A localized storm devastated areas of the Cape Fear Region Monday, and it caught locals off guard.
The unnamed storm dropped 20 inches of rain on Carolina Beach and more than 19 inches near Southport, all in just 12 hours. But projections for the storm only expected up to 8 inches – so the storm caught public officials and residents off guard.
That made it a 1000-year storm, although Steve Pfaff with the National Weather Service says the Cape Fear Region has seen at least nine multi-hundred-year rain events since Hurricane Floyd in 1999.
He said, “The extreme events are becoming more frequent compared to what we typically would see over longer periods.”
And this one was particularly unpredictable; it started as a potential tropical cyclone, but never developed tropical characteristics. Instead, Pfaff says low pressure areas created a stream of water and wind that made a “fire hose” of rainfall in an isolated area.
“There's just an awful lot of heat with the warm ocean temperature this time of year that that feeds the storms," he said, "And then when you start now encountering that fire hose with land that added friction causes a lot of upward motion, and pretty much with it just sitting nearly stationary.”
Areas nearby saw much less rainfall: the Wilmington Airport, north of the city, only got 4 inches of rain. That’s just 18 miles from the apparent center of the storm in Carolina Beach, and it got 16 less inches of rain.
The Cape Fear Region continues to recover from the storm, with more than a dozen roads in Brunswick County closed because of flooding or sinkholes.
