Flood-weary Residents Face Rising Rivers Despite Rain Finally Stopping in Central and Southern US

A dayslong deluge of rain finally subsided across the South and Midwest on Monday, but, like the extensive flooding that followed, the danger for many communities will be slow to recede.

“As long as I’ve been alive — and I’m 52 — this is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” Wendy Quire, the general manager of the Brown Barrel restaurant in downtown Frankfort, Kentucky, told The Associated Press.

Floodwaters inundated communities across a broad swath of the central US on Sunday and Monday, the result of days of rain from storms that claimed at least 25 lives since the middle of last week.

Rivers are still on the rise in several flood-ravaged states. A half dozen states have rivers at “major flood” stage, according to the National Weather Service. Twenty-one measurement points along rivers in the Midwest and South are at major flood stage, and that number is forecast to roughly double in coming days.

Most of the major flood points are in Kentucky. The Kentucky River crested in the state capital of Frankfort Monday morning just shy of the city’s protective flood walls.

“It’s good to be able to come out this morning and it not be raining. We’re thankful for that, but we’re still dealing with water rising,” said John Ward, sheriff of Kentucky’s Hardin County, which is south of Louisville on a bend in the Ohio River.

“I’ve seen homes underwater that have never had water. I don’t think people were ready,” Ward told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on Monday morning.

Over a foot of rain fell from Wednesday through Sunday across the mid-South where some locations – including Memphis, Tennessee – recorded nearly an entire spring’s worth of rain in just a few days.

The rain was dumped by destructive storms that also produced tornadoes across the central US. The weather service has rated at least 88 tornadoes since the storms began, with six rated as EF3 strength.

The storms have left at least 25 people dead across seven states, including 10 in Tennessee. Among them are a 5-year-old boy found in a storm-damaged home in Arkansas and a 9-year-old Kentucky boy who was swept away by floodwaters while walking to his school bus stop. On Sunday, a father and son were killed on a Georgia golf course when the tree they were sheltering under during high winds fell, Muscogee County Coroner Buddy Bryan told CNN.

Remember, this event is not over until the waters have receded, until the areas that have flooded are fully dry, until we don’t have saturated ground that could create mudslides over roads and bridges,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday.

In several parts of Kentucky, the intense flooding has endangered the local water supply.

The Frankfort Plant Board announced Sunday it had turned off the electrical equipment used to pump water from the river and asked customers to “ration their water usage.” And in Harrodsburg, water pumps were turned off overnight as flood levels came close to the city’s “raw water station.” Now, “we are using stored water and the supply is limited,” reads a Facebook post from the city.

Reported by CNN