Flooding concern for southern W.Va. as strong system expected to move in

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — More than a dozen counties in the southern region of West Virginia can expect a very wet weekend that may cause some issues.

The National Weather Service in Charleston issued a Flood Watch early Friday morning that will stay into effect until Sunday morning for 15 counties in West Virginia.

“Across the southern portion of West Virginia we are looking at 1 to 3 inches of rainfall,” Meteorologist Ray Young told MetroNews. “With the ground as wet as we’ve had the past few days, we won’t be able to handle anything of that magnitude.”

Wayne, Cabell, Mason, Lincoln, Putnam, Kanawha, Mingo, Logan, Boone, Clay, McDowell, Wyoming, Raleigh, Fayette, and Nicholas counties are all under the current watch. Most of those counties saw rainfall earlier in the week in a previous flood watch. Young said some counties in central West Virginia saw one and a half inches of rain from the last system.

He said a couple of days between the two strong systems is not enough time to recover.

“Unfortunately we got very little recovery time in between them so the ground is totally saturated so everything runs into the creeks and rivers really quickly,” Young said.

“This time of the year you don’t have any of the trees out, none of the vegetation is drinking water. This time of the year you really need about four or five days to let the creeks and rivers get back down to their normal level.”

Young said there is a very strong possibility of flooding in southern West Virginia that may begin sometime late Friday night. Although he said, the most likely time for flooding in that region is middle of the day Saturday into Saturday night.

“Southern West Virginia, I’d suspect if any of these rainfall amounts are realized, we could have significant problems down there,” Young said.





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