Picture from NBC
Growing up in Potomac, Maryland (A suburb of Washington D.C.) I was used to severe thunderstorms during the summer and flash flooding watches and warnings. What I wasn’t used to, however, was actual flash flooding so bad that I saw pictures of people standing on their cars on Clara Barton Parkway (a National Park Service Road in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area) on the news the next day, or so bad that my own neighborhood had cars stopped on the side of the road because they weren’t able to drive through the water.
This all happened in early July of 2019, I remember there being flash flood warnings due to some severe thunderstorms we were supposed to get, but not thinking too much of it as that was pretty normal. I was quickly surprised as we got about 3-4 inches of torrential rain all within one hour, which led to pretty severe flash flooding and the flash flood warning to switch to a flash flood emergency with the police and other officials telling people to stay off of the roads as best they could. I specifically remember my dad attempting to drive me to my summer day camp at a nearby private school that was around 10 minutes away from my house, and having to stop frequently. The stopping frequently combined with my dad driving very slowly due to the flash flooding in our neighborhood, made it take us about 30 minutes just to get to the camp, only to find out it had been cancelled for the day because of all of the rain and flooding.
Even though the area of Maryland that I live in experiences frequent thunderstorms, and the occasional hurricane (the most notable one being Hurricane Isabel), which means torrential downpour and potential flash flooding, we never really get flash flooding as severe as what we experienced in 2019. So what happened? Maryland got a few slow moving storms that started in Eastern Maryland very early in the morning, and moved throughout the state and to DC and Virginia. With these slow moving storms, came torrential downpour, leading to each area the storms hit getting about 1-5 inches of rain all within a matter of hours. This amount of rainfall in such a short amount of time, ended up overwhelming the drainage systems leading to widespread flash flooding. The rain also caused a mudslide in Potomac, Maryland that ended up damaging a house, but did not injure anyone.
Sources:
https://www.weather.gov/media/marfc/Flood_Events_2019/Jul_8_2019FloodSummary.pdf
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