Tropical Storm Chantal really left an impact on parts of central North Carolina last week. Corey Davis from the state climate office of North Carolina Joining me now, and we really saw I know most of the attention nationally has been on Texas, and I don’t want to downplay that at all, because that has been a horrendous situation there, but we had a small taste of that in Central North Carolina last week. Tell us about that.
“Yeah, Mike, the damage, the flooding, the rainfall from Chantal is even more impressive when you consider the type of system that it was. This was not a land falling hurricane. This was not even that strong of a tropical storm, and it was only a tropical depression when it crossed central North Carolina last Sunday. But because it had sat to our south for several days as it developed, it picked up so much moisture off the Atlantic and just took the perfect inland track to channel that moisture up across central North Carolina, some of the rainfall totals there in parts of Alamance, Orange counties were more than 10 inches back on Sunday. Most of that rain fell over a period of only about 12 hours. And in some places like Chapel Hill, they were seeing rain rates of two and a half to three inches per hour during the height of that storm on Sunday. So again, so impressive to look at what that storm did, obviously the damage and the flooding as well, and then seeing some of those river levels, like along the Haw River that actually topped the crest from Hurricane Fran back in ’96, Mike, I know a lot of folks that have been around the Carolinas for a while will have very distinct memories of Fran and the damage it did that was considered just the end-all-be-all hurricane. It’s hard to imagine anything that would surpass what Fran did, and yet, here was a tropical depression that dropped even more rain and sent those river levels even higher.”
Yeah, that is impressive. And I distinctly remember Fran. I lost a pecan tree in my front yard. Landed right at my front door. And that was there was a lot of rain leading up to Fran, too, as I recall, that really had saturated a lot of the ground. But this one really left its mark. You know, along as you mentioned the Haw River. Let’s talk about some of those river levels right now. What are we seeing post Chantal and what are we likely to still see from that?…