DC Faces Challenges If Anything Like Harvey Ever Comes Our Way

Steve Burns
WMAL.com

WASHINGTON – (WMAL) Severe weather is somewhat of a rarity in the D.C. region. Hurricanes, blizzards, and floods visit the area less frequently than other at-risk metropolitan areas. But meteorologists say there is always a chance of seeing a major hurricane blow into town, and if something on the scale of Hurricane Harvey does stop by, the region may not know what to expect.

“We get the short-term, heavy rainfalls like on a 5-, 10-, 15-, 30-, even 60-minute scale,” National Weather Service Hydrologist Jason Elliott told WMAL. “The difference being, we get them maybe for a few hours most of the time. (Houston) got it, in this case, for…days.”

Hurricanes and prolific rain events, while rare, have made an impact in the Mid-Atlantic. Hurricane Camille’s remnants in 1969 caused problems. Hurricane Isabel in 2003 left its mark, as did Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

“A lot of times, the storms that come up this way are curving back to the north from the Tropics,” Ellliott said. “We’re kind of getting either the leftovers of things that have hit the Gulf or we’re getting things that are curving up along the coast.”

Storms would need to take a rare westerly turn and run up the Chesapeake Bay to have a direct, catastrophic hit on the immediate D.C. region, he said.

There have been some instances of non-hurricane systems wreaking havoc, however. Madison County, Virginia saw 30 inches of rain in about 18 hours in 1995 thanks to a rapid succession of storm systems. Houses were destroyed, roads washed out, and six people were killed throughout central and western Virginia.

The amount of time the region has gone without such an event, however, presents an extra challenge for emergency preparedness initiatives.

“There’s been so much development across the area, you could take probably the same amount of rain that fell in (Camille or Isabel), put it in the same spot, and it’s going to react totally differently,” Elliott said.

Plus, the region would face another dimension of problems that Houston has not dealt with, Elliott said. Houston is flat. The D.C. region is not.

“The water is going to roll down those hills, roll down those mountains,” he said. “If we get heavy rain, even if it’s half of what they had in Houston, we’re going to have things like landslides, mudslides…all sorts of stuff that (Houston) doesn’t have to think about.”