The National Weather Service had 28 flash flood alerts active Thursday across nine states — Alaska, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wyoming — as the flooding threat that swelled to 41 warnings across 14 states a day earlier moved east, away from the Arizona watersheds that dominated Wednesday’s coverage and into the Carolinas, southeastern Virginia and Wyoming’s high country.
The heaviest concentration sits in southeastern North Carolina, where the Weather Service in Wilmington has a warning running from Thursday evening through Friday afternoon for Robeson, Bladen, Columbus, Pender, New Hanover and Brunswick counties, citing excessive runoff from continuing rainfall. Farther north, the Raleigh office issued a warning until 11 a.m. EDT for Alamance, Chatham, Durham, Granville and Orange counties after radar and rain gauges indicated flash flooding was already underway.
In east Tennessee, the Weather Service office in Morristown warned Blount and Monroe counties until 10 a.m. EDT after radar showed thunderstorms had already dropped 1 to 3 inches of rain, with an additional 1 to 2 inches possible. A separate cluster of warnings covers Northampton, Hertford, Gates, Pasquotank, Camden, Bertie, Chowan, Perquimans and Currituck counties in northeastern North Carolina, extending into Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, Suffolk, Norfolk and Portsmouth in southeastern Virginia.
The most geographically expansive addition is Wyoming, where the Weather Service has flash flood alerts spanning dozens of zones — from the Absaroka Mountains, Bighorn Mountains and Wind River Mountains to Yellowstone National Park, Jackson Hole and the Green River and Bighorn river basins. That’s a markedly different flood risk than the Southeast’s rain-soaked lowlands: mountain and canyon terrain where runoff concentrates quickly in narrow drainages.
The overall alert count falling from 41 to 28 and the state count from 14 to nine suggests the flooding threat is consolidating rather than spreading further, even as it relocates. Arizona, the epicenter of Wednesday’s warnings after the Moenkopi Wash rose 11 feet in hours, no longer appears among today’s affected states. Where the threat goes next depends on whether the thunderstorm clusters feeding the Carolinas and Tennessee warnings persist through the weekend, and whether Wyoming’s mountain snowmelt and rainfall combination continues to trigger new warnings at higher elevations.
The Weather Service is repeating its standard flood safety guidance across all affected warnings: turn around, don’t drown, since most flood deaths occur in vehicles on flooded roads, and use extra caution overnight, when floodwaters are harder to spot.