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Nearly 26 inches of rain brought Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to a screeching halt Thursday, swamping cars on highways, shutting down the city’s airport for more than 24 hours and closing schools.
The sheer magnitude of the tsunami from the skies took nearly everyone by surprise.
„Spotty flooding is expected,“ the city posted in an update on its website early Wednesday morning. The National Weather Service expected up to six inches of rain but ultimately at least one location at the airport saw four times that.
If the preliminary report of 25.91 inches measured at a station at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport is verified, it would break the state’s 24-hour rain record by 2.63 inches.
Much of Wednesday’s rain at a couple of weather stations – up to 20 inches – fell within six hours, reported weather service meteorologist Pablo Santos. Such an extreme rain amount has only a 1 in 1000 chance of occurring in Fort Lauderdale in any given year, Santos said.
Many locations in the city and surrounding Broward County received more than 11 inches.
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Florida is prone to storms that dump large sums of rain (that happens when you’re a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water).
Southerners, especially Floridians, are used to heavy rain. The state juts out like a hitchhiker’s thumb into the warm, moisture laden air of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, a conveyor belt for storms.
Rain falls by the feet during hurricanes and comes down by the inches during afternoon thunderstorms. The rainfall record during Hurricane Ian last fall was 26.95 inches.
Unfazed Florida drivers often push through sheets of rain so thick you can’t even see the nose of your car and grouse about out-of-towners driving with their flashers on. This storm, however, was anything but typical.
Frankly, it’s complicated. Several factors aligned in just the wrong way. And it left a rainmaker virtually stalled over the city for hours.
While early morning forecasts warned the alignment of weather systems could produce rainfall amounts up to six inches, the storms dumped up to four times that much rain over Broward County.
