Extreme flooding in West Virginia

Training thunderstorms and mesoscale convective complexes slammed West Virginia and Virginia yesterday, dropping over a foot of rain in some areas and killing at least 14 people.

Here's a radar estimate of the rainfall over a 3-day period:

Rivers and creeks such as the Meadow River at Hines (which rose 5.7 feet in an hour -- that's more than 1 inch per minute!) and the Greenbrier River at Hillsdale are over major stage and in some cases records.

Unfortunately, there are no NWS or USGS rain gauges in the area. One CoCoRAHs gauge showed 7.20 inches and the NWS reported "BROADCAST MEDIA RELAYED A REPORT OF 12.00 INCHES OF RAINFALL THAT FELL SINCE MIDNIGHT NEAR JACKSON FLAT ROAD IN ALLEGHANY VA." The photos and videos tell the rest of the story:

AccuWeather's Elliot Abrams says: "The terrible flooding developed in weather situation that we have seen before. The Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood of 1889 was partly caused by shoddy maintenance of a dam upstream from the town, but the rains were very heavy. The Potomac River at Washington, D.C. had record flooding from that rain.

The burning house in the flood water was reminiscent of the Johnstown disaster because many people were killed by fires that broke in homes that were being washed away. The Johnstown Flood of 1977 occurred in storms that developed and then trained in a manner similar to the current event. In both cases, the events occurred at the northeast rim of an existing extreme heat wave."

As Elliot says, the 1977 Johnstown Flood took place during a similar weather situation -- in fact, a Mesoscale Convective Complex of storms (not unlike yesterday's) caused it, as you can see in the satellite image below. Click here to read more about it.