Bearing witness to a once in a lifetime phenomenon - Much of South Carolina is being washed away

Although I'm deviating from Michigan weather, this needs to be talked about. I've put off posting about it until now for numerous reasons (super busy at work among other things, but mostly I wanted to see just how far this would go), however we're to the point where I think we're crossing a line from a terrible disaster to the altering of geography.

Courtesy of CNN.

The term "disaster" doesn't weigh enough to apply to what's going on here. The news media keeps using terms such as "historic" and "unprecedented" and the latter only begins to apply, while the former is almost laughable in its arrogance regarding what humankind has seen. The threshold for "historic" was crossed by October 1st. The only term that can be used to describe the situation today is "cataclysmic". By the end of the week, we're going to be crossing into "biblical."

After that, I'm not sure what's going to be left - both of descriptions and of the state of South Carolina.

The phenomenon that's causing this is a bit insane. A fairly typical, average, not-even-that-powerful cold front was making its way across the country last week. This was the same cold front that caused some rain here. As it reached the east coast, a truly remarkable and God awful thing occurred. It ran into Hurricane Joaquin.

Satellite imagery taken from October 3rd.

The cold front stalled, and a surface low developed. It began to accrete a truly terrible amount of moisture from the hurricane, and began to dump that moisture as precipitation over the eastern US. It wasn't that strong, but it didn't have to be. Unlike the 1993 Storm of the Century, which exploded as a meteorological bomb and gave it enough power to tow its moisture all the way to New England from the Gulf of Mexico, this one acted as a giant bucket rather than a fire hose - it merely picked up water out of the ocean and dumped it over the coast. Also unlike the 1993 event, this water is falling as liquid rather than snow, and while 20 inches of liquid rain would equate, on average, to between 160-240 inches of snow, it's hard to say which would be worse to endure. One way or another, whether it wants to or not, South Carolina is going to become the benchmark for the first scenario.

I can't overstate just how bad this is. When you think of terrible weather disasters of the last 20 years, Hurricane Katrina and the associated flooding in New Orleans is usually what comes to mind. However, what you have to understand is that what happened in New Orleans, as terrible as it was, was an entirely man made disaster, catalyzed by a natural phenomenon. Hurricane Katrina was a very powerful monster which produced a nearly 30 foot storm surge and inundated the coastline, but it didn't come CLOSE to procuring nearly two feet of water over a diameter greater than 80 miles. Remember that these aren't just feet, but *cubic feet* of water. Taking that into account spread over an 80 mile radius, that's 211,200 cubic feet of water, or 1,579,776 gallons of water confined to that stretch. Note that this is ONE SINGLE STRETCH and not the square mileage, which I'd estimate to be closer to 4800-5000 square miles.

I'll leave that calculation to someone else.

So what kind of damage is occurring from this? Besides the usual staples of flooding such as houses, cars, belongings, pets, and people washing away, South Carolina is dealing with issues such as dam breeches. Millions are stranded as roads and bridges are destroyed by the flood waters. A HUGE 70-mile stretch of north and southbound I-95 is closed between I-20 and I-26. To compare for southeast Michiganders, that would be like closing I-75/U.S. 23 from the southern junction of I-675 in Saginaw County all the way down to the I-96 interchange in Livingston County. No statements have been made as to when the road might reopen, nor what kind of damage has been done.

The green arrow points to the direction the remnants of the low are turning, with the red line representing the hardest hit areas.

The worst part of all this? This crap's not even over yet. This system is still spinning off the coast of South Carolina and threatens to continue to drop rain across the northwestern portions of the state. This is particularly bad for the places already inundated, as this water will wash downstream and out to sea over the coming weeks, directly through the worst-affected areas. With dams already being breached, roads and bridges washing away, and millions of people stranded, there's no telling just what will be left when the waters finally reach sea level again.

This event is going to change more lives in this region than I can possibly come close to empathizing with on an individual level, and is going to make Hurricane Katrina look like a weekend vacation by the time it is over. God go with South Carolina, because the devil certainly is there right now.