Major flood event possible for West Virginia

[Chris Sokol]

West Virginia has had an unusually wet summer, and now the remnants of Ivan are causing significant flooding. What happens if Jeanne comes ashore and tracks over the same area? We could be looking at a flood event that could be more devastating than the one in 1985, which was caused by the remnants of Juan.

 

[tom hanlon]

I am about 30 miles from the WV border in Ohio. If Ivan dumped on them worse than it did here they are in for troubles. Watching radar today it seemed like the storms did not drop much as they came downhill from the Ridges along the VA/WV border. I believe those ridges peak between 3,000 and 4,000 feet. The ohio river on the N side of WV is at about 550-600 ft or so. Seems like the clouds/rain built once the storms hit the flatlands. Well the lowlands anyhow.

I am too busy tracking the flooding here in SE ohio to check in on WV but we got it pretty bad. 4.6 inches of rain in the last 24 hours http://www.scalialab.com/athensobs.txt , the ground was saturated and the streams were above mean flow due to Frances dropping 4" to 8" inches here 8 days ago.

Flash flooding was as bad or worse than I have ever seen it in the tributaries. That surge is hitting the main streams and rivers right now. Looking pretty serious.

Hocking river at athens OH http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwisweb/data/img...0040917.0.0.gif

Cold front seemed to collide with the remains of Ivan over OH, same thing happened with Frances. Seems to focus a lot of rain in one place.

Judging from the automated flood warning gages in WV and OH I would say that OH got hit worse than WV.

http://www.afws.net/states/wv/wv.htm
http://www.afws.net/states/oh/oh.htm

My home county got hit pretty hard.
http://www.afws.net/data/oh/Athens.HTM

Current Rainfall Data for Athens County, Ohio:

GAGE NAME 24 HOUR total in inches.

Nelsonville 4.75
Coolville 5.56
Trimble 5.58
Albany 4.36

The Main ohio river tribs have just begun to slow the pace of rising. The ohio river itself is just beginning to rise. Since the rain has stopped we should be alright.

Kentucky had an earthquake.. Yikes.

 

[Carrie Halliday]

Wow, almost a 4 too. Indiana had one on the 12th too and nearly as strong. Didn't know y'all got many of them up there.

 

[Dan Robinson]

Interestingly enough, these tropical events don't seem to be hurting WV as bad as originally thought. There have been some problems but nothing like I expected.

First, rainfall from Ivan and Frances was slow but steady, spread out over a long period of time. This keeps the creeks and streams from becoming the raging rivers like they do during spring and summer flash floods. This also tends to produce more problems on the major rivers (Monongahela, Kanawha, Ohio) than the smaller creeks and headwaters.

Second, the mountains have actually acted as protection from both Ivan and Frances. The Appalachian spine (which runs close to the WV/VA border, ranging from around 3500 to 4500 feet) is the boundary separating upslope flow (to the east) from downslope (to the west) during southeasterly flow. Ivan and Frances both produced southeasterly flow over the mountains, meaning flooding was worse to the east where upslope was enhanced, and weaker to the west (over the bulk of the state, including Charleston, Clarksburg, etc) where downslope helped to reduce lift.

On another note, I saw that TWC reported a 12 inch plus rain amount 20 miles west of Elkins, in the small town of Ellamore. I know that there are no automated nor co-op observations there (except for a river hydro gauge), how was this amount reported? Do the river gauges have rain reporting capability? It seemed very inconsistent with amounts reported across the rest of the state. Furthermore, 13 inches of rain in that terrain would have likely produced flooding of catastrophic proportions that surely would have made more headlines.