The National Weather Service has 21 active flash flood alerts in effect today across 11 states, with the heaviest concentration stretching from the Ohio Valley through Colorado and across the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania corridor into New England.
In the Ohio Valley, NWS Charleston issued a Flash Flood Warning for southern Gallia and southern Jackson counties and central Lawrence County in southeastern Ohio, along with north-central Cabell and west-central Mason counties in West Virginia. The warning, triggered by radar-indicated rainfall at 6:59 a.m. EDT, runs until 10 a.m. EDT.
Farther west, the National Weather Service warned that excessive rainfall could produce flash flooding across east-central and northeast Colorado, covering all of Logan, Washington, Morgan and Lincoln counties and the eastern portions of Elbert, Adams, Arapahoe and Weld counties. That threat window opens at 3 p.m. and continues until 10 p.m. this evening, with forecasters citing the risk of excessive runoff flooding rivers, creeks and low-lying areas.
The most alert-dense region on the map is the Northeast, where flooding concerns tied to continuing heavy rain extend from Connecticut’s northern and southern Fairfield and New Haven counties — under a flood threat running from 2 p.m. today through Wednesday evening — across the entire New York City metro area. That includes all five boroughs (Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens), New Jersey’s Passaic, Bergen, Essex, Union and Hudson counties, and New York’s Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, Dutchess, Ulster, Columbia and Greene counties, plus Nassau and Suffolk on Long Island and Litchfield and Berkshire counties near the Connecticut-Massachusetts line. Pennsylvania’s Dauphin, Schuylkill, Lebanon, Cumberland, Adams, York and Lancaster counties round out the eastern alert cluster. Additional alerts are active in Arizona, Illinois, New Mexico, Texas and the District of Columbia, part of the same nationwide pattern of slow-moving, rainfall-driven flood risk.
The National Weather Service is urging residents in all warned areas to avoid driving into flooded roadways, noting that most flood deaths occur in vehicles. The agency’s standard guidance — “turn around, don’t drown” — applies broadly given how many jurisdictions are under simultaneous alerts. Forecasters are also asking residents in areas without an active warning to monitor later forecasts, since flash flood warnings can be issued with little advance notice once rainfall rates spike.
With alerts touching population centers as large as New York City and rural counties in the Ohio Valley and the Colorado plains alike, today’s flood threat is less about any single storm system than about widespread atmospheric moisture producing heavy rain rates in scattered locations across the country. Residents in any of the 11 affected states should check local NWS guidance before traveling.