Powerful storms bring flooding problems to the East Coast

The ongoing storm threat that’s impacting the eastern US Many areas are still cleaning up after last night’s severe storms across the South. But now those storms are on the move and we’re dealing with more heavy rainfall and a flooding threat. Plus, we’re talking about other places like South Carolina, even Florida, that have been dealing with severe thunderstorms. Here’s the view coming in from Hickory, NC That’s also where we’ve seen a couple of thunderstorms hanging around recently, and they’ve been pretty problematic getting some breaks of light just before everything goes dark for the evening hours. And that view, courtesy of Earth Cam showing you part of this story, putting on some of the lightning strikes and animating this. You can see we do have several areas where we’ve got heavy rainfall, but we have a couple of thunderstorms. And a lot of that has been through North Carolina where we’ve been talking about that severe weather threat. In fact, as I put on those warnings, there’s a couple areas that are flashing. So we’ll take you into this portion of the nation because you can see where we have our concerns. To the north, we’ve got those green flashing boxes, to the South we’ve got yellow and red ones. So it depends if you’re with the green flashing boxes or flash flood warnings. Meanwhile, to the South, there are severe thunderstorm warnings and tornado warnings, which we’re going to take a moment to get to 1st. I want to take a a detour to the north because we do have a lot of concern for flooding, especially up and down some of the mountainous areas through western Pennsylvania into West Virginia and extending towards places like Charleston where they’re under flash flood warning. So this is a lot of heavy rain coming down and this has been a few hours of it. If I loop it into motion, you can see how it’s just kind of streamed along that same path there through western West Virginia and into Western Pennsylvania. But on top of it all, we do have some extra concern around the Pittsburgh area. We’re getting a lot of reports here coming in of significant flash flooding. So we’ve had a a lot of trouble. Unfortunately with this flash flood emergency, they’re not issued very frequently. We don’t get them a lot. And you can see it’s not too far away from downtown Pittsburgh where we have that issued. In fact, it’s been so much flooding that there’s been a foot of water more on some roadways and we’ve actually had Interstate 376 closed down due to some of this flooding. In fact, I do want to show you some of the flood concerns. We have a flood watches in the area because we’re still dealing with that potential for some heavy rainfall. So we’re going to be dealing with this unfortunately for a little while longer here through the night, and that’s going to be part of our tail to the north with that flooding threat a little farther. S though we are keeping an eye on some of the activity in North Carolina. Those are the thunderstorms where we do have a severe thunderstorm warning and a tornado warning. At this point in time, there is a tornado warning until 8:15 for Surry, Surry County, North Carolina. And this is going to continue, it says South of Mount Airy there where we’re looking at that threat for these storms to cut through. There’s a tornado watch box in place for this region recently added within the past two hours due to some of that tornadic potential. Farther the north, most of the tornado watch box has been set to expire, mostly because it’s become more of a rain threat and that risk for flooding. So as we watch these storms continue to work their way E here for the next couple of hours across the Southeast, keep in mind it’s created more and more power outages, especially in North Carolina. That number keeps going up. Recently, though, the South has been dealing with so much wet weather. The good news is most of the thunderstorms died down in Florida. It’s really just North Carolina that we have to get the stormy weather out, and tomorrow morning we do that. A lot of it leaves, but there will be another band of rainfall coming through. Places like West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina. As we head through tomorrow, Friday, you see that moisture coming in. Meanwhile, it’s pretty windy behind the storm system. Atlanta, Nashville, you’ll know that. But high temperatures, they’re lower than where we’ve been. Temperatures in the 60s for places like Nashville and Atlanta. Raleigh in the lower 1DS.