Severe Weather Awareness Week is wrapping up with a reminder on how to stay safe during flooding.
National Weather Service meteorologist Peter Rogers says flood deaths can be avoided. “One of the things we really want to hit on hard is the idea that many of the flood-related fatalities that we see are due to people driving in vehicles, and more often than not driving into the flood, as opposed to the flood coming to them,” Rogers says.
Rogers says it does not take much water to carry a car or truck off a roadway. “So we have a saying when it comes to flooding ‘turnaround, don’t drown.’ If you’re driving and you come across a roadway that has moving water over the top, it’s better to turn around and find a different way to get to where you’re going than to try to drive through it,” he says.
He says there are two types of flooding. “Flash flooding, which is a lot of rain in a short amount of time, you have river flooding, which was a lot of the issues we saw last year along the Little Sioux, the Ocheyedan, the Big Sioux and other rivers,” he says, “and that was just a tremendous amount of water that fell in a very short amount of time, and it all tried to reach the rivers at the same point.”
Rogers says flooding is another reason they advise you to make up an emergency kit that you have ready to go if you are suddenly forced out of your home.
(By Patrick Hazelett, KICD, Spencer)