00:00We spoke, I believe, last week here. You and Bertie had a conversation about what the heavy
00:04rain from Milton could bring, and we saw it brought plenty of flooding across Florida.
00:10Yeah, it certainly did, Ariella. If you go to that rainfall graphic, you can see where the
00:17heaviest rains were with this thing, and that's where the worst of the stream and river flooding
00:22is going to be. Florida's relatively flat if you've never been there. We don't have the big
00:27hills in there. We don't have the mountains like we do in the mainland, so these creeks and rivers
00:31are very slow-moving. It takes a long time for them to cycle, but the rain is getting in there.
00:36Despite the sandy soil, you can have the sandiest soil in the world. That kind of rainfall, when you
00:42get four to eight times your monthly rainfall for October in a matter of 24 to 36 hours,
00:48you're going to have significant flooding, and that's exactly what we're seeing with this thing
00:52here. You can see St. Petersburg, almost 19 inches of rain. There were probably some remote spots
00:57there that picked up over 20 inches of rain from this thing. Yeah, and Alex, we were talking about
01:02the river flooding here, and we'll take you out to one example of that with the Hillsborough River,
01:08and you can see how that white line really peaks. The previous record here was over 15 feet, and I
01:14believe we saw close to 17. Yeah, the river levels here, and there's another spot there too, multiple
01:20points along the Hillsborough River, which is just north of Tampa. We're already at record stage. In
01:26some cases here, the river level is still rising. These levels were set during Irma in 2017,
01:33and it's going to take a long time for these things to cycle through. Now, if you step along
01:37there, we can swing over toward the St. Johns River. We've got the same problem going on there,
01:43and a lot of the flooding there is still on people's mind from
01:502022, I think it was. Correct me on that if I'm wrong there. That was from Ian.
01:59That produced record flooding. We're already at that stage now in a lot of cases there, and
02:04we're probably going to swing above, and the problem with these rivers here in Florida,
02:09they're slow moving. It can take days, weeks, and in some cases along the St. Johns, it can take
02:14months. These levels here right now, these levels are into homes along the St. Johns, and these
02:19people may be isolated for some time there, so there's significant damage going on as we speak
02:26right now, and that'll be going on here over the next several weeks. That's a good perspective. As
02:31for the future here, you will see a little bit of green returning into some of the areas that
02:35saw the heaviest rain, but most of the heaviest rain here with our forecast is going to stay
02:40across parts of South Florida. Yeah, I don't want to say they can handle the rain down there better
02:45than they can up north. They just didn't have the type of problems with the rivers that we have up
02:50across the central and northern parts of the state, so these downpours down there are fairly
02:55typical, the tropical downpours that they're going to see, but up across the central and northern
02:58part of the state, that type of rainfall that you see there that's coming in spotty showers,
03:03that's insignificant. It's not going to contribute to the flooding. It's going to
03:06be an annoyance for cleanup mostly. Exactly. All right, well, AccuAir flooding expert Alex
03:10Zazowski, thanks again for joining us and for bringing us your expertise on this topic this
03:14morning.
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