Major river flooding continues in Midwest

AccuWeather

The Midwest has been clobbered by heavy rainfall and severe thunderstorms for most of June. This stormy pattern is set to continue, causing rivers to swell to record territory.

Transcript

00:00All right, joining me right now is AccuWeather flood expert Alex Sosnowski.

00:04Alex, earlier in the summer, couldn't get a drop of rain across the Plains states here.

00:09The epicenter of the drought was across central parts of Iowa and in the South Dakota.

00:15I want to show you this graphic here.

00:17This is the rainfall just for the last seven days, Alex.

00:22And you can see radar estimates, especially around Sioux Falls and in parts of southern Minnesota.

00:28That's where the rain has been heaviest.

00:30Yeah, so what you're looking at here, as you said, is the rainfall totals here for the past seven days.

00:35And to put that in perspective, in some cases that's a month's worth of rain,

00:39in some cases two months' worth of rain, all coming in the span of several days.

00:44So that's why we're getting the runoff.

00:46At first it was in the small streams.

00:48Now it's hitting some of the secondary rivers and it's also starting to hit some of the major rivers,

00:52including the Mississippi and the Missouri as well.

00:55You saw some of the footage earlier from the Blue Earth River just south of Mankato.

01:01In fact, you could see all that water is out of their banks.

01:05It's causing some problems here.

01:07But it's not the only river that's experiencing problems in that area, Alex.

01:12No, there's about a dozen rivers or so that I counted that are involved.

01:17That's the Mainstem and the West Fork of the Des Moines, the Little Sioux and Big Sioux Rivers,

01:23the Vermilion, the James, Rock, Cedar.

01:26Even getting, as I said, the upper portion of the Mississippi involved now

01:31and also a portion of the Missouri River are going to have some problems with this.

01:36If you're not experiencing major flooding in some of those rivers,

01:39you probably will over the span of the next several days to as much as the next couple of weeks.

01:45It takes a while for that water to work its way down into the larger rivers.

01:49Even where there's flood control, they have to release some of that water.

01:52They can't hold it all back.

01:54You're looking at footage right now in McCook, South Dakota, Alex.

01:58Again, that's a good point.

02:00It's going to take some time for a lot of these rivers to come on down.

02:04I know it varies based on the river, but a general time length,

02:09assuming we don't get any more rain, how long is it going to take?

02:13That's a big assumption that we're not going to get any more rain.

02:16We are.

02:17It's not going to hit all the exact same areas at the same time,

02:20but it's going to be the summertime nature of rainfall.

02:23It's spotty, and we're going to see that.

02:26But the point is we are going to see additional rain.

02:28I love to say that we're not going to get any more rain here,

02:30and this will all go away here in a week or two,

02:33but it's not how things are stacking up, unfortunately.

02:36It's going to take a while.

02:39You're going to have surges of water coming down all the way, I think,

02:42to St. Louis with this.

02:43That's where the Missouri comes in.

02:45It may not be major flooding there,

02:47but there's certainly going to be a minor to moderate flood

02:51probably occurring over the next week or two, I think.

02:54Alex, I want to get your impression of this graphics,

02:57this drawn up by our long-range forecasting department,

03:00led by Paul Pasteluk and Joe Lumberg.

03:02I mean, this is the pattern that we're going to be seeing in mid-July,

03:05and I want to point you to the area that they're pointing to.

03:08Now, like you said, it's not going to be every day,

03:11but within this next two weeks, there's more rounds of thunderstorms coming.

03:16Yeah, and that may even expand a little bit farther to the south,

03:20which is a bit of a concern that I have.

03:22This may shift a little bit farther south over time, not much,

03:26but that's as the surge is coming down,

03:28so then you get more water coming into where the surge is hitting at the same time.

03:31You may have more problems cropping up farther south in places like Iowa,

03:36Nebraska, and Illinois as the pattern continues to evolve.

03:41This is the same pattern that we saw farther south in Texas,

03:44where we had the heat dome in Mexico,

03:46and the northern edge of that causing rounds of storms coming across Texas and Louisiana.

03:51Now everything is set up farther north here,

03:54so it's not surprising to see that we're getting that on the northern edge of the heat dome.

03:58Our regional expert, Alex Cisnowski.

04:00Alex, thanks for joining us here on AccuWeather.

04:03My pleasure, Bernie.

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