west side of the storm gets a lower wind and less rain. It can still be a LOT of rain but not like what it dropped on the east side when it first came over the land.

Imelda sat on Houston and the outer band of the storm that carries the most rain was right over Beaumont and stayed there dragging more and more water onto the land. The next problem that you have on that side of the storm is that the wind blows the water in the Gulf onto the land creating what is called a storm surge. This can be as high as 30 feet if the storm is strong enough. What that means to low lying coastal places like Beaumont and Houston is that the rivers that all the rain is supposed to run off into are running backward INTO the river and upriver. Both Beaumont and Houston are port cities with major rivers that allow tankers and cargo ships to come up into them. With Imelda parked blowing the water into the Neches River and into Beaumont the 3 plus FEET of rain had no place to go. Beaumont is only 9 feet above sea level at its highest point. the Mount in Beaumont is a molehill!

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?...D4C7EAD61C0BD542B9D8D4C7EAD61C0B&&FORM=VRDGAR

This is what happens when you get a yardstick of rain in a day or two. The thing that looks like a river in the video is State Highway 105 going into Beaumont. It is low but this sort of thing isn't normal...