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Could heavy rains cause metro Detroit massive flooding like 2014, 2016?

Posted at 12:06 PM, May 04, 2017
and last updated 2017-05-04 13:21:20-04

After major flooding events over the past two years, heavy rain is expected to pound metro Detroit over the next two days which could lead to more flooding in some areas.

  • If you encounter any flooding, email us photos of it to sendit@wxyz.com.

On Thursday morning, rain began across the area and around 11 a.m., a flood watch was issued and is in effect for all of southeast Michigan until 8 p.m. Friday.

By Friday afternoon, it's expected that some areas in metro Detroit could have 2-3 inches of rainfall.

MDOT says your trash is part of the reason metro Detroit highways have experienced massive flooding over the past few years.

It's clogging up multi-million dollar pump stations working to get the water off our roads.

 

In August 2014, historic flooding hit metro Detroit leaving hundreds of people stranded and some highways closed as the water rose.

In 2014, 7 First Alert Meteorologist Chris Edwards said that flooding wasn't predicted because technology can't pick up that level of detail.

These kinds of small scale, short-lived precipitation events are notoriously difficult to predict. The computer models we rely on to help us detail the future cannot pick up this kind of detail very much ahead of time, if at all. When it became evident that we had slow moving, heavy rain-producers, flood warnings were issued by the National Weather Service and passed along immediately by the First Alert Weather Team. But forecasting this kind of unprecedented event before it develops is in most cases considered beyond the grasp of modern meteorology. One of the long-standing theories of climate change is that these sorts of localized, very intense storms will become more common in a changing climate.

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