Photo of the Week: Remembering the August 2016 Louisiana Floods

 

Panorama of my parents' neighborhood at the height of the flooding. My parents' house is the one on the left side of the image on top of the hill.

On Friday, August 12, 2016, it started raining in Lafayette. Over the next two days, we would receive nearly 21 inches of rain (about one-third of the average annual rainfall). This was not the result of a tropical cyclone, but a large, persistent, and slow-moving MCS with access to a deep fetch of tropical moisture.

Radar loop from NWS New Orleans. The spin you see is weak low pressure, not related to any kind of tropical storm or hurricane.

Below is the 12Z (7:00 a.m. CDT) sounding from Slidell, LA the morning of August 12th (image created using SHARPpy). The vertical red line in the upper-left panel is temperature, and the green line is dewpoint. With these two lines nearly on top of each other from ground-level to the tropopause, we can see that the environment is extremely saturated. In fact, the sounding parameters in the lower-left tell us the mean relative humidity in the lower levels is 99%, and 96% in the mid-levels. Another incredible statistic is the precipitable water (PW) value in the lower-left of 2.79 inches, which is more than three standard deviations above normal (in fact, this is a near-record value). Needless to say, "Possible Hazard Type: Flash Flood" is an understatement. This is almost a perfect sounding for a tropical heavy rainfall event.


And that's exactly what happened...


So much rain, not even the Lafayette Fire Department could get through.


Nor the Louisiana National Guard.


Rain or shine, the U.S. Postal Service still delivers though.


Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries launched a boat from my parents' driveway in order to rescue folks in the back of the neighborhood that were cutoff by a swollen creek.


Tiger was worried, but in the end, my parents' house escaped flooding by a few feet.


Some photos of the aftermath...





This event left quite an impression on me. I just happened to be visiting my parents in Lafayette when all this unfolded. It wasn't a planned "chase" or anything like that. Flooding often takes a backseat when it comes to some of the more dramatic weather phenomena like tornadoes, giant hail, hurricanes, or wildfires, but flooding is responsible for the most deaths and most destruction of any weather-related phenomena in the United States on an annual basis. And it doesn't even take a hurricane: this was from a prolonged heavy rain event, unrelated to any tropical cyclone.

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