Flooding, Hot Weather Making Life Miserable in Ohio
July 20, 2011
The morning temperatures in Ohio this week have been around 84 degrees and it feels like it is in the low 90s. Things are not shaping up to get any better as the daytime highs are expected to be in the upper 90s for the rest of the week. Combine the hot, sticky, humid weather with the widespread flooding that took place Monday night going into Tuesday and you have a recipe for misery.
Thousands of residents in northeast Ohio are without power and scores of home and business owners are trying to clean up after flood damage. The laborious, sweaty work would certainly be deserving of a cool Lake Erie swim but unfortunately a swim advisory has been put into effect for Lake Erie as bacteria counts are high. Heat and flood weary residents in several northeastern Ohio towns and cities who are without power are being told to head to local cooling centers or to go to air-conditioned shopping centers and malls to seek relief from the hot, humid temperatures.
In Akron, the official rainfall gauges registered 6.8 inches in a twenty-four hour period which is an amount that is likely to occur only once every 1,000 years, so says a spokesman for Ohio’s Dept. of Natural Resources. At the Akron-Canton airport, 4.7 inches of rain fell in just three hours’ time which as the most rain that fell in a day since the airport opened in 1948.
The main terminal’s basement at the airport quickly filled with flood water during the storm which forced officials to shut off the airport’s power. There were several commercial flights canceled due to the flooding problem.
The thunderstorms that brought high winds and massive down-pourings of rain moved slowly from Canada across Lake Erie and hit land just west of Cleveland early Tuesday morning. In Coventry Township, a 4-unit apartment building was evacuated and condemned when the foundation imploded from the weight of the flood water that inundated its basement. Upwards of four feet of water rushed into the building.
The sweltering, hot, hazy and humid weather will linger for several more days in Ohio and there is a chance for late day thunderstorms Friday and Saturday throughout the state which is not good news for residents living in flood-prone or low-lying areas. July was looking as though it was going to go down in the record books as a very dry month but things certainly have changed following the heavy rains that pounded the state early Tuesday.
