WASHINGTON D.C., DC — We all experience strong winds and heavy rain but if you always lived inland you may never have experienced storm surge. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration storm surge is consistently the leading cause of death during a hurricane. So, what is it and how do places like Tampa prepare for it?
Storm surge is when sea water rises higher than normal, usually caused by winds from a storm. Strong winds push water inland and the stronger the storm the worse the surge can be. But how can we prepare for this? To learn more, WUSA9 spoke with Dr. Elizabeth Carter, an environmental engineer who is actively researching flood water management infrastructure. She explained that there are three main types of flooding, fluvial flooding happens when rivers flood, pluvial flooding also known as flash floods, and coastal flooding or better known as storm surge.
“So a hurricane coming in like this is going to be causing all three types of flooding at the same time. It's going to bring that storm surge with it and it's going to hit the coast. That is going to be its own thing that we as an engineering community have tried to prepare for. It's going to be dumping lots of rain on the streets and into the storm sewer systems. That's a specific type of flooding that we as an engineering community have tried to prepare for." Dr. Carter said.
Dr. Carter continued, "So when we have a situation like a hurricane hitting all at once, it's called compound flooding. We're actually having three very distinct mechanisms of flooding happening at the same time."
Storms like Milton and Helene are abnormal in their strength, intensity, and size, making them outliers in the data used to prepare for flooding events.
So, from an infrastructure perspective, environmental engineers have prepared flood prone areas the best they can with the resources and data that they have. The current flood mitigation infrastructure is built to withstand the strongest storm that a certain area has seen before.
But storms like Milton haven't happened before- so the best way to stay safe from the impending storm surge is to evacuate.