OKALOOSA COUNTY, Fla. — Remnants of Tropical Storm Arthur are making their way south on Sunday. Okaloosa County is still seeing flooding as stormwater continues to drain.<\/p>\n
Several rivers were expected to peak this weekend, marking the downhill trend of river levels.<\/p>\n
WEAR News went back out to Okaloosa County to check the flooding.<\/p>\n
Three main rivers run through Okaloosa County: Blackwater, Yellow, and Shoal Rivers.<\/p>\n
“Seeing the Shoal River and its elevation, how high it is, it’s pretty; it starts to be pretty dramatic,” local Ian Weaver said. <\/p>\n
Public Safety Director Patrick Maddox says rainfall is not the only thing causing the rivers to flood.<\/p>\n
“It’s not really the rainfall that’s actually occurring in the river in Okaloosa County that is the concern,” Maddox said. “It’s the combination of that and the rainfall to the north because the river basins drain south, so as they drain south, if you have an onshore flow as in a counterclockwise rotating low-pressure system like we have with the remnants of Arthur — that pushes some water back up into the bay and prevents the rivers from draining efficiently, which is what causes the backup in the flooding.”<\/p>\n
The remnants of Tropical Storm Arthur are still making their way out of the county.<\/p>\n
“It takes 12 to 24 hours for those basins to drain south, and for that backup to occur, it doesn’t rise as sharply as if a dam broke or something like that. It takes time for those backups to occur,” Maddox said. <\/p>\n
According to the National Weather Service in Mobile, the Blackwater River crested at 16.7 feet Sunday morning.<\/p>\n
The Yellow River is expected to crest at 13.1 feet early Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n
Shoal River crested at 8.7 feet this Sunday afternoon and is expected to fall below flood levels Monday night.<\/p>\n
“Of course, when it maxes out, you want to know the amount, and like I said, there can be flooding here; fortunately, we’re a little bit elevated, so it doesn’t bother us,” Weaver said. <\/p>\n
Over the weekend, Okaloosa County, the city of Crestview, and the American Red Cross opened a ‘just in time shelter’ to house anyone experiencing flooding.<\/p>\n
Commissioners say no one showed up and they were ‘fortunate enough’ to shut the shelter down early.<\/p>\n
Maddox still warns people of moving water as the rivers in the county work to get to normal levels.<\/p>\n
“The scary part about water is although it looks like it is a benign factor, it doesn’t take much fast-moving water to sweep a human off their feet or to sweep a car away, and the part about that is you look at water and you expect the ground that is under it to be there,” Maddox said. “That’s not always the case, especially with a roadway that’s undermined by fast-moving water from a river or stream.”<\/p>\n
He says he cannot share this advice enough.<\/p>\n
“Do not cross moving water. Do not cross moving water; turn around,” Maddox said. “Don’t drown because the likelihood of your car rolling into deeper water and being trapped inside that vehicle is high, and those are deaths that are preventable.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OKALOOSA COUNTY, Fla. — Remnants of Tropical Storm Arthur are making their way south on Sunday. Okaloosa County…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":718482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":["post-718481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/718482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}