Quote:
Originally Posted by NorthStarDelight
I really don't see why those people couldn't have left before the water got deep. Did it come tidal-wave style? Or were they sleeping, and woke up to that?
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Here's the main issue. They had forecast this massive rainfall event. So it started raining Friday evening but by Saturday evening it had been pretty mild in Columbia and in most of the areas that would go on to hit double digits. By Saturday evening most of it was supposed to have hit and Sunday was to be the tapering off day ending by early Monday morning. But things slowed down, and people didn't realize what was going to happen Saturday night.
Saturday night, when most people were sleeping, the worst hit in that funnel heading all the way up past Columbia. That is when all the flooding in the Columbia, Clarendon, Sumter etc area really got amazingly bad.
So people went to bed Saturday night thinking 'wow, this was a non-event' only to have a terrible time in the dark hours when you can't even see well to begin with.
That is why people got caught off guard.
And the news actually did a good job but I think people just started to dismiss them because they had started so early saying, "Folks, this is going to be bad." And then when the timeline didn't line up, they started getting dismissive of it.
Also, our rain gauge in our personal weather station here in Manning, SC read 22.33 right before we finally had a long enough break for it to reset the rainfall event to zero. It was insane. But when we went to bed Saturday night it was just over 7".
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